The world of treachery is one unique upon itself in its diversity and manifestations. There is the treachery of silence, where appropriate censure and defence are not invoked in the name of a friend or brother; there is the treachery of power, where people's confidence is violated by their keeper for a personal gain; there is the treachery of ideology, where hypocrites become advocates for a cause they disbelieve in, either to exploit or undermine it; and, there is the treachery of greed over truth, where one knows the line between what is false and true, but sides against truth for a fleeting benefit of this life.
Often, however, there comes upon the earth men, who are trials in the face of the believers, who combine between all that has ever been known of treachery. Their names are the best of names, their places of birth are amongst the burial sites of the best of men and they are born upon the best of faiths. Yet they come to walk amongst the people like kings, whilst in them are the traits of the blemished and disgraced harlots. They speak of mercy and humanity, while they burn the eyes of their own people with poverty and oppression. They pray amongst the people and invoke the best of names, but Allah is free of them and what they say, what they do and who they are.
This phenomenon is as present in Egypt as it is in far reaches of the Muslim world. But due to the significant historical, cultural, geographic and demographic role of Egypt, it is perhaps a good place to begin.
Muhammad Hosni Mubarak
Mubarak is a man of relative intelligence and capacity; he rose through the ranks of the Egyptian Air Force and took on a civilian role as Vice President in the administration of President Anwar Sadat. President Sadat, who wilfully recognised and made peace with Israel, was assassinated at the hands of Khalid Islambouli (rh) and came to be replaced by his protégé Hosni Mubarak as President.
Upon inheriting the responsibility of what was then a nation of fourty million people, Mubarak affirmed the peace with Israel - the illegal and illegitimate state founded and standing upon the lands of Islam and the Muslims - and pledged allegiance to the United States on a level and in a way rarely witnessed amongst the pseudo-states of the Arabs.
In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Mubarak pledged 40,000 troops - attaining $US250,000 for each one - to aide the American effort in the offensive against Iraq and its people. The war however did not end with the military offensive on Baghdad, but rather manifested itself in a campaign which brought about over 350,000 Iraqi deaths through sanctions on Iraq and continued into a U.S military occupation of the Gulf.
Mubarak, of course, also had his own War on Terror – starting from back in 1981. In fighting Islam and those who uphold its banner, Egypt, for almost thirty years, has been under a law of emergency rule which permits indefinite detention without trial, prohibits unauthorised gatherings of more than five people, limits speech and association to opposition political movements which are seen as a threat or corrective to the current establishment, and where reporters are subject to arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.
Till this very day, Egypt's reputation precedes it in the matter of torture, for it is the main pit stop of the CIA's extraordinary rendition; for when even the US has too much of a conscience to torture the Islamist mujahideen, it sends them to Cairo where human beings become ghost detainees - out of the way of judicial oversight - and where the Egyptian mukhabaraat al-khabeyacan have their freedom of the flagitious.
However, this service is not restricted to just the enemies of Egypt and the USA; Israel, Egypt's good friend and ally, has a fundamental interest in the humiliation of the believers on the turf of Amr Ibn Al-Aas (ra), Salaahudeen (rh) and Qutuz (rh). Take an example from early last year: a number of Gazans who happened to be members of Hamas made their way into Egypt, where they were captured and detained without trial and subjected to the most humiliating of exposures: they were stripped naked, beaten, deprived of sleep and their files hand-delivered by the Chief of the Egyptian General Intelligence Services, Omar Suleiman, to the Israelis in Tel Aviv.
Such is the zeal of Mubarak and his administration to undermine those who carry the flag of Islam, that he went as far as launching a verbal attack against the United Kingdom in November 1997 and criticised their lack of effort in curbing the conservative Islamic movement.
Even distant nations such as Venezuela had the decency and self-respect to expel the Israeli Ambassador - at the time of the latest Israeli incursion into Gaza. Yet, the Pharaoh of our times and his regime maintained relations with the enemy of Islam and the enemy of humanity. And as our good brothers and sisters of Egypt rose to resist a betrayal even the disbeliever could not accept upon himself, they were subdued by a State of death and treachery unlike any other.
The Tragedy of Egypt
However, Mubarak's greatest contribution to the devil is upholding a stale secular Egyptian law at the expense of Islam and the Shari'ah, whereby Egypt – like the rest of the lands of the Muslims – is deprived of God's law and justice. And where a law beside that of Allah (swt) has authority in the land, corruption rises and permeates every home; it is simply a dictate of the universe as created by The Creator.
Unemployment and corruption persist at the favour of big business and big names and at the expense of people and their qualifications; this being due to a lack of accountability and coherence at the hands of the Shari'ah and the people of Islam.
Palaces and grand halls are erected instead of schools and hospitals, and the people suffer under the burden of a wealth they can see but not feed their starving children with - where 50% of the population cannot even read or find basic services; this being due to a political class which finds its interest in self-service and not in the service of Allah (swt) and the believers.
Young girls have their legs tied together and are ripped and mutilated of what they were given, while weightless laws and decentralised authority exasperate the problem instead of correcting it; this being due to lack of a system of Islamic corrective and courage on behalf of the religious authorities of the land in conveying the correct Islamic perspective and being able to enforce it.
