We gave Musa the Book and appointed
his brother Harun with him as a helper.
We said, ‘Go to the people who have denied Our Signs,’
and We annihilated them completely.

And when the people of Nuh denied the Messengers,
We drowned them and made them a Sign for all mankind.
We have prepared a painful punishment for the wrongdoers.

The same goes for ‘Ad and Thamud
and the Companions of the Well
and many generations in between.
We gave examples to each one of them
and each one of them We utterly wiped out.

They themselves have come across the city
which was rained on by an evil rain.*
Did they not then see it?
But they do not expect to rise again.

As Muslims we have to review the realm of events not once, but twice. Or rather, we must first look with the eye of Tawhid and then we must look with the eye of Furqan. If we do not approach the matter with the gravity and at the same time the illumination that comes from the light of Tawhid, we will fail in the subsequent discrimination.

However shocking and distressing the matter may be to us, we must recognise that the event is by Allah. With Allah there is no injustice. Allah has set up existence by an intricate pattern of laws which never cease to function at any given moment. All living creatures perform, bounded by those natural laws that Allah has programmed into them. The organisation of the termitiary and the beehive are well known to us. Also the laws by which, when the higher organisms collapse, lower organisms take over. While an animal is alive, it carries in its blood and tissue living micro‑organisms. When it is hunted and killed, it is then hung. During that time these micro-organisms die which might infect the human. If the carcass is allowed to hang, new micro-organisms come to life which can be nutritious and give taste.

It is only with the human species that there is, among the kuffar, the great illusion. The great illusion is that man can do what he likes. The truth, which is clearly laid out in the Qur’an, is that the human creatures live under a charge from Allah, glory be to Him. They have a beyond-time contract which they are called upon to fulfil in the in-time.

Allah the Exalted has said in Surat Al-A‘raf (7:172):

When your Lord took out all their descendants
from the loins of the children of Adam
and made them testify against themselves
‘Am I not your Lord?’
they said, ‘We testify that indeed You are!’
Lest you say on the Day of Rising,
‘We knew nothing of this.’

The distance, indeed the gulf, between those who respond to a command that is vibrating through the whole pattern of their cellular system and those who pretend it did not happen, is vast. Allah the Exalted says in Surat Al-A‘raf (7:178-182):

Whoever Allah guides is truly guided;
but those He misguides are the lost.

We created many of the jinn and mankind for Hell.
They have hearts they do not understand with.
They have eyes they do not see with.
They have ears they do not hear with.
Such people are like cattle.
No, they are even further astray!
They are the unaware.

To Allah belong the Most Beautiful Names,
so call on Him by them
and abandon those who desecrate His Names.
They will be repaid for what they did.

Among those We have created
there is a community who guide by the Truth
and act justly according to it.

But as for those who deny Our Signs,
We will lead them, step by step, into destruction
from where they do not know.

Thus from the mighty and majestic summit of the mountains of what may be and can be thought about Allah, glory be to Him, and the working-out of His Divine Contract with the sons of Adam – there is no doubt that from that position everything that is happening in the Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates lies under the powerful reproach and the inescapable warning of Allah, the Lord of the Universe, and from this viewpoint the Muslims of the Emirates should be more afraid and more ashamed than the people of Lebanon, cowering under their cedar trees, bombarded by an alien people who want to live exactly the same kind of life as they had up until two weeks ago been living themselves.

Having grasped the situation with the Qur’anic perspective, it then obliges us to discriminate as best we can through the smoke and the fire and the blood and the suffering of children. Let us first look at the protagonists of the struggle before examining the wider setting of the so-called World Community which is nowhere either a political or a legal reality.

As the scenario has been concocted, the first shots fired, as it were, involved the taking of one miserable little Israeli soldier in Gaza. This took place in the epicentre of Palestine. The ‘Ummah have long been assailed with the version of events which, using the PLO’s vocabulary, presented an occupied community of Muslims struggling for their ‘just national rights’. The language was that of Nasserite socialism, and the cause was national freedom. This, at the very point that the national state had ceased to exist, de facto and de jure. Nevertheless, there was the added outrage that their land had been stolen from them in a brutal terrorist operation watched helplessly by the rest of the world.

Up until the first Lebanon crisis, all the activities of the Palestinians, although named terrorism, could be claimed as the extreme measures forced on an oppressed people. During the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, Hamas fighters were for a time trapped in the frontier zone, hosted by Hizbollah. It was on their return to Palestine that their fight against Israel took on a new element. This was suicide-bombing. Despite Qur’anic injunctions, despite quite terrifying Hadith warning against suicide, despite the Ijma’ of all the people of the Sunna, we were asked to accept this unacceptable alteration in the unalterable Law of the Shari‘at. The practice was easily identifiable as Isma‘ili, and, from these same Lebanese mountains, it had been used to terrify the Muslims and the christians once before in history. The Isma‘ili are, of course, a branch of the Shi‘a religion. The propaganda that came out from the region offered us a picture of the Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims fighting the admittedly dreadful Israeli enemy. Things were not so simple.

