The Anatomy of Tyranny
From Abu Ghraib to Saydnaya to Gaza: modernity as the age of Muslim Internment and how to resist this global, cancerous, carceral system.
âBe Husayn-like on the path of shahada, then if not, be Zaynab-like on the path of truth-telling.â
- Shaykh Khadr Adnan quoting Ali Shariâati. Adnan was killed after an 87-day hunger strike in Israelâs Ayalon Prison without charge or trial in 2023.
âIf the CIA, wanted a robust interrogation, they would send them to Jordan. If they want them tortured, they would send them to Syria. If they want them disappeared completely, never to see them again, they would send them to Egypt.â
- Former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, Thinking Muslim Podcast
If one could dissect the cadaver of a security state, splayed open on a cold steel table, its organs would pulse with corruption, its veins coursing with fear. It is a monstrous, sentient construct, designed solely to regulate, control and suppress. Its rotten coreâa bloated and charred heartâpumps dread into stunned masses. It is engorged, its chambers connected by viscous, sinewy tendrils to torture chambers that reek of sweat, blood, and despair. On the inside of its ribs, physical and psychological stains are etched by the hopeless struggles of countless broken souls.
The torture rooms are the creature's jagged teeth, gnashing and grinding down anyone who dares to resist. Water and food withheld. Here, under flickering fluorescent lights, victims are stripped of dignity, their terrorized minds, sleep deprived, flayed open by men with deadened eyes and nicotine-stained fingers. Questions are barked like rabid dogs, followed by the hiss of belts, the sharp crack of bones, and the metallic snap of handcuffs tightening. The air smells of a thousand stolen dreams and perspiring fearâstale sweat, acrid smoke, and the faint, nauseating tang of iron.
If the security state were a body, the invisible intelligence forces would form the brainâcoiled and swollen, hunting any whiff of dissent from independent, wayward sovereign individuals. It is a mass of gray matter writhing with spies, native informants, and double agents. If your name is whispered between these gnarly ears, you are an ill-fated, doomed soul. Every synapse fires with distrust, its neurons firing orders to maim, surveil, infiltrate, and betray the human spirit.
The eyes of this beast are everywhere: hidden cameras in dimly lit alleys, eavesdropping devices tucked into cracks, and shadowy figures leaning too close in crowded cafĂ©s. Its maniacal mind never rests, ceaselessly plotting the next purge, the next raid, the next unmarked van to sweep someone into oblivion. Binders full of names. Lists of students who protest for food aid to enter Gaza. Lists of mothers who engage in Qurâan study circles. Lists of the names of those who dare to pray the dawn prayer in mosques are collected. Lists of Friday sermon topics. List upon list, documenting compliance and dissent.
This beastâs lungs are smoke-filled offices, where brutal policemen with hard faces and harder souls chain-smoke cheap cigarettes. Are they jinns made of fire or past-tense humans whose light in their souls has been long extinguished? The smoke curls around their heads like ghostly halos, masking the stink of unwashed uniforms and stale coffee. These sunken silos are where the dragons of corruption heave deeply, where files are stamped with shaking hands and bribes exchange sweaty palms. The air is thick with cynicism, eyes hollow with the weight of complicity pressing down like a stone slab.
The bureaucracy is its bloated, diseased liver, filtering nothing but perpetuating poison. Corrupt officials in ill-fitting suits shuffle papers that mean nothing, rubber-stamping death sentences with the indifference of men counting sheep. The mafia families that lord over these states siphon wealth, funneling it into offshore accounts and gaudy mansions while the streets outside rot. Their prideful laughter is hollow, their smiles thin as razors, and their eyes glassy with the apathy of men long dead inside.
The stateâs skin is made of propagandaâthin, peeling layers of posters, slogans, and logos. Tweets. Reels. Puff pieces. Smiling pictures in hospital wards doing âhumanitarianâ work. Bright colors mask the decay beneath, where truth is flayed alive and replaced with lies. Words like âjihadistâ or âIslamicâ are criminal slurs, but worshipping at the altar of âHis Supreme Eminenceâ and âHis Majestyââtitles borrowed from the vestiges of European, medieval era Divine-right of kingsâis encouraged. Pictures of perfectly manicured Royal Families design every office and school. The state broadcasts its lies through flickering media and perfectly pruned Instagram pages, a sickly sweet coating over the bile of its reality, suffocating dissent and lulling the masses into a soothing stupor.
