The Valor of the Few
Ramadan as sacrifice, fasting as defiance and Palestine as the modern day Badr and Thermopylae.
Those who were warned, “Your enemies have mobilized their forces against you, so fear them,” the warning only made them grow stronger in faith and they replied, “Allah alone is sufficient as an aid for us and is the best Protector.” (Qur’an 3:173)
One might fast but he gets nothing from his fast except hunger. - The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ
Be a foe to the oppressor and an aid to the oppressed - Imam Ali’s advice to his sons, Hasan and Husayn, after being fatally poisoned on the 21st of Ramadan
Fasting is our sacrifice, it is the life of the soul. Let us sacrifice our body, since the soul has arrived as a guest. - Mawlana Rumi
90 Ramadans ago, at the old age of 81, Shaykh Farhan Sa’adi was executed in cold blood by British colonial forces in Palestine while fasting near the city of Nablus.
Before British bullets—at the behest of the Haganah and Irgun—ripped through his body, did he utter the Prophetic supplication, I wonder, as one usually does one one breaks their fast, “the thirst is gone, the veins are moistened, and the reward is confirmed, if Allah wills”?
Is shahada considered a form of fasting too, when one fasts from life itself, and feasts in the afterlife instead?
Like Imam Hussein, he was martyred thirsty and hungry.
In the Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad said that “the smell of the mouth of a fasting person is better in the sight of God than the smell of musk.”
In Palestinian lamentation lore, when bidding farewell to a shahid, it is common to sing to them in their funerary procession before their burial: “Ma’ as-alameh ya misk fayeh, farewell o fragrant musk, go to your Lord now, to paradise, to the light. Ma’ issalameh ya ghālī ‘a gleibi, farewell, oh dear one to my heart.”
Fragrant starving breath, fragrant decimated bodies.
When did Ramadan become about fragrant, elaborate iftars and indulgent desserts when it was a time of revolt against evil and musk-scented sacrifice?
Shaykh Farhan, born in the village of Mazar in today’s West Bank, would probably be aghast that his homeland was abandoned by billions of Muslims, while they go on 5-star luxury hajj packages and listen to preachers who decry feminism and aqida wars, but are mealy mouthed about the fiqh of living under pervasive tyranny in this New Dark Age.
Shaykh Farhan was thought to have been the person who ignited the Great Palestinian Rebellion of 1936, the fiercest campaign of resistance against British and Zionist colonization led by Muslim clerics, scholars and youth, which largely began in mosques and lodges, such as that of Izzidin Qassam’s zawiya in Haifa. (Unsurprisingly, the recent film on this rebellion, Palestine 36 by Annemarie Jacir dilutes—if not wholly erases—the unique Islamic character of the revolts.)
Shaykh Farhan was among those who heralded, over a century ago, the native Palestinian struggle against ongoing Zionist oppression and colonization.
This 100-year battle has reached its zenith.
With the birth of a new crescent tonight, the battered people of Gaza will celebrate their 3rd Ramadan under the rubble of genocidal conditions.
Additionally, nearly 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners will observe the holy month in brutal captivity as they endure abuse, including torture, sexual assault, deliberate starvation, electrocution and beatings at the hand of their terroristic Israeli wardens.
Many Palestinians like the elder paramedic Hatem Ismail Rayyan, who was killed earlier this week, will not live to see this coming Ramadan. He was killed in the Negev Prison under torture.
Now, Israel is making bloodthirsty plans to execute in cold blood hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as official policy, reminiscent of the same racist British policies that killed Sheikh Farhan with wanton cruelty during Ramadan in the 1930s.
Only now, the diseased cancer of colonial campaigns has metastasized into astonishing levels of cruelty: Israel is reportedly allowing 3 volunteers to pull the trigger at once to execute abductees from Gaza point blank.
It for this reason and others why Jewish scholars like Norman Finklestein call Israeli society at large an “in bred society of lunatics” that is "incapable of guilt".
Despite all this decades long barefaced degeneracy, whether from the British colonial apparatus then, or this Epstein administration ruling the world today, these extended legacies are marked by shameless perversion, both as deliberate private and public mandates, to corrupt and desecrate humanity.
Now we understand why they stood by and watched as the Palestinian holocaust targeted children in particular:
It was a blood orgy.
A glorious ritual of mass sacrifice for them.
This moral rot has also reached its zenith, and it is overdue for incineration.
Ramadan in the Arabic language derives from the word al-ramad and al-ramdā’, meaning the earth which is scorched under intense heat, possibly due to the fact that before Islam, this month gained its name at the height of summer.
But scholars have commented on the fast’s ability to burn away sins and attachments.
Like a sword, Ramadan blazes the mundane and disrupts even the most autocratic secular state routines, reordering time itself. It tests the mettle of the believer.
In other words, Ramadan comes not only to sear stomachs and throats, it comes as an invitation to purify hearts and intentions. To baptize by fire. To sharpen the vision of inner sight. To intensify attributes of humanity—hunger, need, introspection, vulnerability—in the face of rampant and endemic inhumanity.
It cuts through base, bestial gluttonous attachments and releases one from the prison of physical bodies, to the boundless freedom of celestial souls.
This Ramadan comes with an acute, unprecedented urgency to resist and confront systematized inhumanity.
Because the Final Revelation to humanity descended in it, Ramadan’s greatest enemy, therefore, is malice. It is a blowtorch to pervasive evil. Its higher form of observance is to fast from the wickedness of the tongue and hearts. For the knower of God, the highest fast of all is to fast from perceiving anything other than God.