Early in 2006 we invited the Mufti of Jerusalem and the Mufti of Nablus to attend our Islamic Conference in Cape Town. The Mufti of Jerusalem, apprised of the news that we intended to ask from him a fatwa denouncing suicide bombing, cancelled his visit at the last minute. The Mufti of Nablus informed us that neither of them could make such a Fatwa, for they would certainly be killed by Hamas. He further said that if the Mufti of Jerusalem, who is highly respected by his people, were to make such a Fatwa, the people would follow him. Reflection on the matter forced us to a distressing conclusion. The ghastly performance of the Hamas election, the American, sloganised baseball caps, the pseudo-military outfits of the women, the unnerving similarity between their social persona and that of Hizbollah and Tehran – all these seem to indicate that certainly the leadership, and almost certainly the teaching apparatus inside Palestine, had become Shi‘a. This perception was regrettably confirmed in the recent parades in Palestine at which the Lebanese Shi‘a leaders’ portraits were brandished aloft by the hysterical crowd.

Lebanon itself was today successfully demonstrating the original French atheist concept on which the pseudo-country was invented. Lebanon was intended from its creation as a modern State to be that arena which would witness by its successful programme not only the abolition of Islam, but something even more sordid than a mere dismantling of the Divine religion. Lebanon was designed to represent the perfect masonic model which demonstrated that “All religions are equal!” Of course, as our scholar Umar Pasha has indicated in his book ‘The Esoteric Deviation in Islam’ (www.madinahmedia.com), if you claim all religions to be equal, then none of them is true, being all then meaningless.

French Jesuits translated christian books into Arabic, and when they came on the name ‘God’ they translated it as ‘Allah’. Offering higher education and government jobs, they soon had a significant christian population, which they wittily defined as the Maronite christians to give a false historical identity to what was almost entirely a colonialist phenomenon. It has long been considered that Lebanon was the brothel playground for the Arab rich. So it transpired that Lebanon in this picture represented a microcosm not only of the Arab world but of the Muslim world, in the sense that there was a revolutionary Shi‘a body living alongside what they described as a “Sunni Muslim community” which got along just fine with the christians, their lifestyle, and their enthusiastic embrace of investment capitalism.

It is at this point that our first discrimination must be made. The conflict between the Shi‘a religion and the Muslim religion is not a sectarian divide of one religion. Let us say it again. The Shi‘a religion is not only a discrete entity, but it is one which takes its meaning, metaphysics, and raison d’être from this distinction. The element which separates the Deen of Islam from this other religion has nothing to do with its pretence that justice denied Khalifate to ‘Ali, and all the dreadful hatreds that followed from this, nor is it either the dubious itinerary of twelve Imams who all bizarrely submitted to assassination, bar the twelfth who disappeared, only to return at the end of the world.

Hidden in all that Medieval invention is the true core of the Shi‘a phenomenon – they reject the Shari‘at of Islam because for its execution it requires a Khalif. The Shi‘a do not believe in Khalifate, at all. If they did, they would accept King Muhammad VI of Morocco as their ruler, since he is the direct genealogical inheritor through Hasan as the head of the Ahl a-Bayt. They slander him, as they slandered his father, because he was a dedicated follower of Imam Malik, Imam Dar al-Hijra.

At this point it is important to notice how the extremities touch. The wahhabis reject Khalifate since their version of events leaves them uniquely as Muwahhidun, without Khilafa. Thus the wahhabis, a people of bida’, adopt the same position on Khilafa as the Shi‘a, who have gone outside the Deen. Remember, at the very beginning of the affair Hasan al-Basri, may Allah be pleased with him, said to the dissenting group in the mosque – “You have separated from us!” He did not say, “You have disagreed with us!”

On this subject, it is vital that our Fuqaha and our scholars should mount the most public and overt Da’wa to call the Shi‘a peoples back to the Deen of Islam. The first stage of the process must be that we place clear blue water between us and them. For the second time in recent history, a Shi‘a leader has tried to speak for all the Muslims. He cannot do it. In the present case, all the more so, since Muslim mosques are being torn down inside Iran itself, and Muslims persecuted.

