Ahmed Bin Qasim
“It’s true that the world witnesses such phases when life becomes a purgatory, and when humanity is rendered into a walking crowd of corpses. But who is to be blamed for it? When mortal humans act as false gods over the destinies of (other) humans, and the opponents of principles and truth feel determined to incarcerate fellow human beings, what can befall us in such a situation besides abjection? Whenever such a situation is present, pain and anguish becomes the fate of the people. In spite of this… history of the world is witness that in any era of oppression, the possession of abundant resources did not grant immortality to the tyrants. It is because the temple of false idols has always sought its Ibrahim and found it.”
Maqbool Bhat, a Kashmiri resistance leader who was executed by India in 1984
For the last eighteen months, I watched Gaza as a Kashmiri. I must say that Gaza is, or ought to be, like the trumpet of ʾIsrāfīl. It proclaimed that the world as we know it must end, a world that allowed for such oppression to take place, an entirely new world, new time, a new reality has to be inaugurated, one where the Hinds of Palestine and Sameer Rahs of Kashmir can live and laugh, and where no trace of their tormentors remains. Yes, Hind Rajab is nestled in the mercy of Allah now, whom she remembered in her final moments. But we must not concede this world to the oppressors. Gaza, as the trumpet of ʾIsrāfīl, is calling for the dead to rise. Are we not dead? Isn’t the helplessness with which we have watched Israel burn our men, women, and children in the makeshift hospital tents in Gaza akin to a living death? Yes, we have spilled a lot of ink for Gaza, and a lot of tears too. And one must not question the truth of the words or the tears. But the sighs, the tears, the words alone are not going to drown the Israeli jets and tanks.
This new world also has to be one where a Kashmiri and a Palestinian can sit together by the beach in Khan Younis and live, with no jets hovering above but just birds. Or where the two can meet in Lal Chowk in Srinagar and eat Kashmiri apples, with no shadow of the Indian occupation forces cast upon this commingling. Palestine is the homeland of Palestinians, and Kashmir is for Kashmiris, and in this new world, it will continue to be so, but in it a Kashmiri will feel at home in Palestine and a Palestinian will feel at home in Kashmir. Kashmiris will gift Palestinians their apples and saffron, and we may taste the olives and strawberries from Palestine. This has to be a world where not only are the occupations not there to prevent this from taking place, but also the statist borders that have made the Quranic injunction of “travel throughout the land,” a close impossibility.
This new world will allow for Dr. Muhammad Qasim, a Kashmiri liberation fighter and scholar who has been incarcerated by India for the last 32 years, to sit with Karim Younis, a Palestinian who was incarcerated by Israel for 40 years, to sit together and reflect on their time in prison, on the resistance, on ṣabr, on the story of Yūsuf, and perhaps also on how the prison cells are designed in such a way that for many years, Karim and Qasim could not see a sunrise or a sunset. Kierkegaard’s aphorism comes to mind: It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence. But aided by Allah, our Muslim prisoners often turn prisons into what a martyred Palestinian leader referred to as “sanctuaries of worship and academies of study,” the Jāmi’a of Yūsuf, the school of Yūsuf. While Karim and Qasim sit together here on earth, Ibrahim al-Nābulusī and Manan Wani, two martyrs from Palestine and Kashmir respectively, might be flying together as “green birds who have their nests in chandeliers hung from the throne of the Almighty…eating the fruits of Paradise from wherever they like and then nestling in these chandeliers.”
This new world is not here yet. I might be accused of idealism. What I would say is that we must refuse to accept the story that the occupiers tell us about themselves. We must refuse their claims of permanence and assert their finitude, they are not al-Bāqī (The Everlasting). This does not mean that they do not wield vast and devastating power, but this power is neither impenetrable nor ever-lasting, they are not al-Qādir (The Omnipotent).
Although the empire does bear an exhaustive system of surveillance, the empire is not al-Khabīr (The All-Aware): it can be tricked, it can be fooled. Although its panopticons are ubiquitous, the empire is not al-Baṣīr (The All-Seeing) or ar-Raqīb (The Ever-Watchful): we can throw dust in its eyes, their networks can be evaded; their mechanisms of control disrupted. Unlike the Lord of al-Kursī, the empire can be overtaken by drowsiness, it does not perfectly know what is ahead of it and what is behind it, it can succumb to the very weaknesses it denies. The praxis of Tawḥīd demands that we never ascribe the Names of God to these empires, for to do so is to partake in their deification.
