Muhammedi Islam or Sufyani Islam

The struggle for the heart of Muslims by Ali A. Allawi

Sheikh Abd el-Qadir as-Sufi, Sheikh of the Shadhili-Darqawi Tariqa and head of
the
Murabitun movement, wrote an extended essay in 2000 entitled
“A letter to an ArabMuslim”. The learned master, Sheikh Abd el-Qadir, expounded
on
the crisis facing the Arabs and their inability to rise to their historic status.
Although the
elucidation of the Sheikh on this vital issue was often profound and incisive, it
was
nevertheless curiously incomplete.
This open letter is in way of a response to the Sheikh’s essay.
Assalamu aleikum wa Rahmatullahu wa Barakuttuhu.
All praise is to Allah, the Master of the Worlds. It is through Him that we seek assistance
and guidance. He is the First and Last; the Manifest and the Hidden; there is no deity
but
He; there is no reality but Allah.
Peace and Blessings upon the Most Noble of Creation, the Blessed Prophet, his
Progeny,
His Righteous Companions, and all those who follow him, with ihsan, until the Day of
Reckoning, the Yawm ad-Deen
Allah, Glorified and Exalted is He, in His infinite Mercies, has given power and insight to
those of His chosen servants who have been authorised to carry the trust of His
friendship,
His wilaya. The burden of wilaya is immense. It is the entire load that the mountains
shrank
from carrying. For with authority to reflect the Divine Mercy, the Rahma of Allah, along
the
perfect pattern of our Noble Prophet, Peace and Blessings upon him, is another
condition of
equal import – to reflect it with guidance and compassion to man. Call upon the
Rahman,
the All-Merciful, we are commanded, for His Mercy is the Font of all His Attributes.
Rahma, Forbearance and Guidance are the attributes of Allah, Glorified and Exalted is
He,
that are chiselled on the eternal tablet of the Fatiha. And is not the entire Quran al-
Karim
contained within the Fatiha?
I have not met you, the upright Sheikh Abd el-Qadir. Suffice it for me that you are the
acknowledged Sheikh of my Sheikh, the realised and illumined master, Sheikh
Fadhlallah al-Haeri,
may Allah protect and support him. There is no doubt that both of you are masters, and
true friends,
awliyas, of Allah, Glorified and Exalted is He, drawing your light from the great source
that passes
back along the lines of confirmed attribution to the Prophet, Peace and Blessing of Allah
be upon
him, through that Master of those who are in true awe of Allah, Imam Ali, peace be upon
him. The
West, possibly for the first time in modern history, is home to masters who are from the
West itself.
And it is part of Allah’s design that there will be no point, in time, when the world is
bereft of a
person who will announce the eternal refrain of the shahada. If the East, the original
source of light
and truth, begins to fade in its luminance, then Allah, Glorified and Exalted is He, will
cause the
West to reflect that Light, and the roles will be reversed. This is the command of Allah,
and to those
who follow the commands of Allah, all points of the azimuth can be the homeland of a
wali of
Allah. Your presence in the West – inside the belly of the beast as it were – is,
therefore, all the
more significant.
I believe I have read all your published works, and I have had the honour of being in the
company of a number of your fuqara. Your works in the way of Islam are remarkable in
their audacity and forthrightness, and I can say, in truth, that you are a founder of an
entire
school, a madrassa of knowledge and action. It is therefore, with the utmost courtesy
and
consideration for your high station and standing, that I am addressing this letter to you
in
direct response to your “Letter to an Arab Muslim”.
The dignity of the Arab is in his Islam. The identity of the Arab is inseparable from his
Islam. There is no dispute about this. Throughout the last two hundred years, ever since
the
disastrous incursion of the West into the Arab heartlands with the Napoleonic invasion
of
Egypt, the Arabs have been subject to a relentless onslaught from within and without
aimed
at undermining their vital link to the deen. None of the historic peoples that guarded the
deen in its first 1400 years had to undergo such a systematic campaign to decouple a
people
from the wellsprings of its vitality. The Arabs were the catalyst for the propagation of
Islam
and this is their assigned role in the order of things. It is not to dominate Muslims for
eternity by any racial or ethnic priority. It is not to claim any special status for them by
virtue of the Prophet’s lineage or the language of the Qur`an. Both of these are legacies
for
all mankind and do not confer any special privileges for the Arab. The vitality of the
deen is
in direct proportion to the taqwa of Muslims, and not to their real or imagined services to
the civilisation of Islam. But the figure of the Arab – his language, his energy and his
person
– was the chosen agent for the spread of Islam. The medium for carrying the message
must
not be confused with the message itself. That is clear. But any vessel, be it made of the
basest clay will always retain within its memory, within its cellular structure, the traces of
the elixir that it used to hold. Whether the Arabs, qua Arabs, upheld this trust faithfully,
only Allah knows, but the simple fact of being the carriers of the message, even for a
brief
but glorious moment, at its birth in existential time and for a few decades thereafter, has
always marked the Arab with a special promise and potential. Whether this is real or not
is
not the issue. It has been seen by the enemies of the deen to be real. Undermining the
Arab’s
self-confidence, which can only be Islam-rooted, and finally alienating the Arab from his
potential catalytic role in Islam, has always been the ultimate purpose of tyrants and
oppressors, unbelievers and hypocrites, the kuffar and munafiqun against whom the
Glorious
Qur`an expressly warns.
