Allah the Exalted declares in Surat al-Ahzab (33:70-71):

You who have iman! have taqwa of Allah
and speak words which hit the mark.
He will put your actions right for you
and forgive you your wrong deeds.
All who obey Allah and His Messenger
have won a mighty victory.

Perhaps it was the call by the government imposing on the nation two minutes of silence that marked the beginning of clarity in the current turbulent ethos of goalless terrorism and goalless imperialist occupation. We recall that the utterly meaningless rite of a collective silence was initiated at the equally meaningless marble slab of the Cenotaph to silence the masses after World War I, lest they should turn on the political class and lay the slaughter of the tens of millions in that war at their door. ‘One day we will understand’ – that was the political message of the silence. Don’t ask questions! You will only get confused. What happened? It was the militarism of the Germans. It was the evil Kaiser. It was one bullet from the Serbian nationalist student Princip. The terrorist bullet gave the signal to let loose the dogs of war, and Europe committed suicide. At its end the victorious party united in the smashing of monarchic rule in Turkey, Germany, and Russia. It was the war to end wars. We had to defend poor little Belgium. Do you see how complicated it is? Do not ask. Stand in silence. Lay the wreath. Play a funeral march. One day you will understand. Paul Morand sums it up: ‘What an alibi – History!’

Firstly let us define our opposition to and abhorrence of the terrorist and the act of terror. It is the political expression of nihilism. Nihilism is its own philosophy, voided of any moral evaluation or indeed political doctrine. The function of the terrorist act is in fact not to kill 50 or indeed thousands of people. Its unique reality is the staged splendour of its horror. It is individual self-mutilation on the theatrical stage of technology itself. The aeroplane, the skyscraper, the commuter train – all these are but the grizzly staging of a despairing individual who in the end can only say, ‘Now do you see – I do exist!’ By him or her, society cannot be changed, injustice cannot be righted, and new leadership cannot emerge, for the protagonist has left the stage.

The instigators, the trainers, the suppliers of weaponry, they are the intellectuals of nihilism. They can think it, they can instigate it, but they can never inherit from it a later leadership, since they were the cowards who let others die for the cause they themselves did not die for. From a moral point of view, therefore, those who order the slaughter of others by the act of suicide but do not themselves commit suicide reveal the desperate and tragic flaw in their cause. The leader who sends others forward to die while he remains safely withdrawn from the conflict is surely the most despicable of people.

It is not accidental that the two great Russian writers, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, who intellectually isolated and defined nihilism and its political practice, terrorism, were themselves feared by the Tsar and his regime, who even tried to accuse them of being spokesmen of it. The reason for the Tsar’s fear of these great men was that he could not escape the nature of their diagnosis. To them, the individual nihilist destroyers with their bombs and assassinations were like a single lens which focused the general conflagration of social decline into an intense fire in one spot, the point of their suicidal destructive act. It was an inescapable truth which these great men laid bare. There is no otherness to the terrorist. He is the mirror-image, the brother, blinded in his misery and unable to see us, but leaving his survivors shattered and afraid, stubbornly unable to see him.

Let us go back to the bullet that in the schoolbook version of the holocaust of World War I set the trains of death rolling out to the trenches. We find a web of interlocking disasters of major social and political importance. The first part of the event lies in the European Powers’ deliberate attempt, territory by territory, to bring about the end of the Osmanli Dawlet. That process, from Kosovo to Bulgaria, was to result in a genocide of over five million from 1821 to 1922. This disintegration led, in turn, to a local uprising of the Serb people led by a demented and uneducated clerical class of Orthodox priests. This in turn aroused imperial ambitions in the sclerotic Austro-Hungarian Empire, coloured by a natural desire for peace on their borders. Added to this dangerous mix were the well-known Secret Societies of jewish and Russian origin, the most famous of which, the Black Hand, spawned the tiny group of student terrorists in Sarajevo. Now stir into this hellish soup a further ingredient. Three of the terrorists were discovered at their trial to be in the final stages of tuberculosis, the proof and badge of the degraded poverty in which the post-Osmanli Serbs lived. Remember that the earlier heir to the Empire’s throne had committed suicide with his mistress, he in turn a private victim of the corruption and decadence of the Habsburg throne. What the terrorists in Sarajevo did, therefore, can now clearly be seen as the mirror-image of what the all-but-totally petrified Empire of Austro-Hungary was doing to itself. Remember, too, that the Emperor’s beautiful and bulimic wife had earlier been stabbed to death by an anarchist in Geneva.