Well before the Palestinian Revolt of 1936, the tradition of fasting as resistance began of course, in the Battle of Badr, which marked Ramadan as the witness to a David and Goliath battle, when a small band of Muslims, 313 to be precise, met the beast not only with swords, but with emptied stomachs and a relentless unbroken reliance on the unyielding power of the Victor (an-Nasir).
This theme of the few confronting the many is present, but forgotten in Western civilizational mythology, too. In 480 BCE, a small Greek force led by Spartan King Leonidas held off King Xerxes I’s massive Persian army for three days at the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae.
300 or so Spartans, alongside a few thousand Greek allies, faced the massive invading forces of Xerxes I. The resisting force was annihilated, yet in Western memory, Thermopylae became a story of defiance, sacrifice, and heroic death in the face of an overwhelming imperial force.
Though it was a military defeat in the short term, the delay provided crucial time for Greek city-states to prepare for further conflict, ultimately contributing to the Persian defeat.
Both the battle of Badr and Thermopylae center asymmetry: the few against the many, conviction against cold-hearted raw power. Thermopylae holds forgotten vestiges of sacrifice in the materialistic, satiated West.
This contrast becomes instructive when thinking about Palestine today. As many Americans begin to awaken to the Great Ruse, that the stoked fears of “a Muslim takeover of America,” hide the fact that a Zionist already has.
In this way, Gaza is serving as the world’s Thermopylae.
Like a century long Battle of Badr, Palestine has been valiantly staving off the Zionist Xerxes at the gate of humanity, while they are the ones being called the “barbarians.”
For many in the Global South, this Ramadan is marked by a living battle of Badr in the ongoing Palestinian struggle. Its exterior reality (thahir) looks like Thermopylae: a small, besieged population confronting a vastly superior military apparatus backed by empire, being singularly demonized and fought through displacement, blockade, bombardment, and now, a holocaust.
But its batin (interior reality) is, in fact, Badr: it reminds us that righteous resistance does not need to be commensurate with military might. In fact, it rarely does. It is precisely this jarring asymmetry between the oppressed in Palestine, Yemen or Sudan that often exposes the fragility of empires that often overplay their hand with brute force at the cusp of their downfall.
The Palestinian refusal to surrender, the refusal be erased is, in reality, humanity’s soul refusal to be euthanized.
The irony is that Western philosophers and scholars celebrate Thermopylae precisely because a small band dared to resist empire. But when a small band actually resists today—when Palestinians resist their brutal occupation—the same Western imagination that venerates Leonidas often denies Muslims and Palestinians their due honor and valor for their defiance. The myth of the few going against the beast is admired in antiquity but loathed in real-time. They draw the line at the perpetual “beast”—the Arab/Muslim “other”—no matter how noble or sacrificial.
In this sense, Palestine is as much the West’s Thermopylae as it is the modern day Badr of the Muslims. For the West, is it its mirror, forcing it to remember and reckon with its unrealized and abandoned foundational principles, as a martyr for humanity, even when it is villainized.
For Muslims, Palestine stands as its guilty conscience: that the plenty have reneged on their duties towards the ragtag few, the lone wolves upholding a resilient dam against theological and civilizational erasure. The small band that represents the true, lived, sacrificial Islam while their fellow brethren in the ummah opt for an Islam of opulence, laziness, docility and reactionary religiosity.
In fact, there were other modern Thermopylae across the 19th century led by Muslims, too. In 1857, the Naqshbandi Sufi Shaykh, who was the leader of the Muslim Dagestan and Chechen community, led a fierce resistance that delayed Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus for 25 years.
Enslaved Muslims in colonial-era America once had to observe their Ramadan in secret due to "slave codes" that banned assemblies, exposing them to punishment for fasting. The 1835 Malê Revolt, a significant uprising by enslaved African Muslims in Bahia, Brazil, also occurred during Ramadan. Mainly Yoruba and Hausa-speaking enslaved and free Muslims from West Africa resisted slavery and forced conversion to Catholicism. Despite its outward “failure,” the uprising is considered a major turning point that highlighted African resistance and influenced the long-term decline of slavery in Brazil and in the Americas generally.
Though they did not see the fruits of their victory in their lifetime, they fulfilled their covenant as to safeguard future generations from evil.
So you see, victories against tyranny, whether delayed or immediate, are inevitable. Many before us have sacrificed their musk-scented souls at the altar of the Divine in to honor the highest aims of humanity before us.
What base attachments can we scorch within us this Ramadan to scorch pervasive malice in the world?
For the ummah, for humanity, the exterior reality of Ramadan may appear as one of fragility, weakness and defeat, of being overpowered by evil, but never forget that history rarely honors the boastful plenty, rather, it remembers the sincere few.
Victory is not for the loudest, most powerful and most mighty. This is in reality, in the metric of cosmic principles, weakness.
True power—true light— is reserved for the humble. For the hungry, those with throats dry, hair disheveled, stomachs hollow. Victory is for the wretched of the earth, oppressed under the weight of godless arrogance, with bloodied stones in their hands and spears of light in their hearts.
Freedom belongs to righteous living souls, to those whose hearts are free, encircling the throne of God.
The enslaved ones are those who are chained in the mud of their malice and bestiality.
So this Ramadan, incinerate the malice within and walk the path of Prophetic sacrifice, to scorch the pervasive devilry that is running amok in this decisive battle for the soul of humanity.
"How many a small company has overcome a large company by permission of Allāh. And Allāh is with the patient." (Qur’an 2:248)