Omer Tayyab
he genocide in Gaza continues unabated as most Muslims around the world watch in horror. Unable to impact events in any material way, the current state of affairs has laid bare the lack of weight Muslim sentiment holds in a world controlled by Western elites and traitors to the Ummah. While the Palestinians (alongside the wider axis of resistance) continue to write tales of incredible sacrifice, unbreakable courage and unshakable faith against impossible odds, the larger Muslim community remains immobile.
This lack of motion doesn’t stem from apathy, though some elements among Muslims do display this trait. It emerges out of centuries of disempowerment and depoliticization in Muslim lands carried out either directly by imperial attacks or at the behest of local imperial agents. More recently, from Africa to Asia, Muslim countries have been subjected to odious debt, sanctions, coups and of course assassinations. In parallel, a class of local compradors has also been raised in our lands to ensure that the neocolonized remain confounded.
The goal of these actions of the imperialists is always the same: to impede sovereign development because it threatens their global hegemony. This is the reason why Russia, China and Iran find themselves in imperial crosshairs. All of them have different internal logics to their political and economic systems but they share one key trait: the desire to be fully sovereign and challenge Western domination.
The US-led Capitalist Bloc
How did the current global order come to be? By the end of World War 2, major capitalist powers of the world other than the United States (i.e. Europe and Japan) had had their human and industrial powerbase destroyed. Seizing this moment, the US ascended to become the undisputed leader of the capitalist world order, leading the charge against all struggles for independence around the World. Japan and European states were turned into vassals by establishment of NATO and US military bases all over their soil, creation of economic dependence via alliance with the local capitalist class and manipulation in the political arena to keep anti-imperialists away from power.
Violence was then exported to the rest of the world to ensure capital accumulation could continue unabated for Western corporations. From crippling national liberation and sovereignty movements, to the establishment of the petrodollar, to ingraining dependence by cultivating local elites — a system of dispossession was built to ensure that the diktats of the US elite would be obeyed around the world.The imperial loot was enough to be spread around the US and its junior partners, and living standards rose in these countries at the expense of the global south.
Muslims in the Empire
The Middle East occupied a special place in imperial designs for world domination. Positioned as a key international trade corridor and the most abundant source of fossil fuels at the time – the lifeblood of capitalist economies – it was never going to be left to its own devices. As the US became the de facto capitalist leader, Israel, a creature of previous British imperial forays, became its dependable lieutenant in the region. Conscripting settlers as a militia protecting imperial interests, it effectively thwarted movements of emancipation in the region with US technological and financial support. Subduing or eviscerating Arab states, the Satanic embrace between the two settler colonies has tightened over the past few decades to the point they have become one in all but name.
The Empire’s devastation of the majority world had many effects. One was the mass migration of people from their scorched and/or economically wrecked homelands to the global North. Their precarious status meant that they were always near the bottom of the hierarchy providing cheap, docile labour and sustaining the imperial mode of living for the dominant classes. Over time, it has meant that millions of Muslims now reside in the core states of the World-system with only one avenue for climbing the social ladder: conformity to the Empire. Simply put, the more they play by the Empire’s rules, the more influence they can gain; and eventually, their material interests become intertwined with the interests of the Empire.
This is particularly obvious in the settler colonies, where co-opted Muslims continue to further the settler-colonial project and display apathy towards Black and Indigenous communities. Enjoying the fruits of Western imperialism in the form of relative material prosperity, they have – as a whole – abdicated the responsibility to struggle for justice for their brethren. They’ve reduced their participation in shaping global politics to taking part in elections every few years, mostly siding with liberal capitalists or at most protesting Empire’s actions that can ultimately be ignored by the centers of power.
These Muslims also see the Western model of politics as an ideal for their countries of origin. Having internalized Western bourgeois propaganda which claims the superiority of liberal democracy and capitalism over locally developed alternatives, they see their own people as backwards and in need of Western intervention. This is clear to see from their political formations, none of which explicitly denounces their own role in the ongoing settler-colonial projects and sides with movements like Land Back. They also sanctimoniously denounce material resistance to the global capital order as illegitimate and immoral, instead directing energy towards ineffective platforms like NGOs or appeals to the bodies of the so-called international law. Characters like Mehdi Hasan, Malala Yousufzai and Fouad Alkhatib are a few prominent figureheads of this class who are provided platforms by Western liberals and held up as models of being “civilized” that the rest should follow. At best, they are controlled opposition, criticizing Empire in the abstract but never crossing the line to support the state and non-state actors resisting U.S. imperialism. As Mohammad Abdou writes in his book Islam and Anarchism:
However, in adopting liberal-progressive stances, at the expense of more decolonial/radical social justice trajectories, diasporic Muslims reinforce the problematic notion that there is a “moderate” Islam and that there is congruence between, on the one hand, patriotic allegiance to nation-states that structure gender, racial, and sexual power, and on the other hand, ethico-political Muslim and Quranic ontological/epistemological commitments. The irony is that innumerable progressives…market themselves as supporters of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali’s radical Black legacies, while neglecting the fact that Malcolm X, in particular, explicitly adopted an anti-American stance.
