Allah
the Almighty says in Surat an-Nisa (4:89);,
They would like you to be kafir as they are kafir
so that you will all be the same.
Our fellow Muslims
in France have asked for a ruling in relation to the
state ordinance forbidding Muslim girls from wearing
a head-scarf in state schools. To begin, therefore,
we are anxious to make a distinction between the
matter of what is approved-of dress for Muslim women
in general, and the situation facing these young
Muslim women in France. The basic discrimination is
well known and has no debate. It derives from two
blessed ayats in the Surat an-Nur (24:30-31):
Say to the muminun that they should lower their eyes
and guard their private parts.
That is purer for them.
Allah is aware of what they do.
Say to the mumin women that they should lower their
eyes
and guard their private parts
and not display their adornments -
except for what normally shows -
and draw their head-coverings across their breasts.
They should only display their adornments to their
husbands
or their fathers or their husbands’ fathers,
or their sons or their husbands’ sons
or their brothers or their brothers’ sons
or their sisters’ sons
or other women
or those they own as slaves
or their male attendants who have no sexual desire
or children who still have no awareness
of women’s private parts.
Nor should they stamp their feet
so that their hidden ornaments are known.
Turn to Allah every one of you, muminun,
so that hopefully you will have success.
The phrase “and not display their adornments”
derives from the Arabic root “zeena” (Zeen-Ya-Nun).
In its root source this indicates the embellishment
or embossing on a shield. From it also come the
terms “Zayan” for beautiful, “Zeeyana” for the
barber’s trade, and “Tazyin” for ornamentation. Thus
in this ayat the principal adornments or beauty of
women are recognised as being the breasts and
buttocks, that is, the embossed form of the body,
but also the hair. This, and the covering of the
private parts, contain the ruling. It should be
remembered that the Messenger, may Allah bless him
and grant him peace, had indicated that the thighs
were included in the term for the private parts. It
is clear from this ayat and the ayat which precedes
it, calling on men to lower their eyes and to guard
their private parts, that the concern for the
Muslims is that they should protect themselves from
illicit sexual arousal.
On one occasion, in the Haram in Makkah, a black
American Muslim asked a renowned Shafi‘i ‘alim for a
strict ruling on women’s dress. He expected the
answer to confirm his obsessional concern in the
strictest manner. The ‘alim smiled and waved his
hand over the Haram, and said, “You are at the House
of Allah. The women here are all muminat. Take a
look around-you will see women from Sudan, Nigeria,
India, the Maghrib, and Indonesia. Let your women
look at them and choose which dress is most pleasing
to them, and they will be pleasing to Allah.”
Two further specific references should be made.
Firstly, in the classical time of European Islam
under the rule of the Murabitun who had come out
from the Sahara to occupy half of Spain, the women’s
heads were uncovered while the men were veiled. The
men were veiled against the desert sands while
riding their camels, and for this they were known as
the “Mulathimin”, the veiled men. It should be
remembered that during this epoch some of the
greatest Muslim ‘ulema emerged, propounding and
defending an all-inclusive social ethos of Islamic
Law. The Murabitun were lenient on matters of dress
but utterly unyielding on all law concerning trade
and finance. They defended the essential elements of
Islamic Law on finance, that is, Zakat, which
implies Halal currency of gold and silver on the
Madinan model, trade practice, that is selling from
unrented premises, and a strict inhibition of unjust
taxes, that is any imposition of extra taxes beyond
the Kharaj, and lastly the Jizya tax and the fair
distribution of Ghanam. Their motto was “Dawat al-Haqq,
wa radd’ul-Madhalim, wa qatt’ul-Magharim.” “Call to
the Truth, put right injustice, abolish unjust
taxes.” On the arrival of Ibn Tumart’s Muwahid
forces, a strict dress code was imposed along with a
collapse of the Shari‘at of finance, which in turn
permitted extra taxation.
Given the history of the Muslim World Community over
centuries, it can now be observed easily that
puritanical strictness and the policing of women has
always gone alongside a laxity of financial limits
and strictures on commerce and conquest. This was
especially noteworthy in the case of India. Under
Aurangzeb, may Allah be pleased with him, an Islamic
financial order was imposed. With the conquest by
the English Raj, Zakat was abolished and interest
initiated, while the ‘ulema turned obsessively to
covering up the women. These preliminary
observations allow us to confirm that the matter of
women’s dress cannot be seen as a single element on
which the Deen of Islam depends, nor can it be
separated from other social inhibitions. It has been
shown that these other inhibitions impinge on vital,
inescapable laws, including the defence of the great
Fard of Zakat.
