The theme of our Conference is the rule of law. Our lawyer, Amir Tareq Ali, after his devastating analysis of the complete break-down in the legal heritage not only of Britain but of the European tradition, summed up saying:

‘The question that arises when looking at the move to this New World Order, put shortly, is - where is the law? [...]

‘International politics, economic imperatives, usury fuelled banking capitalism, the industrial-military complex now dictate the value of human life in place of 1000 years of legal heritage; and seek to deny any other system of ruling that removes power from these interests.

The Roman historian Tacitus had stated that it was the lust for power which was the most flagrant of all passions.

I would beg to differ, what we see is that it is the lust for wealth which is the most flagrant of all passions. It is the only appetite that cannot be appeased, and in the madness it brings, even the rule of law is subjected to its will.’

It is in the nature of this present world hegemony that its underlying structure could be defined as inter-link. It is a vast and amorphous entity which in its totality is identifiable as nothing. Yet it makes a whole. Yet its furthest part is linked to its most central part. It is like an enormous Lego system designed by a lunatic using every piece of Lego in the factory in order to make something total which signifies absolutely nothing. Its most intriguing and outrageous aspect is that the whole moral and political ethos, which it claims it was brought into action in order to defend, it has in fact abolished. It has instituted, as Amir Tareq Ali demonstrated, a totalitarian system of repression using almost identical terms and clauses inside every National State. Only the State of Israel is free from the contingencies and restrictions imposed on all the rest of that amorphous entity, the World Community. The World Community seems to move in a haze of absolute unity and without dissent, yet it is devoid of personnel, of leadership, of constitution, of philosophy, indeed of identity. It is certainly not the United Nations Organisation, which is ignored in every serious affair, and in any event is owed a fortune by the USA, which is, after all, one of the few psychic medium States that seems to be in communication with the ectoplasmic entity, the World Community.

The university system has been globalised for some decades. A student in Peking or Kabul desiring a PhD has to apply the same methodology of critical analysis used in Cambridge and Stanford. Currencies are an absolute inter-link system, only some Nation States are punished either because of poverty or refusal to assure market access by the super-powers, their punishment being that their currencies, while they may be valued, cannot be traded.

The whole banking system is on inter-link. It is a many-tiered system and goes from small private banks, to national banks, all the way up to the super-banks which govern the great projects of commodity extraction and repossession. There is a particular class of banks which is simply inaccessible to public scrutiny, neither its personnel nor its capital holdings being available even to sophisticated journalistic enquiry. Nation-State political representation is also clicked in to a variety of supra-national organisations which pretend either to a cultural purpose, a trading purpose, or for the purpose of mutual legal re-alignment. Interpol, the Old-World police model, is already resentful that new and more secret security systems are taking over the world police system, leaving them free to nab the occasional inter-continental smuggler.

The motor-force which is now giving energy to the ultimate transformation of the old liberal political order into the new slave system of financial power, is the doctrine of Terrorism. This is the most audacious and, alas, the most successful trick in the book of these world adventurers. Instituting a World Terror, playing at the world level what the French Revolution accomplished at a national level, they turn the situation completely upside down. The New World Order is the Terror machine. The Arab militants, the Afghan people, the Pakistani people, the Darfur refugees, the denizens of the Brazilian Favelas - all these un-defined millions stand accused as Terrorists or potential Terrorists. Amir Tareq Ali has warned us that a capacity to commit a crime against them has now been re-defined as being itself an act against them.

I stood amazed for a long time at how no-one seemed to be objecting to the simply appalling and quite ruthless enslavement of whole peoples, and how the impoverishment of rich countries was met by a seeming indifference. In the 19th century and throughout the 20th, great writers, poets and musicians railed against the growing tyranny and enslavement of corporation capitalism. Why had the human peoples so passively and submissively withdrawn into their houses? It was only as I examined it that I saw that this was not the case. All the resisters, all the fighters, all the ferocious, unforgiving and vengeful Arabs, Afghans, Irish, Basque, Corsicans, Assami, Burmese, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and the heroic Uygurs, fighting on a daily basis the murder and torture of their men and the surgical removal of the wombs of their women - all of these are fighting the same enemy. The girl university student fighting to save the whale is indissolubly one with the Palestinian who once struggled for a worthless little nation, but now, desperately, for sheer survival.

