Sermons at the Court
Someone asked Rumi, 'Which music is forbidden?' He replied, 'The sound of the utensils of the rich that falls into the ears of the poor.’
The cat gets close
to try the flesh;
a bomb pounds the street.
No flesh, no girl,
no father, no cat.
Nobody is hungry.
The moon overhead
is not the moon.
Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet and Pulitzer Prize winner
Last week, I had the honor of gathering with the Muslim students who—at the time of writing this—have been leading Stanford University’s hunger strike for over 12 days. Their strike is part of a series of hunger strikes across the California State University system that started earlier this month. In their own words, they elected to go hungry as a form of protest because “the body speaks in a prose no committee can redline: it quivers, thins, goes ice‑cold after sunset. Each tremor mirrors, on a minute scale, the famine tightening its fist around Gaza.”
Their bodies were weakening and thinning, but their morale was high and their spirits luminescent.
Despite their brave and dangerous act of protest, university administrators continue to ignore them despite the students’ repeated calls for action.
By being maligned, ignored and ostracized by the powers-that-be, these students are experiencing but a sliver of the abandonment that Palestinians feel daily, as their calls from the heart of suffering have also fallen on deaf ears and blind hearts.
Amidst the criminal conditions of starvation in Gaza, Dr. Fayez Abu Shamala, a respected academic and former mayor of Khan Younis—himself a former prisoner who spent ten years in Israeli prisons—recently appeared in a viral video in which he facetiously implored Muslim scholars worldwide for support. Instead of appealing to them for any modicum of conscience and moral outrage, instead, he implored them for a fatwa:
“To the high and mighty Muslim scholars of this ummah, to the Grand Mufti of al-Azhar, to the Shuyukh of Two Holy Sanctuaries, to all those who give sermons on their pulpits… we do not want your solidarity, we do not want you to make calls to defend us militarily, we do not even call upon you to demand that the borders to be opened for the aid to flow in.
No… we only ask of you one thing: pray tell, please instruct us, how exactly did the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ used to tie a rock around his stomach when he was hungry? What kind of rock did he use? Can we use rocks from the ground, or can it be a piece of rubble from our homes? Should the rock be big in size, or small? How should we tie it? On which part of our abdomen?
Please, enlighten us, oh Muslim scholars, enlighten us with your fierce, scathing, roaring and insightful scholarship.”
His painfully satirical question points to the theater of the absurd that is the state of Muslim scholarship today. His question reminds us of the eternal message of the Qur’an: that it is comprised of 6,236 verses, but only 500 or so of which are about legal rulings. The holistic message of the Qur’an is one of cultivating sincere faith through introspection, understanding one’s covenant before God, and actualizing one’s sincerity and agency in the face of injustice and immorality. In short, the Qur’anic and Prophetic message, is one of shedding worldly attachments to cultivate a sound heart that will one day lay its actions bare at the court of an All-Seeing, All-Knowing God.
Similar to the hard-heartedness of university administrators and autocratic regime bureaucrats, the general state of Islam today is such that it has been reduced to the tight, narrow confines of technical discussions. Instead of embodying and internalizing the Qur’anic ethos as a litmus test between good and evil—as the final covenant for humanity—Muslim scholars are content hiding behind the legal corpus as a shield for their crude passivity.
As the 20th century Egyptian scholar Muhammad al-Ghazali once remarked, “Islamic universities left out 5,000 verses of the Qur’an and chose to focus on 500 verses instead.” Meaning that the singular preoccupation with the minute, technical details of the law, fiqh, as the primary expression of being religious in the modern age, has become our downfall. It is a huge indictment that it is secular, American universities that are at the forefront of the student movement for Palestine, while Islamic universities across the world—Muslim liberal arts colleges in the West included—remain silent.
Nowhere is this crisis of Muslim scholarship manifested more clearly than in the abandonment of Palestine today. The religious class has failed to respond to the gravity of the genocide that has unfolded in this land of gentle, Cana’anite descendants of saints, companions and Prophets. Instead of calling upon their rulers and governments to end their complicity in the crimes against the Palestinian people, they are stuck in a world of rote technicalities. A “least common denominator” Islam. A “plausible deniability” Islam.
When Dr. Fayez Abu Shalama appealed not for military intervention or aid, but rather, sarcastically requested a fatwa about how the noble Prophet used to remedy his own hunger, it was a scathing rallying-cry against those who have turned Islam into a dry, lifeless worldview of compliant, shrunken rulings removed from reality. He was pointing to the authentic understanding of Islam as a life-giving force that has the potential to battle and obliterate depravity and moral decay, as the Prophet ﷺ intended it to be.
