A Message to the Muslims of Britain
from Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi
Allah the Exalted says in Surat al-Jathiyya (45:22-24):
Allah created the heavens and earth with truth
so that every self might be repaid for what it earned
and they will not be wronged.
Have you seen him who takes
his whims and desires to be his god -
whom Allah has misguided knowingly,
sealing up his hearing and his heart
and placing a blindfold over his eyes?
Who then will guide him after Allah?
So will you not pay heed?
They say, ‘There is nothing but our existence in the dunya.
We die and we live and nothing destroys us except for time.’
They have no knowledge of that.
They are only conjecturing.
Most dear Muslim Community of Britain, all its men, its women and its children - that is, all those who confirm that Allah is One without association, and that our Master, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is the Seal of the Messengers before him, those named and those unnamed - I am moved to send this message to you out of my concern for you. The situation you are in has two aspects, one, the understandable dis-unity among us caused on the one hand by the creation of masonic structures inside the mosques, Mosque Committees, Treasurers, and Chairmen, and on the other hand by the inherited decimation of Islam in our time due to the disaster of the Khalif’s expulsion from Istanbul and the Oil Corporations’ adoption of wahhabism as a means to end Islamic governance.
The second aspect is the wider historical context of the British Isles. Britain itself is a fractured entity which over the centuries has experienced terrible scars. North of the border, in Scotland, there was monarchic continuity of King and People up to the Union of the Kingdoms. South of the border, England, according to Shakespeare, knew nothing but usurpation and illegitimacy, the chronicle of which is to be found in his History Plays. It is a dreadful story of disinheritance and usurpation, that is, the Wars of the Roses culminating in illegal Tudor power, then the illegitimacy of Queen Elizabeth I. Then, with legitimacy restored in a United Kingdom with a Scottish Monarch, soon in turn his first son was beheaded and his grandson driven into exile in a coup d’état which marked the end of personal rule.
Everything that followed is nothing less than, or other than, the evolution of mercantile capitalism under the Hanovers. By the 19th century, England was a nation crippled by a degrading poverty that reduced the masses to a sub-human condition. This outrage on the common people was ferociously attacked by very great men who fought for social justice, Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. From the end of governing monarchy in 1688 until the death of Churchill in 1965, Britain had been ruled by the landed aristocracy.
By 1920, the last century’s greatest political theorist in Britain, Hilaire Belloc, recognised that Parliament as an institution, that is as the institution which the landed gentry had created as the governing oligarchy, had come to an end. He explained: ‘My point is that the co-operation, the organisation of many human beings regarded as one governing class is no longer a thing within the vision of the governed. The gentry no longer means anything to them. What may be left of such a class they merge in a general vision of excessive, unjust, and indeed malignant wealth.’ He recognised that as a result of this, ‘The whole nature of the State has suffered transformation.’
He goes on: ‘The public mind naturally returns to the contemplation of the House of Commons as a whole, and that contemplation is not pleasing. It thinks of the man in question, however personally honest, as a politician, and that title has now acquired a significance which it cannot shake off.’
He sums up the matter in a definition: ‘Dying institutions do not restore themselves. […] The reform of the House of Commons from within is hopeless. You have never yet got in history a thoroughly corrupt governing organ reforming and restoring itself. The thing would seem to be as impossible in the body politic as in the physical body of man. We have further seen that mechanical reform from without - that is, changes in the method of election and so forth - could not eliminate the fatal weakness of a modern Parliament, which is that it is an Oligarchy no longer Aristocratic.’
This analysis of the state of Parliament in 1920 by Britain’s greatest political thinker was confirmed again by Lord Boothby in his assessment of the 1939 Parliament which he considered, ‘The worst Parliament in Westminster’s history.’ World War II and Churchill provided a noble last movement to the symphony of oligarchic rule. What has followed has been an up-to-then unimaginable decline. With a back-stage plot, the corrupted Conservative Party, along with un-elected monetarists, rejected its legitimate leader, Rab Butler, and placed at the head of the country a recidivist shopkeeper, Margaret Thatcher. From Thatcher to Blair we have witnessed the piece-by-piece dissection of parliamentary government, so that now the body politic lies before us, ready for burial.
