Non-Violent Resistance: An Islamic Value

1
Non-Violent Resistance: An Islamic Value

"Islam should be presented without any fanaticism. Without any stress on our having the only possible
way and the others are lost.- Mohammed Asad, Jewish-born Austro-Hungarian born political theorist
who became an Islamic scholar.
In 1947 India erupted in an enormous bloodletting as a result of the land partition. On August
14th and 15th of 1947 Pakistan and India were separated and became sovereign states. This led to the
deaths of over one million people and there were over 10,000 deaths in Calcutta alone. When the
Indian Independence Act was invoked this led to ten to twelve million people being forcibly transferred
to different sides of the border between Pakistan and India. Entire communities were uprooted and
ethnically cleansed from their lands. It was at this time that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi entered the
Hindu temples of Calcutta and insisted on reading from the Quran in an attempt to unify the people.
1

Two decades earlier Gandhi made his sentiments towards Prophet Mohammed publically known. In a
statement published in 1924 by the daily Young India Gandhi said the following;
I wanted to know the best of the life of one who holds today an undisputed sway over the hearts of
millions of mankind.... I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place
for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the
Prophet, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his
intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword
carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle I was sorry there was not more for me
to read of that great life.
2

In 1948 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist who blamed the
catastrophic land partition on both the Muslim community for desiring the partition in the first place
and on Gandhi for wanting unity with them. Gandhis killer, Nathuram Godse, said in his own words
during his trial that Gandhi always showed or evinced a bias towards Muslims.
3

Gandhi was deeply connected to Muslim people throughout his entire life. Most of his
childhood friends were Muslim, he worked as a human rights attorney on behalf of the Muslim
community in South Africa, encouraged Hindu Sheikhs to study the Quran, and relentlessly reiterated
the importance of Hindu-Muslim unity in the face of British aggression.
4
Due to Imperial Britains theft
of the natural resources of what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh roughly twenty-five million
native inhabitants starved to death over a period of thirty years.
5
Islam heavily influenced Gandhis
politics of non-violent resistance in the face of such savagery. Through episodes of massive civil
disobedience Gandhi wanted to achieve not only Indias independence and freedom from British
colonialism but also an unbreakable unity between the Hindus and Muslims in his country. In 1919 was
the Jallianwala Bagh massacre; hundreds of unarmed civilians, both Hindu and Muslim, were shot to
death by British occupation soldiers in Punjab and this was followed by a tidal wave of retaliatory
violence.
6
Following this particular episode of bloodshed is when Gandhi became the Gandhi that the

1
N. Finkelstein, Norman Finkelstein on What Gandhi Says About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage,
Democracy Now, (June 5, 2012).
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/6/5/part_2_norman_finkelstein_on_what_gandhi_says_about_nonviolen
ce_resistance_and_courage
2
A. Zahoor, What Non-Muslims Say About Prophet Mohammed (1990).
http://www.cyberistan.org/islamic/quote1.html
3
"Nathuram Godse's deposition in the red Fort Court case (November 8, 1948) - Items 15 to 47. Indian Court
Records. http://www.votebankpolitics.com/source/nvg/godselsp1.html
4
S. Ashraf Ali, Gandhi and Islam, Ikhwan Web. (August 9, 2010).
http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=25987
5
Famines in India under British Rule (from "Racism: A History", BBC).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7CxKVIQKx4
6
W. Darwymple, Apologising for Amritsar is pointless. Better redress is to never forget, The Guardian,
(February 23, 2013). http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/23/apologising-amritsar-teach-british-
empire
2

wider public of today is familiar with; a deep thinker who fully believed in and promoted non-violent
resistance. He wrote almost a hundred volumes on the subject. To him it was not a simple matter. To
Gandhi this was a very complicated subject, especially in regards to the hierarchy of human
impotence. He wrote the following;
"My nonviolence does not admit of running away from danger and leaving dear ones unprotected.
Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence to cowardice. I can no more preach
nonviolence to a coward than I can tempt a blind man to enjoy healthy sight. Nonviolence is the
summit of bravery. And in my own experience, I have had no difficulty in demonstrating to men
trained in the school of violence the superiority of nonviolence. As a coward, which I was for years, I
harbored violence. I began to prize nonviolence only when I began to shed cowardice."
So Gandhi did hate something more than violence; cowardice. He believed that the coward did not
have a right to exist. He went so far as to say that its better to be violent, if there is violence in our
hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.
7
Gandhi firmly placed non-violent
resistance in a context of courageous self-sacrifice for the greater good. He continues;
"Youre supposed to march into the line of fire, smilingly and cheerfully, and get yourself blown to
bits Dont be a coward and go to jail because youre afraid to get killed. Dont use jail as a pretext to
get away from getting killed. You better get your skulls cracked. Otherwise, I dont want to hear from
you."
Gandhi described his massive campaigns of civil disobedience as being the armies of the non-violent
and his position in that army as the general. Although extremely strict in regards to the non-violent
struggle against tyranny he used militaristic language to describe his movement and violent language to
describe the impotent cowards who remained on the sidelines.
8
Pain and possible death must be
accepted not only as a consequence in the struggle against oppression, but also as a major component to
non-violent resistance in particular.
9

Ghaffar Khan was a Pashtun friend of Mahatma Gandhi who shared his political sentiments
and commitment to non-violent resistance in the face of oppression. He was a devout Muslim, a strict
pacifist, and a political leader that was relentlessly persecuted in his quest for the liberation of his
people. Khan developed his politics of non-violence independently of Gandhi by reading the Quran
while he was imprisoned.
10
The numerous armed revolts his people enacted against the British
occupation forces had gotten them nowhere. He felt that the time had come for civil disobedience,
social activism, for peoples rage to be enhanced with reason, and for the masses to use their minds like
they had been using their weapons. His movement, Servants of God, was founded on Gandhis
principles of self-sacrifice and non-violence. He stated the following to his 100,000 supporters;
"I am going to give you such a weapon that the police and the army will not be able to stand against. It
is the weapon of the Prophet, but you are not aware of it. That weapon is patience and righteousness.
No power on earth can stand against it."
11

7
T. Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence: A Selection from the Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, (NY: New Directions
Publishing Corporation, 1965) http://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/Gandhi.htm
8
N. Finkelstein, Norman Finkelstein on What Gandhi Says About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage,
Democracy Now, (June 5, 2012).
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/6/5/part_2_norman_finkelstein_on_what_gandhi_says_about_nonviolen
ce_resistance_and_courage
9
M. Abu Nader, p. 15, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam (University Press of Florida: 2003).
10
R. Terri Harris, On Islamic Nonviolence, Fellowship of Reconciliation (2009).
http://forusa.org/fellowship/2010/spring/islamic-nonviolence/11639
11
M. Abu-Nimer, Non-Violence in the Islamic Context, Fellowship of Reconciliation, (August 24, 2003).
http://forusa.org/fellowship/2004/september-october/nonviolence-islamic-context/12208
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Just as non-Hindus were essential to Gandhis campaign for national liberation, Ghaffar Khan viewed
non-Muslims as having equal importance. He reiterated, time and again, that the Pashtuns would work
with and protect the Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians who resided in the Muslim-majority provinces.
12
He
bristled at the thought of an authoritarian nationalism, especially one engaged in religious intolerance.
13

