About this blog

In recent times a plethora of misconceptions, misrepresentation and myths have been forged about Islam
and Muslims. Many western influentials from politicians, policymakers to judges have taken it upon
themselves to undermine the Islamic beliefs, values and rules so to make it palatable to their
egotistic minds and the secular liberal thoughts.

This blog is dedicated:-

1. To argue the point for Islam in its belief and systems and to refute the misconceptions.
2. To expose the weakness and contradictions of all forms of secularism.

26 Jan 2011

Tunisia: Change we really can believe in

14th January 2011 marked a day my ruler, Mumar Gaddaffi of Libya, and I shared a similar reaction on hearing that President Zine al-Abidine of Tunisia, our neighbouring country, had hastily left his country following mass demonstrations against his tyrannical rule. Our reactions were of disbelief; but that is where the similarity began and ended. Whilst it stirred jubilation amongst my fellow citizens and I, the Arab rulers in the region were left feeling insecure and mortified at the news still to come.

I left Libya along with my family at the tender age of 7, but remember the unpleasant and tragic experiences of other people that came from the Maghreb - Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. The rulers were all dictators and spared no expense and no lives at ensuring that their rule went unhindered and unchallenged.

Four years after Gaddaffi came into power my father began to receive strange telephone calls at our home, men asking for his whereabouts and making it clear that we were being watched. I only recently learned that since my father used to travel out of the country regularly he had become the subject of interest by the state. He was spoken to by the intelligence services who warned that if he was committing adultery the state would support him; if he was stealing from others the state would support that and indeed most crimes; but if he was ever to consider standing against the state that will mean definite torture and death.

We then began to hear of people disappearing and one of those was my first cousin. His crime being that he was reported as often praying Fajr (morning prayers) at his local mosque. We heard fathers of men who tried to mobilise opposition to such tyrannical rule being set alight, women raped and tortured, public hangings where all the victims' families were ordered to attend and watch and people being beaten and then buried alive in mass graves. People became afraid not just of their rulers, but of one another, fearing that one of their family members could secretly be working for the secret intelligence services - the Makhabarat.

My mother would often tell me that Tunisia was no different and this seemed all the more real when we visited the country after fleeing Libya as political refugees. Tunisia is a known tourist hotspot for the West, very little else is known about the nation in the world.

The Hijab was frowned upon and Ibn Ali's predecessor was famous for removing the hijab of a woman, in full view of the media, whilst telling her that she was now liberated.

Upon our visit we were approached by women who quietly whispered how they envied our dress, but donning the hijab would mean arrest and unspeakable torture. I recall my family travelling in a taxi when the driver told them that he had something very special to show them. He opened the glove compartment and removed an object that was wrapped in layers of a garment. The driver took extraordinary care to reveal what he had hidden - we were amazed to discover that it was the Qur'an! He told us that he was risking his life for simply carrying it.

Our prayers at the mosque were summoned by a recording of the Azhan (call to prayer), which had volume control, there was not even a moazzin present. As in Libya, people who prayed at mosques were carefully monitored. Regular reports to the police chiefs were sent and men were often arrested and imprisoned or worse.

These snapshots of an Ummah oppressed throughout the region even made me believe that change was near impossible.

I learnt at a young age that the British and French constructed the post Ottoman regions by creating borders and placing puppets in power to ensure the Ummah would never unite. These rulers such as the Saud family, who for long collaborated with the British and fought the Ottoman Khilafah utilised their secret services to spy on their own people and cripple any possible momentum for change - often using very brutal tactics. This architecture was constructed to protect Western interests and to ensure the Ummah could never unite.

The past few weeks has seen the smallest state in North Africa do exactly that, revolt against its tyrannical rulers in a way that has inspired the rest of the Ummah. Ibn Ali's first reaction was to threaten the people by blaming gangs for the unrest. The following day his tone and demeanour had completely altered to one of reconciliation, almost pleading, by lowering the price of bread. King Abdullah of Jordan followed suit.

The very next day, Ibn Ali fled Tunisia. His friends in France would not even allow his airplane to land on their tarmac. It is reported that France is now grooming her agents to go and try seizing power in Tunisia. The long exiled secularist Monsif Almarzoki has just left France for Tunisia.

A new President Ghanoushi assumed the ruling, but further demonstrations ensured that his presidency would go down as one of the shortest in history- two days. The demonstrations continue today, and the government is in disarray as to who to hire and fire. People are demanding a new constitution.

So what can we learn from these events. Unarmed people went out en mass to remove their ruler in a region, which has a shoot to kill policy.

We can now lay to rest the argument that we are weak as an Ummah. Some people are calling for democracy, but at the same time they are shunning the west and its system, why; because "democratia" to the Arabs merely means being able to account the ruler.

Tunisia knows what it does not want, what it needs is still unclear to the people at the moment. Although there have been chants of "Allhu Akbar", the call of Islam is just reemerging in the region, simply because France removed it from public life and then the minds of the people upon the destruction of the Khilafah.

What is clear however, is that Islam is still very much in their hearts. In fifty years the people finally heard the Azhan live which brought so much joy that people began to pray in the streets.

As Ibn Ali's wife looted the treasury escaping with 1.5 tons of gold the Arab rulers across the Middle East are attempting to sure up support by giving handouts to ensure they will not be the next ruler discarded into the dustbin of history.

I make dua that this incident marks the beginning of the end of the Muslim rulers and that Allah (swt) blesses us with change under the shade of the Khilafah.

[Written by Ibtihal Bsis]
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

What they said...

“Islam represented the greatest military power on earth…It was the foremost economic power in the world…It had achieved the highest level so far in human history, in the arts and sciences of civilization...Islam in contrast created a world civilization, poly-ethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental.”





[Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Orientalist and Historian, 2001]





"There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world. It was able to create a continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts…the civilization I'm talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600… Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage"





[Carly Fiorina, ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, 2001]





"For the first three centuries of its existence (circ. A.D 650-1000) the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques and quiet universities where the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved and appreciated, the Moslem world offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, then sunk in the night of the Dark Ages."





[Lothrop Stoddard, Ph.D (Harvard), American political theorist and historian, 1932]





"Medieval Islam was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than in contemporary Europe;it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical books are now known to us only through Arabic copies. It invented windmills ,trigonometry, lateen sails and made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering and irrigation methods. In the middle-ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe rather from Europe to Islam. Only after the 1500's did the net direction of flow begin to reverse."





[Jared Diamond, UCLA sociologist and Author, 1997]



"No other society has such a record of success in uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity and endeavour so many and so varied races of mankind. The great Muslim communities of Africa, India and Indonesia, perhaps also the small community in Japan, show that Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the opposition of the great societies of the East and west is to be replaced by cooperation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition."





[Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, Professor at Harvard University, 1932]





“The Muhammadan Law which is binding on all -- from the crowned head to the meanest subject is a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned and the most enlightened jurisprudence that ever existed in the world.”





[Edmund Burke, British Statesman and Philosopher, 1789]





"The Exile here is not like in our homeland. The Turks hold respectable Jews in esteem. Here and in Alexandria, Egypt, Jews are the chief officers and administrators of the customs, and the king’s revenues. No injuries are perpetuated against them in all the empire. Only this year, in consequence of the extraordinary expenditure caused by the war against Shah Tahmsap al-Sufi, were the Jews required to make advances of loans to the princes."





[David dei Rossi, Jewish Traveller 17CE, quoted by Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands]





"The notable religious tolerance towards Christians and Jew under Muslim rule had given way to the uncompromising zealotry of Spanish Inquisition. Jews and Muslims thus fled Spain with large numbers of Jews immigrating to the Ottoman Empire which was known for its tolerance to the Jews."





[Graham Fuller, Author and former CIA, 1995]





“If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the straightjacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and systems of beliefs, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history”





[Charles Philip Arthur George, HRH The Prince of Wales, 1993]





"...Not being subject to the Sharia, Jews and Christians were free to go to their own religious authorities for adjudication of disputes; but in many cases they went instead to the [Muslim] Qadi"





[Richard W. Bulliet, Professor of History and Author, 2004]





"Here in the land of the Turks we have nothing to complain of. We possess great fortunes; much gold and silver are in our hands. We are not oppressed by heavy taxes and our commerce is free and unhindered. Rich are the fruits of the earth. Everything is cheap and each one of us lives in freedom. Here a Jew is not compelled to wear a yellow star as a badge of shame as is the case in Germany where even wealth and great fortune is a curse for a Jew because he therewith arouses jealousy among the Christians and they devise all kinds of slander against him to rob him of his gold. Arise my brethren, gird up your loins, collect up your forces and come to us."





[In his book 'Constantinople', Philip Mansel quotes a rabbi in Turkey writing to his brethren in Europe where they were facing increasing persecution after 1453]





"Praise be to the beneficent God for his mercy towards me! Kings of the earth, to whom his [the Caliph’s] magnificence and power are known, bring gifts to him, conciliating his favour by costly presents, such as the king of the Germans, the king of the Gebalim, the king of Constantinople, and others. All their gifts pass through my hands, and I am charged with making gifts in return. (Let my lips express praise to the God in heaven who so far extends his loving kindness towards me without any merit of my own, but in the fullness of his mercies.) I always ask the ambassadors of these monarchs about our brethren the Jews, the remnant of the captivity, whether they have heard anything concerning the deliverance of those who have pined in bondage and had found no rest."





[Hasdai Ibn Shaprut (915-990 CE) Jewish physician, chief minister of Islamic Caliphate in Cordova, 'The Jewish Caravan']





"In Baghdad there are about forty thousand Jews, and they dwell in security, prosperity, and honour under the great Caliph [al-Mustanjid, 1160-70 CE], and amongst them are great sages, the Heads of the Academies engaged in the study of the Law…’"





[Benjamin of Tudela, Rabbi in Baghdad in the year 1168 CE, 'The Jew in the Medieval World']





"Those Eastern thinkers of the ninth century laid down, on the basis of their theology, the principle of the Rights of Man, in those very terms, comprehending the rights of individual liberty, and of inviolability of person and property; described the supreme power in Islam, or Califate, as based on a contract, implying conditions of capacity and performance, and subject to cancellation if the conditions under the contract were not fulfilled; elaborated a Law of War of which the humane, chivalrous prescriptions would have put to the blush certain belligerents in the Great War; expounded a doctrine of toleration of non-Moslem creeds so liberal that our West had to wait a thousand years before seeing equivalent principles adopted.





[Leon Ostorog, French Jurist]





"The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence"





[Robert Briffault, Novelist and Historian, 1928]





"The only effective link between the old and the new science is afforded by the Arabs. The dark ages come as an utter gap in the scientific history of Europe, and for more than a thousand years there was not a scientific man of note except in Arabia"





[Oliver Joseph Lodge, Writer and Professor of Physics, 1893]





“Thus, when Muslims crossed the straits of Gibraltar from North Africa in 711 and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, Jews welcomed them as liberators from Christian Persecution.”





[Zion Zohar, Jewish scholar at Florida International University, 2005]







“Throughout much of the period in question, Arabic served as the global language of scholarship, and learned men of all stripes could travel widely and hold serious and nuanced discussions in this lingua franca. Medieval Western scholars who wanted access to the latest findings also needed to master the Arabic Tongue or work from translations by those who had done so.”





[Jonathan Lyons, Author, Writer and Lecturer, 2009]