Aidan Haj Qassem

“Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the
Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you
damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.”

-Ghassan Kanafani

Imperialism has produced the conditions of the modern day, and with it wrought terror and mass death across the Muslim world, whether it be Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, or currently in Gaza. Imperialism seeks to facilitate continual resource extraction in the Arab-Iranian region as well as impose its own political hegemony, effectively necessitating a war against development to maintain this structure. It is not enough to simply support the economic basis of imperialism, but rather to enforce it through pure siege-siege that is meant to be ongoing and without end.

The Ummah is colloquially used to refer to the global community of Muslims, yet as Professor Mohammed Abdo puts it:

The Ummah is often translated to mean the global community of Muslims, but the Qurān arguably defines the Ummah in an expanded way, as a global community of believers, including Muslims and non-Muslims alike, who are anchored in principles of justice and freedom from tyranny.

Yet, as the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque, a unified global community is noticeably absent amidst global Muslims who appear divided and disjointed, are either unable or, worse, unwilling to halt genocide.

What we see in a large sense now is the secularization of Islam. At one moment, the enemies of Islam self-proclaim their disdain for all things Islamic, as they unrelentingly continue the slaughter in Gaza. Yet in the next moment, those same people will be posting “Ramadan Kareem” or “Eid Mubarak”. What they have done is take the thorns out of the rose, that is, Islam as a social and political force.

This mandates that Islam, at most, should be embraced solely at a superficial level without any political involvement, a stance which some Muslims seem to adopt as well.

Islam becomes limited, unable to wrestle with the current conditions, and confined within the imperialist structure. The position asserts that Muslims should abandon core duties such as jihad and commitment to justice, either declaring themselves as ‘peaceful’ or as full supporters of the Western Imperial system, rendering Islam nothing more than an aesthetic.

The secularization of Islam facilitates and reproduces the conditions of dependency, rendering the Ummah passive to domination and ultimately fractured. Since the 1970s, the Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia, have been subject to the Imperialist World Order. The Arabian Gulf, in its position as a regional leader, has been structurally dependent on the US for its oil wealth and has been keen on reproducing regional dependency both structurally and socially. In other words, the war against development plays out within religious leadership that rejects Islam’s central call to unified resistance—jihad.

Similarly, there has been an augmented Western narrative of the rise of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) in Syria, claiming Arab or Muslim nations’ duty to serve their self-interest before they can engage in anti-imperialist struggle: for example, claims like “Syria is too weak to engage in combat against the Zionist enemy” while the Zionist eneemy is currently occupying more of its land.

The US removed its sanctions against the Syrian people while Ahmad Al Sharaa, the new Syrian president, smiled for a photo-opportunity with Mohammed Bin Salman and Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia. At the same time, just tens of miles south, the Zionist entity expands its presence in Syria, and further down, it continues its genocide in Gaza. Much of the discourse has decidedly framed these events with the necessity for Syria after years of imperial warfare, to stabilize first, and engage in questions of resistance later. This position is effectively no different than that of the Palestinian Authority, who convert the question of national liberation into a state-building project, predicated on adopting neoliberalism as a way to build a “nation” subordinate to imperialism’s interests. As the people of Palestine look from their genocide to the sanctions and debt relief from Gulf funds, the impossibility of the question of “resistance later” is laid bare.

On what basis will Muslims have their sovereignty? Sovereignty based on dependence is an impossibility. Flooding the country with American and Gulf investments means that no amount of “stabilization” will permit Syria to produce a capacity to fight for Palestine or even itself; The Yemeni armed forces did not end the war on Yemen by ‘developing first’, they did so by bombing Saudi oil fields and challenging the basis of violence with violence. The only strategy to build capacity against imperialism is through armed resistance and posing a military challenge to imperialism. This ultimate challenge against domination is the expression of the masses’ autonomy, and only it may liberate nations in the Global South from the economic dependency and strangulation that the US empire seeks to impose. Waiting to resist simply facilitates dependency and guarantees disempowerment.

The reason why this violence is so often delegitimised in the discourse is that at its core, it defies the violent basis of imperialism.

Despite cases in which Muslims have either willingly or unwillingly remained complicit, there is a long and rich history of Islam being a force of resistance to imperialism. Islam, in the current moment too, has been the vessel from which the revolutionary subject has launched his battle against the oncoming crusaders.

Yet many have criticised political Islam, labelling it as foolish, unable to account for the material reality of imperialism. One particular criticism comes from Samir Amin, who stated:

Based on this position, every current of political Islam chooses to conduct its struggle on the terrain of culture…The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them.

But Amin’s claim flattens Islam in struggle, and does not account for the complexities from which it arises. One case where political Islam has served imperialism is the Islamic State, known regionally as “Daesh.” The Islamic State/Daesh as a political formation has emerged in many places and forms, from Syria to West Africa to Afghanistan. Yet, it is not Daesh’s emphasis on culture and lack of structural understanding that makes it problematic; it is the simple rejection of all structure and the context from which it thereby enacts barbaric violence chaotically and totally. In this sense, it has meant that Daesh has ultimately abetted the goals of the Empire, while at face value to the uninitiated, it seemed to have “confronted” it.

While anti-imperialism as a political position and strategy has been seen or associated with pan-Arab forces, it is political Islam’s adoption of these tenets in the face of pan-Arab failure that again sees Islam at the forefront of the liberation struggle, following a long line from Omar Mukhtar and Izzedine Al Qassam, Yahya Sinwar, and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

The Palestinian resistance employs, like other strains of political Islam, violence on the logic of martyrdom. This violence is intensely potent, as it unearths imperialism’s claim on violence. Martyrdom, understood by the teachings of Islam, draws upon violence at the most grassroots and personal levels; it is a violence of the masses, and unifies every individual Muslim’s responsibility to resist. But, the uniqueness and ingenuity of the Islamic resistance can use this violence not in rejection of all structures, but one structure in particular, US-zionist imperialism, not in total rejection of the dunya and its duties, but in uprooting the plague of imperial death that has come over it.

This type of armed resistance is not an isolated mode of operation, but rather is embedded within an anti-imperial analysis and strategy of anti-colonial struggle. One that can analyse the landscape at hand and align strategically with groups across sectarian lines, receiving state support for arms production and political backstopping from Iran, for instance, and mount large-scale offences such as the Al Aqsa Flood. It’s a force that can carefully combine strategic unity and chaos against the occupier.

Islamic Resistance serves as a challenge to two groups: Marxists who unabashedly critique religious struggle as backwards and Muslims who refuse to engage with their material reality, leaving their political analysis to parrots of the Empire. At this moment, the leading political force of the struggle for the Arab and Muslim world is Islam.

In West Asia, Islam is the leading force in the fight against imperialism compared to ideologies that have faded away or become part of the systems they initially opposed. With post-Oslo counter-revolution plaguing the region and Palestine, it is the Islamic Resistance that gave honor and hope in its defiance and presented Palestine with a vision of liberation that has yet to be fully realised.

Aidan Haj Qassem is a writer exploring questions of Islam, sovereignty, and struggle, and how they relate in West Asia.