Both Gandhi and Khan stressed the Islamic value that the differences of language and form of the
prayer doesnt change the fact that they are all addressed to the one same God.
14

The acceptance of Gods will and ones submission to it depends on action rather than just
talk.
15
According to Gandhi the method of non-violence does not depend for its success on the
goodwill of the dictators, for a nonviolent resister depends on the unfailing assistance of God which
sustains him throughout difficulties which could otherwise be considered insurmountable.
16
Non-
violent resistance is a method that requires a deep spiritual commitment. This certainly is not about
only praying to God and asking for guidance. One must diligently work to make His will a reality.
Political power has a short shelf-life when compared to spiritual power. The Arabic word for such a
commitment is Islam, is peace, is the name of the Muslim faith itself.
17
Sura 5, Ayat 32 in the Quran
states , if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. The sanctity of
life in Islam parallels its commitment towards ending injustice and oppression through non-violent
means. Because murder is such a grave sin in Islam how does one preserve the sacredness of life while
simultaneously struggling against the forces of annihilation? The only option is the most Islamic
option; non-violent resistance.
18
Gene Sharp, the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution which is
dedicated to the study of non-violent civil disobedience, defines this action as a civilian-based method
used to wage conflict through social, psychological, economic, and political means without the threat
or use of violence. It includes acts of omission, acts of commission, or a combination of both.
19
Erica
Chenoweth, an American political scientist who is prominent in the international relations community
for her investigative work in non-violent resistance movements, believes that peaceful action has an
advantage over violent action. She explains;
First, repressing nonviolent campaigns may backfire. In backfire, an unjust actoften violent
repressionrecoils against its originators, often resulting in the breakdown of obedience among regime
supporters, mobilization of the population against the regime, and international condemnation of the
regime. The internal and external costs of repressing nonviolent campaigns are thus higher than the
costs of repressing violent campaigns These dynamics are more likely to occur when an opponents
violence is not met with violent counter reprisals by the resistance campaign and when this is
communicated to internal and external audiences.
20

The Arabic term for the method of non-violent resistance is jihad.
21
In the Quran jihad is never
used in a militaristic fashion. Islam tells us that the greatest war is inside our own heads; the fight
against the immoral impulses that lie within the human soul.
22
It was never meant to be exploited and

12
R. Gandhi, p. 3, Ghaffar Khan: Non-violent Badshah of the Pakhtuns, (Penguin Books- India; 2004).
13
14
15
16
C. Satha-Anand, p. 17, Islam and Nonviolence (Center for Global Nonviolence: 2001)
http://nonkilling.org/pdf/b3.pdf
17
18
C. Satha-Anand, p. 15-16, Islam and Nonviolence (Center for Global Nonviolence: 2001)
19
G. Sharp, p. 41, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential,
(Boston: Porter Sargent, 2005).
20
E. Chenoweth, p. 11, Why Civil Resistance Works, (August 2011),
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/IS3301_pp007-044_Stephan_Chenoweth.pdf
21
22
Transcript of Interview with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson by Michael Enright on the September 11 Tragedy,
(September 23, 2001). http://www.ihyaproductions.com/articles/hyCBCtranscript.htm
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perverted in such an extreme manner as to make the term become associated with political power and
acts of vengeance in modern times. Who is it that destroys religious teachings in such a way?
According to Prophet Mohammed its a combination of ill-tempered scholars, tyrannical leaders, and
ignorant theologians.
23
Regardless, an individual Muslims obligation to fight for justice through non-
violent means is sacred and set in stone. Sura 2, Ayat 193 explains that to fight in the cause of God is
synonymous with the fight for social justice. The oppressor must be fought on until there is no more
tumult and there prevail justice and faith in God. If one is working on behalf of the oppressed
against despotism and injustice then one is a jihadist. A humanitarian aid worker is a jihadist according
to the Quran, and it doesnt matter if they are a devout Muslim or not. However, the internal jihad is
still the greater jihad; the fight to eliminate evil from within yourself. Ibn Taymiyya, the Turkish
Islamic scholar who lived during the chaotic times of the Mongol invasion and went on to deliver
sermons from the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, defined a jihadists two main weapons as being
understanding and patience.
24
The Ottoman Turks banned the Salafist writings of Ibn Taymiyya, but
once the Ottoman Empire collapsed a Salafi revival came about in the late 19th century. Today this is
labeled as Islamic modernism; a pious, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian jihad that seeks to
modernize society in an effort to combat despotism. The Salafi movement in Syria in particular has a
long history of anti-authoritarian struggle against both religious elites and the French occupiers.
25
There
is a very strong Salafi wing within Syrias Muslim Brotherhood, which historically champions political
Islam, so a politization and combination of jihadism and Salafism in Syria against Hafez al Assads
secular state-violence, and again against the son, was only natural.
26
The struggle against injustice in an
Islamic context is placed within the sphere of morality. An end, once and for all, to structural violence
is the goal. Its absolutely forbidden to murder or harm non-combatants in any way. Even the
destruction of an enemys trees is forbidden. A report from the Hadith offers the following instructions;
Go in Gods name, trusting in God, and adhering to the religion of Gods messenger. Do not kill a
decrepit old man, or a young infant, or a woman; do not be dishonest about booty, but collect your
spoils, do right and act well, for God loves those who do well.
Caliph Abu Bakr reiterated this Islamic value in a speech before his army as they were about to head
towards Syria;
Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies. Neither
kill a child, nor a woman, nor an aged man. Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire,
especially those which are fruitful. Slay not any of the enemys flock, save for your food. You are
likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services, leave them alone.
27

Erica Chenoweth reiterates this Islamic value;
nonviolent resistance campaigns appear to be more open to negotiation and bargaining because they
do not threaten the lives or well-being of members of the target regime. Regime supporters are more
likely to bargain with resistance groups that are not killing or maiming their comrades.
28

23
R. Frager, p. 108, Essential Sufism (Harper One: November 17, 2009).
24
25
Dr. Thomas Pierret,Syrian Salafis got much more conservative Interview with Thomas Pierret, Part I (Al
Sharq Blog, August 7, 2013), http://www.alsharq.de/2013/mashreq/syrien/one-has-to-distinguish-between-
salafism-and-jihadism-an-interview-with-thomas-pierret-part-ii/
26
Dr. Thomas Pierret,One has to distinguish between Salafism and Jihadism an Interview with Thomas
Pierret, Part II (Al Sharq Blog, October 7, 2013), http://www.alsharq.de/2013/mashreq/syrien/one-has-to-
distinguish-between-salafism-and-jihadism-an-interview-with-thomas-pierret-part-ii/
27
28
5