By requesting a fatwa atop the rubble of his home, Dr. Fayez issued a timeless commentary on the state of Islam in this moment: an Islam that sees state power as a force to be unconditionally obeyed, an Islam that has nothing to offer collective Muslim suffering and dignity. By reminding them that the Prophet ﷺ himself went hungry, he effectively drew a line in the sand between those who seek the face of God amidst adversity—the victims of state terrorism, the true Pharaoh, the taghut of our age—and between the religious enablers, the armchair voyeurs in the garb of duplicitous scholars, who call themselves representatives of the “Islamic tradition.” The line of demarcation is clear: one is the Prophetic path, the other, is the Pharaonic one.
Famine as a Weapon of “Civilizing Barbarians”
Similar to constructed notions of “tradition” and “the law,” the unforgivable famine in Gaza is also man-made. It is not only carried out by Israel, but also bears the seal of approval of all neighboring Arab countries and their armies. In fact, history will forever witness that as the starvation and displacement reach its zenith, Gulf rulers, like mechanical, thob-wearing ATMs, grotesquely handed out trillions of dollars to the current genocider-in-chief, Trump
The ultimate ruse of our time is that Muslim rulers are “Muhammads” in name only, but if you scratch them, they bleed the septic blood of Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir. Despite donning Muslim garb, they are the complete inversion of Islam, representing its dictatorial, misleading, soothsaying, antichristic form. Unfortunately, if you criticize the Orwellian-named “Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace” or Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission,” you will still be whipped with by the adab police and get branded a socialist, or worse, a kharijite, for calling a spade a spade.
But what does famine and have to do with the push to spread the duplicitous “Abraham Accords Islam”? This Islam of trickery, treachery and collusion with oppression?
Inflicting hunger has always been seen as a corrective, civilizational whip. There is a long history of famine in occupied territories in the context of empire building, and of famines linked to imperial or colonial rule. British colonial policies in India and Bengal, for example, led to a series of famines that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These famines were a result of policies that prioritized resource extraction at the expense of human life. Colonial policies—aimed at extracting wealth and supplies from local populations—almost always exacerbated food shortages and contributed to starvation, from Ireland, to Haiti, from Vietnam to Somalia, from Yemen to Gaza.
According to “famine scholar” Yan Slobodkin in his work, Empire of Hunger: Famine and the French colonial state, 1867-1945, starvation has always been a weapon in the toolkit of the so-called “civilizing mission” of colonized Muslim-majority communities. Slobodkin explains how, in the 1910s and 1920s, as French subjects were starving in West and Equatorial Africa, the French believed that by hungering their subjects, they sought to manufacture an acceptance of extreme suffering in exchange for future rewards: that being “a cultural change.” Thus, inflicting hunger can be understood as a whip to beat “bad ideologies” and “wayward” ways of being. That punishment by famine is an adequate response to the “radical fanaticism” of the “barbarians.”
In other words, the French sought to starve the spirit Islam—so to speak—out of native consciousness in order to roll out the gradual assimilation of Muslims into a Christian society through conversion. Conversion by starvation.
Slobodkin narrates how in Algeria, the French used famine as a battle tactic for their own political gain. Settlers, French liberals, the Church and the State, all used famine to try to extend their influence over Algerian society at the expense of erasing the dominant culture and religion—Islam. He writes, “indigenous subjects were not so much political beings whose role in the polity needed to be established, but rather a problem to be managed to achieve maximal security and minimal humanitarian guilt.” (Empire of Hunger, 31).
In the French archives of West Africa that I work on in my own academic research, I read reports of a French trader who had spent eighteen years in 19th century Mauritania, who advocated starving the Tuareg tribes into submission along with the marabouts (the Muslim scholars), whom he described as “a vermin that becomes dangerous unless it is crushed.”
Recall that from Algeria to Morocco, through Senegal and through all the way to Chad, France saw itself as an African Muslim power, meaning, it sought to subsume the African Muslim identity to distort the core values of society from within. As explained elsewhere on this Substack, colonial logic often deploys the tactic of memesis of the people it is seeking to erase. It seeks to change, regulate and destroy the religious and cultural character of its people as a pretext for land theft, which then becomes subsumed and internalized by power-hungry natives themselves.
Abraham Accords Islam as the New Face of “Mission Civilatrice”
Today, the Israeli “mission civilisatrice” in the Middle East mirrors the colonial brutality of yesteryear, but its sadistic confessions are not left to archival obscurity for future “scholars of famine” to unearth. Rather, they are proudly boasted in real-time on our phones and devices from the the Knesset, and on news outlets like Ha’aretz and the Guardian. “There are no innocentsin Gaza,” they justify. “Even the children must be killed,” they proclaim. This dehumanizing logic is used to justify this ongoing sadistic, wanton cruelty against a primarily young civilian population. It is the worst face of what human beings are capable of doing.