The matter before us does not concern the issue in
general but its application and the nature of its
application in a particular place at a particular
time. In order to arrive at a correct judgment on
the matter, and since the general case is
established and known, the particular case demands
that we have a thorough knowledge of the place and
time in which this anomalous situation has arisen.
II
Before we examine
the prohibition of Muslim girls’ head-coverings in
the schools, incorrectly called Hijab, it is first
necessary to ask about the identity of the
empowering authority, the French state. What is it
in the nature of the French state that forces it to
legislate on the head-dress of adolescent girls? To
arrive at our judgment we must therefore ask-“What
is France?” The following dating uses BC/AD for
clarification of historical reference.
7000 BC: From the earliest times of Homo Sapiens,
there is evidence of communities in France. In
Neolithic times the great megaliths of Brittany and
the Massif Central indicate primal worship.
1800 BC: Mediterranean people of unknown origin
begin to move into France.
1400 BC sees the arrival of the Proto-Celts who came
from Kazakhstan and the Upper Danube.
600 BC: Greeks and Phoenicians are to be found along
the Mediterranean coast.
500 BC saw a massive occupation of French territory
by Celtic tribes.
300-200 BC sees the beginning of cities of the
Gaulois.
154 BC: the first limited incursion of the Roman
Empire
140-120 BC saw the conquest of the Roman Province (Provence)
109-101 BC: an invasion of Teutons and Cimbres who
crossed the Rhine and the Alps.
70 BC: Caesar’s effective conquest of Gaul, almost
entirely.
0-300 AD: France lives through a series of anarchic
local rebellions and the expanding presence of
christianity
400-470 AD witnessed the great invasions of the
Visigoths and the Huns. Out of Germany, ironically,
came the Franks and settled in the western valleys
of the Rhine.
481 AD: Clovis becomes King of the Salic French, and
current state history books name him as the first
French king. This is completely erroneous since he
only ruled a small province in the extreme
north-east of the country. While Clovis and the
Merovingian dynasty ruled, Paris had not achieved
the status of a capital. Crowning was at Riems.
719: The Sarrasins cross the Pyrenees and occupy
southern France. The country is still broken up into
local kingdoms and baronies.
800 AD: The Advent of Charlemagne witnesses the
first geographical reality of France and the
beginning of the Carolingian dynasty.
843 AD: Already the empire of Charlemagne is
dismembered in the Treaty of Verdun, with the
country divided into seven independent kingdoms plus
Brittany.
987 AD: the end of the Carolingian epoch and the
beginning of Capetian epoch. With the crowning of
Hughes Capet, the official history books again claim
a beginning to the French state. The reality was
that a small zone around Orleans was the royal
domain, and if a line is drawn vertically from
Anvers through Troyes to the west of Arles, to the
west of that line was Capetian France consisting of
all but autonomous duchies and local Comtés, while
to the east of that line, all of Lorraine, Upper and
Lower, and all the way from Arles to Nice, is a
separate kingdom.
1000 AD: The Capetian monarchy is declared
hereditary and indivisible. The reality of the
Kingdom is famine, epidemics, feudal chaos, and the
Catharist heresy.
1035 AD: William, Duke of Normandy, from his
all-but-autonomous dukedom begins the expansion of
Normandy.
1066: William the Conqueror forms the Anglo-Norman
state.
1146: The second Crusade bleeds the country of one
hundred thousand men.
1154 AD: The Capetian kingdom, now based in Paris,
is still the smallest province of the country. It
should be noted that at this time the Benedictine
Order of Citeaux-Clairvaux had an organised social
structure of abbeys from Brittany to Provence and
centred on Citeaux in the heart of France.
1300 AD: Under Philippe le Bel, the true beginning
of French statehood emerges. That struggle involves
resistance to the Inquisition, the restructuring of
feudal practice, the expulsion of the jewish and
Lombardian financiers and the abolition of the
Knights Templar, which had become a state within the
state.
1328: The Capetian dynasty ends and the Valois
dynasty begins with Philip VI.
1336: The Hundred Years War creates havoc between
England and the French royal allies, causing civil
war between them and the Armagnacs and the
Bourguignons.
1453 AD: End of Hundred Years War. England retains
Calais until 1558. At this stage, Royal France
consists only of the southern half of the country,
excluding the Bordeaux territories. From Chinon and
Bourges southwards is the territory of France.