The first Muslim scholar to label wars as just or unjust was Al Farabi.
29
As one of the
intellectual heavyweights of Islams Golden Age he was anointed The Second Teacher; Aristotles
successor. He played a huge role in translating Aristotles work for the Christian West and he was one
of Maimonides greatest influences.
30
According to his teachings the justness of war rests on whether or
not it works for the good of the majority.
31
Dar al Islam (Islams territory) and Dar al harb (wars
territory) are seen as political institutions. Through a true jihad the territory of Islam is expanded, and
therefore a just peace is expanded. Sura 22, Ayat 39 states that those whom war is made, permission is
given to fight because they are wrong, but do not transgress limits as Sura 2, Ayat 190 commands.
32

The priority above all else, without question, must be the Ummah; the human family. The principle that
holds true the foundations for both Islam and jihad is tawhid; to consistently affirm the unity of God.
33

This unity between humankind and the divine is repeated throughout the Quran. Sura 2, Ayat 213
describes the human race as one single nation. This line comes up again in Sura 10, Ayat 19.
34
God
commands us to view ourselves as being one single family, and thus we should treat each other
accordingly. The Ummah must hold fast, all together, by a rope, which God stretches out be not
divided.
35
This is tawhid; the existence of one absolute truth that transcends everything in the material
world. The Quran reasserts, time and again, that God is universal and is not confined to one particular
country or people.
36
It was European colonialists that watered-down the term ummah to mean one
racial group, which is incorrect. This is not exclusively the ummah arabiyyah. Rather, this is the
human family.
37
Islamist political parties are not on the fringe; they have massive grassroots support
and are the political mainstream. Much to the chagrin of the West and the dictatorships it props up in
the Arab world, the Islamists groups are the most democratic organizations.
38
Prominent Egyptian
scholar Anwar al Jundi believes that Islam is a force of liberation because of this unity. Islam refused
to elevate sentimentalists and rationalists and established that the most salient concept was that existing
between belief and action, the word and behavior. Indeed, the Islamic faith demands that all of lifes
elements be maintained in such a manner so that the unity of the human soul is enhanced. He
continues;
Islam has the capacity to coexist with different civilizations and cultures. The characteristic of Islam is
that it unites, liberates and controls, individualism and collectivism, science and religion, nationalism
and effectivity, the spirit and matter, revelation and reason, this life and the hereafter, the world of
mystery and the perceptible world, stability and evolution, the past and the present, conservation and
regeneration, Islam and humanity.
39

The previously mentioned principles are both objective and subjective, both basic and
controversial.
40
Quranic traditions are almost completely oral in nature and entirely in Arabic. This
allows it to be split wide open for a tremendous variety of interpretations. Even the most sheltered mind
can understand that no religion is one only of peace and nothing else. The infinite amount of different
schools of thought within Islam itself can be daunting; someone elses messiah is someone elses

29
30
H. Corbin, p. 872, History of Islamic Philosophy (2001).
31
32
33
34
35
36
A. Barles, p. 96, Believing Women in Islam (University of Texas Press: 2002).
37
38
M. Stephan, p. 65, Civilian Jihad (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009).
39
40
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blasphemer. These internal conflicts have yet to come to an end.
41
The Islam of 800 years from now
could be unrecognizable when compared to the Islam of today. The text remains the same but peoples
interpretations of the text do not. Its a kaleidoscopic faith with a seemingly endless list of different
sects ; Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Alevi, Sufi, Salafi, Wahhabi, Ismaili, and so on and so on. Your Islam, my
Islam, your neighbors Islam, and your governments Islam will all be different from one another.
42

Take the imagery of the Prophet as an example. Sunni Orthodox Islam is strictly iconoclastic; images
of Mohammeds face are prohibited. However, Shia Islam is much more tolerant on the matter. An
Iranian poster image of a young Mohammad can be found throughout the country. Its based on the
image of a young Tunisian boy who was photographed by a European graphic artist in the early
1900s.
43
Still, the Iranian regime threatened to take serious action against the BBC in 2011 because
of their documentary series about the life of Prophet Mohammed even though his image never made an
appearance.
44
Theres what the Quran says, and then theres the cultural traditions that Arab Muslim
people have adopted as being crucial to ending violence in their daily lives and living with dignity. Any
overgeneralizing is a grave mistake. Mohammed Abu Nimer goes into this at great length in his
Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam. No doctrines in Islamic religious or political thought have
been settled. Not one. The politics and resistance of a Lebanese Shia community will be very different
from the politics and resistance of a Syrian Sunni community. Islamic culture is at home in the
individual, in the communitys institutions, and in their civil society just as much as in their holy
scriptures.
45

The road to Islamophobia can be paved with good intentions. The false notion that religion is
an obstacle to justice can often be found in peace-building workshops organized by non-Muslims in
predominantly Muslim lands. Religion is blamed for the violence of individuals and episodes of
horrific government crackdowns only work to reinforce Islamophobic imagery even though these
authoritarian regimes have secular and political justifications for their brutality. A severely unfair
amount of attention is given to fundamentalism and the very recent birth of armed Islamist
organizations.
46
Westerners, and Westernized Arab individuals for that matter, confuse radicalism
with violence rather than with a civil rights movement that shakes the earth, thus forcing the status quo
to crumble.
47
Prophet Mohammad was a messenger to the Arabs, and therefore he was also a civilizer.
The sociocultural context of the Arab world has been formed by Islam even though they are not all
Muslims, and even though not all the Muslims are religious.
48
Religious tolerance and the acceptance
of pluralistic societies were reiterated time and again by Mohammed. Conquests were ideological and
an emphasis was placed on continuity instead of conflict. As the Quran states, Let there be no
compulsion in religion.
49
Conversion is to be as non-violent as the struggle against oppression.
According to Caliph Abu Bakr, God has not sought vengeance even in the case of polytheism
50

Abdul Aziz Sachedina, the head of Islamic Studies at George Mason University and who annually
teaches courses on Classical Islam, Islam in the Modern Age, Islam, Democracy and Human Rights,
Islamic Bioethics and Muslim Theology has stated the following;

41
C. Hitchens, p. 123-127, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: 2007).
42
43
Sons of Sunnah (Wordpress) http://sonsofsunnah.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/33333333333.jpg
44
Iran threatens 'serious action' over BBC plans to screen documentary series on Muslim prophet Muhammad,
Daily Mail (July 7, 2011).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2012252/Iran-threatens-BBC-Muslim-prophet-Muhammad-
documentary.html
45
M. Abu Nader, p. 7-9, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam (University Press of Florida: 2003).
46
47
48
49
50
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If Muslims were made aware of the centrality of Quranic teachings about religious and cultural
pluralism as a divinely ordained principle of peaceful coexistence among human societies, then they
would spurn violence in challenging their repressive and grossly inefficient governments.
51

