Letter to an African Muslim

Description

“In order to understand the present enslavement of our Islamic nation it is important to recognise the forces involved, their deployment, effect, power and weakness. At present a web of false information has been put out across Africa, and, more seriously, working models and methods put forward to ‘solve’ the ‘problems’ of the ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ state. In other words the muslim intellectual (for a muslim is by definition an intellectual) has been fed a false dialectic which if he continues to work within it will leave him in a power vacuum unable to impingle on the social and personal reality around him. It is vital that we both decode the current myths of ‘problem and solution’ as well as create a new polarity system of opposites to vitalise our renewed action as Islamic workers.” (Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, from the introduction to Letter to an African Muslim)

Even more relevant in the age of AFRICOM than when it was written, and applicable to many other situations around the world.

66 pages

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi entered Islam with the Imam of the Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fez, Morocco, and studied under Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib of Meknes and Shaykh Muhammad al-Fayturi of Beghazi.

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi has been responsible for the most far-reaching and successful Islamic Da’wa of the 20th century. He has founded mosques in England, Spain and South Africa. His writings encompass well over 20 books and many essays and articles, and he has initiated the translation and publication of numerous classical works of Islam, most notably the Muwatta of Imam Malik and Ash-Shifa of Qadi ‘Iyad.

His students, many of whom are world-renowned and respected in their own fields, have been responsible among other things for definitive translations of the Qur’an into English and Spanish.

Excerpt from Letter to An African Muslim

TECHNIQUE – THE DOMINANT CULTURE

In order to understand the present enslavement of our Islamic nation it is important to recognise the forces involved, their deployment, effect, power and weakness. At present a web of false information has been put out across Africa and, more seriously, working models and methods put forward to ‘solve’ the ‘problems’ of the ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ state. In other words, the Muslim intellectual (for a Muslim is by definition an intellectual) has been fed a false dialectic which, if he continues to work within it, will leave him in a power vacuum unable to impinge on the social and personal reality around him. It is vital that we both decode the current myths of ‘problem and solution’ as well as create a new polarity system of opposites to vitalise our renewed action as Islamic workers.

Before examining the current situation of external and kafir control of Africa, let us examine the nature of the enemy’s social modes. During this examination it is necessary to stress that everything referred to in the following pages has already been defined in terms of a ‘political framework’ of evolving democracy over and against tribalism and backward despotisms due to local past history. All this we must put out of our minds as a mythic system devised to allow free access to and intervention in, the local African scene.

When we speak of the kafir society we are not accepting the current dialectic of ‘northern’ media which sees Africa as a killing-ground for the conflict of political democracy western-style and socialism eastern-style. Each of these two materialist camps have a rhetoric of freedom. That rhetoric, if applied to an African situation as a critique, can present the country as either the victim of ruthless imperialist exploitation by multi-national corporations, or it can be seen as a totalitarian ‘foreign’ control by socialist hegemonists. Each has its horror stories about the other side. Both stories may well be true. It does not follow that the military confrontation between east and west is a genuine one. It must be remembered that there has been virtually no face to face conflict between russia and the west since the end of world war one.

What we appear to be witnessing are the inner contradictions of trade forces within imperalist societies working themselves out on carefully staged killing-grounds which permit no loss of life or property to the source group, yet permit a massive convulsion within the source economy by the trying out and usage of high-tech weaponry, followed up by the opening of new markets in the rehabilitation phase following battles. Thus after the vietnam war, russia opens up new markets in vietnam itself and expands new war-theatres in neighbouring countries, while america gets access to Chinese markets in open trading which places the high-tech module of taiwan on the line as ransom.

What we are dealing with therefore is a high-technology camp stylistically divided in two with a self-energising force built into the so-called political conflict but which in reality constantly creates new markets and new resource-areas by the continental shift brought about by the plate-movement of each ‘side’. So, we are really witnessing the continual impingement of high-tech processes and systems on zero-ground resource-areas, and the occupation of strategic zones for ‘protection of interests’ to allow change in the market structure.