If you want to grasp how far we have come from the oligarchic rule of the aristocracy to a government no longer in the service of the British people but of the worst, most ruthless, and most hidden elements of global finance, you need only look at a few statements of the last great Parliamentarian, Churchill.
In 1897, referring to the invasion of Afghanistan, he declared: ‘Financially it is ruinous. Morally it is wicked. Militarily it is an open question, and politically it is a blunder.’ He added, ‘…there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.’
On the judiciary he said: ‘The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the State, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if only you can find it, in the heart of every man - these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.’
Then in 1945 he made a famous speech which caused outrage at the time. However, this was a man who with the advent of the Boer War anticipated the First World War, and who at its end foresaw the inevitable coming of the Second World War. Now we can say that half a century ago he foresaw the inevitable demise of liberalism and radicalism from which would emerge in the Blair regime what he defined as ‘Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State.’
He said: ‘No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.’
It is clear from this brief survey of our history that we have reached end-game with the governing institution of Parliament, and it is not accidental that a Leader who has a gravely flawed psychology, and for whom the adjective ‘inadequate’ seems to provide a total definition, has under him two utterly inadequate and untrustworthy men whose exalted tasks should be the upholding of the Constitution and the Judiciary. I refer to the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, of dubious provenance, who has even publicly lied about himself in the matter of the Iraq War, and the totally inexperienced Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, whose main achievement was the covering-up of Blair’s squandering one billion sterling on the notorious Dome, before going on to the systematic dismantling of the inner structure of a Parliament that under the aristocracy had flourished for three hundred years.
Once we can view Britain in a proper light and regretfully recognise that it teeters on the brink of anarchy, we will be forced to realise that our duty as British citizens is to play a vital part in the recovery of Britain, and that it is a task for which we must prepare.
The real Terror in England, worse than that imported Terror which we the Muslims more than anyone deplore, lies in the disturbing statistics of violence. Firstly there is the continuing and rising number of women being raped. Only recently, five women were raped by a gang in the one city of Northampton. A black youth is murdered, his assailants known, and no-one brought to justice. In Liverpool, another black youth has his head split open with an axe. Added to all this there is the tragic list of young girls brutally assaulted and murdered, so regular is this terrible crime that the British public numbingly seem to have accepted it on an almost monthly basis.
All terror, according to its classical definition, has to be placed at the door of Government. They are always and in every case to blame. It is neither inappropriate nor accidental that a recent Prime Minister, personally responsible for the last phase of the active tearing-apart of the British Constitution, should have a son who is a convicted and self-confessed terrorist. Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark Thatcher, openly confessed in a South African court to the active participation in a planned coup d’état on an African country which would have led to the certain death of at least hundreds. He was found guilty and expelled ignominiously from the country.
We know we have to act from within our own Community, once we have recognised that the out-dated system of parliamentary democracy has now nowhere to go, and has already started the grim march, the historically well known march to totalitarian rule - arrest without trial, witch-hunt and slander by media, invasive interference in the practice of religion, persecution of intellectual opponents, and a failure to curb an increasing criminality coupled with turning upon the nation’s own youth as an enemy, re-defining them as yobs and hooligans.
What then is our task? Our first task is the integration and unification of that highly important section of British citizenry, the Muslim Community, a Community which significantly represents the largest religious group within the nation.
How is this task to be accomplished? Ibn Taymiyya told us that in a crisis the Muslims always must return to the First Community and find purification from that model. Following his counsel we would therefore, and he would have confirmed us in this, declare that while the Shi‘a religion takes its leadership from its Imam class, in Islam we do not do this. Our leadership must be the best, the strongest and certainly, following an exalted Sunna, the noblest of the young generation. Following the model of the Salaf, that leadership can be by appointment, selection and election.