Unsurprisingly, the Iranian mullahs issued a statement in 1998 recommending that no one listen to
Sachedina or ask him about religious matters.
52
Perhaps they did not read Sura 2, Ayat 193; Let there
be no hostility except to those who practice oppression.
53
According to Sachedina human relationships
are front and center in the cause of a legitimate jihad;
Jihad is divinely sanctioned only as a measure for enhancing the security and integrity of the Muslim
polity. Hence any jihad that leads to meaningless destruction of human life and ignores concerns for
peace with justice is non-Quranic jihad.
54

To take Islam away from Muslim people is to neuter their revolutionary potential. This is very
apparent in the Alawite community of Syria. By the 1970s they were in complete control of the
military-security apparatus, the economy, and most of the religious institutions.
55
However, the regime
denied any public space for Alawites to openly practice their faith. The Syrian government, run by
Alawites, did not recognize any Alawite council that could provide religious rulings. No Alawite clergy
could manifest itself. Assadism, a faux Baathism, filled the gap that was left by the states theft of the
Alawite identity. This process was systematic, deliberate, and designed to turn Syria into a secular
Alawite apartheid state that steamrolled the Sunni majority.
56
Four weeks into siege of Deraa in April
of 2011 the call to prayer was banned and all the mosques were desecrated by the Alawite security
forces. The graffiti said, Your God is Bashar.
57
Ghiyath Matar, a young Muslim man with Palestinian
origins living in the Daraya suburbs of Damascus, pioneered the tactic of handing out roses and water
to the Alawite security forces sent to shoot demonstrators. By early September of 2011 he was dead.
His mutilated body was delivered to his family four days after his arrest. The spokespeople for the
Assad regime said an armed Salafi gang was responsible for Ghiyaths torture and death, and that is
half true because, after all, there was an armed gang running the government.
58
Ibrahim Qashoush, a
forty two year old Muslim father of three who worked as a fireman in Hama, became a center of the
demonstrations thanks to the protest songs he wrote and sang. Nicknamed the nightingale of the
revolution Ibrahim was arrested on his way to work, and his dead body discovered the next day
floating in the Orontes River. His vocal cords had been severed. The rockstar literally had his voice
box ripped out. It was the likes of Ghiyath Matar and Ibrahim Qashoush who Syrian state television
referred to as Salafists, or murdered by Salafists, while Assads supporters from Damascus to Beirut
referred to as Zionist traitors.
59
Challenging or disobeying orders is abnormal behavior for members of
security forces, writes Erica Chenoweth. Evidence of defections within the ranks of the military
would suggest that the regime no longer commands the cooperation and obedience of its most
important pillar of support. Nonviolent challenges should be more likely to evoke loyalty shifts in the

51
52
A. Sachedina. What Happened in Najaf? http://islam.uga.edu/sachedina_silencing.html
53
54
55
Fouad Ajami, p. 43, The Syrian Rebellion (Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 2012).
56
Amal Hanano, Framing Syria, Jadaliyya (November 11, 2011).
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3209/framing-
syria?fb_action_ids=4595567807851&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation
_id=246965925417366
57
Fouad Ajami, p. 74-75, The Syrian Rebellion (Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 2012).
58
Liz Sly, Syrian activist Ghiyath Matars death spurs grief, debate (TheWashington Post, September 15, 2011),
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/syrian-activist-ghiyath-matars-death-spurs-grief-
debate/2011/09/14/gIQArgq8SK_story.html
59
Bassem Mroue, Ibrahim Qashoush, Syria Protest Songwriter, Gruesomely Killed (The Huffington Post, July 27,
2011), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/ibrahim-qashoush-syria-protests_n_911284.html
8

opponents security forces, whereas armed resistance is more likely to encourage a closing of the ranks
against the insurgency.
60

Erica Chenoweth was one of the intellectuals interviewed by Bassel Shehadeh in his film
Singing to Freedom; a documentary about non-violent resistance in the Syrian uprising.
61
Bassel was a
young Christian Syrian filmmaker from Damascus who gave up his studies in the US to return home
and take part in the revolution for democracy that began in 2011.
62
Besides making his own films about
the uprising he also trained other activists and citizen journalists how to shoot and edit their video
footage.
63
In 2011 Bassel was awarded a Fullbright scholarship to study documentary filmmaking in
the US. Before leaving he participated in a demonstration organized in Damascus. Bassel was arrested
during the protest, released after two days, and then headed to Syracuse University where he made the
previously mentioned documentary. Bassel Shehadeh felt that he could not abandon his people at a
time like this and decided to return to Syria in late 2011.
64
He was killed in May of 2012 in Homs when
the Assad regime shelled the city. He was working on a documentary about a recent massacre
committed by the state security forces.
65
Compared to what Bashar al Assad has done in the past few
years, his father showed restraint. As a direct result of social media the police state had lost its grip.
The internet and the mobile phones of the people were out of Assads control. Its impossible to enact
a 1950s style tyranny in the social media age of today. Every cell phone turned each Syrian individual
into a satellite.
66
This tactic of internet advocacy would only become more refined in 2012. Today the
world knows through multiple social media outlets and citizen journalists when a war crime is taking
place as its actually happening. In 2011 Syrians began to find one another and talk to one another
other after decades of asphyxiating silence that was deliberately manipulated by layer upon layer of
fear. This fear was handed down over generations as a direct result of the severe trauma inflicted by the
regimes campaign of massive imprisonment and torture. Syria was the most fearsome national security
state in the Arab East. This fear dissipated following the Arab Spring uprisings within Egypt and
Tunisia. To quote Lebanese cyber-activist Rami Nakhla, You cant quash an uprising if millions of
people are acting like their own independent news stations.
67
The Hama massacre of 1982 crystallized
Syrian political culture and the events of 2011 worked to smash it to pieces. Today the Syrian
revolution is being met with a genocidal campaign of government repression supported by the sectarian
regime of Iran. The Syrian tragedy is greatest refugee crisis since WWII; Obamas Rwanda.
68
A new
Nakba is here, and the only option left for the people of Syria is the Palestinian option; to resist.
Prophet Mohammeds teachings of non-violent resistance and self-sacrifice were what
Ghiyath Matar, Ibrahim Qashoush, and Bassel Shehada lived up to and were killed for manifesting.
Prophet Mohammed committed his entire existence to serving God and he was sent as a mercy to the
worlds. His greatest opponent was jahiliyyah; a violent ignorance.
69
His preaching of a new
monotheistic faith was met with great hostility by the whole city of Mecca. He was charged with