The technocratic state (east/west) is structuralist, and pyramidic. It is vividly described in the Qur’an al-Karim in the encounters between the (Islamic) Allah Musa, peace be upon him, and the (kafir) high-tech leader, Pharaon.

Pharaon rules a totalitarian and materialist state which exalts him as a god. The whole state exists to ‘fix’ leadership in a permanent state and thus tyranny and social stasis. The ‘magicians’ are his scientists who calculate the necessary computations which will build the pyramids, whose function is the entombment of the embalmed leader, that is, structures which will ensure the ongoing conditions of rigidity and leader-orientation. The building of the pyramid and other gigantic structures are means to that end, but in fact the means are the end, since these ensure the continued slavery of the people in the never-ending building process.

It is in the nature of the high-tech state that it is based on slavery. We do not mean it in the deliberately romanticised way in which the term slavery has been presented. That is, it is not slavery in an agrarian sense, as was the case in the u.s.a. two hundred years ago. Nor is it in the sense that it was to the european workers in the mines and factories one hundred years ago. Slavery today is controlled by media and consumer activity. Movement and social group is basically forbidden or rendered undesirable in western models. With mass sport, fantasy-tv, and the arts, it is not necessary to put slaves in a compound. They already are in one, albeit beautifully decorated – the mall, the stadium, the concert-hall.

The high-tech society is not ‘new’. It is not ‘modern’ at all. It is medievalist from start to finish. It is ancient. Look at the riot police! Are they not an exact replica of medieval infantry with their shields, helmets, lances, and smoke bombs? Indeed, the best model of modern society is the society of the medieval Aztecs.

The Aztec Syndrome

Aztec society was a high-tech society obsessed with gigantism and imperial development of surrounding peoples. It was a total interlock system. Building the city state was its ‘rational’ activity, This involved everyone. Since this process had to continue unquestioned and in perpetuity a mythic religion was evolved which declared that for the sun to rise every day a sacrifice was necessary. Thus, each pre-dawn a man was taken to the top of the temple pyramid and laid out on a slab. Within seconds his heart was torn out with an obsidian knife. Thus at the heart of this totally logical society, mathematically based, calculating and systemic, lay the one necessary, utterly irrational (yet irresistibly logical) act of the slaughter of an innocent man.

In 1487, this great medieval state in dedicating its Great Temple ritually murdered around 50.000 people. Four people at a time were killed without pause for four days from sun-up to sun-down. The whole city stank. These were a friendly people who did this killing and they were known for their affectionate natures. Like the americans who are so kind and so humanistic in their values, who tie yellow ribbons on trees for fifty missing countrymen – yet seem to view without compunction the ruthless torture and killing of iranians by a secret police trained by their own men and under orders to them. The only difference between the old Aztecs and the new Aztecs is that now they have removed the stink of rotting flesh from their own homes. The killing-ground is now afghanistan, iran, or biafra.

Its Seven Conditions

So, in the Aztec syndrome we note first of all that the state is high-tech and that implies it is systems linked. Thus it cannot be destroyed from outside by attacking one zone since interlink will allow the rest of the structure to take the strain and there will be no lesion in the social nexus. That is to say that social patterns are linked, like the knitting of a sweater, any tear is held by the inter-weave of the rest of the fabric. Thus killing a politician or blowing up a bank does not in any serious way affect the whole social order.

Secondly, we note that it nevertheless is based on the intellectual enslavement of the masses to the idea of the necessity of the social project – in our case ‘development’.

Thirdly, we note that it is, being medievalist, an elitist society. It has a large and enslaves low-drive mass of people all working in services and administration, while control and programming remains in the hands of a high-drive elite. Tape recorders for the masses, computer programming and control by the elite.