I am not asking us to take passive comfort in the adage that all empires fall, that would be criminal, it is a reminder that we can and must topple the empire. As Muslims, the Quran does not permit us to ascribe foreverness to any empire, including the Indian or Israeli regimes, its reminders to us of the ruins of many empires of the past speaks directly to the Kashmiris and the Palestinians. Muhammad Al-Ardah, a Palestinian prisoner released recently, had previously escaped Gilboa maximum security prison with spoons in 2021. After his escape, he said that he and his comrades had done it to show that occupation is just an illusion made of dust, and that its power is not impregnable. The colonizer is always parasitical upon despair.
Having said that, the world we have right now is one where Kashmiris, a colonized people themselves, are jailed by the Indian state because they protested for Palestine. Mosques were shut down on important occasions so that Kashmiris would not make duʿāʾ for Palestine together. Duʿāʾ, after all, is an intimate form of protest, a rejection of what we are faced with as an interminable fact of life. The minbars are divested of their liberating promise, you cannot talk about the occupation of your homeland or the occupations that your brothers and sisters elsewhere are experiencing elsewhere, especially if the two occupiers break bread together.
The affinity of India and Israel is not limited to their shared logics, ideologies, or lexicons of domination, but this affinity is very material, its heat is felt by Palestinians and Kashmiris on their flesh. Since 1950, India has been the world’s largest importer of arms, and it is Israel’s top customer, spending significantly on drones, missile systems, sensors, radar, and electro-optic technologies. Last year, Spain refused permission for a ship carrying nearly tonnes of explosive materials from India to Israel to dock at a Spanish port. Between 2000-2010, India imported around $10bn worth of arms from Israel.
Indian colonization of Kashmir has also resulted in a very unnatural and counter-fiṭrah dismemberment of the Kashmiri land, families, and even animals, through what is called the Line of Control, a heavily militarized boundary that divides the region between Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir. In 2003, India and Israel began cooperating on the construction of a “fence” along the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. Modeled after the Israeli barrier in the occupied Palestinian territories, the fence was promoted by Delhi as a means to protect India from “infiltrators.”
The nefarious collaboration between India and Israel is extensive and recent scholarship by Azad Essa and Rhys Machold eloquently brings it to the fore. The exchange of weapons, intelligence, and capital flows both ways. And the capital flows with the blood of Kashmiris and Palestinians. The Quran warned us when it said,
“As for the ˹belligerent˺ disbelievers, they are guardians of one another. And unless you act likewise, there will be great oppression and corruption in the land.” [8:73]
The truth of this verse has manifested in the clearest ways, both in its descriptive and prescriptive parts.
What does all of this mean, beyond the numbers and the statistics? It means that a shell that is manufactured in India snuffs a Palestinian life out in Nuseirat refugee camp. A surveillance technology manufactured in Israel contributes directly to the continued incarceration of thousands of Kashmiris. At the same time, it also means that when a Palestinian prisoner walks home, a Kashmiri prisoner rejoices. When a tank of Israeli occupation forces is shattered or when a member of Israeli occupation forces falls, we smile thousands of miles away.
This is not a story of ‘solidarity,’ that I am narrating. Solidarity presupposes an atomization of the whole that we are, and it is an impoverished way of speaking about the care or affinity that we ought to feel for each other. The grammar of solidarity presumes that two separate bodies have it in their common interests to align with each other. In my recent conversation with Muneeza Rizvi, she observed, “We are often too quick to assimilate concepts like Ummah into the grammar of solidarity, which comes from a very specific genealogy. I wonder if this is an attempt to make transnational alliances between Muslims more legible at a time when they are viewed with so much suspicion.”
Rousseau spoke of the collective moral body as a collection of individual wills, an idea that underlies liberal conceptions of solidarity. In the Prophetic enunciation, in contrast, the believers are forged as a single body, when one limb suffers, the whole body responds with wakefulness and fever. This Hadith prescribes a very attentive, Deleuzian rhizomatic, and active orientation toward other believers, but this care is mediated, or enriched, by an attentiveness to God and accountability in ākhirah, it is not reducible to considerations of this-worldly utility or mutual interests alone.
It is also important to note that when we speak of Kashmir and Palestine in the same breath, it is not to suggest that their experiences of colonization are completely identical. There are important differences, both have their historical particularities. This is important because, as Lorenzo Veracini says, there isn’t one colonialism but colonialisms. Some disingenuous voices exploit the current devastation in Gaza to dismiss the Kashmiri struggle for liberation, asserting, “Kashmir is not Gaza,” as if the absence of visible ruins negates India’s occupation of Kashmir, as if we ought to feel grateful to India that it has not bombed us, yet. Kashmir does not need to be reduced to rubble to affirm that it remains a colonized homeland.