1483: At the death of Louis XI there is a unified
France with the exception of Brittany, central
France and Pyrenean France.
1651: Louis XIV. Ten years later his personal rule
begins. Throughout the whole dynastic history of
France there has been a continual battle against
first catholic christianity and later protestant
christianity. Despite the theology, the battle had
always been about governance.
1789: Fall of the Bastille. Louis XVI leaves
Versailles for Paris. This time sees the emergence
of secular and masonic Orders, like their previous
catholic equivalents, now called Clubs: Jacobins,
Cordeliers, and Feuillants. From them will come the
first formulations of secular state values.
1793: The assassination of Marat. The government of
the extreme revolutionary Montagnards and the
nationally widespread Terror. Alongside the Terror
there is the war of the Vendée, royalist and
catholic, in an uprising in the north-west of the
country and the Atlantic littoral, that would
continue until 1800.
1799: Coup d’État of Napoleon.
1800-1815: The formulation of the primal modern
atheist state. At the beginning of the Napoleonic
state, French is still a minority language.
1800: The foundation of the Banque de France, like
the Bank of England, a bank in private hands giving
itself a national name.
1815-1915: A period of political dialectics, between
monarchism and republicanism, the final
disconnecting of the catholic church from the state,
and the ineluctable growth of jewish power over the
banking and financial institutions.
1914-1944: Named by General de Gaulle the “Second
Thirty Years War”.
1956: After a long war of attrition, Morocco
recovers its independence under Muhammad V. Tunisia
granted a puppet independence. After ten years of
struggle, the French evacuate Vietnam.
1962: After eight years of bloody struggle, the
Evian Accord is signed granting independence to
Algeria.
1969: Pompidou, the nephew of Rothschild, takes the
presidency.
1970-2000: The French state sets up an active, armed
and controlling security elite force governing Mali
and Niger with the use of torture and execution,
ostensibly to protect nuclear exports. They carried
out the deliberate genocide of the Muslim Tuareg
aristocracy.
III
This overview of
the French state permits us to make certain
deductions. Furthermore, an examination of current
events from 1940 up to the present, indicates a
decisive viewpoint. It is perfectly clear that there
is no such thing as a Frenchman in any racial sense,
and that even with the post-Napoleonic modern state
there is no genuine patriotism to be found, say, in
Brittany, or in the Vosges mountains, or in Provence,
let alone in the heartlands or Limousin and Berri.
Pétain surrendered to the German forces because he
loved the French and was their military hero in
World War One. De Gaulle rebelled against his
President and called the French to fight with
England, because he loved France. He begins his
political biography with this sentence: “All my life
I have had a certain idea of France.” He goes on to
say that he imagines France as a fairytale princess
or a madonna on a wall-painting, and as having an
eminent and exceptional destiny. He continues,
“France cannot be France without grandeur.”
The sense in which De Gaulle, while a political
genius, was also a fantasist, lies embedded in the
events of his rule. His realistic surrender of the
colonies represents his recognition that the
grandeur of France is over. His attempt to rescue
the anti-Nazi Resistance from the communist forces
on the ground in metropolitan France never truly
succeeded. The ferocious jewish and communist
punishment of the Épuration, or Cleansing Period,
exposed the nation as more collaborationist than
resistant. De Gaulle’s final act of rebellion, that
is, to recover grandeur, was the failed attempt to
free France not from Nazi political power but from
US-based banking power, by selling France’s dollars
to buy gold. For this he was punished by expulsion,
and the bankers took over the instruments of
government. From then on the jewish vision of a
United States of Europe with “democratic
governance”, powerless because unable to control the
nation’s finance, now securely in the hands of the
banking system, became a reality under successive
presidents.
The present state of France is clearly one of a
terminal decline from which it cannot escape. The
increasing impoverishment of the worker and
technical class continues as it does throughout the
kafir world capitalist system. Agricultural France,
that society which still links itself in social
memory and practice with old monarchic days, is in
the process of collapse, with the Gaullist romantic
subsidies doomed by the new banking order. There is
a general de-population of villages across France,
communities that have known continuity since the
Capetian kingdoms. Provence, once a strong,
independent mountain region, as depicted by Jean
Giono, now finds its hilltop houses taken over by
foreigners, jewish and American, playing at being
Provençale. All literary activity has nearly ceased,
and the great publishing houses, with a few
exceptions, are firmly in the hands of ideologically
committed jews. It is this exhausted France which
has lost its past and hopelessly struggles against
encroaching americanisation, which finds itself with
a Muslim population of between five and six million
people. Even the statistic goes between exaggeration
to frighten one group and diminution to calm the
other. Now the dwarf minister responsible, Nicolas
Sarkozy (a French name?), has imposed on the
government the ban on the notorious head-scarf.