Qualified and professional men reach their thirties and fourties without having saved enough to rent a room, marry a woman and protect their chastity, leaving them to a desperation unlike any other; this being due to a failed economic system and culture, established upon a mediocrity of thought, wherein Islam has fallen from the hearts and institutions of man.
The challenges of young women walking the streets having to deflect stares, obscenities, pinches and random marriage proposals have become case studies for political students the world over and comedy sketches for European midnight shows; this being due to a failed religious class and the chronic inability of young men, financially, to find stability and security.
The streets of the Arab world are more familiar with Egypt's Zizi and Fifi than they are of Hasan, Sayyid, Abdul-Hamid, Khalid, Ayman or Abu Ishaaq; this being due to a media realm that is left unregulated, and hence closer to whoredom than decency and responsibility. The Arab and Muslim world has become more familiar with the traditional Sa'eedi dances than with the Egyptian Mamelukes and Saif Ad-Din Qutuz to whom they owe their lands.
Corruption has spread in the land of Egypt, and its reality is a tragic one. But this reality is but a mirror of what has become entrenched in all the lands of the Muslims. Are Albania, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Malaysia, Turkey or Tunisia any better? Islam has fallen from the hands of its adherents and our homelands have become graveyards of what we believe in. And even still, they remain spiritual havens compared to the lands of disbelief and the disbelievers.
The Role of Politics
After the authority of Allah (swt) over His creation, there is the authority of the righteous over the lands of the earth. The masses, in their majority, are a flock at the hands of the shepherds who fear and care for them. Otherwise, and in unfortunate circumstances, masses are preys at the hands of the wolves who become 'shepherds' – as we witness today.
Correct governance is a step of rectifying societies and bringing physical, mental and spiritual security and safety to the people. And both Islam and history affirm that the implementation of the Shari'ah of Allah (swt) is the undoubted and unrivalled source of progress and decency.
Even prominent figures of the West, such as Hewlett Packard's former CEO, Carly Fiorina, have acknowledged the supremacy of the Islamic state, when she said:
"There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world. It was able to create a continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean and from northern climes to tropics and deserts. Within its dominion lived hundreds of millions of people, of different creeds and ethnic origins.
One of its languages became the universal language of much of the world, the bridge between the peoples of a hundred lands. Its armies were made up of people of many nationalities, and its military protection allowed a degree of peace and prosperity that had never been known.
When other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others.
While modern Western civilization shares many of these traits, the civilization I’m talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600, which included the Ottoman Empire and the courts of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo."
So where is Cairo from that today? Has Al-Qaahirah (The Victorious) satisfied itself with what has become of it: a land wherein the defeated governors sell their souls and their people for a pathetic price, where the mosques and lands of Islam are at the vanguard of the war against the Palestinians and the Muslims?
The Muslim world urgently needs an Islamic alternative to what governs the people today. Yes, there are many reformists and pseudo-reformists amongst us, but most are failing a failure that has little equal.
Solution
It seems, on some level, that Islamic political reformists are locked in an enclosed and restricted mindset of political engagement – devoid of historical context or responsibility -- wherein they have convinced themselves that they cannot be effective except by being a part of the very system they seek to 'change'. That, by definition, is a contradiction of logic and terms; for when a political system stands, it does so with all its methodologies, institutions and interest groups embedded within it, leaving no space for a reform that compromises its standing.
The current Egyptian state is a fruit of the disintegration of the Islamic state and the colonisation at the hand of the Western powers. Therefore, it is imperative that any serious reform bring the authority of the entire so called Egypt nation-state and its history, beginning from 1914 as a British protectorate, into question. But to attempt integration into a system that rejects you to begin with, is the epitome of naivety.
The example of the political arm of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who are our beloved brothers and have achieved some surface benefit, but also wasted much time, is a good one. For while the organisation began as a serious threat to the Egyptian establishment by attacking the very basis upon which the Egyptian government derived its so called authority, the Brotherhood then drifted inwards – into the very establishment it was fighting – and became a pacified movement bound by the constructs of its new position. When even liberal democratic and Arab-Nasserist political parties have had the audacity to reject the Egyptian establishment altogether, the Muslim Brotherhood has insisted on participation, which is indicative of a misplaced pragmatism that even the most deluded of people came to reject. And with time, the state is establishing its presence further and time is being lost.
Yes, perhaps many would find it risky to be at the periphery of Egypt's political and social landscape by calling to a true, untainted and uncompromised Islamic political paradigm. But ultimately, only in going for the jugular and offering an undiluted, yet relevant, Islamic perspective to Egypt's social and political problems can there be any sort of tangible change and corrective process. There is simply no other political option and potential solution; and as the mainstream moves to Islam – not the other way around – the task at hand becomes easier.
Muslims in the West also have a role to play in engaging the Muslims of Africa, Arabia and Asia. Whether it is through establishing contacts and assisting from a distance or using the power of the spoken or written word to debate the status quo, there must be a movement towards joining one of this Ummah's greatest challenges: liberating our lands and establishing our state.
We cannot continue oppressing ourselves by accepting our status as a disenfranchised people and not re-establishing the home that the Ummah has always had. The Islamic state and the Islamic alternative – an alternative to the quislings and tragedy and treachery amongst us - must be revived. The truth does not change for the world; the world changes for the truth – verily, no state or harmony was established in the world without an extraordinary process and people to nurture it.
Br. Abdul-Latif
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