And then, there are its claws: the military police, armed to the teeth, stomping down streets like storm clouds ready to burst. Their boots crush protests, their batons splinter skulls, and their rifles are aimed at the chests of their own countrymen. They sow ethnic, tribal and class warfare, flashing their badges and weapons to intimidate and silence. They are the enforcers, the agents of state terror who ensure that the creatureâs hunger is always fedâthrough fear, through submission, through blood.
You might think I am describing Assadist Syria in this mangled monster. But the truth is, this malformed colossus has embedded itself upon large swaths of the earth. In fact, if you blow the lid off and peel the crust of any modern state, you will find, to varying degrees of horror, a similar anatomy of tyrannyâwired, watching, fed and fattened up by decades of unchecked coercion and control. Whether it is in the East or West of the bank of the River Jordan, the Nile or the Euphrates, these malignant, mangled torture states live as one, thriving and heaving off of teacher other, competing mimetically in the sinister dark arts of mass control, repression and subjugation.
This is the anatomy of tyranny. The liberal ruse-based world order is the force that breaths life into this wicked monster. Every organ of this dis-order interlocks, from Rikers to Rafah, feeding off the other in a ghastly symbiosis. It grows stronger with every silenced voice, every disappeared body, every soul that capitulates to silence or submits to its suffocating embrace. To behold this behemoth it is to confront its raw, visceral face: it looks like âcivilizedâ men and women in respectable suits and sharp runway clothing, those who attend high brow international conferences like UN, WEF, COP, and the WHO. All the while, men like the bearded, turbaned Gazan Abu Diyaâ, the grandfather of âsoul of my soulâ are written off as the âterrorists,â worthy of extermination.
Everything this monster represents is inverted. It thrives on double speak and deception. Its insides are spilled out on the outside, throbbing, raw and exposed. The most marvelous thing about this gruesome creature is that it moves, but it lacks a soul. Its ghoulish, unseen form represents a living dead reminder of what systemic power, unchecked perpetually, can look like.
Because if it isnât the Nazi designed underground hell that is the infamous slaughterhouse of Saydnaya in Syria, it is the torture chambers of occupied Palestine, where men and women get raped with metal rods and thousands of children are held captive, terrorized. It is Tehranâs infamous Evin prison. It is the dark hallways of the political prisons of Jordan, Pakistan, Libya, Sudan, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco. It is the notoriously monstrous Egyptian cells were innocent people are tortured, snatched in the night without warning, and swallowed into oblivion like they never were. It is Roumieh in Lebanon or Nasiriyah (al-Hout) in Iraq. It is in the cells of Al-Saud where scholars like Shaykh Salman al-Ouda, Awad al-Qarni and al-Omari have been detained unjustly for the most absurd of charges. It is the Hindutva prisons of Kashmir, or Uttar Pradesh and other places in India, where sometimes, as many as 150 boys are held in a cell for the simple crime of breathing while Muslim. And on, and onâŠ
I wrote previously on this Substack that we are living in an age of Muslim Internment but no one is the wiser. It is the biggest, most neglected elephant in the room of our time. We do not acknowledge that after World World II, we have almost overwhelmingly seenâand been forced to acceptâimages of torture normalized on primarily Muslim bodies. It is as if the nation state monster is fed and sustained by the souls and limbs of Muslim folks. From Bosnia, to Abu Ghraib, to Rabaâa, to the West Bank, to Guantanamo, to the Uyghur âre-educationâ camps, to the ongoing mass graves and concentration camps in Gaza, we are living in a global system that has normalized unleashing unspeakable injustice violence on Muslim men, women and children. This monstrosity must be clearly definedâit must be acknowledgedâso we can truly fight it.
In America, this system is sustained through the unconstitutional, Islamophobic âPatriot Act, which chains political prisoners like Imam Amin al-Jamil, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui or the Holy Land 5 in super max prisons. Americaâs model of the prison-industrial complex represents the snakeâs head of the this globalized, cancerous system of internment. In America alone, the prison system holds over 1.9 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, at a cost of at least $182 billion each year. Injustice is expensive. If not on American soil, the security state warlords of these âcivilizedâ liberal states outsource the messy work of torture to the poorer security states they control in what is called âextraordinary renditionâ, where poor souls get arbitrarily snatched and are destined to a long spiraling nightmare of cruel forms of torture and degradation.