The truth is that where we find terror, there also do we find a corrupted and disintegrating society, a collapse of moral values already enervating and destroying social life. The statistic of the tragic victims in the London terrorist attack matches almost identically the annual statistic of the murder of innocent girls from childhood to puberty in the houses, streets and fields of England’s green and pleasant land. It is not terrorism that requires massive legislation, rather, it is in the lands where terror strikes that legislators and political leaders are required of a totally other calibre and of a totally as-yet undiscovered moral quality of courage and nobility, a leadership which will act not to save its political skin, but to elevate and revitalise the social nexus.

More serious than the hydra-headed monster of a terrorism erupting spontaneously, as it were, in various places, without a leadership, without doctrines, and utterly devoid of moral principles – more serious than that is the present failure and breakdown of all the major models of elected government in the system called democracy. Most serious of all is that the leadership is thrown up by a mass electoral system, itself not the free choice of the masses, but a chosen oligarchy selected by the in-back wealth which finances the political party systems. If terrorism is a synchronicity of unpredictable acts of horror, democracy has become by its current nature a rigid totalitarianism. While all the power systems of the democratic State are obedient to a leader with dictatorial powers, two elements mark his isolation. The President, or Prime Minister, has no identifiable challenge from the internal institution of Parliament or Senate, since the Ministers more even than the Members of such a body are mere place-men, utterly pre-occupied with retaining their position or, even better, being elevated to Ministerial rank, with all its material rewards.

The other, and even graver, inhibition on the so-called Leader in a democracy is that he himself is under orders from the financial elite. Not even the frivolous debt relief offered up by the democratic Leaders lay within their gift. Only after the banking oligarchy put a figure to their charity were they able to announce the reward. Neither the democratic institution, nor its communications system, the media, dares to point out that the cause of the poverty in Africa is not the result of mis-management and corruption, but of the very nature of the usury function built into the world banking system.

Only two weeks after the Prime Minister of Great Britain stood before the television cameras and let himself be lectured by a failed rock star of dubious origin about what he had to do to remove poverty from the world, the media announced that in Mali not thousands but millions of children were dying of starvation. The French democracy has a military presence in Mali supporting its regime and assuring the export of its mineral wealth into France, while the Foreign Legion drives about the desert settlements murdering the Muslim Tuareg aristocracy while they claim to be rooting out Islamic extremists in the deep Sahara.

The role of President or Prime Minister had up until 1945 represented a leader of substantive powers. It now required not even a politician, but merely an actor. He had become the Front Man. He was no longer paid for political expertise – he was paid danger money. The clumsy and despicable change of motive made by the British and American leaders in relation to Iraq is a clear indication of this. For months we were bombarded with a three-word mantra: Weapons of Mass Destruction. In order to sustain this myth, both countries humiliated and seriously damaged their Intelligence Services. Indeed, the damage done to the Intelligence communities can now be identified as one of the reasons they failed to anticipate the terrorist attacks when they finally came. Later, we were ordered to believe that the invasion was to make the world a better place now that Saddam was gone. Given the totalitarian nature of democratic parliamentarism, responsibility must fall uniquely on the shoulders of the however spuriously elected leader, and on him alone.

Winston Churchill, in his great study of the British imperial adventure in North Africa, ‘The River War’ (1899), which recounted the campaign against the Mahdi in Sudan, wrote an outstandingly sympathetic account of the Mahdi’s revolt against Egyptian rule. He said: ‘Those whose practice it is to regard their own nation as possessing a monopoly of virtue and common sense are wont to ascribe every military enterprise of savage people to fanaticism. They calmly ignore obvious and legitimate motives … Upon the whole, there exists no better case for rebellion than presented itself to the Soudanese.’ Churchill also fought under Kitchener there, being in the aristocratic tradition, which came to an end with his death.

