Editor’s note: The following is an exclusive translation of an excerpt from Palestinian Islamic Jihad founder Martyr Fathi Shaqaqi’s book on Islamic resistance. This particular excerpt addresses the colonialist roots of both liberalism and socialism in various forms of governance that ruled over West Asia since the involvement of colonial forces in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His thesis emphasizes that Islamic thought is superior to the materialist and secularist movements that sprung up in West Asia over the decades, specifically referencing the Islamic Revolution in Iran led by Imam Khomeini (ra). This is an intellectual means of expounding on the deeper meaning of Islamic revolutionary slogans like “no west (liberalism, capitalism), no east (Communism); only Islam.”
However, the war against the ideology of the Ummah and the only thought capable of mobilizing it to its political and social battle continued.
Abdel Nasser passed, leaving thousands of kilometers in the hands of the enemies of this nation and leaving Egypt groaning under the burden of deteriorating economic conditions and debts exceeding ten billion dollars.
And from Egypt to Algeria, Houari Boumediene answered a question about what made him make his move against Ben Bella, the symbol of the Algerian revolution.
He replied in 1966, saying: “I did not accept the responsibility of ruling until I saw hundreds of thousands of Algerians marching in the funeral of Sheikh Bashir al-Ibrahimi, as if they wanted to declare their disbelief in the new [i.e., secular] things that Ben Bella had brought them… and he had tyrannized.”
Imam Muhammad Abduh said during his stay in Beirut in 1886: “Preserving the Sublime Ottoman State is the third principle after belief in God and His Messenger, for it alone protects the Sultan’s religion and guarantees the continuity of his domain. Religion has no authority other than it. I adhere to this belief, praise be to God. We live by it and we die by it.”
And here he confirms in a conversation with Rashid Rida after the Turkish victory in the Greek War in 1897:
“Many of the notables of Egypt hate and denounce the Ottoman State, even though most of them love it. I also hate the Sultan. But there is no Muslim who wants harm for the State, for it is a protective fence in general. If it falls, we Muslims will remain like the Jews, or even less than the Jews, for the Jews have something they can preserve and protect their interests and their community with, which is money, and we have nothing left; we [would] have lost everything.”
This is Mustafa Kamil, one of the leaders of the national movement in Egypt, saying in a sermon in 1900 that religion and nationalism are inseparable twins, and he answered a question from Prince (Laybaring) (Kromer’s brother) about his nationality by saying “I am an Ottoman Egyptian,” but the process of forcing Muslims to abandon Islam as an ideology and the Ottoman state as a symbol of Islamic unity continued with all ferocity. This is one of the French writers who believes that there is no solution to the question of Islam except by eliminating the Muslims and digging up the grave of the Noble Messenger and transferring his bones to the Louvre Museum in Paris.
And this William Gladstone, 19th century leader of the British Liberal Party, announces that the British will not accept a decision in Egypt until they burn the Qur’an in the hearts of the Egyptians, and he refers to Sultan Abdul Hamid once by saying “the enemy of Christ” and another time “the devil.” And this Brit (Wilfred Scawin Blunt) says in his book The Future of Islam:
The destruction of the Ottoman Empire does not harm the Muslims, but rather, this Ottoman contract is being scattered to return as a better and more beautiful Arab contract. In (Blunt’s) last word, there is a clear indication that colonialism was behind the proposal of Arabism in exchange for Islam as a temporary alternative that was less dangerous to colonialism, in addition to what this proposal contains of attacking the idea of Islamic unity and undermining the Ottoman state under the guise of Arabism, in order to make it easier for them to divide the region among themselves, in addition to what this proposal would lead to in terms of confining the Arab movement later on to Asia, because it was not easy to separate Arabism from Islam in Arab Africa.
And for this plan to be achieved, colonialism began to educate its students by sending them on missions to Europe or through missionaries, evangelists, schools, and newspapers that they financed and that their agents supervised.
This colonial expansion culminated in the Great Arab Revolt, which the British planned and executed under their watch.
The Arabs, with their hands, [led] this revolution, which was a stake in the body of the Islamic state. And if things are to end, the history of this nation will not have mercy on those who raised the weapons of their enemies against their brothers, even if they used the excuses of Prince Ali bin al-Hussain.