Only it is happening not in history books, but right now. This age-old soulless, cold, calculated brutality is exhibited in its worst forms in Gaza today, because unlike colonial France, Israel does not need to become an “Israeli Muslim Power” to enact a destruction of Muslim, native consciousness. It can carry it out with full impunity, because Arab regimes have become leaders in the manufactured “War on Terror” campaign that shares the view that Gaza ruled by Hamas = a threat to their legitimacy = worthy of extermination. Together, they are vested partners in this bloody campaign to enforce a “fundamental cultural change.”
According to the logic of empire and states, the people of Gaza are essentially “bad Islamists”, thus their whole sale extermination is justified. Not only that, in their minds, they deserve to be punished because they are cannot be controlled, subsumed, rendered compliant, read: “uncivilized.” Thus, this inhumane campaign of starvation and live-streamed genocide represents the most ironclad colonial campaign based on anti-Muslim animus in human history.
Because for the first time in Muslim history, Arab and Muslim rulers such as the Gulf states, Morocco and Jordan, are directly aiding this extermination campaign through “peace” deals, the Abraham Accords and other “counter extremism” policies in their own countries. The nebulous categories of “extremism” and “terrorism” have given these states unchecked power to take down anyone they deem “bad” according to Netanyahu’s metric for “Muslim moderation”, its fullest expression being Muslim Zionism.
The reason this collective punishment-cum-land grab under the false pretense of enacting a “cultural change” in the beleaguered, occupied refugee strip is so uniquely vicious, is due to the cover it enjoys courtesy of Arab and Muslim states and scholars. Israel has earned the financial and political backing of Muslim states such as MBZ’s UAE, who, in the past two decades, has taken the global helm in leading Netanyahu’s so-called “War on Terror” and abnormalization efforts like the Abraham Accords.
What is happening in Palestine today—and indeed in Sudan and Yemen—is part of a centuries long pernicious effort to break the spirit of the native Muslim population of these lands into submission. They think that brutal state power can erase all traces of resistance from the “hearts and minds” of Muslims, but they do not realize that the collective indignant fury and awakening is only rising across Muslim communities worldwide. They use atrocious mass violence as a whip to enforce the “civil marker” of anti-Islamism: accepting Zionism and soulless, authoritarian, “Abraham Accords Islam” as the status quo.
An Islam skimmed of its essence. A kneeling Islam, not before the Almighty, but before the unethical tyrants and dictators of our time. An Islam sans all the pesky parts: ethics, justice and Prophetic resistance to evil. An Islam that normalizes a dysfunctional coexistence with genocidal violence as mere background noise. An erasure of the beating heart and soul of Islam.
In essence, they are calling for what an Israeli Rabbi has lauded as an “Emirati Islam of tolerance [as] the hope of the Muslim world,”
This “Emirati Islam” is centuries of colonial dreams come true, because it offers a “native” rubber stamp for the deployment of hunger—and indeed bombs, displacement, disease and genocide— as weapons in this Judeo-Arabian crusade against “bad, Islamist” Muslims who refuse to bow down to this dystopic, dajallic reality.
From the Sufi Brotherhoods to the Muslim Brotherhood: Arab States as Partners in Crushing Any Version of an Islam that Resists
After 9/11 and particularly after the Arab Spring, the UAE has made it its singular goal to crackdown on all manifestations of political Islam—not just in its own country, but globally. It saw “the West” as too weak in its persecution of groups it perceived to be “Muslim Brotherhood” affiliated, thus, it placed itself as a leader in the so-called “War on Terror”—alongside Israel. Together, they promote a program of brute force to ensure authoritarian stability in the Middle East and Africa and work overtime to demobilize civil society. Not only that, the UAE has spent billions of dollars to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim tensions in European countries such as France and other former colonial powers.
The quest to ban and crush “the Muslim Brotherhood” is not recent, of course. In the 20th century, it arguably started in 1948 in Egypt, when Mahmud al-Nuqrashi Pasha sought to crush the military wing of the brotherhood during its resistance of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since their inception, Arab states made it their mission to eradicate any version of military resistance to foreign occupation, because the state, by design, had to have a monopoly on violence. It was invested in manufacturing the Muslim menace, which only fed anti-Muslim imperial interests, to the point that they have reached this most cancerous form we are witnessing today.
But vestiges of this campaign started much earlier than the creation of Arab nation states, almost two centuries earlier, with efforts to crush the Sufi brotherhoods in West and North Africa, who represented the greatest threat to European colonial presence. In their 1897 document, Confréries religieuses musulmane, Coppolani and Depont, who classified all Algerian Sufi brotherhoods as either “docile” or “rebellious”, wrote the following about the threat of a politically aware Islam:
“One can sense... all the extreme exaltation of religious madness in which the echo of Islam is unfortunately always to be found and which demonstrates that we should never cease our vigilance, that we should on the contrary always prepare ourselves against the surprises that Muslim fanaticism has in store for us. The principal agents of this fanaticism are the [Sufi] brotherhoods, compact bundles of politico-religious forces which have seized hold of the minds of the masses whom they dominate and direct as they wish.” (p. 21)
This language mirrors verbatim that of Arab states towards “Islamist” dissent—such as that of Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan, which has also recently banned the Muslim Brotherhood.