The seed-bed, the fertile ground from which the monster has sprung is nothing less than the century-and-a-half of brutal imperialism and the stripping of the vast wealth of Muslim lands. Byron-Farwell, in his study of the Victorian imperialist wars, explains: ‘In the last century, no-one below the Prime Minister controlled the Empire’s army, and even his ability to direct it was doubtful; until after the Indian Mutiny, half of Britain’s military strength was owned by a private chartered company. … No account of any aspect of British imperialism can be told without a mention of India and that peculiar institution: the Honourable East India Company. … There was not a single year in Queen Victoria’s long reign in which somewhere in the world her soldiers were not fighting for her and for her Empire.’

In 1838 Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India, issued the Simla Manifesto which announced that British troops would invade Afghanistan. Three years earlier Lord Auckland had written to Dost Muhammad, the Amir of Afghanistan: ‘My friend, you are aware that it is not the practice of the British Government to interfere in the affairs of other independent states.’ General Keene was despatched there with a new puppet Amir, Shah Shuja, the Hamid Karzai of his time. Shah Shuja was installed in Kabul but his rule did not extend beyond it. The occupying force was soon to find out the bitter truth: you cannot buy an Afghan – but you can rent him! After the slow and relentless resistance, here and there, the Afghans made life impossible for the occupying force. In 1841 there was open revolt. On 6 January 1842 a British force of 4,500 troops, about 700 of whom were Britons, together with several wives and their children and about 10,000 camp followers, marched out towards Jellalabad. Seven days later the fortress at Jellalabad saw a solitary horseman riding towards them. It was Surgeon William Brydon, the sole Briton to complete the march from Kabul.

It is in India that we see the indissoluble linkage between the Money-Elite and their obedient servants the parliamentarians. When Lord Canning set out for India as Governor-General, he warned: ‘We must not forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man’s hand, but which, growing bigger and bigger, may at last threaten to overwhelm us with ruin.’ With the first uprising against the British, the Muslims marched to Delhi. The Moghul Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, headed the uprising. This of course was the legitimate governance and the legitimate monarchic power of India. The civilised response of John Nicholson in a letter at the time best expresses the English position when faced with resistance. Following the so-called Mutiny he wrote: ‘Let us propose a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi. The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening.’ The actual response was much more savage and sadistic. Queen Victoria wrote to King Leopold, the ghastly Butcher of the Congo: ‘The horrors committed on the poor ladies – women and children – are unknown in these ages, and make one’s blood run cold.’ She ordered a ‘Day of National Prayer and Humiliation’.

The despicable behaviour of the civilised British force in its revenge is well chronicled. It is vitally important for us, however, to underline the terrible and disastrous act of the most despised man in Indian history – Major William Hodson (1821-58). He was the son of an archdeacon and a graduate of Trinity Cambridge. He was in the East India Company army. He was convicted by a military court of cruelty, lost his command, but was eventually cleared. He sought out and found the Moghul Amir in prayer at the Tomb of Humayun. He took him captive and then captured the three Shahzadahs, the Royal Princes. In front of an enormous crowd, Hodson worked himself into what seems to have been a state of sexual frenzy. He seized a carbine from one of his men. He ordered the princes to strip naked. He then personally shot each one of them dead in cold blood, one after the other. He ordered the corpses to be thrown onto a bullock cart, and then rode proudly into Delhi.

The end result of all this was that the British made Delhi their capital. This was the de-facto end of the great civilised masterpiece of social organisation that was the Moghul Dawlet. The jewish Prime Minister, D’israeli, persuaded Victoria to let herself be declared Empress of India. If the Jewels in the British Crown were returned to the Muslims, that crown would be little more than Queen Victoria’s mop cap. Up until this transition India was a great country of simply enormous wealth and wellbeing. From then on it was slowly and systematically stripped of that wealth, stripped of a social order far superior to the sparse replacement at the hands of the British.

