As Muslims we have to
review the realm of events not once, but twice. Or rather, we must
first look with the eye of Tawhid and then we must look with the eye of
Furqan. If we do not approach the matter with the gravity and at the
same time the illumination that comes from the light of Tawhid, we will
fail in the subsequent discrimination.
However shocking and distressing the matter may be to us, we must
recognise that the event is by Allah. With Allah there is no injustice.
Allah has set up existence by an intricate pattern of laws which never
cease to function at any given moment. All living creatures perform,
bounded by those natural laws that Allah has programmed into them.
The
organisation of the termitiary and the beehive are well known to us.
Also the laws by which, when the higher organisms collapse, lower
organisms take over. While an animal is alive, it carries in its blood
and tissue living micro‑organisms. When it is hunted and killed, it is
then hung. During that time these micro-organisms die which might infect
the human. If the carcass is allowed to hang, new micro-organisms come
to life which can be nutritious and give taste.
It is only with the human species that there is, among the kuffar,
the great illusion. The great illusion is that man can do what he likes.
The truth, which is clearly laid out in the Qur’an, is that the human
creatures live under a charge from Allah, glory be to Him. They have a
beyond-time contract which they are called upon to fulfil in the
in-time.
Allah the Exalted has said in Surat Al-A‘raf (7:172):
Thus from the mighty
and majestic summit of the mountains of what may be and can be thought
about Allah, glory be to Him, and the working-out of His Divine Contract
with the sons of Adam – there is no doubt that from that position
everything that is happening in the Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Syria,
Iran, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates lies under the powerful
reproach and the inescapable warning of Allah, the Lord of the Universe,
and from this viewpoint the Muslims of the Emirates should be more
afraid and more ashamed than the people of Lebanon, cowering under their
cedar trees, bombarded by an alien people who want to live exactly the
same kind of life as they had up until two weeks ago been living
themselves.
Having grasped the situation with the Qur’anic perspective, it then
obliges us to discriminate as best we can through the smoke and the fire
and the blood and the suffering of children. Let us first look at the
protagonists of the struggle before examining the wider setting of the
so-called World Community which is nowhere either a political or a legal
reality.
As the scenario has been concocted, the first shots fired, as it
were, involved the taking of one miserable little Israeli soldier in
Gaza. This took place in the epicentre of Palestine. The ‘Ummah have
long been assailed with the version of events which, using the PLO’s
vocabulary, presented an occupied community of Muslims struggling for
their ‘just national rights’. The language was that of Nasserite
socialism, and the cause was national freedom. This, at the very point
that the national state had ceased to exist, de facto and de jure.
Nevertheless, there was the added outrage that their land had been
stolen from them in a brutal terrorist operation watched helplessly by
the rest of the world.
Up until the first Lebanon crisis, all the activities of the
Palestinians, although named terrorism, could be claimed as the extreme
measures forced on an oppressed people. During the Israeli incursion
into Lebanon, Hamas fighters were for a time trapped in the frontier
zone, hosted by Hizbollah. It was on their return to Palestine that
their fight against Israel took on a new element. This was
suicide-bombing. Despite Qur’anic injunctions, despite quite terrifying
Hadith warning against suicide, despite the Ijma’ of all the people of
the Sunna, we were asked to accept this unacceptable alteration in the
unalterable Law of the Shari‘at. The practice was easily identifiable as
Isma‘ili, and, from these same Lebanese mountains, it had been used to
terrify the Muslims and the christians once before in history. The
Isma‘ili are, of course, a branch of the Shi‘a religion. The propaganda
that came out from the region offered us a picture of the Palestinian
and Lebanese Muslims fighting the admittedly dreadful Israeli enemy.
Things were not so simple.
Early in 2006 we invited the Mufti of Jerusalem and the Mufti of
Nablus to attend our Islamic Conference in Cape Town. The Mufti of
Jerusalem, apprised of the news that we intended to ask from him a fatwa
denouncing suicide bombing, cancelled his visit at the last minute. The
Mufti of Nablus informed us that neither of them could make such a
Fatwa, for they would certainly be killed by Hamas. He further said that
if the Mufti of Jerusalem, who is highly respected by his people, were
to make such a Fatwa, the people would follow him. Reflection on the
matter forced us to a distressing conclusion. The ghastly performance of
the Hamas election, the American, sloganised baseball caps, the
pseudo-military outfits of the women, the unnerving similarity between
their social persona and that of Hizbollah and Tehran – all these seem
to indicate that certainly the leadership, and almost certainly the
teaching apparatus inside Palestine, had become Shi‘a. This perception
was regrettably confirmed in the recent parades in Palestine at which
the Lebanese Shi‘a leaders’ portraits were brandished aloft by the
hysterical crowd.
