Let’s face it: Qaddafi was a failure.
He was looking for unity in all the wrong places: Arab unity, African unity, “third-world” unity.
In his doomed quest for unity, Qaddafi was a failed idealist. “Arab”-ness is just another nationalism, another form of empty identity politics. “African-ness” and “Third Worldness” are no better. Africa has two thousand different languages and cultures. The Third World has even more.
Qaddafi also failed to survive and carve out a niche for himself as a head of state to be reckoned with. He failed to win the West as an ally, despite all his concessions and backroom deals.
In his doomed quest for power-through-accommodation, Qaddafi was a failed pragmatist.
Finally, in the most noble effort of his life, Qaddafi took up the cause of the Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham. In this he was a failed saviour.
The irony is that the real Grand Unity Project, fueled by the Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham, was right there in front of Qaddafi’s nose all along, only he couldn’t see it. It’s called Islamic unity.
The vast majority of the world’s Muslims consider themselves part of the Umma – the Islamic nation. According to a Global Public Opinion poll, two-thirds of the world’s Muslims want to “unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or caliphate.” That means that the minute there is real democracy in the Muslim-majority countries, those countries will cease to exist, and merge into a reborn Islamic caliphate.
But wait! Those people don’t want to be ruled by sharia law, do they?! Oh yes they do. According to the same poll, three-quarters of the world’s Muslims want to “require Islamic countries to impose a strict application of sharia.” If you think about it, this is no more outrageous than Americans wanting to use the American legal system, or the French wanting to use the Napoleonic code. Nobody wants to be ruled by powerful foreigners, and nobody wants to be forced to use a foreign legal system in ones own country. And for most Muslims, their country is Islam – not the pathetic little bantustans the West carved out of the Islamic world less than a century ago, nor the even smaller and more pathetic bantustans the Israelis and their American lapdogs are trying to carve out today.
Qaddafi, ironically enough, silenced, persecuted, tortured, and murdered Islamic activists who held high the green banner of Islam, with its creed “no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s prophet,” as the basis of anti-imperialist unity and a reborn Islamic nation. He was the last great Arab secular nationalist, in the mold of his hero Nasser. With his passing, Arab secular nationalism is officially dead.
The Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham, however, are very much alive; and they are the weapons that will create the Islamic unity that the Muslim majority wants. All Muslims have to do is say, very firmly: Our religion requires us to use only commodity currency. We must pay our zakat in gold and silver. Usury is a crime equal to rape and murder, and using money created through usury is as bad as participating in mass rape and murder. We cannot use Rothschild money. Henceforth, we will only accept commodity money in return for our oil and gas exports. And henceforth, usury money, like usury itself, will be banned from all Muslim-majority lands. Like the EU, we will create a common currency, the gold dinar and silver dirham; and then we will move beyond the EU and create a real political union with a shared defense force.
These are the demands that Occupy movements in Islamic nations must adopt – and which the Occupy movements in the West should support. After all, the root of all political evil is the Rothschild money monopoly. Western dissidents alone don’t have the power to topple it. Only the Muslim bloc – 1.5 billion people potentially willing to die to liberate themselves and the planet from the rule of the usurers – has that power. That’s why Muslims were framed for 9/11: To launch a pre-emptive war on Islam. The banksters were trying to pre-empt Islam’s coming victory over usury.
Whether it happens this year or next, or in a decade or two, Islamic unity is coming, because the people want it. The rebels’ victory over Qaddafi will be seen in retrospect not as a win for Western imperialism – as so many alternative journalists think – but as the end of misguided nationalism and another big step toward the coming reunification of the Islamic world.
As an Episcopalian and a Buddhist, I am certainly in agreement with most of what you are saying. I am part of the U.S. faction which wants to see our constitution restored and English Common Law put back in place in our courts instead of statutory law. If there is no victim, there is no crime. I would not favor the implementation of any aspect of Sharia law which creates victimless crimes. Nobody should be stoned to death for immodesty, adultery or practicing or converting to other religions.
I agree – the US needs more common law, including jury power, as explained by the Fully Informed Jury Association. Obviously imposing sharia on the US against the will of the majority of the population would be just as evil as imposing non-sharia European systems on Muslim countries is today.
As far as hudud punishments in sharia, keep in mind that they are very rarely carried out. For example, during the strict-sharia period in Sudan, there were a few stoning sentences, but none were carried out.