60
61
Syria Nonviolence, Singing to Freedom, a Film about the Syrian uprising featuring: Noam Chomsky , Norman
Finkelstein, Amy Goodman, Erica Chenoweth and Syrian Protesters (December 23, 2011)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D7wcuHLH58
62
J. Hauser, Syrian filmmaker Bassel Shehadeh killed in Homs, Storyful Journalist (May 29, 2012)
shellinghttp://storyful.com/stories/30678-syrian-filmmaker-bassel-shehadeh-killed-in-homs-shelling
63
K. McEvers, Slain Syrian Filmmaker Traded Study For Revolution, NPR (May 29, 2012)
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/29/153937342/student-helped-the-world-see-inside-a-ravaged-syria
64
Whos Who: Bassel Shehadeh, The Syrian Observer (September 14, 2013)
http://syrianobserver.com/Who/Civil_Who/Whos+who+Bassel+Shehadeh
65
K. McEvers, Slain Syrian Filmmaker Traded Study For Revolution, NPR (May 29, 2012)
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/29/153937342/student-helped-the-world-see-inside-a-ravaged-syria
66
D. Lesch, p. 48, Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 2012).
67
D. Lesch, p. 121, Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 2012).
68
Z. Baddorf, Syria is Obamas Rwanda, Vice News (June 2, 2014) http://www.vice.com/read/syria-is-obamas-
rwanda
69
9

blasphemy, and his family was humiliated, yet he did not wish death or pain upon anyone. Prophet
Mohammeds non-violent resistance was to pray for their enlightenment as hostile forces persecuted
him for twelve years. Only when he became aware of an assassination plan did he flee Mecca. Indeed,
it was a blessing in disguise. Upon his return from Medina he was unstoppable.
70
Prophet Mohammed
committed himself to a dozen years of non-violent struggle in Mecca. He and his followers preached
the word of God in the face of relentless intimidation.
71
Upon his return from Medina he very
reluctantly endorsed a limited warfare and only as a last resort.
72
Islam permitted a freedom of
conscience and it did not take long for it to become a shield against various strains of oppression at the
time.
73
According to the teachings of Prophet Mohammed, The ink of the scholar is holier than the
blood of the martyr,
74
or to put it more bluntly, The pen is mightier than the sword. He commands
us to follow truthfulness even if we think it may harm us.
75
This adherence to non-violent resistance
suggests that ignorance does not prevail solely due to the ignorant, but rather, due to the cowardly
silence of those who know better; the silence of the writer, the researcher, the intellectual, or in
Mohammeds case, the enlightened. Mammon al Rasheed observes that violence is rooted in
selfishness, ignorance, is antithetical to social change, and therefore, its un-Islamic;
The link between poverty, deprivation, and violence has been firmly established. Unjust disparities
exist not only between nations but also within nations and among individuals. This deformed
relationship leads to a violent social order Injustice is the spawning ground of violence. And injustice
stems from economic disparities and social inequities. Once injustice is eliminated through social
transformation, especially in the rural areas, there will be no occasion for violence. There will be no
injustice to prompt violence.
76

I don't believe in any form of discrimination or segregation, said Malcolm X upon his return
from Mecca, I believe in Islam.
77
It wasnt until after he went on his pilgrimage that the late great
Malcolm X began to speak of the power of non-violent resistance, and that perhaps it had more
potential for social justice than one keeping their finger on the trigger of a gun for their whole life.
78

The hajj; a reaffirmation of both the oneness of humankind and Islamic brotherhood.
79
It was the hajj
that helped to open Malcolms eyes to the intrinsic Islamic value of non-violence. Islam is firmly set in
the grassroots of the community through each individual. Demanding the Islamization of non-
violence feels painfully redundant.
80
Malcolm Xs jihad was in the name of freedom and human
rights. For this he was eliminated by those who found such righteousness to be a threat. The Arabic
word for martyr, shaheed, literally translates to witness. Martyrdom in an Islamic context is not about
irresponsibly sacrificing yourself, but rather, about witnessing the truth and giving up your life for it.
The Truth, al huq, is one of Gods 99 names, and one certainly does not have to be a devout Muslim to
worship the divine in such a manner. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be considered a

70
71
M. Abu-Nimer, Non-Violence in the Islamic Context, Fellowship of Reconciliation, (August 24, 2003).
http://forusa.org/fellowship/2004/september-october/nonviolence-islamic-context/12208
72
73
74
I. Ahmad Rashid, Unparalleled Scientific Legacy of Islam, Story of Pakistan (July 26, 2003).
http://storyofpakistan.com/unparalleled-scientific-legacy-of-islam/
75
R. Frager, p. 108, Essential Sufism (Harper One: November 17, 2009).
76
77
Malcolm X on Islam Quotes, http://www.malcolm-x.org/islam.htm
78
79
80
10

shaheed. Hamza Yusuf, an American Muslim scholar and the co-founder of the Zaytuna College,
explains;
The greatest martyr in the eyes of God is the one who stands in the presence of a tyrant and speaks the
truth and is killed for it. He is martyred for his tongue.
81

The Quran demands that no matter how weak we may think we are we must refuse to follow an unjust
ruler. That alone is non-violent resistance. That alone works to disintegrate a political power that has
become hostile towards human life.
82
Fascist regimes who feel they must warehouse and terrorize their
constituents in order to rule over them usually, historically speaking, dig their own graves. Obedience
to God can be viewed as a great threat to the authority of the secular state because no man-made
institution can legitimately claim to represent Gods will on earth.
83
Such devotion is pregnant with the
possibility of resistance to tyranny. The potential for self-sacrifice and civil disobedience is
enormous.
84

The application of nonviolence and peacebuilding in Islamic countries is a daily occurrence.
They dont need help from non-Muslims and non-Arabs in this department. What they need is for the
non-Muslims and non-Arabs who hold power on the world stage to stop funneling billions of dollars-
worth of weaponry to the authoritarian regimes that are turning entire Muslim countries into massive
torture chambers and prisons, such as Americas military support for the Egyptian and Israeli regimes
or Russias military support for the regimes of Syria and Iran. Fascism is not sustainable anywhere as
evidenced by the fact that the most notorious police states in the Muslim world cant finance their own
objectives. The overwhelming majority of dictatorships in the Arab world are supported by the West.
Pro-democratic Islamist forces are not delusional; they know that American encouragement, or at least
neutrality, is necessary in the campaign for freedom and justice.
85
According to former CIA agent
Robert Baer, If you want people to be well interrogated, you send them to Jordan. If you want people
to be disappeared, you send them to Egypt. And if you want people to be tortured, you send them to
Syria.
86
The current state of geopolitics has made it increasingly difficult for Muslims to remain non-
violent in the face of such annihilation, but the overwhelming majority remains non-violent anyway.
That in itself is a testament to the intrinsic Islamic value of non-violent resistance. If the West is not
interested in supporting the Ummah, then at least it could stay out of the way. Islam is the religion of
those militants against whom severe wrongs have been committed and who in turn are committed to
truth and justice, writes Mamoon al Rasheed. Islam today is the slogan of those who desire freedom
and justice but are denied it, and an institution for those who struggle against local brute force and
against all forms of international aggrandizement.
87

