Foreign Domination

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

British imperial rule over the Muslims is resented by and large by our people due to spread of poisonous ideologies, having their roots in the anti-colonial movements themselves, like nationalism and leftism. It is an indisputable fact that the condition of the Muslim world under European colonialism, and particularly the British, was preferable to the present state of affairs although Muslims are by and large autonomous. The truth is foreign rule and domination is often superior to native, self-rule. To the ordinary subject it shouldn’t really matter whether there is a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen in government buildings and offices, or a portrait of a brown man wearing a red fez. What really matters is the quality of governance, not the identity of the governor. Look back at the height of British imperial power, we Muslims have a lot to be grateful for. These are the people who liberated the Punjab from the Akali tyranny through the Anglo-Sikh wars of the mid 19^th century. During the Akali tyranny, the impotent Muslims of Punjab were forbidden the rite of cow sacrifice—on pain of death. Mosques were desecrated and calling the adhān was likewise proscribed. Incidentally, today in the Punjab province of Pakistan, the moronic government and other cultural institutions celebrate Ranjit Singh as a hero and part of their heritage. There are even statues [idols] of that indecent tāghūt that have been erected relatively recently to honor his memory. Likewise, there is a growing trend in the Punjab province of Pakistan to celebrate the murderer Bhagat Singh, considered a martyr by some, especially in India among the Sikhs. Upon liberating Punjab from the Akali thugs, the British fully restored the religious liberty of the Muslims. The change in political atmosphere allowed for various Islamic movements, reformist and traditional, to flourish. Regrettably, the rise of Indian nationalism and its general demand for self-rule affected many of the Muslims who shockingly joined hands with idolatrous Hindus to oppose the ‘White Man’. This solidarity with idolatrous Hindus and Sikhs, as an expression of subcontinental ‘Desi’ nationalism has only served to worsen the condition of Muslims who remained behind in India after the Partition. The present rise of Hindutva chauvinism is not hidden from anyone and exonerates the narrative of those who rejected Indian nationalism in favor of Muslim communalism during the height of the Swaraj movement. In the Mideast, the British installed client monarchies. Many of them were later overthrown by nationalists and leftists. For example, the Free Officers Movement overthrew the client monarchy in Egypt in 1952. Since then Egypt has been an extremely authoritarian and autocratic state. The revolution of 1952 used the slogans of nationalism and leftism that eventually brought the despicable Nasser to power. In 1958, something similar happened in Iraq when nationalists overthrew the British installed Hashemite monarchy. Ever since Iraq has gone from bad to worse. In 1969, another devil, Gaddafi, through a coup removed a pro-British monarchy and seized power in Libya. These Arabs may imagine they have gained something through native rule and independence but the opposite is true. They have destroyed themselves and been sucked into a vacuum of perpetual tyranny, corruption, inefficient government, autocracy and injustice. It is narrated that the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم said:

السُّلْطَانُ ظِلُّ اللَّهِ فِي الأَرْضِ

The Sultān is the shadow of God upon the Earth

(Musnad al-Bazzar)

The meaning of the Hadīth does not discriminate between a Muslim or non-Muslim sovereign, let alone a foreign or native one. The British Crown at the height of its imperial power was therefore the ‘Shadow of God’. It was a blessing and a divine favor for the Muslims who were under its shade. Don’t forget it was the British imperialists who partitioned Bengal in 1905 as a means of addressing the Hindu industrialist’s exploitation of underdeveloped, predominantly Muslim East Bengal, despite the fury it evoked among the Bengali Hindu. Of course, the final parting gift from the British was the creation of Pakistan. Those who imagine Pakistan was achieved solely through the political struggle the Muslim League led by Jinnah and his associates are living in a delusion. Pakistan could not have come to fruition without British approval. Consequently, two-thirds of the Subcontinent’s Muslims owe a debt of gratitude to the British. Yes, perhaps it can be said that the British rewarded the Muslim Pakistan in recognition of their loyalty to the Crown in supporting the war effort against the Axis, whereas the Hindu led Congress of Gandhi and Nehru boycotted the war effort, and other Indian nationalists like Bose actually went to the extent of fighting on the side of the Japanese, hoping the latter would liberate them from British rule. For the Muslims at least, British rule of India proved to be the ‘Shadow of God upon the Earth’. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States of America emerged as the successor to British imperialism. It waged a Cold War against the evil Soviets and the spread of communism around the globe. A large number of Muslims were duped into viewing the US negatively because of this. Leftism had deeply penetrated much of the Muslim Ummah during this period. Combined with nationalist and anti-colonialist sentiment, it became a toxic mix. In the 1970s, communism managed to take over Afghanistan, otherwise one of the more traditional and conservative Muslim countries. Many Afghan Muslims rose up against the communists, provoking the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in 1979. We must be grateful that the Americans, through their CIA, materially assisted the Afghan Mujāhidīn in resisting the Soviet invader, who were eventually driven out in humiliation, by the grace of Allāh عزّ وجلّ. In 1990, Baathist Iraq led by the tāghūt Saddam invaded Kuwait. The latter were rescued and liberated by the US, who taught Saddam a lesson in humility. Then in the 1990s, Muslim populations in the Balkans—Bosniaks and ethnic Albanians of Kosovo—were the victims of a ghastly genocide perpetrated by the Christian Serbs. They too were rescued by a US led military intervention. In 2003, the US went into Iraq to liberate the country once and for all from Saddam’s tyranny and terror. The US practically handed Iraq freedom on a silver platter. But the subsequent chaos and bloodshed was not at all the fault of the Americans. Iraq’s immediate neighbors—Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria—were alarmed at the prospect of a free and democratic Arab state in the midst succeeding. That success would likely result in calls for more freedom and democracy in their own countries. They therefore had a critical interest in destabilizing and sabotaging the democratic experiment in Iraq. They did this by infiltrating the country with sectarian militias, terrorists, insurgents and Jihadists. The Iraqis themselves proved the proverb ‘Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’ perfectly true when they elected unsavory politicians into office who immediately went about marginalizing the Sunnis and looting the coffers. For their part, the Sunnis foolishly remained loyal to the overthrown Baathist regime and launched an insurgency against the Americans. Al-Qaeda emerged in Iraq, and under their agent al-Zarqawi, they decided to provoke a sectarian war by bombing Shi’ite processions and shrines. The US tried its best to restore law and order to the country, but in the end Iraq proved to be a hopeless case. Meanwhile, in 2011, when the people of Libya rose up against the cruel dictator Gaddafi, inspired by the success of the ‘Arab Spring’ in neighboring Tunisia, a US-led intervention helped them overthrow Gaddafi. But once again, certain Arab states couldn’t stomach the prospect of Libya becoming a free and democratic state. The Egyptians and Emiratis in particular sought to undermine and disrupt peace in Libya by backing the warlord Haftar, who seeks to become another Gaddafi, thus plunging that country into a civil war. So we see a recurring theme of the US intervening militarily to liberate various Muslim countries from tyranny, only for other Muslim states to sabotage and undermine them.