When he said:
“We were only simple nomads. Before the revolution, we had never entered international life, or dealt with foreigners, or had any contact with them, near or far. The British came to the Hijaz, and we did not go to them. They came to us with a blank piece of paper with the seal of the empire at the bottom. They told us, ‘This is an official paper, so write on it whatever you want, and we are ready to implement and comply.’ So we believed, trusted, and fought on their side, but they soon betrayed and deceived us.”
Likewise, what Amin Said narrated in his book, Secrets of the Arab Revolution and the Tragedy of Sharif Hussain, about the leader of the “Great Arab Revolt”, that he did not live after his arrival in Jordan for more than a few days, during which he was unconscious and emotional, and he would call out and say “this is the reward of those who trust the British, befriend them, and work with them.”
History will not be merciful and will despise anyone who tries to follow a tactic or strategy separate from the ideology of his Ummah, whether it be Sharif Hussain or the line of leaders and commanders who have been taking turns leading this nation and usurping power in it. The Caliphate state fell, and the Crusader armies were encamped in our country. But colonialism, which knows that its armies have no place in the lands of Islam, began dividing this region and handing it over to its agents and disciples.
The fear of the danger of the Islamic resurrection and the Islamic light continued to confuse them and terrify them, as it remained in their plans and calculations. Despite all their efforts, the masses and the Islamic movements became the center of attraction in the region with their heroic stances against colonialism, whether before the fall of the Caliphate or after its fall, such as the Islamic al-Mahdiyya in Sudan, which, if it had been destined to live, would have changed the face of Africa and the Arab East, and ending with the recent Iranian revolution under the leadership of the Islamic leader Ayatollah Khomeini, through the revolutionary leader Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who stood guard against colonialism and pursued it everywhere and was a spiritual father to many Islamic thinkers, preachers, and companies.
Likewise, the ongoing Islamic revolutions in Algeria led by Abdelkader al-Jazairi, Ibn Badis, and the Association of Scholars, which made the Algerian National Charter – which is a secular charter – recognize this important role for them, considering that Islam was the impenetrable fortress.
This enabled the Algerians to withstand all attempts to undermine their identity. Islam, the religion of struggle, rigor, justice, and equality protected the Algerian people. They took refuge in it during the darkest eras of colonial control and derived from it that moral energy and spiritual strength that preserved them from surrendering to despair and provided them with the means for victory.
In Morocco, the Mujahid Abdul Karim al-Khattabi rose, who faced off against entire Spanish and French armies.
In Libya, the Senussi movement and the Mujahid Omar al-Mukhtar played an important role in resisting the Italians, who came with nearly 100,000 soldiers to exterminate the Muslim Libyan people.
In Palestine, Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who was a student of Sheikh Muhammad Abduh, led a revolution against the British until martyrdom. The revolution continued without interruption after him. In 1948, the Muslim Brotherhood fought an honorable battle that astonished everyone and revealed the danger of this group of believers to the interests of colonialism and Zionism.
But colonialism tried to isolate all these Islamic revolutions and movements, and led, with its agents and disciples of the Westernization movement, a counter-campaign that was opened by Farah Antun with his book on Ibn Rushd and his philosophy (1902). This book was a distorted copy of the book by the French thinker Ernest Renan on Ibn Rushd and Averroism (1852). He was then followed by Ali Abdel Razek, who called in his book Islam and the Principles of Governance for the separation of religion from the state, following the example of what the Europeans had done, forgetting or ignoring that the clash that occurred in Europe was unacceptable and illogical for it to occur in our Islamic society for many reasons that there is no room here to discuss.
It is sufficient to explain that the conflict that arose between the Church, which holds the Christian viewpoint of abstinence from life and the pursuit of gain, and the rising bourgeoisie could not have occurred here. Islam, in addition to coming with a more comprehensive organization in all aspects of human life, did not demand of its followers anything but that they be more effective in the worldly aspect, something that would satisfy the desires and achieve the ambition of any effective rising power.
It was Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyid who called for the “naturalization” of foreigners in Egypt at a time when they controlled economic life, almost as if he was calling for this economic influence to extend to political life. And Taha Hussain, who called in his book, The Future of Culture, for the dissolution of the Egyptian nation in European civilization – “its good and evil, its sweet and bitter, what is liked and disliked from it, what is praised and what is criticized,” as he put it. And finally, Louis Awad in al-Ahram on April 7, 1978, criticizes us for teaching our children the history of Tariq, Saqr Quraish, and Saladin more than we taught them the history of Ali Bey the Great, Muhammad Ali, and Khedive Ismail (Ismail Pasha of Egypt).