What is to be done?
On the one hand we find that there is a puppet
Islamic government set up by the atheist state,
fronted by the director of the Paris mosque and the
utterly disgraceful, self-styled Mufti of
Marseilles. On the other hand there are the
so-called extremists driving Muslim women into the
streets to shout and scream in a manner more
befitting the French Commune than Islamic behaviour.
In the light of the condition of France, a passive
acceptance of the head-scarf ruling is clearly
unacceptable since its intention is to ghetto-ise
the Muslim community. Equally, a passive submission
to subsuming the issue under the programme of the
“Total War” of these activists is absurd. Terror for
the sake of scarves?
The judgment on this matter is as follows:
The arrival in French territory of this significant
population of several million indicates a natural
and further development of the historical process
which we have here observed as being continuous from
prehistoric times. Given the utter moral and
financial collapse of the present atheist society of
France, with its worn-out and historically
irrelevant catholic minority, the indication is that
the time has come for the Maghribine community to
assert its ascendancy, vitality, and social dynamism
by sweeping up the lost and shamed community of
other Frenchmen and to bring them under the Muslim
aegis. Resisting the state and forcing it to
repressive measures will not give us the success we
must have. The French state’s powerlessness is
precisely because the democratic system has
abrogated the power to govern the wealth, which is
the only governance the state can know, by handing
it over to the banking system.
The struggle is not military, nor is it civic. The
Muslim community has to unify itself, establish
Amirate, and, given the crisis situation, take,
repeat take Zakat and also raise it to the level of
the Khums. This procedure should be parallel with
similar integration in Britain and Germany.
Non-state schooling must be established. Islamic
media must be disseminated. Islamic trade must be
propagated on a Euro-scale, but not using the Euro.
The weakness of the kafir state is its financial
system, its instruments of exchange, and its
institutions of financial control. This weakness and
error is not additional to, but is the evidence of
their atheism. Victory for Islam is uniquely
dependent in this age on a serious and profound
spiritual obedience to the Islamic Shari‘at. By
that, only the ignorant and the uninformed can
imagine that this is dependent on stoning, cutting
hands and wearing scarves. Take up the Muwatta of
Imam Malik. The chapter headings alone indicate
where the gravity and weight of Islamic Law falls.
It is founded on a correct Tawhid and the primal
pattern of ‘ibada as found in the Mother of the
Madh-habs, the School of the Amal of the People of
Madinah. It follows, in sequence but not in time,
adherence to a strict set of commercial obligations.
All those rules, and we do not deny them, involving
personal punishments for criminal acts, are laid
down for a practising Muslim community living in an
ethos of established worship and abolished usury.
For example, the adultery beheadings and the severed
hands of Saudi Arabia are a cynical mockery of
Islamic Law when neither the rulership nor its
currency, neither the political alliances nor the
capitalist consumption, are conducive to that proper
Islamic behaviour which would be as repelled by
adultery as it was by theft.
All Islamic text-books by modernist writers must be
put away. The Deen in all its glory, which is the
sublime inheritance of the Maghrib and Andalusia,
must be restored. The adhan of Madinah, the practice
of Salat, the adab of the mosque-all these must be
recovered, for Saudi-regime influence and television
almost completely effaced them from the Maghrib and
Algeria. Simultaneously with this purification, this
absolutely necessary purification of the practice of
‘ibada, must come an awakening to a financial
evaluation and practice that has been unknown to our
Muslim nation for over one hundred years.
The Islamic Dinar and Dirham and Fulus must begin to
pass hand-to-hand among the Muslims, as well as
being used for international trade, physically and
by the internet.
Ancillary to this there should be a massive
withdrawal of savings funds from all banks,
including “Islamic Banks”, and a transformation of
that saved false money, which as in Argentina can be
rendered worthless overnight. These monies, if not
converted into halal gold and silver, should be used
for the purchase of land over significant areas
within the state of France. The withdrawal of large
quantities of Muslim savings will immediately
demonstrate that our Muslim French population has
got an enormous and unique power in the country, and
one which is denied to the individual secularised
slave.
The active dynamic thrust of this financial activity
must be a new and pure call to Islam. The Da’wa to
Islam cannot be couched in the worthless masonic
language of “Tolérance” and “Islamic Principles”.