To remove this threat, Coppolani argued for a strategy of pacification, or, in other words, manufacturing the “good Muslim”:
“With their (the Sufi orders) co-operation we shall have peace, the security of the caravan routes and the solution to the problem of our north-west African Empire” –(p. 37)
Today, the extensive, centuries-long campaign to pacify Islam has arguably been temporarily achieved, with “Sufi cooperation” secured on the state level in the Emirates, the bulwark and financier in the global campaign to “counter extremism.” They have solidified this campaign through the religious legitimacy provided by neo-traditionalist, Sufi-leaning scholars, who hide behind strict, black and white legal reasoning and defend their positions as stemming from classical Islamic law, which technically defends unconditional obedience to state power, no matter how brutal or genocidal it gets. “Lowest common denominator” Islam in service of a “might makes right” policy. A dajallic project if there was ever one.
Thus, the age old colonial campaign to enact a “mission civlilatrice” has now reached its worst, most wicked forms: backed by the blessings of Arab states, who, like Israel, the US, India, Germany, France and others, have now made it illegal to promote a version of Islam that resists tyranny in any way shape or form. Instead, they seek to promote a “skimmed” and “starved” Islam that complies and obeys state power, no matter what. In other words, a shell of Islam that is no Islam at all.
But when all is done, though these efforts have reached the peak of their duplicity, they have never truly been fully successful. There have been many compounded efforts to distort Islam by brute force, but that only leads more people to turn to the power of true faith, not move away from it. All the fatwasand trillions of dollars spent in the way of the century’s “War on Terror” have not been able to outlaw, demonize, tame and destroy collective Muslim consciousness. Bound by Qur’anic revelation based on tawhid, the essence of Islam ultimately cannot be controlled, distorted, even if it is starved and beaten unconscious. Even if a thousand nuclear bombs fall, the power of a believer’s faith can never be bombed.
Colonial officials always knew this. Le Chatelier, the editor of the Revue du Monde Musulman, an early 20th century French magazine, warned against the great potential unity within the Muslim world, drawing parallels with how a Brit would have felt in the age of British empire:
From Morocco to China, from South Africa to Siberia, the Muslim of one country feels quite at home in the country of another Muslim, just as the Englishman [feels at home] from Vancouver to Hong Kong, from Cape Town to Nepal. (Harrison, 31)
They know deep down that spirit of Islam based on principled resistance to injustice cannot ultimately be defeated because it transcends mundane power. It is based on that which is beyond the sensory, material world. The campaign to exterminate Muslims who dare to speak up against injustice has reached its genocidal peak, but the faith of people worldwide is also at its zenith. Unshakable faith provides access to an unseen power. One that can never be contained. Despite the bombs, displacement and starvation, the people of Palestine derive their power from the realization that, if the whole world abandons them, God ultimately suffices them. That death is not the end. That even when their bones stick to their skin, their faith, freedom and living in dignity free from occupation is far more important than mere food and drink. Unlike the Pharaohs and Yazids lording over Muslim lands, they are the true kings and sultans, because they can truly say that they lived like their beloved Prophet ﷺ, their shining exemplar, their guiding, shimmering light, the man who elected to be a servant-prophet over a king-prophet, and said: “I spend the night with my Lord who feeds me and gives me drink.”
That is a power that is greater than the heavens and the earth. That is sustenance that can fill the emptiest of cups and the barest of bowls. That is a type of wealth that is beyond what any temporal Gulf state ruler can ever posses. It is higher than the tallest sky scraper and more towering than every mega mall.
Because in reality, the fat cats handing out trillions of dollars to supremacist warmongers are the starving ones. That they are the ones whose souls are hungering for light. For truth. For good. True poverty is poverty of the soul. True wealth is that of faith. Ultimately, how many bellies go to sleep, engorged and full, but whose hearts are barren and empty? And how many millions of those who are hungry, mouths dry, skin sagging and their eyes hollow, but their hearts are full, their heads high, and their souls are soaring above with the stars, free and pure?
They are the ones satiated with humanity. They are the ones overflowing with life. With faith. With light. They are the richest and most powerful of humankind.
The Wretched of the Earth are King.
“While those who disbelieve enjoy themselves and eat as cattle eat” [Qur’an 47:12].
“Some people are so poor, all they have is money.” -Bob Marley
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