Because a true jihad permits only a miniscule amount of defensive violence and mostly
encompasses non-violent means of fighting oppression a true mujahideen is one who non-violently
struggles in the name of God and justice, which are synonymous in Islam. Its entirely due to the fault
of the West, British imperialists initially, that such a pious term, mujahideen, has become associated
with armed Afghani militants and nothing else.
88
Technically speaking, Islam tells us that we are all

81
Transcript of Interview with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson by Michael Enright on the September 11 Tragedy,
(September 23, 2001). http://www.ihyaproductions.com/articles/hyCBCtranscript.htm
82
83
84
85
M. Stephan, p. 68 , Civilian Jihad (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009).
86
Democracy Now!, Maher Arar: My Rendition & Torture in Syrian Prison Highlights U.S. Reliance on Syria as
an Ally (Democracy Now!, June 11, 2013)
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/13/maher_arar_my_rendition_torture_in
87
88
B. Farwell, p. 150-151, Queen Victorias Little Wars (Pen & Sword Military Books. 2009).
11

born Muslim but must go through a process of awakening in order to realize our full potential to
become a servant of God. Hurting non-believers or conversion through the barrel of a gun is not
supported by the Quran. All aggression must be strictly defensive and kept to a bare minimum.
89
What
does it mean to be on Gods path? What does it mean to truly awaken to the truth in an Islamic context?
Terry Colin Holdbrooks Jr, a young American man from Arizona who joined the military and was
stationed at Guantanamo Bay, converted to Islam six months into the job. Within a year he was
discharged from the US Army and then went on to write a book about the injustices he witnessed. This
is a clear-cut mujahideen; someone who completely changes their life in an effort to bear witness to the
truth and to shine a light on the evil that rumbles just below the surface within the human heart. Terry
did not convert to Islam through the use of force. He converted to Islam because of his conversations
with those who are being imprisoned and tortured to death at his former place of work. Terry has
received endless death threats and harassment for embarking on his struggle for justice against the
atrocities he witnessed at Guantanamo Bay.
90
He now works as a speaker for the Muslim Legal Fund
of America in an effort to raise awareness about what the US Army is doing to prisoners in the name of
security. Terry stated the following in an interview in 2013;
Gitmo is 100 percent antithetical to the basis of our legal system. Thats not the America I signed up
to defend I had all the freedom in the world. But I was waking up unhappy while these men were in
cages, smiling and praying five times a day Islam teaches you that if you see an injustice in the
world, you should do anything within your power to stop it It would be wrong if I sat by and let
Gitmo continue to exist or let people think that Islam is Americas greatest enemy.
91

Terry Holbrooks has written about a fellow mujahideen named Moazzam Begg.
92
Moazzam
did humanitarian aid work in Bosnia and then Afghanistan where he and his family worked to establish
a school. Forced to flee to Pakistan following the American invasion in the fall of 2001 Moazzam was
arrested by the CIA and Pakistani police in early 2002. While imprisoned in a windowless cell at
Bagram airbase in Kabul for a year he witnessed the murder of two of his fellow detainees by US
soldiers. Moazzam was then sent to solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay for two years. Here is
where he memorized large portions of the Quran. He was released after two years of solitary
confinement without charge, without explanation, and without apology. Following his return home to
the UK Moazzam penned Enemy Combatant; an autobiography about his story of survival. This is the
first book published by a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner. Moazzam then became the director of a
human rights organization that advocates for men and women who have been kidnapped and
imprisoned in the name of the War on Terror. He has spoken at the UKs top universities, was
keynote speaker at the Jewish Forum for Human Rights, and has delivered sermons from Cape Town to
Nairobi.
93
When the revolution began in Syria Moazzam started his own investigation into the Assad
regimes campaign of widespread torture and its partnership with the CIA in its War on Terror.
Indeed, Syria is where the CIA in Bagram had threatened to send him multiple times. His findings
revealed how deeply connected both the UK and the US were to the Syrian governments policies of
brutalization. It's land and its people are special, of that there is little doubt, wrote Moazzam in the
summer of 2013, But the sense of brutal, unrelenting war seemed even more potent here and the
legacy of imprisonment and torture can be felt the moment you talk to the people. Moazzam met with
the freedom fighters of Aleppo and remarked that they reminded him of the good that still exists in
Syria, despite the betrayal they've faced from their own government The surprising thing for me was
just how many of the Syrians I met had been imprisoned and how widely the cases of Syrian rendition

89
90
N, Lakshman, Converted Gitmo guard turns guardian of inmates (The Hindu: June 9, 2013).
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/converted-gitmo-guard-turns-guardian-of-
inmates/article4795310.ece?homepage=true
91
C. Kuruvilla, Guantanamo guard converts to Islam, demands release of detainees (NY Daily News: May 29,
2013). http://www.nydailynews.com/gitmo-guard-converts-islam-demands-release-detainees-article-1.1357918
92
T. Holbrooks, A Dignified Detainee: A Gitmo Guard on Moazzam Begg, CAGE (May 12, 2004)
http://www.cageuk.org/article/dignified-detainee-gitmo-guard-moazzam-begg
93
Case File: Moazzam Begg, CAGE UK http://www.cageuk.org/case/2-moazzam-begg
12

victims, including Guantanamo prisoners, are known.
94
He described the Wests foreign policy as an
anti-terrorism industry that uses the Syrian crisis, rather than to solving it, in order to expand
draconian legal measures which crackdown on Muslim people.
95
If the Palestine Branch is captured by
the rebels and intelligence secrets are laid bare, wrote Moazzam in the summer of 2013, Scotland
Yard will have its hands full- again, and well hear more about British ministers suffering amnesia,
instead of justice.
96
Moazzam is currently one of nine different British citizens imprisoned by the US
at Guantanamo Bay. His visit to South Africa in late 2013 coincided with Nelson Mandelas funeral.
97

Moazam spoke at the Apartheid Museum in which he condemned the hypocrisy of the West.
98
It was
upon his return to the UK that his passport was seized and he was handed the terrorist smear for his
work in Syria. He was arrested a few months later and remains imprisoned.
99
Moazzam would play
chess with some of the worst guards in the Camp, writes Terry Holbrooks of Moazzams non-violent
resistance while imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the first time. Men who were known for taking
joy in the abuse of detainees would be getting frustrated and walk away at a loss, as Moazzam played
chess with them, beat them, and taught them a lesson that these men are not terrorists, they are just
fellows like us. Moazzam would be busy playing chess with you in his actions, but in his words he
would be challenging your belief structure about the validity of GTMO, and the brainwashing we had
been given. He continues;
Moazzam would force us to see the detainees as people and not objects. Moazzam would literally toss
aside the veil that the government had blinded us with. If there were only a means by which I could
find out how many guards were affected in a positive way by Moazzam, it would be astonishing and
certainly speak volumes for his character.
100