Now it is understandable that the tragic event of the assassination of the Princes left the Muslim ulema not only in shock, but devoid of an Amirate which would licence and empower the carrying-out of a Mufti’s orders. The crisis drove two important bodies of fuqaha out of Delhi, now the seat of a military and menacing occupation army. One group went to Barelwi and the other to Deoband. It must be understood that up until the crisis these two bodies of scholars had an identical and classical view of Islamic Law within the tradition of our great Imam Abu Hanifa, may Allah be pleased with him. These two bodies of ulema were to draw further and further apart. Those of Barelwi took refuge in love of the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and in the honouring of the grave-sites of long-dead Awliya. The men of Deoband sought to exalt a pure Tawhid but in the end held only to Tanzih, correctly exalting Allah above creation, and thus failing to take account of His Rububiyya in governing the created world. In the end, both these schools had abandoned the Qur’anic order to ‘enter Islam completely’.

It is at this point we must confront what is from the Muslim point of view a very serious matter. There is only one Islam. The group who followed Sayyeduna ‘Ali rejected the social entity of the Islamic Dawlet and Amirate, so in this invented religion there is no need for a Khalif, everything is held in abeyance, and the people rely for their guidance on the Mullahs who lead the worship and teach in the mosques. In Islam the Imam’s function is to lead the Salat, or if designated, take the Khutba. There is a higher caste of lawyers, that is, the Fuqaha and the Muftis. They in turn cannot function unless there is an Amir to order the execution of their legal judgments. Imams may counsel but they may not command. The command among the Muslims is in the hands of its strongest men and whomever they may chose to lead them.

Now Khilafa is an obligation on all Muslims. The so-called experts who have been in the media defining our religion for us have spread far and wide the myth that the extremists and terrorists want to establish a Khalifate, while moderate Muslims are good little boys happy with any kind of civic governance. This must be forcefully rejected. Khilafa was never abolished. The last Khalif went into exile, taking with him the Cloak of Power. The terrorists do not want governance since their lone political act is itself anarchic and unauthorised. They have no Ba’yat, and Ba’yat of its nature in Islamic Law is done publicly in accordance with the Sunna.

The next phase of our deconstruction takes us to Arabia. The family of Ibn Saud extended their tiny desert rule over the people of Najd with the help of the great British imperialist programme that boasted such illustrious actors as Glubb Pasha, T.E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill. The Saudi decision to embrace wahhabism gave the Saudi forces a seal of approval from the British imperialists who still sought to smash forever the great Osmanli Dawlet. As is now well known, the new Churchill-appointed King of Arabia in turn had to crush the wahhabi forces in order to sit back as the ignorant nomads they were and enjoy the vast wealth that was laid at their feet by first, a grateful Britain, and later America. The name of the principal oil corporation that embodies their wealth is Aramco, which unites the two politiques of the desert kingdom and the imperialist democracy.

The wahhabis were given complete control of the educational system in Arabia. The institution of Rabita was a kind of global wahhabi mosque-control system. It was over the last part of the 20th century that the pattern began to emerge. On the one hand there was a ferocious and active attempt by the wahhabism of Arabia to wipe out the Sufic phenomenon. This activity has been known to us for decades and we have encountered it in the jungles of Thailand, in the deserts of southern Morocco, in Europe and in Pakistan. It then followed, due in part to the enormous scattering of wealth by the wahhabi leadership, that a variant set of forces began to reverberate in sympathy. The wahhabis adopted the Deoband. They supported Jamat al-Islamiyya under the dismal leadership of Mawdudi. Their subvention reached to the Ikhwan al-Muslimun, while their solution to Sufism was to be its replacement, the milky pietism of the Tablighi-Jamaat.

Again one cannot avoid the doubleness of organisations, events and people. Tablighi-Jamaat, praised by The Economist magazine, held up in Britain as how Muslims should be, this imperialist phenomenon was given a clean bill of health on a world-wide level. While innocent Muslims are delayed at frontiers, the dreary groups of lost abandoned souls find themselves whisked through immigration without a murmur. The French say that the extremes meet. So it was that this pacific and emasculated group of alienated young men seeking temporary asylum in its puritan brotherhood proved to be the perfect recruiting ground for active service in a war without leadership authority.