Many Muslims in the global North have played a role in enabling imperialism and oppression of their fellow Muslims and ex-countrymen. They are complicit in the genocides in Gaza, Sudan and Ethiopia as it is their work which, in part, keeps the whole system operational by confounding the realization of class consciousness among Muslims. They’ve become the Muslim version of “house slaves” excoriating those of us in the plantations who dare resist and inculcating within us the servile attitudes towards the “Master”. This dynamic is also replicated at the level of states. For example, Gulf monarchies have historically advanced US imperial interests with treacherous entanglements with the Zionist entity like the Abraham Accords.
Incompatibility of Islam and Capitalism
It is important here to underscore the antagonism between capitalism (alongside its ideological expression, liberalism) and Islam. While the former views accumulation of power, pursuit of worldly pleasures and service of the self as the ultimate goal, the latter exhorts the individual to subdue one’s ego, to submit to the Almighty completely and live a life of service to others making sacrifices for justice and human dignity. Capitalism and liberalism may make grandiose claims of liberating the individual, but in practice, they encourage sociopathic behavior and they have only enriched the few while immiserating the masses. Opposingly, Islam’s ethos of negation of the self inspires liberatory and revolutionary struggles in Muslim lands.
It’s obvious then that capitalism-liberalism and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, materially and ideologically. The above-mentioned description of the conflict between Islam and capitalism-liberalism is different from the Islamic fundamentalist point of view, which incorrectly conflates superficial cultural wars rooted in personal choice as the basis of the conflict. The seed of the conflict resides within political economy, not differences of lifestyles. Recognizing the conflict, Muslims must act in accordance. Decolonial, anti-capitalist struggle is the Jihad of our times, an obligation made mandatory on all of us by Allah. Those of us in the North have an important role to play here. We must rediscover the relationship between internal and external dimensions of Jihad. On the one hand, we must protect our spirituality from corrosive hedonism by establishing prayer and dhikr; and on the other hand, we must materially strive for dismantling global capitalism and Empire by taking part in direct action and progressive organizing.
Attacking Capitalism in the Core
It is no coincidence that non-Muslim progressives support causes like Palestinian liberation, often at material costs to themselves. Having been under the boot of imperial power within the core, the world looks very similar from their perspective. They too have endured campaigns of deception, assassination and dispossession (albeit at a smaller scale) but have kept the flame of overcoming capitalism going. And while we can differ on several issues, the primacy of confronting the oppressive capitalist system must remain at the forefront. So, allying on the basis of mutual respect and love should be our guiding principle.
یہ شہا دت گہ الفت میں قدم رکھنا ہے
لوگ آساں سمجھتے ہیں مسلماں ہونا
Believing (in the one God), is entering the world of love
Yet people think it’s easy to be a Muslim
– Dr. Allama Muhammad Iqbal
Muslims of the North must now shed their support for long-standing political and economic structures in the centres of capitalism and start putting their weight behind progressive forces. Attacking capitalist visions of the world with ideas of sufficiency, stopping valorization of large corporations by refusing to be submissive workers and joining hands with anti-imperialist organizations is not optional when multiple genocides are being perpetrated upon our peoples.
The significant Muslim presence in the global North means that we possess some ability to clog up the gears of the imperial machine. Helping to bring out millions of protestors to support Palestinian liberation over the last two years, we have managed to educate the broader world population to the extent that Zionism is fast losing support, even in the core states. Surveys across the Western world show that support for Israel is consistently outmatched by support for Palestine, particularly among the youth.
Protests though are just the first step and ultimately not enough because they can be ignored or weathered out by conniving power brokers. Here, organizations like Palestine Action show us the way. Actions that disrupt the supply chains of death impose a cost on the system that force it to change behaviour. At this moment, if a Muslim-led coalition of the working class were to wage a campaign of withholding their labor across the global North, it would directly challenge Capital on its home turf and would force it to withdraw from the neocolonies. A global strike will force the Zionist entity and its Master to their knees.
For too long, Muslims in the North have shirked their responsibilities and ignored the command for Jihad and self-sacrifice. There may yet be a possibility of redemption but the window is closing fast. It is not going to be without pain and suffering, but as Allah tells us in the Quran, it is not supposed to be:
Do you think you will be admitted into Paradise without being tested like those before you? They were afflicted with suffering and adversity and were so ˹violently˺ shaken that ˹even˺ the Messenger and the believers with him cried out, “When will Allah’s help come?” Indeed, Allah’s help is ˹always˺ near.
– Quran, 2:214
Omer Tayyab is an economist and researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. His work focuses on structural inequality in the global economy and its remedies.