Islamist pro-democracy groups are consistently forced to become states within states because
the regime works for the international powers and not for the countrys millions of inhabitants. Such
organizations construct their own schools, hospitals, banks, businesses, mosques, and human rights
organizations all to serve their constituency, which is the majority population. This is not only about
the downfall of the regime that does not work for the people. Rather, the transformation of society in
order to better serve everyone is the goal. Constructing a community that is separate from the corrupt
regime that has been imposed upon the people is an example of both democratic values and non-violent
resistance. Unfortunately, the collapse of these states-within-states comes with devastating
consequences. Millions of people become deprived of jobs, education, and healthcare services. The
Western-backed Arab despots and dictators, from Egypt to Syria to Iraq, do not fill in the emptiness
carved out of a violent police-state crackdown on civil society.
101
According to Shadi Hamid a
combination of a well-educated professional class, a history of political participation, and a
cooperative Islamist movement are whats essential to expanding democracy in the Arab world.
102

Egypts Muslim Brotherhood is an example of such a combination. In the Mubarak era they functioned
as an unofficial organ of the state. The Brotherhood provided over a thousand social service provisions,
which helped to cushion the effects of the vast deterioration of the welfare state as a result of Mubarak's
neo-liberal economic policies. This is why they were tolerated under Mubarak in a limited fashion. As
a religious, political, and social movement the Brotherhood was the largest and best-organized political

94
M. Begg, Syria: My journey to the land of blessing and torture, CAGE (August 16, 2013)
http://www.cageuk.org/article/syria-my-journey-land-blessing-and-torture
95
96
M. Begg, Syria: My journey to the land of blessing and torture, CAGE (August 16, 2013)
http://www.cageuk.org/article/syria-my-journey-land-blessing-and-torture
97
98
E. Moosa, Moazzam Begg: Obama tributes to Madiba ironic, Cii News (December 10, 2013)
http://www.ciibroadcasting.com/2013/12/10/moazzam-begg-obama-tributes-to-madiba-ironic/
99
100
T. Holbrooks, A Dignified Detainee: A Gitmo Guard on Moazzam Begg, CAGE (May 12, 2004)
http://www.cageuk.org/article/dignified-detainee-gitmo-guard-moazzam-begg
101
M. Stephan, p. 69-71 , Civilian Jihad (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009).
102
13

forces in Egypt with over two million members. Its system for recruitment is complex and produces
supporters who are strongly committed to the organization. At first they avoided becoming directly
involved in the January 25
th
uprising in 2011 because the state security apparatus threatened to arrest
Mohammed Badie, their supreme guide, if its members participated. This avoidance did not last more
than 24 hours. By the 26
th
the Guidance Office succumbed to the demands of its younger members and
made it "obligatory" for its members to attend the massive demonstrations on January 28
th
; the "Friday
of Rage. It was this order from the Brotherhood that gave a boost to the early victory of the uprising;
Mubarak actually removed the Central Security Forces from the streets. Brotherhood members
gathered at the entrances to the mosques, and it was this support that helped to break down the wall of
fear. Following Mubaraks resignation the Muslim Brotherhood continued to hold massive
demonstrations in Tahrir Square every Friday.
103
In February 2011 the Brotherhood entered the nitty-
gritty game of politics. Mohammed Morsi and the future head of the Freedom and Justice Party, Saad
al Katatni, began to negotiate with the intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. The deal was for them to get
a larger share of power in return for calming down their supporters who were revolting in the streets.
Many Islamists cynically allowed themselves to become a part of the state security apparatus, thus
neutering their democratic and revolutionary potential. There was a sense of entitlement. When Morsi
was sworn in he congratulated the police for reforming themselves. Abuses by the security forces
remained rampant.
104
In the spring of 2012 Mohammad Morsi invited liberal and secular to the
constitutional committee, but they boycotted it and then complained that they had no input in the final
result.
105
Regardless, President Mohammed Morsi came into office with 13.2 million votes and had a
64% approval rating by the end of 2012.
106

A Pew Research poll revealed in the spring of 2013 that 60% of Egyptians prefer democracy
to any other kind of government and that they want Islam to play a major role in their democracy.
63% had a positive view of the Brotherhood and that was down only 7% from 2012.
107
Still, the 2011
uprising left the security apparatus intact, and the military regained the autonomy they had lost under
Mubarak. The Brotherhood was far more organized than the activists who sparked January 25
th
, but
were not a huge a threat to the military and all its privileges Khaled Fahmy made a similar observation
in late 2012;
We might have overwhelmed the police by sheer numbers, but we have not yet managed to
fundamentally reform the security sector. We might have brought down the July 1952 regime, but we
have not yet put in place a mechanism that would guarantee civilian oversight over the military. We
might have toppled the president and put him on trial, but we have not yet managed to find an
institutional way to curb the power of the presidency.
108

In early 2013, while most of Egypts population was and still is terribly impoverished, the Interior
Ministry spent over two million dollars to purchase 140,000 American-made tear gas bombs.
109
Egypts
military industrial complex has a long and very intimate relationship with Americas military industrial
complex. A close friend who is a Muslim pro-democracy activist and writer from Cairo more

103
E. Trager, The Unbreakable Muslim Brotherhood: Grim Prospects for a Liberal Egypt, The Washington
Institute (September-October 2011) http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/the-unbreakable-
muslim-brotherhood-grim-prospects-for-a-liberal-egypt
104
H. Kandil, Sisis Turn, London Review of Books (February 20, 2014) http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/hazem-
kandil/sisis-turn
105
T. el Tablawy, Egyptian Constitutional Committee Moves Ahead Amid Boycotts, Bloomberg (April 5, 2012)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-05/egyptian-constitutional-committee-moves-ahead-amid-
boycotts.html
106
M. Dunne, Legitimizing an Undemocratic Process in Egypt, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(January 9, 2014) http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/01/09/legitimizing-undemocratic-process-in-egypt/gxx4
107
Pew: Egyptians Favor Major Role for Islam in Politics, Woodrow Wilson Center (May 16, 2013)
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/islamists/article/pew-egyptians-favor-major-role-for-islam-politics
108
K. Fahmy, Dripping with Blood and Dirt, Al Ahram Weekly (December 20, 2014)
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/606/31/Dripping-with-blood-and-dirt.aspx
109
M. el Garhi, Egypt imports 140,000 teargas canisters from US, Egypt Independent (February 22, 2013)
http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/egypt-imports-140000-teargas-canisters-us
14