A further strand of this story lies in the no-man’s-land between Israel and Lebanon. At a certain point in that ongoing war, a group of Palestinians found themselves isolated between the two countries along with the Shi‘a force from the Lebanon. It was in that strange military limbo that the Palestinians were indoctrinated into the Ismaili strategy of attack by suicide. In one move the human being, created specifically by Allah to glorify Him and to be the just and governing lord of creation, found himself reduced to being nothing more than the active software of an explosive device.

As reason must prevail, it is impossible to avoid the recognition that that first Afghan War which we have outlined is intimately connected with the current Afghan War. The infiltration of that unbalanced Saudi adventurer into the already mobile adventure of Musharaf the dog, and Pakistani Intelligence Chiefs, the Taliban army, doomed the whole affair to a tragic end. The tragedy of Afghanistan. Yet again an occupied country. The betrayal of the Muslims in India by the incompetent coward Mountbatten and his jewish wife doomed the Subcontinent to a never-ending struggle and a constant death-toll. No cry from the democratic USA or the democratic Britain to hold a democratic head-count in Kashmir. At the heart of all these interconnected imperialist events lies the wahhabi betrayal of Islam and its bitter tribal war against the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.

What then is the path to sanity and safety? What is the medicine for the Sick Man that is Europe itself? What is the hope and the constructive programme for the world Muslim community? I place the key of the affair in the hands of the Princes of the House of Saud.

In my student days in London I stayed in the house of diplomat friends. Often at the breakfast table I would find myself next to the Princess Romanov. I recall her saying to me, ‘The tragedy of our family cannot be blamed on Lenin and communism. It cannot be blamed on the things we did not do for the people. Our tragedy was that when the warning came, we did not listen and so we were not saved.’ My proposal is addressed to the now Crown Prince of Arabia and to all the younger Princes of the Household, especially those with a near position to the inheritance of power.

To the Princes of the House of Saud:
Sirs, I want to propose to you what will be a rescue not only for your Royal House and for the Haramayn, but also for all the Muslim peoples of the world. I ask you, temporarily, to close down the Islamic Universities and Madrasas. I ask you to take the best qualified of the new generation and send them under the protection of His Majesty King Muhammad VI of Morocco to receive instruction at the great Qarawiyyin Mosque of Fes. There, they should take on and learn both the operative principles and the courteous adab of the school of Imam Malik, Imam of Dar al-Hijra. I ask that the Kingdom of Arabia adopt this as its unique source of Islamic learning, along with the Qur’an, its Tafsirs, its Nasikh wal-Mansukh and its Ahkam. Take on al-Muwatta. Let Arabia take the very best of its own history. Let the family of Ibn Saud turn to the defence, adoption and propagation of the School of the ‘Amal of the Ahl al-Madinah.

Further, I request that these scholars of the new generation should along with like scholars in the dutiful service of King Muhammad VI set about looking to how they can be that group of people who, after less than a hundred years of living without a legal Zakat, may finally restore it. We call on you to restore a legal Zakat, which demands that it is taken in the Islamic Dinar and Dirham of known status and weight. It is not Zakat until it is taken. It is not Zakat until it goes into the hands of the Zakat Collectors appointed by the Ruler. It is not Zakat until it is distributed to the poor according to the conditions laid out for us to obey. Where there is a Halal Zakat there will be no terrorism. Where there is a Halal Zakat, Islam will revive, the Holy Places will be secure, and Muslims will honour you as today, more than ever, we know they revile you.

Allah has said in His Glorious Qur’an (Al-Ahzab 33: 45-48):

O Prophet! We have sent you as a witness,
and a bringer of good news and a warner,
and a caller to Allah by His permission
and a light-giving lamp.
Give good news to the muminun that they will receive
immense favour from Allah.
Do not obey the kafirun and munafiqun
and disregard their abuse of you.
Put your trust in Allah.
Allah suffices as a Protector.