American intellectuals have already insisted that the doctrine of War Against Terror is simply devoid of meaning in legal terms, and even within the stricter confines of common sense and rationality. It is as unreal as the term, referred to yesterday, of ‘armed combatants’. However, wherever you touch the World Community inter-link system, your finger passes through its amorphous phantom shape.

To see the irrationality of the current situation, and the abysmal failure of the political class to confront matters in a manner that gained respect from thinking people, let us look at the dilemma of South Africa. In 1910, following the Boer War, South Africa emerged as the Union of South Africa. By 1959 the Group Areas Act saw the complete system of Apartheid in place. In 1961 the Republic of South Africa was established. The full horror of a race and sub-race society had been set up. It must be noted that when Apartheid was set up, the gold and diamond mining monolithic financial structure which in effect represented the wealth of the country massively increased its wealth and in fact flourished under its aegis. From 1994 to 95 Apartheid was abolished and the new regime set up. Although men did fight, and indeed the Muslims were most prominent among the fighters, nevertheless the new regime was not the product of a military victory. The whole new government system had been set up and planned before the collapse of De Klerk’s regime.

Today the Freedom Charter Anniversary is celebrated by a country possessed by mass amnesia - utterly unable to remember that it once contained two clauses assuring that the mineral wealth of the country would be the possession of the people of the country. This was the whispered clause that could no longer even be whispered, but on it political democracy could be established. This was not an unfair deal - if what you wanted was political democracy. No-one ever said that in a democracy the government was meant to get its hands on the money. Britain did not enter the new World System as leaders until the socialist government handed over its governance of the Bank of England. Democracy is a system whose function is to create citizens, equal in rights to appoint people to Parliament. To do this they must enter their names in the National Census. At that moment the citizen is transformed into a debtor and takes on two inescapable debts. The small debt he must have to stay alive. The second debt is the National Debt, which he now has to pay for in order that the political class continue to dictate his personal affairs. Democracy cannot allow the citizens access to the wealth of the country’s commodities and produce. So it is that after a decade, Khayelitsha remains Khayelitsha and Soweto remains Soweto - and Sun City remains Sun City.

Tocqueville, the great French political theorist, said: ‘The notion of government simplifies itself. The numbers themselves alone make the law and the rights. In politics, everything is reduced to a question of arithmetic.’

This means you can never be governed by the strong. You can never be governed by the just. You can never be governed by the intelligent. You will always be governed by the lowest in the land who can call on a helpless populace and, by a series of endless promises which are never fulfilled, can perpetually assure themselves a salary and a car. The English political theorist Hilaire Belloc said: ‘The citizen must submit to being governed by ‘Place-Men’, people whose only function in life is to keep their place and salary in the system.

I am very proud to say that I was black-listed by the last Apartheid government. What I had gone on record as doing went as follows: we had a Zulu friend who went on the air as if he were a local Zulu elder, and he said in his quavering voice: ‘I tell you the truth. I don’t mind Apartheid. It’s fine with me! If that’s what you want, let me propose this. We keep Apartheid and you give me the gold and the diamonds - then the system suits me fine!’ The only difference between then and now is that I can say it and it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. This ‘doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference’ is what in political theory we call democracy.

Let us now look at the key sentence of the brilliant discourse of Dr. Ali Mert. He said, summing up his examination of the Osmanli unifying and peaceful model in contrast to the bloody anarchy of the invading forces, ‘The defence of Istanbul starts from Al-Quds. And the defence of Al-Quds starts from Baghdad.’