The second stage of the process should be that we invite their leading Mullahs to come, perhaps to the Qarawiyyin in Fes, and listen to the true picture of Islam, which they simply do not know. For example, we should remind them of Mawlana Rumi’s guidance. The shocked Muslim traveller, in the Mathnawi, finds the Shi‘a townsfolk whipping their bleeding backs, only to be told that they are mourning for the death of Hussein. The Muslim replied, “If what you say is true, why are you mourning? If he died a Shahid, he will go to the Jannah. Surely this is an ‘Eid?” We would further explain that we do not have a Mullah class and we are not governed by them. The Islamic State is governed by an Amir. He is counselled by his Fuqaha. The Qadi judges, but he does not rule.

The compulsions of realpolitic are removed from that discourse of the Fiqh. Now that we have linkage from Palestine to Iran, this permits us to surmise that Hamas received their instructions from Iran, precisely to tunnel into Israel to take a hostage. It was not a side-effect. It was the purpose of the operation. Given the weak civilian leadership in Israel of what is, after all, a Spartan military State, their response was, alas, predictable. We now know that the Hizbollah entity had its weaponry in place well before this event, and so was ready to react immediately. In one move, Iran has effectively taken control of the whole Middle East, since it now stretches from Tehran through Iraq, through Syria, into Lebanon, and over to Palestine.

Clearly, it is bad for Israel. It is worse for the Lebanese people. In truth, it is worst for the presence of living Islam among the Muslim ‘Ummah in our time.

Now let us look at Israel. The Israeli State has already failed. Its original Zionist fantasy was born out of the massive propaganda unleashed after World War II and the sickening revelation of the genocide they had suffered. What Hitler failed to foresee, and what the democratic regimes failed to look back and understand, was that great suffering invests the people who survive with enormous strength. The Siege of Stalingrad made the Russian people strong. The Blitz of British cities gave them the force to survive. The bombing of Dresden and Hamburg assured the leadership of post-War Germany. The mass slaughter by the Nazis gave the survivors Israel, and an opportunity for the jewish banking class to dominate the post-War financial markets.

Today, half a century on, everything has changed. America does not need Israel. It had already picked Lebanon as its Mediterranean base. The world’s banking markets have soared way beyond their distinguished jewish founding fathers. Today’s banker can equally be Japanese, Indonesian, Indian, or indeed, even German.

With the fading of the Zionist dream arose the secular one. Now half the Israelis would consider their holy city to be Las Vegas, not Jerusalem. The human tragedy for the Israelis is that subvention and support are dependent on attack from outside. The political strategy of the Israeli State has always been provocation. Deliberate provocation was the father of terrorism. If the Palestinians had forgotten their fantasies of midget statehood, the dream of Luxembourg, and taken on the Deen of Islam and its ennobling gifts, that is, to have made their aim four wives and ten children, then sheer demographics would have handed them the whole region. Instead they went out of Islam, and quite evil men sent other men’s sons out to blow themselves to pieces – every time, therefore, one Palestinian less!

During this time that the Shi‘a-Iran dynamic was pouring out of Tehran, the Israelis saw to their horror that America had chosen Lebanon as its surrogate nation. They saw that from it they intended to take over Ba’athist Syria. With, as they imagined, Iraq out of the way, Syria was a pushover, given also the flaccid son of Assad as President. The new atheist Lebanon (“All religions are equal”) was a resounding success. Tourists would rather gamble and fornicate in a christian playground without the disapproving glare of the rabbis and the unpredictable explosion in the marketplace. And Lebanese cooking was certainly better than the Russian pickles of the Israeli Deli.

As happens in geo-politics without a statesman leader, the implications of the violence itself could not be understood. To Israel, Hizbollah was the excuse to destroy Lebanon. To Iran, Hizbollah was the excuse to take on full colonial control of the whole area once called the Middle East.

The ravenous dogs of Israeli war are slaughtering a civilian population with an indifference that is an exact copy of the Nazi indifference to Guernica, and Warsaw, yet the wise would be advised to look further. Now that the thunder is rolling from the green hills of Lebanon and resounding with the storm winds of Iraq, there is no target more certain than the foolish and worthless skyscrapers of Dubai. If Lebanon was built with christian wealth, and as such threatened Israel, Dubai is built not just with Arab wealth – I cannot bring myself to say Muslim wealth – it is equally enmeshed in jewish finance. It is potentially the most dangerous place in the whole region. It is a bullseye waiting for an arrow. It is a target waiting to be hit. When it does happen, no-one will be surprised. If the world does not care about the poor people of Lebanon, why should it bother about the rich people of Dubai? They are a disgrace to the whole Muslim world, and Dubai with its shameless government and its poor hindu slaves, so shamefully treated, is a reproach to the whole Muslim nation. The trouble with the rulers of Dubai is that they do not think that the Qur’an was revealed for them.

Allah the Exalted commanded the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, with this Ayat (Surat al-Furqan, 25:77):

Say: ‘What has My Lord to do with you if you do not call on Him?
But you have denied the truth,
so punishment is bound to come.’