Despite the hudud (extreme) punishments being hardly ever carried out, it does seem that when a strong version of sharia becomes the law of the land, crime decreases dramatically or even virtually disappears. Thus the Taliban was able to completely end opium production in Afghanistan without any use of force whatsoever, simply by announcing that it was a violation of sharia. The overall effect of a sharia system, which virtually ends crime and with it the need for prisons and armed cops, would seem to be a dramatic decrease in human suffering. So I support a strong sharia system for Muslim-majority countries, but not for non-Muslim-majority ones, where it would be unjust and impractical.
But I thought Sunni and Shia Muslims are bitter enemies? Where is the "unity" between Saudi Arabia and Iran? the Sudan and Turkey? I'm all for breaking the stranglehold of the userers over the international economy, but don't see a unified pan-Islamic movement that is anywhere near to doing so.
Peace,
I'd just like to mention that in the Quran there is no stoning to death for immodesty, adultery, or practicing or converting to other religions. These are all innovations imported to Islam either through the Bible and/or pagan practices through the insidious Hadith literature.
excellent Kevin ? What about Mr Bouddhist the stoning to death by bombs of millions of innocent civilians ? Tortures without evidence ? rape systematic of Muslim women during war of civilized people against stone aged muslims ? who is stone aged ? what about your law allowing this to happen ? why imposing your law by genociding people who never express the will to adopt it ?
Any explanations will be more than welcomed
Mojo: the governments of Muslim nations, for the most part, oppose their people's desire for Islamic unity, for obvious reasons. (Think about it. What CEO wants to abolish his corporation?)
That said, not all governments are the same. Since the Iranian revolution, the Islamic Republic has generally tried to promote Islamic unity. (It has to to be genuinely Islamic – unity is part of the religion!) Iran has been resisted in this by the corrupt sheikdoms of the Gulf, where the rulers are propped up in power by the West so they can steal trillions from their own people and use it for drugs, prostitution, gambling junkets, Swiss bank accounts, and investing in Rothschild usury-money.
Turkey is moving toward Islam, and will become an ever-stronger supporter of Islamic unity as it does (since unity is part of the religion).
I could go on, but you get the drift.
Over at Veterans Today, this article is getting a lot of comments. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/10/22/where-qaddafi-failed-islam-will-succeed/
Many of the non-Muslims aren't all that happy with the thought of Muslims uniting.
Debbie Menon, one of VT's editors, said "The Muslims can't even unite to defend Palestine, so how are they going to unite for the dinar."
My response:
Lots of anti-religion and anti-Islam comments here. People fear and loathe what they don’t understand. I can relate; I was an ignorant islamophobe once myself.
Debbie, the threat to Palestine HAS unified Muslims worldwide. We all oppose Zionism. Show me a Muslim who doesn’t and I’ll show you a very rare specimen of ignoramus. Opposing Zionism, and finishing it off, are two very different things. The former is easy, while the latter will take a few more years, maybe even decades. After all, we don’t want a bloodbath. Remember, the Muslim-majority lands have been plundered and disempowered, and getting our power and autonomy back is a long-term project which faces the fanatical opposition of the psychopaths who rule the West – the scumbags who blew up the World Trade Center to rev up their war on Islam.
As for “Look at them bicker, they’ll never unite”; that can be said of any group, from a small nuclear family to a brother- and sisterhood of 1.5 billion people. Every group bickers; every group has some potential to unite. The likelihood of unification depends on (1) how ardently it’s desired, and (2) how much the members of the group have in common.
The USA today has no great desire to be united, and Americans bicker wildly and have very little in common. As Pat Buchanan puts it in his new book, “If a married couple fought like this, they’d have divorced ages ago.” And yet there’s the USA (though Buchanan wonders whether it will last till 2025).
Europeans lack a common language or common religion, and have been fighting each other with extraordinary brutality since time immemorial. And yet there’s the EU. That, too, may or may not last.
Muslims are united by a common religion – a religion that demands political unity, and has achieved it, historically, to a remarkable degree. And Muslims do all pretty much agree on the basics of Islam. The difference in basic belief and practice between a practicing sunni, shi’a, sufi, etc. is far less than the difference between the members of almost any American church! (Not denomination – church!)
Muslims are also united by a common language: high Arabic. During the whole history of Islam, every educated Muslim had to become proficient in it. Today, it has become ever-easier for an ever-larger proportion of Muslims to learn high Arabic, thanks to the communications revolution. For example, I get a lot of my news from al-’Alam and al-Jazeera, as well as Arabic-language stuff friends post on Facebook.