What Ali Mert had unearthed from the rubble of the battle was the historical truth, the geographical truth, and the Islamic imperative. Two evidences of this are at present visible to us on the horizon. In the long-term equation of the political forces in the area driven by the World Community strategy, the Kurds play a decisive part. Tragically, this great Muslim people have been corrupted from within by a decades-long communist movement, in turn a result of the Kemalist rejection of the Kurdish people and their language. This rejection stemmed from his inability to grasp the unitary Osmanli vision since he had been trained to set up an inward-looking national State of Turks. He was the perfect kafir. He called himself the Father of the Turks, but he was not Turk. Apart from Stalin, we know of no other dictator who preferred, even more than genocide, the act of linguicide. He destroyed the Osmanli language, cutting the Muslims off from access to their own historical past. He banned Kurdish and punished its usage, assuring enmity between two peoples who up to then lived in harmony in Islam. The Kemalist persecution forced the Kurds to enter, alongside the jews of Israel, into the game of yearning for a National State - a disease which ultimately fell on the Arabs in the Palestinian hills.

The meaning of Dr. Mert’s analysis is that if Al-Quds is lost to the enemy, Istanbul is exposed to attack and the first instrument of the attack will be the stirring-up and agitation of the Kurdish people leading to the de-stabilisation of Anatolia and leading to a radical crisis in Istanbul. This has already started. The disturbances in Eastern Anatolia indicate the work of ‘agents provocateurs’.

The second term of the equation was that the defence of Al-Quds starts from Baghdad. Baghdad, as the protector of Al-Quds, has to be seen as a Muslim zone. I say Muslim in contra-distinction to Shi‘a, which in the estimation of our ‘ulema is not a sect of Islam but a distinct religion which from its inception was not only a Fitna but a declared war. As a religion it is demonstrably an invention set up well after the time of Nabawiyyat and the Khulafa Rashidun.

Again we have to remind ourselves, so unbelievably ignorant is Blair, and so compulsively repeated is the Blairite doctrine of the wicked dictator and the need to depose him, that Saddam Hussein was the darling the British and American regimes and a hero of the Pope in Rome, who sent him annual telegrams congratulating his elevation of the christian educated class and his persecution of the Muslim intellectuals, again I make the distinction between Muslim and Shi‘a.

As of today, none of us can recall having seen the face of one Muslim ‘alim or Muslim leader in Baghdad. We know the names of the Shi‘a Mullahs and we know the names of the Shi‘a civic leadership. We know nothing of Islam in Iraq. Is the Islamic university functioning? Who is in charge? Is the tomb of Moulay Abdalqadir al-Jilani safe? Or that of Abu Hanif? Or that of Imam Junaid? Is anybody there? Name him! We simply know nothing of the Muslims of Baghdad. It would be significant to send a delegation to find out answers and to know who the leadership is. Further, since there is no Iraq, equally there is no Syria, what must be established is a line of active Islamic unification from the tomb of Abu Hanif to the tomb of Sultan Abdulhamid in Istanbul. Between Istanbul and Baghdad lies the pivotal zone of Al-Quds. The project of a Palestinian State is a repellent anachronism that historically was out of date almost exactly at the time the PLO was formed. The great tragedy of Palestine is not Israel, that is their lesser tragedy. The great tragedy is the stunning ignorance and betrayal of its gagged and obedient ‘ulema. We remind ourselves again that Islam is not ruled by its Muftis or its Imams. It was not ruled by the class of the ‘ulema. Only the Shi‘a have a clergy.

Dr. Ali Mert has told us that the Muftiad of Al-Quds was appointed by the court in Istanbul. In the light of his thesis of the relationship Istanbul-Al-Quds-Baghdad, the first step to the restoration of an Islamic politique is the establishment of that Muftiad not only from Istanbul but in Istanbul, free from the nationalist pressures of the horrifically ambitious political class in Palestine and from the Nazi savagery of the Israeli forces. Proof of the necessity of this comes with our shocked discovery that the Mufti of Al-Quds is appointed from the gangster class of the Palestinian Authority, so-called, and that he has not once made Fatwa with Qur’an and the renowned Hadith on the subject, forbidding suicide bombing, and as a result has introduced Isma‘ili practices into the very area which had been the ancient heartland of the Isma‘ili attack on Islam.

