Islam vs. the State
This year has been one of callous evil, but it was also one of revolt and resistance against state fundamentalism.
“We have skillfully set Mecca against Istanbul, and nationalism against Islam.”
- Saying attributed to T. E. Lawrence
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two-
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
- Langston Hughes
Did you know that upon entering Egypt, Napoleon tried to dominate the Egyptian masses by declaring himself the Mahdi (the Muslim eschatological figure at the end of times who would come before Jesus and restore peace and order to the world)? Napoleon even said that verses of the Qur’an foretold his deeds, and patronizingly declared that every Muslim knows that “the words of God in His book are truth and righteousness which are inevitable in their realization.”
A historic example of a delusional megalomaniac?
How about the dashing Englishman, T.E. Lawrence, who helped destroy the Ottoman Empire by colluding with the Hashemites with his perfect Arabic and Orientalist charm?
A racist relic of the past?
Not quite. Rhetoric like this can easily be found in more contemporary examples. Take that callous Israeli spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, whose full time profession is to ridicule Islam and Muslims by playing the role of settler colonial Zionist mufti. Enraged by Iranian solidarity with the Palestinians, he frequently rants that Sunnis who pray alongside Shi’a have left the fold of Islam: “How do these ‘believers’ justify praying behind those who stab the back of the Sunni world?” he asks. Quoting medieval Muslim scholars, Adraee also claimed in a video that Shi’a Muslims are “fundamentally hypocrites and liars who invented falsehoods to ruin Islam.”
It doesn’t take a genius to see whose interests such divide-and-conquer, sectarian rhetoric ultimately serves.
It is the oldest game in the colonial playbook. Once we study history and begin to connect the dots, we can clearly see the connection between French, British and Israeli colonizer rhetoric. These cunning, racist, blue-eyed colonial “wannabe mullahs” have for so long tried to undermine, neuter and destroy Muslim self-determination.
Centuries before Zionism and before the establishment of the Jewish ethno-religious state in Palestine, European colonial officials projected a mimetic, fetishistic desire to dominate and subsume “the Orient” and “Mohammedans.” At the same time, they feared the deep, political danger that Islam represented: its uniting, anti-hegemonic power. Since well before the 18th century—with the trusted help of foxlike native informants—colonial forces have been doing everything in their power to divide and conquer Muslim communities by subsuming the voice of Islamic orthodoxy.
Now, for the first time in a long time, this pernicious, age old project is crumbling like a house of cards. How do we know that? Well, look around you. The political apparatus colonizers have long deployed to regulate Islam—the nation state experiment —is gasping its last breaths.
Let us take Cambon’s colossal “fatwa fail” as an example.
In 1893, Jules Cambon (d.1935), the Governor-General of Algeria sought to quell Muslim animosity towards French colonial presence in Algerian land. He naively sought a fatwa (a legal ruling), from the Sharif of Mecca, declaring it permissible for Muslims to obey a non-Muslim government. He was able only to do so, of course, with the help of native informant Hadj Akli, an Algerian merchant who mediated with the Sharif of Mecca on his behalf.
Cambon, like colonial officials before and after him, falsely equated the authority of the Sharif of Mecca with the centralized authority represented in the figure of the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church. Cambon’s ignorance of Islam and his misuse of Islamic law was reflective of a common, central tool for colonial governmentality across Muslim majority societies in the 18th and 19th centuries.
He printed fifty copies of the fatwa and sent it to his colleagues, other French colonial administrations in the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal and French Sudan, hoping it would act as a wand that would magically make those millions of diverse Muslim populations across North and West Africa willfully accept and obey French colonial rule.
Cambon’s fatwa seeking colonial compliance was met with mixed responses, but not for the reasons you might think. In the Ivory Coast and Guinea it was somewhat taken into consideration by colonial officials, but in Sudan, Cambon’s counterpart Governor Grodet was deeply unenthused by it. Why? Not because he rejected it on a basis of principle or a modicum of respect towards the religious and cultural sovereignty of the people he colonized, but rather because he thought that local Muslim leaders in Sudan were mere 'ignorant fanatics' who were incapable of understanding the document. (Yeah, I know, insert horrified/face palm emoji here).
Cambon's “fatwa fail” encapsulates two key things: ignorant presumptions about how Islamic law actually works and how different communities adjudicate differently, and Grodet's racist refusal to recognize African Muslims as real Muslims. This two-headed beast of ignorance and racism colors most colonial attitudes towards Islam and Muslims to this very day. This attitude will never change because the persistence of this Empire continues to be predicated upon—and fueled by—the twin menaces of ignorance and racism.
On brand, Cambon also famously wrote a famous letter to Zionist diplomat Nahum Sokolow in support of a Jewish homeland. It was issued by the French government in June 1917 during the First World War, announcing support for the Zionist project in Palestine. It has been argued that the Cambon letter was a necessary precondition for issuing the Balfour Declaration.
Today, Cambon and his ilk would be very proud that Muslims have finally adopted colonial fatwas and supports for Zionism on the state level in the “normalization” efforts enshrined in the inauspicious UAE-backed “Abraham Accords.” The devilish spirits of Napoleon, Cambon, Lawrence live on in the rotten souls of Netanyahu, Ardaee and Ben-Gvir, who can only continue their carte blanche genocidal campaign due to receiving the dutiful compliance of the “Sunni Muslim” leaders of Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states. After all, their impunity has gone on unchecked due to the trusted aid and support of clerics such as those in the UAE Fatwa Council and other Zionists in Muslim garb. Even Israel security analysts credit “official religious institutions and Muslim jurists in the UAE for stamping the [Abraham] accord with their religious approval.” Napoleonic megalomania and delusional “fatwa fails” finally found their way home. In their treacherous “abnormalization” efforts, they finally managed to attain the golden goose of a “Muslim” endorsement for Zionism at the state level.