Islam cannot be defined by the kuffar, as at
present. Islam means submission to Allah, that in
turn demands an adherence to the Divine Order:
You who have iman! obey Allah and obey the
Messenger
and those in command among you.
If you have a dispute about something,
refer it back to Allah and the Messenger,
if you have iman in Allah and the Last Day.
That is the best thing to do and gives the best
result.
Do you not see those who claim that they have iman
in what has been sent down to you
and what was sent down before you,
still desiring to turn to a satanic source for
judgement
in spite of being ordered to reject it?
Shaytan wants to misguide them far away.
When they are told, ‘Come to what Allah has sent
down
and to the Messenger,’
you see the munafiqun turning away from you
completely.
(Surat
an-Nisa, 4:59-61)
When the
christians in the Middle Ages reconquered Sicily,
the Muslims of the island sent to Qayrawan for a
Fatwa on whether they could continue to live under
kafir rule. The considered judgment of these great
‘ulema, in the method of Khalil, who must be studied
anew, was twofold. The first part of the judgment
was that if people felt that things which were
essential to them in their daily lives, such as
dress and eating, became unacceptable, they should
make Hijra and live under a Muslim Amir. The second
part of the judgment was that if they determine that
Hijra was impossible or that they desired to remain,
then they had an active and quotidian duty to call
the kuffar of the land to enter the Deen of Islam.
This judgment is utterly valid today as much as it
was then. Given the vast nature of the Muslim
presence in France, it is the duty of the scholars
of the Muslim community to revive the Deen of Islam
in all its glory and be mortally aware of the danger
of following Shaytans like the self-styled Mufti of
Marseilles or the puppets of the kafir French state.
Equally, they must beware of being trapped in the
nihilistic struggle of Middle Eastern Arabs who have
never known the Deen except in its modernist
revisions, so profound as to make the Deen
unrecognisable. Their signs are that they do not
refer to the Book of Allah and they do not adhere to
the Sunna of His Rasul, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace. At funerals, they shout takbirs but
they do not shout the Shahadatayn.
The only protection that can assure the safety of
our women is a strict adherence to the commercial
exigencies as laid down by Allah the Almighty in His
Book, by the events of Madinah under the Rasul, may
Allah bless him and grant him peace, the Khulafa
Rashidun, and the Salaf. To follow in this path is
to return to the Muwatta and its commentaries. To
return to the Mudawwana. And to return to Qadi
Iyad’s ennoblement of our beloved Messenger, may
Allah bless him and grant him peace, in Ash-Shifa.
Look how Allah the Almighty gives His judgment on
the protection of women. It contains a moral command
of correct behaviour, and that moral command is made
manifest by an obedience to protective financial
obligations towards women and children. In Surat an-Nisa
(4:127-132) and also in ayat 176, Allah the Almighty
says:
They will ask you for a fatwa about women.
Say, ‘Allah gives you a fatwa about them;
and also what is recited to you in the Book about
orphan girls
to whom you do not give the inheritance they are
owed,
while at the same time desiring to marry them;
and also about young children who are denied their
rights:
that you should act justly with respect to orphans.’
Whatever good you do, Allah knows it.
If a woman fears cruelty or aversion on her
husband’s part,
there is nothing wrong in the couple becoming
reconciled.
Reconciliation is better.
But people are prone to selfish greed.
If you do good and have taqwa,
Allah is aware of what you do.
You will not be able to be completely fair between
your wives,
however hard you try.
But do not be completely partial so as to leave a
wife,
as it were, suspended in mid-air.
And if you make amends and have taqwa,
Allah is Ever-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
If a couple do separate,
Allah will enrich each of them
from His boundless wealth.
Allah is All-Encompassing, All-Wise.
What is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to
Allah.
We have instructed those given the Book before you
and you yourselves, to have taqwa of Allah,
but if you are kafir,
what is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to
Allah.
Allah is Rich Beyond Need, Praiseworthy.
What is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to
Allah.
Allah suffices as a Guardian.
* * * * *
They will ask you for a fatwa.
Say: ‘Allah gives you a fatwa
about people who die without direct heirs:
If a man dies childless but has a sister
she receives half of what he leaves,
and he is her heir if she dies childless.
If there are two sisters
they receive two-thirds of what he leaves.
If there are brothers and sisters
the males receive the share of two females.
Allah makes things clear to you so you will not go
astray.
Allah has knowledge of all things.’