It is exceedingly clear that modernity is, by design and necessity, an age of invisible internment. One long âwar on terrorâ campaign by the purveyors of state-sponsored terror. If Islamâembodied by the wayward bodies of believing Muslimsâis the single most cogent threat to the nation state, then it is a logical outcome that Muslim bodies are used as firewood and fodder for this cancerous, carceral world. Prison systems are the animating core of the modern nation state because their looming threat provides the necessary logic for unchecked power, emboldening and metastasizing the security apparatus in perpetuity. With the US, China, Russia and Israel as leaders and architects in designing and outsourcing mass incarceration systems, their aims are not to punish or rehabilitate, but are part of a continuous trajectory of subjugation and enforcing brute power. By design, the logic and technology of mass incarceration almost single-handedly targets Muslims, black people and other oppressed groups.
In this time of great deception, any discussion or rhetoric that omits the existence of this over-arching, pervasive, pernicious system cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, even the arrival of a long-awaited revolution in one security state can sustain, upholdâand further ambiguateâthis pernicious system. For example, when the Syrian revolutionâs leader says he is uninterested in fighting the ultimate source of state-terrorism in the region, I hope that we, along with our beloved Syrian brethren and sisters, exercise more mistrust and caution in the days to come: replacing one flag for another still rehearses the rhetoric, logic and mechanism of nationalism. Our vision is fragmented if it sill cannot see beyond the confines of the state apparatus.
Mandela said it aptly when he said, âour freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.â Not because Palestinians are more special than Syrians, but because, as we have seen, Palestine represents a defiance to the world order and threw a real wrench in it for the first time in a long, long time. So long as this system exists in its current, colonially constructed, post-WW2 form, the globalization and normalization of Muslim Internment and nowâgenocideâwill not end. Systemic Islamophobia/mass injustice will continue to seep from every bleeding orifice of this world so long as the liberal ruse-based order represented in the security state has a monopoly on violence. It is the vested strategic interest of great power puppeteers for us to remain siloed and caged in our imagined mental and spiritual confines and borders. Freedom for one people/nation/group is still a cage, a veil if that freedom does not extend to all of humanity.
We have understood the anatomy of tyranny, but what is the anatomy of a human being? In the material sense, a body, a heart, a brain, sure. But in the metaphysical sense, the human being possesses that which terrifies the security state. Something that monstrous regimes can never have: a soul. Light. In order to slay this gory, grisly soulless Frankenstein beast that is the behemoth state, we must remember that it is a devilish ruse. A recent trick, a phenomenon, one that was constructed in a lab of crude, worldly forces. What is constructed and fed on fear is naturally fickle and thus, can be defeated. Love and unity upon the truth can vanquish it.
In order to truly slay it, we must remember that we, human souls are celestial bodies of light. Every individual one of us has the untapped power to be a Vanquisher of the Kingdom of Fear. In the Qurâanic ethos, if one human soul dies unjustly, the whole world dies with it. And if one life is saved, the whole world is saved with it. Let us come back to an understanding of humanity that terrifies the monsters in charge: that of us as one body, as conveyed in the Prophetic words, âthe parable of the believers in their affection, mercy, and compassion for each other is that of a body. When any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever.â What are we now if not a feverish, dying, ailing body? The only healing tonic, the remedy this body so sorely need, is the light that already exists within each of us: to remember our untapped, uniting power that is tethered to the throne of the One. That is a power that is beyond regulation. Beyond control. It exists beyond the confines of prison states and torture chambers.
It is freedom.
Prayers for patience, persevere
Above all, God, my heart's revere
No matter if the storm's severe
Persevere, persevere
Far as it seems, help is near
So long as God's to me dear
The tide's on high -
hold on, don't fear
Persevere, persevere
Perseverance is God's cheer
Prayers! God is near right here
Despair not! The sky will clear
Persevere, persevere.
- Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, 14th Nov. 2024, FMC Carswell
Suggestions for further reading: When Only God Can See by Walaa Quisay and Asim Qureshi, These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons by Ramzy Baroud, Richard Falk and Khalida Jarrar, The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wissam Rafeedie, Captive Revolution, Palestinian Women's Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System by Nahla Abdo, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated by Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutionsby Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba bin Wahad and Jamal Joseph and much more. For Arabic sources, consult:
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