This takes us to the key sentence of Hajj Abdalhaqq Bewley’s profound study of Islamic Law in relation to governance. He quoted Imam Malik’s reminder that when we need to recover our Islam in a time of crisis we must go back to the beginning. If we apply this to Baghdad, and therefore the present Iraq, the source of the trouble is not as the ignorant leaders of the invading force have pretended, a Saddami problem. It goes back further. Nor is it a result of the miserable Nasserite philosophy of Pan-Arabic Unity - what a farce that was. Arabic brotherhood in humanist terms is described in the Qur’an with the explanation of the two sons of Sayyiduna Adam, ‘alayhi salam. The matter goes back to the beginning. It goes back to Sayyedeta Aisha, Umm al-Muminun, Talha and Zubayr, and the festering sickness that had set up from the day that Sayyiduna Uthman, radiyallahu ‘anhu, became Shahid.

The restoration of Islamic Shariat has as one of its primary necessities the unconditional separation and rejection of Shi‘ism as a post-Revelation religion set up on a declared enmity towards the beloved followers of Rasul, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, especially those he had already told us had been assured by Allah the Garden in the Next World.

From one point of view Shi ‘ism is not a religion in any way - it is a geography, just as the Sikh religion is not a religion but a geography. No-one calls the Sikhs Muslims, so why should we call the Shi‘a Muslims? This matter of Shi‘ism must be viewed with coolness, political astuteness, as well as an intellectual and compassionate concern. In certain arenas it will undoubtedly be fought. In the light of its irrational nature and the dubiety of its historical foundations, educated Muslims, and especially the Sufis, have a duty to do as Sayyadeta ‘Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, did when faced with this terrible Fitna. Prepared for war, she entered the tent of reconciliation. In the end of the day we can rescue from the disaster of Shi‘ism, with its cursing and its blooded backs, all those who thought they belonged to it but realised that their love was for Sayyiduna Ali, may Allah enlighten his face. We can say to them as Jalaluddin Rumi said to them in the Mathnawi when he told of a Muslim man entering a town where the people were sobbing and parading in the street, lashing their backs. He enquired if they had just lost some great dignitary. ‘No,’ he was told, ‘we are mourning for the murder of the Prophet’s grandson.’ The Muslim man replied, ‘What is the matter with you? If he died a Shahid - you should be rejoicing! Such a day is an ‘Eid for the Muslims!’

So it is in all these matters we must recognise the terrain we stand on in this present time. The financial system and its banking has destroyed the Nation State and the national currencies are collapsing far more quickly than any manipulated recovery could rescue them. The structural system, as Amir Tareq Ali pointed out, is fragile as in the Ayat of the Spider’s Web. On the other hand, the collapse of National State and currency, the inevitable and mathematically inescapable collapse of the monetary system, opens the door to a new age, of which you must be not only the authors but the electrifying leadership. The response to the failure to see the Islamic Shariat carried out in the case of the Danish criminal who insulted the Rasul, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, put the kafir world into shock. Suddenly, without organisation, without structures, without even leadership, the great majority of the two billion Muslim World Community rose up and showed their power and their rage. Nothing holds the kuffar together - for their system is nothing. The Muslims, as our beloved Prophet reminded us, are the like the supports of a house. We are united as a community of love of Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and fear of Allah, the Mighty, the Great.

I started this discourse by reminding us of South Africa’s past and present. I would like to indicate what, if it is in the Decree of Allah, glory be to Him, will be its future. Democracy has failed already. Of its nature it is doomed to fighting between parties. It will disintegrate here and elsewhere, and from the hills of Natal the Zulu people will take on Islam in its primal form as it was taught by the great Mujahid Ibn Fodio of Nigeria in the School of Imam Malik, whose father was Arab and whose mother was black. What we will see in Southern Africa is an Islamic Kingdom ruled by a great Zulu King.

Assalaamu alaykum wa rahmatullah