While these liberal ideas were making their way among men of thought and literature, the other side of the coin was the arrival of liberal regimes to power as the first organized alternative to Islam. But these regimes, which did not borrow from liberalism The West, except for its form, and it seems that it was unable to do otherwise. It quickly announced its inability to continue its claims to preserve this nation and support its national path. The defeat of 1948 made clear the reality of its inability to achieve modernization within national independence, in addition to the inability to confront the enemy to the end and lack of awareness of the liberal regimes of the nature of the conflict as well as its lack of authenticity and integration into Islamic society.
But the secular and alien movements did not despair from the defeat of liberalism and tried to save themselves and sever themselves of the inevitable path back to the Islamic solution that appeared on the horizon. The phenomenon of military coups emerged, in which the American intelligence agencies played a lion’s share role, and what was called revolutionary socialism began to take its role as a new alternative.
If the liberal regimes played their role by placing obstacles in front of the Islamic movement and trying to weaken it through invasion and intellectual oppression sometimes and political isolation at other times, the military socialist regimes played their role by physically eliminating the Islamic movement in addition to intellectual oppression and political isolation. The socialists and anarchists treated the Islamic movement as political opponents (and even much less than that) and not as ideological opponents, because they – for one of the reasons only – they realize that the battle on its other side means the fall of the masks, and we are not here to evaluate the socialist experience, which quickly came with the defeat of 1967 to announce what the defeat of 1948 had previously announced in the great confrontation between the Arab and Islamic nation and the new colonialism and Zionism in the tenth crusade that began in 1948 and its fire is still raging.
Although the death certificate was signed for the socialist, tory, or anarchist regimes (call them what you will), as it was signed for their other sister in the current of torture (liberalism). Despite the signing of the death certificate, it seems that the burial has not yet taken place.
In a desperate attempt to revive the corpses whose stench has offended the nostrils, and just as the year of history passed for the Shah, who, as one of the bastions of liberalism, tried to resist burial, it will pass for others, and the time will end in which a magazine like the Syrian “People’s Army” magazine publishes an article announcing the death of God (exalted be He above what they say, far above them), on the eve of the “Israeli” attack on the Golan Heights, just as the time will end in which the struggle against Zionism takes an Arab fighter who belongs to a revolutionary organization whose Muslim youth are martyred every day while he He writes to us about the ordeal of Satan in the Qur’an (like Sadiq Jalal al-Azm in Critique of Religious Thought).
Voices like this discordant one, which was issued on the sixth anniversary of the 1967 Nakba (perhaps by chance from Dar al-Awda by the Iraqi Marxist Hadi al-Alawi), will also be eliminated in Religion and Heritage to declare with all impudence “In principle, there is no contradiction between Islam and colonialism. Colonialism does not fight religions because they do not fight it in the first place, and Islam, as a belief, has nothing to do with colonialism.” He cries out once again “Revolutionary ideology is in essence in conflict with religion, and religion, in turn, has no contribution to our current struggle against colonialism and imperialism.”
Has this “fighter” even read his history?
At a time when the modern Western challenge was penetrating the borders of our country, trying to remove Islamic ideology from leadership and trying to present alternatives, the Islamic movement emerged as a natural reaction to this invasion and the fall of the Caliphate. Its emergence in the 1920s as an effective social movement in Islamic society had a major impact, as serious steps began on the path of Islamic revival to restore the Muslim nation to existence and international influence once again
It succeeded to a large extent in restoring the psychological balance of the Islamic community and played its role in the process of psychological purification of the individual and the Islamic community to get rid of the inferiority complex in the face of the coming challenges. The Islamic thinker Tawfiq al-Tayyib expressed in his book After the Two Nakbas, which was published in 1968 and is considered one of the most important Islamic papers published after the 1967 Nakba (Naksa), what is hoped for from this role, saying: “There is no longer an excuse for the Muslim intellectual from today to read a European book for leisure, but rather as a student and critic, and not to stand in front of a painting that he does not understand, admiring, but contemplating and appreciating, nor to stand in front of a machine dazzled, but rather as a learner and master or an interpreter, and perhaps one day he will become a teacher or as the Holy Qur’an wants him to be, a witness.”