The task of the leadership is not to make pronouncements, but rather to impose on the Community a correct fulfilment of the Fara’id. I do see this as a task for the new generation, because we have among them men and women of the highest quality and education who want the Deen and have already seen through the failure of the atheist society. From a structural point of view we could liken it to the creation of a Trade Union of Muslims. I have been advised by a governing member of the I.L.O. in Geneva that just such an entity would be legal in labour law, since a union requires only a common factor binding its members, and that not necessarily the work they do. Further, this would begin to create the social welfare system on which our Deen is founded.
The first step to this would be that the Leader of the Muslims would order the institution of the obligatory and necessary Pillar of Zakat. Without the erection of this Pillar there is no Islam, for it, with the other four Pillars together, uniquely represents Islam. Now Zakat is not a charity, it is defined in the Qur’an as a Sadaqa but with a unique condition. Allah has ordered in the Qur’an on the issue of Zakat a one-word Command on which the whole affair is founded - ‘Take!’
Allah the Exalted declares in Surat at-Tawba (9:103):
Take Zakat from their wealth
to purify and cleanse them
and pray for them.
Your prayers bring relief to them.
Allah is All-Hearing, All-Knowing.
This tells us that there is no Leadership without Zakat. The reverse also is true, there can be no Zakat without Leadership. The primary task of the Leader must be, and we must assume that he will have either co-opted or indeed been chosen by a High Council, to collect the Zakat. The Council in collaboration with the district mosques must then appoint Zakat Collectors according to the well-known conditions required of the Collectors. Then Zakat is assessed and collected. Once the Zakat is collected in its various places it must be immediately distributed, again according to the well-known categories. Zakat is for the poor and the welfare of the Muslims. There is no Tsunami Zakat - it is for the people in the place where it is collected.
This action, and this action alone, can give an absolute guarantee that no ignorant, uneducated, and socially alienated group can mistakenly plunge into terrorism in the name of an Islam which they never for a moment had understood.
This vital matter, and it is nothing other than the restoration of Islam, has one further liberating but necessary component. It has long been known to our best ‘ulema, although they have remained timidly reticent about declaring it, that there can be no Zakat taken on paper money. It is worth only the weight of the paper it is printed on. Zakat must be taken in the Gold Dinar and Silver Dirham. All the technicalities of this matter, both as viable economic model and realistic politique, have been worked out and worked over, with an expertise in both theory and practice, by Umar Ibrahim Vadillo. Politically, through his work, the former Prime Minister of Turkey, Dr. Mahathir of Malaysia and King Hasan II of Morocco, may Allah be merciful to him, the last of the three vowing in the last Ramadan of his life to set up a Commission to restore a gold/silver Zakat to Morocco - all these important Muslim leaders have confirmed the validity of the need for a return to a taken Zakat.
It is this act, when it takes place and when it is seen to take place, that will mark the beginning of a wide National Da’wa which will see the rest of the British population follow in the steps of their Muslim co-citizens, and among them, most movingly, we will find the surviving members of those families who lost a girl or child to evil violators and murderers, drawn to us perhaps at first only because they know that as Muslims we insist on the execution of those who commit these ghastly crimes.
Please accept this as the first pointer on the way not just to the creation of an Islamic presence in Britain, and not only an opening of the Deen to our fellow citizens, but also a path towards a re-constructed Governance to replace the failed parliamentary system. What, inshallah, we would propose would not only rescue Britain from the impending anarchy that has already started under our eyes, but it would hold out an opportunity for the survival of monarchy, not under its Whig dispensation as the Royal Puppets, but a Restoration of personal rule which would be far from the present absolutist rule of an inadequate politician chosen to represent the Lowest Common Denominator of the national populace.
Source: http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/content/articles/Art045_1708 2005.html