A. Cynicism, despotism and corruption – the legacy of the First Fitna
The issue of the primacy of Arab over non-Arab in Islam is an invention of the bigotry or
asabiyya of the enemies of the Prophet and this has always been twinned with a hatred
of
the Banu Hashim generally and the Prophet’s household, the Ahl-ul-Bayt, in particular.
The
Muawiyya who is vaunted as a “dahiyya” for his perceived astuteness, and has
astoundingly
been accepted as a narrator of genuine hadith began the process of cursing the Imam
Ali as
part of state policy. I relate this on the authority of Tabari, not particularly known for his
Shia proclivities. And the Mu’tazzali, Ibn Abi al-Hadid, narrates that Muawiyya used to
refer to the blessed Prophet, Peace and Blessings of Allah upon him, in fits of
uncontrolled
jealousy, as, astaghfurillah, Ibn Abi Kabsha, the scornful name that was given to the
most
noble of men by the Prophet’s enemies in Mecca. Does this not resemble, in intensity of
hatred to the Prophet, to the remarks that you attributed to Ibn Saud when he met the
Ulemas
of India? The “virtues” of Muawiyya include the poisoning of the Prophet’s grandson,
Imam
Hassan, and the appointment of his illegitimate half-brother, the infamous and bloody
Ziyad
ibn Abih, as governor over Basrah to hound and eliminate the partisans of Ahl-ul-Bayt. It
is
inconceivable for a pious Muslim to give legitimacy to such a person and place him in
authority over the mu’minun. This is what Muawiyya did with Ziyad, in flagrant violation
of
all the ordinances of Islam. Ziyad’s crimes against Islam can only be exceeded by his
son,
the notorious Ubaydullah, who presided over the massacres at Kerbala.
I do not want to go into the deliberate murder of scores of the Talibin – the descendants
of
the Imam Ali – during Muawiyya’s kingship and throughout the benighted rule of the
Sufyanis, and indeed throughout the first two hundred years of the Islamic Empire. All
that
one has to do is to read the impeccable scholarship of the “Maqatil” of Abu Faraj al-
Isfahani to see for oneself the extent to which the descendants of the Prophet, Peace
and
Blessings of Allah upon him, were hounded and murdered by those who wielded
authority
over Muslims. The charge of usurpation and illegitimacy that has been levelled at the
Ummayyads and the Abbassis is not without justification, and the response of these
rulers
had been the classic one of divide and rule, liberally laced with state terror. The entire
reign
of the ill-fated Sufyanis was based on the encouragement of bloody division, discord
and
fitna amongst Muslims, and government by repression and oppression. The tragedy for
the
Arabs began there and then. Kingship of the most odious kind was imposed on them,
and
subsequently justified by the hirelings who, then as now, were always ready to do the
tyrant’s bidding. The entire program of Muawiyya was to intimidate, cheat, and threaten
to
ensure the successful establishment of despotic kingship with his loathsome son, Yazid,
as
his anointed successor. The hatred of the Ummayyads for the Prophet and his
household
reached epidemic proportions. It became a sunna for the Ummayyads to curse Imam
Ali,
peace be upon him, during the Hajj on the day of Arafa. The great historian Baladhuri
relates a story of the encounter of one of the “dahiyyas” of Banu Umayya, Marwan, with
Imam Ali as-Sajjad, the great grandson of the Noble Prophet. The Imam as-Sajjad
asked
Marwan why the Imam Ali Ibn abi Taleb was being cursed from the pulpits in all the
mosques. Marwan’s cynical but revealing response was:
“la yastaqimu l-amru illa bi-dhalik” – Our rule would not be established without it.
Marwan thereby acknowledged openly that Ummayyad rule was based on a monstrous
injustice.
The fuqaha of Islam – rightly fearing to perpetuate the deep sense of outrage felt by all
Muslims at the seizure of power by munafiqun – have generally shrank from confronting
this usurpation of power by the worst of Quraish. And it has come down to treating this
as
an unfortunate squabble – the Great Fitna as it has been euphemistically called. In
reality it
is the Great Betrayal. The Umma of Islam was cheated from its birthright to govern itself
by
the laws of Allah, Glorified and Exalted is He, whether through consultation, acclamation
or
designation, by a cynical and corrupt power grab that set the precedent for all
subsequent
governments over Muslims generally and Arabs specifically.
Dwelling on the patterns of rule and legitimacy developed by Muawiyya may be an
exercise
in futility, but Muawiyya wrote the handbook for the “effective” ruler and his methods
have
been copied, in part or in whole, by the gang that rules over the Arabs at present.
Firstly, is the preference given to non-Muslims over Muslims in councils of state and as
the
trusted executors of the will of the ruler. Muawiyya’s use of Syrian Christians as
administrators and advisers finds its counterpart today in the extensive use of minorities
in
powerful positions of authority and control throughout the Arab World, from the power of
the Jewish Azouleys in Morocco to the Sawaris Copts of Egypt and the Christian
businessmen surrounding the courts of the oil and Baath potentates.
Secondly, the preference given to regional, tribal and clan loyalties over the taqwa of
individuals. This has provided the norm for cementing political control in most of the
Arab
countries today. A simple glance at the political map of the Arab World shows the ugly
face
of tribalism and narrow clannishness behind all the regimes, most notably those who
hide
behind the wretched slogans of socialism, nationalism and revolutionary power. Scratch
an
Arab Baathist or Socialist and you will find a thicket of interlocking tribal and clan
interests
that prop up the structures of tyranny.