The Islamic movement, which emerged from the midst and with the support of the popular masses, grew in a way that astonished observers, confirming what was stated in a book written by a group of orientalists under the supervision of the British Foreign Office Advisor. The Islamic movements maneuver, for they explode with an astonishing speed and before observers can discern from its signs what calls them to doubt its existence, the presence of leadership… The Islamic movements lack nothing but the appearance of Saladin.
The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, was able to become the largest mass movement, for it entered the villages and cities of Egypt and they entered the army and the universities, and the secret of this mass gathering was, according to the expression of an Egyptian Marxist – who wrote without a neutral or objective sense an analytical introduction to the translation of Richard P. Mitchell’s book on the Muslim Brotherhood – he wrote saying “that they started from an ideology capable of attracting the broadest masses” and then “that they proved their skill in the tight, strong, and effective organization to the point that they took from their traditional opponents – the Communists – one of their most important classic slogans, which is the slogan of the iron organization, and applied it while it remained for others, for the most part, just a slogan.”
And the Islamic Revolution in its emergence sought to unify the Muslim with his personality and his theory and to reject the existing ignorance and tyrants who created contradiction and crisis in the life of the individual and the Islamic society that carries an ideology and sees a reality completely different from the reality of injustice and inequality. The process of change through which unification will be achieved is organized into two silver linings that are two sides of the same coin.
The Islamic ideology as a realistic, moral, positive, and universal divine method includes solutions to all the problems of contemporary society. Once, however, the objective conditions for the solution, or some of them only (money and Arab technology), are achieved, without taking into account the subjective conditions, these conditions in which the Islamic light sees and sees in its assimilation the other wing the objective conditions for achieving renaissance. This subjective condition, by which we mean achieving it here, mobilizing the masses in any battle, whether battles for development or military jihad, will not be achieved except through the Islamic revival of the nation, shaking off the dust of the currents of Westernization, and eliminating the phenomena of duality, fabrication, and schizophrenia.
Here the other side of the coin emerges, which is how to formulate Islamic thought in a revolutionary way, a formulation by which the Islamic movement can build strong bridges with the Muslim masses, so that these masses realize the meaning of their connection to the Islamic movement and the role of this connection in preserving their history, heritage, and interests, and so that the Islamic body becomes a single body, so that if one of its members complains, the rest of the members respond to it with sleeplessness and fever, as the great Messenger, may God bless him and grant him peace, told us.
The formulation process, which the Islamic movement in Iran appears to have succeeded in, as will become clear in the next chapter and the rest of the chapters, requires adopting internal dialogue and criticism – and self-criticism is a first step on the path to that dialogue which may have been obstructed until now by the extreme sensitivity of the Islamic movement will remain the chatter of intellectuals who recite them in moments of ecstasy unless the masses arm themselves with them and move to implement them and struggle for them and engage in political conflicts for that. The falsehoods and lies spread about Islam were so great that they were actually sufficient to isolate this movement from the masses of Muslims, especially since this atmosphere of lies had two important conditions:
1. The absence of the Islamic movement from the scene and its forced silence as a result of the process of arrest and liquidation
2. The loss of the Arab and Muslim mind in the phase of camouflage and terrorism of the critical senses. This lack that struck the social consciousness of the nation at its core is its failure to see correctly, even temporarily. Perhaps the cheapest and most malicious of these lies was what Rifaat al-Saeed fabricated in his book about Imam Hassan al-Banna (Madbouli Library 1977), which he dedicated to everyone who works for a new era of enlightenment for Egypt and repels the raids of the new Tatars. What he fabricated on behalf of the martyred Imam on the subject of Shura, indicating brazenly that what he conveyed is present in Our Problems in Light of the Islamic System, p. 60. See page 92 in Al-Saeed’s book and compare it to the letter of Professor al-Banna to understand what enlightenment these people are demanding and who the new Tatars are. Despite this, I repeat that this sensitivity should not stand in the way of the first and basic demand within the movement, which is internal, dialogue-based, and self-critical.
Certainly, it will prepare the atmosphere to present scientific and analytical studies of the reality that the movement came to change, as it will achieve another necessary requirement, which is to create an Islamic vision of the main problems in the Islamic world, their nature and priorities.
A unified program of work was established that begins with defining the starting points and means, and with understanding the dialectical relationship between them, then defining the final goals of the movement and the direct and indirect goals.