(continued from last comment)
As Muslims gain an ever-more-common language thanks to the communications revolution, we’re also gaining an ever-more-common culture. The weird little cultural details of the many tribal versions of Islam are gradually disappearing, and a more one-size-fits-all Islamic culture (along with the religion) is rising. For example, I learned Islam through a combination of my own reading, a religious studies Ph.D. program, and folks from Morocco who are members of the Maliki school of law. Yet while traveling in Turkey last spring, where the Hanafi school predominates, and where a completely different language is spoken, I felt right at home – in fact, I felt culturally very close to the devout Muslims I was traveling with, in the same way I feel close to those in Morocco and the USA and everywhere else. (And less close to secular people, except the rare ones with an exceptional degree of inner peace, high moral standards, and a God-given passion for justice.)
You don’t have to be a hopeful Muslim like me to see Islamic unity coming. Why do you think Bernard Lewis and the other Zionist fanatics are wailing and gnashing their teeth? Why do you think the folks who blew up the World Trade Center were so worried that they had to resort to extreme measures? By any rational-empirical estimation, it’s obvious that Muslims want unity, have more and more in common, and are very likely to eventually get what they want.
none of the Muslim government were chosen by their people except for Iran, and now it i beginning to happen, so just wait a couple of years and you'll see the unification happening, all the Arabs absolutely all of the people, I do not speak about governments which are our fundamental enemies… supports palestine…that's why israel is scared and will push the saud against iran
Assalamualaykum Kevin,
Thank you very much for your article Where Qaddafi Failed Islam Will Succeed. You hit the nail on the head with your analysis. If only we had more media like this in the mainstream. One thing I'd like to point out regarding this statement:
"That means that the minute there is real democracy in the Muslim-majority countries, those countries will cease to exist, and merge into a reborn Islamic caliphate."
I know when you say democracy you are referring to the right of self determination and the ability of a nation's people to choose their leader. However, democracy in the western sense goes far beyond that.
Democracy comes from the Greek words demos (people) kratos (rule), meaning the rule of the people. It is not limited to just electing a ruler, it means they do the ruling themselves also. Democracy itself is merely the legislative system of the underlying ideology, secular capitalism. Voting and elections does not make a country democratic by themselves, it is only a means to empower a person or group of people who then legislate. Be definition democracy is when people give themselves the right to legislate. We know this is completely contradictory to Islam as all our laws come from Allah (swt).
“The rule (Hukm) is for none but Allah, He has commanded that you worship none but Him, that is the straight Deen, but most men know not.” [TMQ 12:40]
“It is not fitting for a believing man or a believing woman, when Allah and His Messenger have decided an affair (for them), that they should (after that) have any option in their decision; and whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger, he has indeed strayed in plain error.” [TMQ 33:36]
“And whosoever does not judge by what Allah has revealed, such are the Kaafirun disbelievers).” [TMQ 5:44]
Although it may seem like a minor issue, terminology can have huge impacts. Take the Arab spring for example. The people on the ground are calling for the end of opression and tyranny and the right to choose their leaders. The western media spins this that they are calling for democracy although true democracy goes far beyond what they are calling for. This then allows them to push their agenda of 'democracy' (open markets, pro-west leadership, secularism) under the guise of responding to what the people want.
What do you think?
Saleem
AAS Saleem,
Good points here!
The Western countries are very far from being true democracies in the strict sense of the word. But they do give so much lip service to "democracy" that it has almost become an idol for them.
In practice, when people talk about democracy, what they mean is the people having a voice in helping choose the leaders and the policies. That is usually a good thing. Sometimes they also mean "having a degree of respect for human rights." That is also a good thing.
There is a tradition of governance by Allah swt and his Messenger in the Islamic world, by way of shariah based on Qur'an and ahadith. Usually this was combined with some kind of absolute rule by a caliph, emir or sultan, and the Islamic aspect prevented or at least set limits on tyranny. I think the experiments with "Islamic democracy" or "Islamic republicanism" in the Islamic Republic of Iran and (insha'allah) Turkey, perhaps Egypt, etc. represent an advance on that tradition, which has never really lived up to its ideals since the time of the khulafa' ar-rashidoon…perhaps not even then. The Shi'a are right about one thing: When the Islamic community fell back into the hands of Quraysh, dynasticism, plutocracy, etc. after karbala, it was a terrible tragedy. I don't think we've ever really gotten governance right since the time of the Prophet saas. Today, the Islamic peoples seem to be rejecting absolute rule by emirs, sultans and dictators, and demanding a voice in governance, and also shariah. That means some kind of "Islamic democracy" or "Islamic republicanism." It does NOT mean opening Islamic lands to free market Western capitalism and rape by the IMF and the Rothschild bankster syndicate!! We had better work on educating our fellow Muslims about how important it is to reject the kufr system of riba currency.