“They wish you would compromise so they would yield ˹to you˺” [68:9]
“There is nothing in our book, the Qur’an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous…respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery.” -Malcolm X
There is an Islam that is embodied by the Palestinians and the Kashmiris. Then there is an imposter that goes by the name of Islam, exemplified by the proponents of Abraham Accords. The former says no to the Abū Jahls of today, the latter disfigures Islam in ways that make it “acceptable” to the Pharaohs of the age. Here Mūsā does not liberate his people from slavery, but instead lectures his people on the many “benefits” of living under Pharaonic tyranny.
To reword Kierkegaard, they make Islam so completely devoid of character that there is really nothing left to persecute.
Islam does not need the suffocating “acceptance” of the oppressors, this acceptance smothers Islam to death. In other words, an Islam that is palatable to Modi and Netanyahu is not Islam, but an imposter. On the other hand, the Islam of the Kashmiris, the Palestinians, breathes in fresh air, it tells the oppressors, “Perish in your rage!”
Historian Hafsa Kanjwal, in one of her writings, recounts the story of a Kashmiri Muslim scholar who hosted a program on Islam on state-run radio. When tasked with speaking about the life of Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), he was instructed to avoid mentioning specific events that could stir public sentiment against Indian occupation, such as the Battle of Badr. This moment, where the Prophet’s small community triumphed over their larger oppressive foes, was seen by state officials as provocative, hence it was expunged from the story of Islam itself. The Indian state wanted to forge an Islam that either said yes to it, or at least maintained silence. This is an Islam that encourages you to follow the traffic signals, but forbids you from throwing a stone at the Indian military convoy that often tramples Kashmiris under their wheels, and this is not a metaphor.
Let us wonder: if the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) were to be in our midst today, where do you picture him? I see him in Gaza battling oppression. I see a stone tied to his belly, would he eat a morsel while the children of Gaza starve? Would he not ache to feed them with his own hands? I see him in anguish about the thousands of incarcerated Kashmiris, would he not strive to emancipate them like he emancipated Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ? If emancipation were not possible, I see him telling the Kashmiri prisoners enduring torturous conditions the same words of solace he once told the family of Yasir: “Patience, O family of Yasir. Verily, your meeting place is paradise.”
An unbearably hot summer awaits thousands of Kashmiris in small prison cells across India; I have seen prisoners place wet clothes on their heads so that they avoid heatstroke and pour water all over the floors of their cell so that they limit the blistering of their skin. The fire of Nimrod endured by Ibrahim (as) is not just a story of the past. It reoccurs in changed form, and the faithful are still thrown into it. A Kashmiri prisoner once told me that they ask Allah to cool their prison cells just as He cooled the fire for Ibrahim (as). When the occupation entices them with promises of a comfortable life at the cost of the haqq (truth), they say to it what Yusuf (as) declared:
“My Lord, the prison is dearer to me than what they invite me to” [12:33]
The task at hand, for those who are living in distant safety, is to cultivate a state of wakeful vigilance actively. At this moment, the most “normal” condition to be in is one of soaring fever, a fever that the Prophet ﷺ described not as a pathology, but as a sign of the living Ummatic body. Unlike the common fever, which debilitates, this Prophetic fever invigorates. It is a sacred state of discomfort, a necessary restlessness and a heightened state of awareness that resists numbness and apathy, ensuring a tender heart, the tongue persistently speaking for the oppressed, and every necessary act of support flowing. I say “necessary” and not “possible” because there is a lot that Islam holds as necessary and desirable that the current unjust order of the world marks as an impossibility. We must not allow our oppressors and the bystanders to determine the parameters and strategies of our resistance, to limit the boundaries of possibility. Our house is on fire. Some are lighting it and others are watching complicitly. As for the latter, they cannot tell us how to douse the fire.
“Prepare against them what you [believers] can of power and cavalry to deter Allah’s enemies and your enemies as well as other enemies unknown to you but known to Allah. Whatever you spend in the cause of Allah will be paid to you in full and you will not be wronged.”[8:60]
“O Prophet! Motivate the believers to fight. If there are twenty steadfast among you, they will overcome two hundred. And if there are one hundred of you, they will overcome one thousand of the disbelievers, for they are a people who do not comprehend.” [8:65]
Ahmed Bin Qasim is a Kashmiri anthropology researcher and host of the Koshur Musalman Podcast.