Fourthly we observe the need to provide arenas for the masses to keep them from unrest. These glorify the state’s power – they are told it is the sovereignty of the people – and there they expend their physical energies in orgies of marching and athletics and games. The intellectuals are fed into the fantasy production of media, are given harmless arenas for free debate on issues that never impinge on the actual activities of the imperial group. For example, one video director strayed from his carefully defined zone of ‘documentaries’ to record the true history which led to the founding of the irish republic and although the events took place over fifty years ago, a true version of them could not be told to the british people, because it would impinge on the realities of power existing today in northern ireland. His work was refused a viewing to the masses and sold to him for one pound. This revealed their cynical awareness that the work without access to a mass tv audience was ineffective. Fortunately for the kafir state most of quite radically drugged masses are content with quiz games, prowess competitions, football and rock concerts.

Fifthly, we note the social implications of systems application on the body politic. Control. Computerised records, a passive work force which does not have access to its own records, a military elite who are not accountable to the public in any way and certainly not even accountable to the mythic political stage that is erected centre foreground to mask the true power apparatus. Crime itself has to be systematised and permitted as a kind of civic goitre which hangs full and fat from the neck of society. Organised crime is never eliminated but it is simply limited and then protected. It is an essential drainage system for the poisonous fluids of the ethnic minorities and the corrupt elements in state police. Another element of control that increases dramatically all the time in the high-tech society is limited and monitored travel. Once a Muslim could travel from Tangiers in the west to Canton in the east and stay with Muslims all the way, carrying only a few letters of laissez-passer – as did the moroccan traveller Ibn Batutta hundreds of years ago.

Sixthly, we note that high-tech society is dependent on drugs, alcohol, and sexual amorality to survive the stress impact of working in a technological modality. We must never forget there is no ‘clean technology’ – neither ecologically or morally. Kufr is one system. All armies are basically one army in ‘modern times’ – it is a system based on the english army for its empire was the first technologically organised in the ‘modern’ sense of the term. Military men are one brotherhood across the high-tech world, as indeed, are the police, to say nothing of the technocrats themselves who still do not run the very system they keep in action.

This sixth condition leads inevitably to the valueless society and so it is clear that a high-tech state cannot tolerate any religion which cannot be reduced to a pattern of private worship and belief devoid of morality and social obligation. Christianity has been forced into and has found easy, being a pseudo-religion, the adoption of a no-value morality, accepting sexual deviation, divorce and a female priesthood. Child abuse, which one might consider the humanity-barrier, has already been swept away. One in seven american children has been sexually assaulted by an adult member of their family by the age of nine. It follows ultimately that even suicide has to be permitted in the mythic confirmation of man’s ‘freedom’ in the great enslavement of ‘development’ that is current ‘modern’ life!

The seventh condition of the Aztec syndrome lies in its priesthood: the academics and scientists. No previous Aztec society has so intricately and expertly gone about providing itself not only with licence and pedigree but with a certificate of superiority over all previous and all currently opposing groups. Again it must be remembered that every activity of the university structure is of its nature part of the power nexus. There is no research and no remote academic interest that does not feed back into an open political framework involved in the control and sometimes genocide of innocent Muslims, especially in Africa.

Just as a remote piece of research on enzymes and plant growth by an ‘innocent’ scientist in the u.s.a. led to the defoliation of the vietnamese jungle dividing north and south vietnam, so again and again one can see direct linkage between research and its counterpart in the lethal and inhuman ‘development’ we are told we dare not resist. In tracing some west African language in the George Washington University we found ourselves in what should have been a remote academic bywater – an institute which dealt with Applied Linguistics. Not only was all its information tuned in by direct line to the state department, but it lay next door to an over political organisation that was chaired by the man who had negotiated the peace treaty between the u.s.a. and vietnam. Interlink, the key term in understanding the Aztec syndrome in all its frozen and majestic terror!

The structuralist principle can best be seen in its naked capacity by examining the university system within the greater system. It should not be forgotten that the traditional university was based on other premises and in the older universities themselves they have difficulty in realising how they have been seconded to their political duties, witness the ‘academic’ row at Cambridge in england over the presence of structuralist literary critics within the english department.