Yet, such treatises and crooked fatwas are ultimately meaningless. No amount of hypocrites in Shaykh’s clothing can ever truly undermine Islam, however much they try. “The most fickle of all shelters is certainly that of a spider, if only they knew.” (Qur’an, 29: 41) Just like colonial efforts to rein Islam in have been colossal failures, the “Abraham Accords” and any Muslim attempts to support an ideology of injustice as grave as Zionism will likewise be doomed to the disgraceful dustbin of history.
In fact, what we are witnessing now is a breaking of the dam of not only decades—but centuries—of hegemonic state fundamentalism and pro-tyranny Islam (an oxymoron if there ever was one). October 7th set into motion the final blow to the systematic plot to manufacture and sustain an Islam that is complaint and subservient to globalist state terror.
The reason why Islam—represented in the lived practice and lone resistance of the Palestinian and Lebanese people—is shaking the very core of state tyranny is its inherent incompatibility with the nation state structure. The seriousness of this question is prevalent in academic studies on Islam and the modern nation state. In his seminal work, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament, Professor Wael Hallaq (a leading Christian Palestinian scholar of Islamic Studies) argues that the modern state is fundamentally incompatible with Islamic governance. Hallaq asserts that the modern nation-state, with its structures of control and secularism inherently conflicts with the ethical and moral framework of shari’a, which emphasizes justice, moral responsibility, and communal welfare. He critiques how colonialism and modernity reconfigured Muslim societies and imposed new systems that destabilized traditional Islamic governance, which was historically rooted in moral and legal principles overseen by scholars rather than bureaucratic state structures.
Hallaq proposes a reevaluation of what governance should look like if it is to be authentically “Islamic,” advocating instead for a morally-driven, justice-oriented societal structure that transcends modern political forms.
One thing is exceedingly clear: this moment of reevaluation is finally here. Muslims (and non-Muslims) would be wise to ready themselves for the future beyond this crucial moment of rupture, which will affect not only Muslim societies, but humanity as a whole.
It is not hyperbolic to state the obvious: the modern nation state system is inherently based—and predicated upon—anti-Muslim animus. Just look at the hateful climate surrounding this existential US election. Democrats would rather commit suicide than humanize Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians. They would rather unravel the entirety of the Western order than relinquish their ardent, singular worship at the altar of Zionism, which is nothing but an extreme form of Islamophobia, anti-Palestinianism and Jewish supremacy mixed into one Frankenstein ideology. It is not an exaggeration to say that this centuries-long, persistent, systematic Islamophobia has been the final nail in the coffin of this “ruse-based” world order as we know it.
As stated previously in this Substack, efforts to pacify Muslim-majority societies by reworking the laws that govern their lives into a malleable, state complaint form are not new. There are myriad examples of similar efforts to create a colonial “state-complaint Islam” even before the establishment of the modern nation state. The desire to control, codify, categorize and regulate Muslims happened vividly in India under British rule as well, with the establishment of the East India Company’s control over Bengal in 1757 onwards. Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India was instrumental in formalizing the approach toward codifying Islamic and Hindu laws, seeking to create legal systems that could be more easily administered by British officials.
This year has been one of callous evil, horror and blood, but it was also one of revolt and resistance against state fundamentalism. The pernicious plots and schemes of totalitarian states such as the US, Israel and Arab governments who colluded to erase and suffocate Palestine, only revealed the hypocrisy inherent within the rotting core of this global disorder and those who profit from sustaining it.
Going forward, there will be two types of people: state fundamentalists and non-state fundamentalists. What I mean by state-fundamentalists is: those who are so wed to the power of nationalism and to the institutions that sustain the nation state structure, that it blinds them from seeing an ethical, just and moral path forward for humanity without the suffocating, pervasive presence of hegemonic state regulation and control. They idolize the nation state, the modern day taghut.1
State fundamentalists are, for example, those who lash out and threaten so that you vote for Kamala Harris, because not voting for Democrat fascism is a vote for Republican fascism. It is those who tell you that the “lesser of two evils” is voting for the party that funded a non-stop, coldblooded, live-streamed genocide. It is those who make all manners of excuses for genocidal governments who, by definition, have a monopoly on violence, but place the entire onus of non-violence on non-state actors who attempt to resist this maniacal death machine.
It is those people who see the nation state not as a recent blip in human history, a construct, but as an infallible idol. A given. Those that forget that nation states were born out of violence and thus have a monopoly on violence. Those who talk of “condemning violence” and call for “peace” without condemning security states, surveillance, military violence and weapons testing on non-state human beings.
Weapons manufacturers, lobbyists and colonial overlords are now very proud of state- fundamentalists—especially native informants and Muslim Zionists—because such groups have imposed upon themselves such stringent limits on their agency, dignity and self-respect that they would rather accept a genocidal status quo than imagine a future for humanity that is rid of the tyrannical chokehold of state-sponsored terrorism.
But their glee will be short lived and the fickle webs they have spun are doomed for destruction.
*A final word to the wise: be careful not to fall for the honey trap of Chinese, Russian or - - -insert different State Fundamentalist power here- - -. Be wary of replacing one totalitarianism with the next. Any solution for this predicament that rinses and repeats the same tyrannical structures but with a different face/flag must be seen as suspect.
Taghut is Islamic terminology denoting the worship of another deity besides God.