shaykh abdalqadir, dec 2

Empire and The Siege of Bombay
Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, Dec 2 2008

1. The Long View

The first Empire with world hegemony was the British Empire. The British Empire began when Disraeli persuaded Queen Victoria to claim India as Imperatrix. She was declared Empress in 1877. The Empire lasted precisely 70 years. It came to an ignominious end under Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, whose wife, daughter of the notorious banker Sir Ernest Cassel, during the partition settlement carried on an adulterous affair with the Hindu leader Nehru. The disastrous and illegal partition cost the lives of millions of Muslims. The populace was never consulted by ballot or referendum. It was 1947. The second Empire with world hegemony was the American Empire. The American Empire began following the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended WW2. The assumption of power was founded on three events. One: the settlement of the UN in New York. Two: The establishment of Israel through the instrument of the UN. Three: The Bretton Woods Agreement, which defined the dollar-based capitalism which collapsed in 2007, when the Bear Sterns Hedge Fund declared a bankruptcy which heralded the 2008 absolute failure of the Bretton Woods dual power system of banking and democracy. The American Empire lasted only 50 years. It began when the wartime leader General Eisenhower was elected President and took office in 1952. It came to an end when, ignoring Eisenhower’s famous warning of the military-industrial complex, Congress gave authority to the invasion of Iraq. The ‘free-world’ project was over. It was 2002.

2. The Myth of Al Qaeda & the Realities of Terror

The political construct that posits a secret-cell system of a militant Islam that is in Schmittian terms ‘The Enemy’ suits lots of people from President to Pope. Of course, with the help of TV media, and the new academic breed of ‘Experts,’ it is convincing to the IPod masses. Intellectually, it does not play.

Firstly: its leadership. Bin Laden is scarcely convincing. As a son of a Saudi billionaire family, as a former CIA operative, as someone who bought his way into Afghan society, he fails to take on the mantle of Islamic leadership. As head of a secret society which drives adolescent youths to suicide and stays hidden out of danger in the mountains he can be at least recognised as a perfect copy of the Isma’ili leader, the Old Man of the Mountain, with his gang of corrupted youths, the assassins or Hashishiyin, who fought Salahuddin. As dead, which every tea-house in Peshawar knows, he is very interesting politically. It is the US leadership which ‘needs him’ alive. His second-in-command only talks Marxist anti-US polemics. Never an ayat of Qur’an. Never a Salat-an-Nabei. Never a judgement of Fiqh. In short ignorant of Islam.

Secondly: Its bizarre targets. If the World Trade Centre is a target because it represents world-market capitalism, as such it can be defined as an enemy stronghold, but, but, but! If you destroy it, you strengthen world capitalism, plus the insurance system of capitalism will more than double its value. Strengthen, because, as Ernst Jünger has demonstrated, destruction of capitalist entities by ‘The Enemy’ is necessary for its own survival. Why the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad? Why the Taj Hotel in Bombay? Why trains in London and Madrid? No strategy, if such a militant approach could offer success, could bring Islamic success any closer, no strategy such as the terrorists have elected to perpetrate. Thirdly: who are they? There is a world-wide élite in the Muslim world, of Ulama’, scholars and social activists. We know each other across schools and movements, rejoicing in the variety and energy of our local approaches. Nobody, neither modernist nor traditionalist, had ever heard of those secretly appointed assassins drawn from the under-class of Arabs and Asians, ending with semi-idiots like the infamous and absurd shoe-bomber!

The realities of terror and their exponents do however point to zones of extreme injustice, oppression and poverty. There is a point when the sons of Adam turn against their degradation. When they strike it is, unsurprisingly, violent. The four zones of inhuman and unaccounted for savagery and oppression are:

1. The Uighur nation and the evil Chinese occupation.
2. Afghanistan and its wars of occupation.
3. The Indian sub-continent and its endemic persecution of Muslims.
4. Palestine and its persecution by Israel.

Now the root of disorder in 1 and 4 goes back to the political reality from which they came. The Uighur was a linked province to the Osmanli Dawlet. Palestine was a linked and protected province of that same Osmanli Dawlet. 2 and 3 are the unified provinces of the Mughal Dawlet. The last legal frame of India was dominated by the Mughal centres of a mighty civilisation based in Delhi, Lahore, Shrinigar, Agra and Lucknow. Since the exploitation of discontent, not to remove the cause but to keep it down, is the known policy of capitalism, deeper questions must be asked. To banish the conspiracy theory of Al Qaeda and its assassins we must ask the questions of real-politique.

3. Who Stands to Gain from the Conflict?

1. The Uighur. A ‘colonial’ conflict in East Turkestan and Tibet is an inexpensive but brilliant diversion of foreign attention from the full – scale commercial and cultural invasion by China (the top three hotels of Cape Town no longer sell Indian tea at teatime, but china tea, timers, cups and pots!)
2. Darfur and Congo are now part of a military take-over with paid surrogate armies.
3. Palestine. Terrorism assures that the massive subsidy of the US without which the Israeli State cannot survive, continues, a one-party (coalition) state since its inception!
4. Afghanistan. The last bastion of bankrupt US global policy, it is needed as the southern base on Russian Asia’s network of oil and gas. It is under NATO command to avoid any accusation of torture and killing pointing to the US. NATO forces are above all state laws.
5. India/Pak/Bangla. The potential awakening of sub-continental wealth, firstly in its brilliant people, secondly in its communities, thirdly in its industries. Bollywood menaces Hollywood! If the US is bankrupt, India is massively rich — when it breaks free of the dying dollar hegemony. The Bombay incident is a last futile attempt to halt Indian domination of the US and its markets. It also assures that an Indo – Pak conflict, along with a continued matriarchy in Bangladesh, will allow a few years more before the completion of the Mexican take-over of a failed USA. The constructive Islamic response to the horror of the Bombay siege should be the foundation of a pan-Indian Muslim union, uniting all Muslims of the sub-continent to take an oath of loyalty to fellow Muslims and a vow to refuse to fight fellow Muslims across the three countries.