The encyclopaedia, the archive, the research and development method – these are all, on examination, instruments not just of precision, but in the ‘scientific’ framework, of power, since it is the myth of precision that confers power on the magically structured mathematical ‘base’ to scientific research and method. Everything is measured, analysed, named and codified. This is imperialism manifesting as scientific method. one can trace an over relationship between the Encyclopaedia of Islam and the carving up of the ‘middle east’ – middle in relation to an imperial england that found china ‘far east’ from London.

The research and analysis within the orientalists’ Islam that lies between the pages of that encyclopaedia provided the theoretical background for the carving of a christian enclave out of Muslim syria, called lebanon, as well as a jewish enclave out of Muslim palestine called israel. It is not accidental that the educational modules of lebanon were to author the forthcoming attacks on what remained of the Islamic ethos, nor that those of israel now boast the largest and most cogent output of Islamic ‘studies’ in the world! Do not imagine that a detailed study of the life of the Mahdi of Sudan and the sufic phenomenon coming from there is made out of a pure desire for knowledge, rather it is a clear indication of future imperialistic designs on a still stubbornly Islamic corner of Africa.

Equally the linguistic studies represent the most political examination of a people and their control possible. The enslavement of the Muslim peoples in south-western russia is based on a most far-reaching analytical study of local languages and by the ruthless re-alignment of spoken and written language to accord with the Moscow dominant elite. Stalin’s concept of language as a basis of nation-hood allowed him to cut up the unified Muslim south into harmless and competing pseudo-nations or states. In the same way one should ask whether linguistic studies preserved the Navajo language among the american indians and whether anthropological studies strengthened Navajo culture and its ‘way of life’ – no, there is no doubt that the path from the archive to the museum is short and inevitable.

The World Festival of Islam held in London a few years ago was an overt scheme to paralyse the Islam they knew was bursting out in all its power, but they had underestimated it, as they still do, for it is from Allah and His Light, glory be to Him. Remember also that the structuralist groups based on ‘modernist’ theory like Maududi’s Jama’aat al-Islamia helped stage the Festival and worked in collaboration with those europeans who were ‘scholars and freemasons’ despite warnings from their brother Muslims. None of this, as we shall see, is at all accidental.

Lastly where there is not direct interface between research and political action we find a three tiered system as follows: anthropology/linguistics – Aid programmes – political control systems.

The Situation Today

Today we find the Aztec syndrome in full force yet rent by the inevitable contradiction, caused by too much stasis and fixity unable to retain power. Since this is against the dynamic rule of opposites on which Allah has set up existence it naturally cannot remain static. In fact we find within the Aztec syndrome the unpredictable inner-destruct mechanism that comes from over-stress. The results of this are structure breakdown-failure of political mythic systems to function –institutions unable to adapt – and random madness and crime which breaks out unpredictably. All the breakdowns, personal and social, lead to a further polarisation of power and tyranny over and against slave oppression within the Aztec syndrome. Its own privileged members are randomly murdered, put out of work, go mad, have family break-ups, commit suicide, change sex, become victims of rime or terrorism, find themselves on a war fringe when there is some piece of ‘continental shift’ change in markets – e.g. whites in rhodesia.

The irrational element – the slaughter, genocide and resources-removal from the world’s poor, and particularly from the peoples of Africa – that element without which the whole syndrome is unable to flourish – must now be put in question, understood and given the great refusal that will mark the emergence of the Islamic movement in its true nature, something that has not, as yet, happened.

It is now necessary to examine in detail and in background theory the structures and methodology of the new post-political colonialism which currently enslaves the African peoples, our dear Muslim brothers and innocent and misled local christians, as well as great groups of ignorant animists held in degradation by an ideology that prefers its Africans to be naked savages rather than civilised and worshipping self-governing Muslims.