commonly known as Shimaa from Tahrir Square, has documented this very thoroughly. The army
controls 25-40% of the economy, the armed forces are not criticized or even remotely discussed in the
media, and the production of food and gas falls under the category of military secrets. Everything is
made, controlled, and owned by the military, which is an extension of American foreign policy
interests in the country.
110
The military cant be reinstalled if it never really went away; the deep state
was always there, the Western aid to it didnt end, and it was constantly making it impossible for
Mohammed Morsi to enact any reforms. Everything from American foreign policy interests to the
Egyptian police state propaganda was stacked against the Brotherhood.
111
The campaign of
delegitimization against Morsi and the Brotherhood was relentless and the biggest knife in the heart
was something very few outsiders could have expected; the violent counter-revolution.
I was in Egypt witnessing the aftermath of the military coup in the summer of 2013. I was
staying with what I thought were fellow socialist comrades who were supportive of democracy and
non-violent resistance in their country, and saw the connection between these goals and political Islam
in a Muslim majority country. I was gravely mistaken. Indeed, the modernized, secular Twitterati did
manage to bring together a critical mass in early 2011. I watched them abort all their efforts because
they did not want to become politically savvy. The English speaking, Westernized keyboard warriors
did not want to get involved with regular Egyptians. The regular Egyptians, the huddled masses
yearning to breathe free, elected the Muslim Brotherhood. They were quite dismayed at the electoral
accomplishments of the Islamists. Mohammad el Masry, an assistant professor in Department of
Journalism and Mass Communication at The American University in Cairo, exposed how dangerously
anti-democratic and violent these secular activists tend to be by debating on CNN a young, hip blogger
named Gigi Ibrahim in early 2013.
112
The Twitterati, such as Gigi, were spreading false information
about the severity of the Brotherhoods authoritarianism and were calling for a military coup. They
called for the same military that oversaw the horrific dispersal of Tahrir Square, the massacres at
Mohammad Mahmoud Street and Maspero, that routinely engages in sexual violence against female
protestors, that allowed the Port Said disaster to take place, and that imprisoned over 12,000 civilians in
military jails.
113
The young, hip, computer saavy, English speaking secularists did not want to make
concessions to gain popular support. Rather, they wanted to take it by force. They too, like some
Muslim Brotherhood members, felt entitled. Thinking that a military intervention is the only
ultimate solution to the Egyptian crisis indicates that many in the opposition are obviously using the
revolution rhetoric to accomplish their own political and personal purposes, writes Shimaa. Political
entities that are fully aware they can't get into power through legitimate means such as elections or
building up an alternative stronger long term form of resistance against the regime will more likely ask
for a military coup. They might be remnants of Mubarak's time opposition, or also from the neo-
controlled-opposition that came to the surface after the revolution. For sticking to her democratic,
non-violent, Islamic principles Shimaa was labeled as anti-revolutionary and an undercover member
of the Muslim Brotherhood.
114

The state propaganda machine was working overtime, the resentment was increasing, the
Brotherhoods inexperienced governance was dismal, and the US was obsessing over preserving the
Camp David Accords that the anti-Zionist Muslim Brotherhood couldve been a threat to. For about a
week in late June a few million Egyptians took to the streets and demanded the fall of the

110
S. Helmy, What you must know about the Egyptian military industrial complex, In Quest for Justice (January
3, 2013) http://inalllanguages.blogspot.com/2013/01/what-you-must-know-about-egyptian.html
111
M. Bradley, Egyptian TV Swayed Public Against Morsi, in Favor of Sisi, The Wall Street Journal (May 28,
2014) http://online.wsj.com/articles/egyptian-tv-swayed-public-against-morsi-in-favor-of-sisi-1401330765
112
Two Years On: Has Egypt Changed For The Better? CNN (January 25, 2013)
http://connecttheworld.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/25/two-years-on-has-egypt-changed-for-the-better/
113
P. Galey, The Day the Revolution Died, Blog (July 1, 2013) http://patrickgaley.com/2013/07/01/the-day-the-
revolution-died/
114
A. Helmy, When a Revolution calls for military rule, In Quest for Justice (February 27, 2013)
http://www.inalllanguages.blogspot.com/2013/02/when-revolution-calls-for-military-rule.html
15

democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.
115
However, many were paid by the old regime and others
were drinking up the anti-Islamist media pumped out by the authoritarian state. State propaganda
asserted over and over that Morsi was responsible for releasing a huge swath of dangerous militants
from prison. This is a myth. Morsi released 27 Islamists with criminal records during his time as
president while the military council released over 800.
116
Although millions were in attendance, the
number of people in Tahrir Square that has been parroted by the counterrevolution is absurd. The
figure, 33 million, doesnt make sense; that would be one third of Egypts population fitting into Tahrir
Square. This is a number that is twice the size the population of the more urban areas of Cairo. The
source for this number, 33 million, was, of course, the army, and then Gigi Ibrahim tweeted it. Still,
Mubarak couldnt get more than 100,000 supporters out into the streets at any time during his reign. It
cannot be denied that the Brotherhood proved to be inexperienced and dismal .
117
It also cannot be
denied that to think that the first democratically elected president in Egypts history would have been
able to solve all of the societal ills within a year, a year that was filled with obstacles placed in front of
him by the Western-backed deep state. This was a president who didn't even have control of the postal
service while Mubaraks men continued to dominate the state apparatuses, and this was combined with
a computer saavy, elitist opposition that was calling for violence, was calling for the military to
overthrow Egypts first democratically elected president. Shadi Hamid has used the Polity IV Index, a
trustworthy empirical technique that measures levels of autocracy and democracy in a country, to
define Morsi as no Mandela but also no autocrat. On a scale of 10 to 10, Morsi comes in at a 2.
The average score for countries in the middle of a democratic transition, whether they have a Muslim
majority or not, is also a 2. The Islamist, the religious traditional conservative Muslim, was a sincere
democrat with only minor majoritarian hang ups that are to be expected during a regime change in a
country that has survived on intense corruption for decades.
118
The far more severe betrayal of
democracy in Egypt did not come from the Islamist forces. Alaa Abdel Fattah, a darling of Western
secular leftist circles, called for the police to crackdown on the Nahda sit-in.
119
Meanwhile, a founder
of Tamarod, the campaign that led the protests with which the army rode in on, has admitted that they
were taking orders from the military. A peaceful transition to a democratic path suddenly
transformed into an Egyptian war on terror. The Tamarod movement has been linked to Egypts
interior ministry and several members have admitted to being in communication with the army.
120
This
campaign was not Islamic, was not democratic, was not non-violent, and such concepts are not alien to
one another.
121

Ive seen nothing to justify calling in the military to overthrow the elected government,
wrote Noam Chomsky in an e-mail to blogger and journalist Austin G. Mackell last summer. However
flawed the elections or objectionable the post-election policies, and I expect that the faith now often
expressed in the benign intentions of the military will prove severely misplaced.
122
While young, hip,
computer s saavy secularists who spearheaded the January 25
th
uprising were cheering the downfall of
the Muslim Brotherhood and attempting to portray it as anything other than a coup, the Muslim
Brotherhood continued to non-violently resist the states violence. They were punished severely for it

115
S. Frenkel, How Egypts Rebel Movement Helped Pave The Way For A Sisi Presidency, Buzzfeed (April 15,
2014) http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/how-egypts-rebel-movement-helped-pave-the-way-for-a-sisi-pre
116
H. Baghat, Who let the jihadis out? Mada Masr (February 16, 2014) http://www.madamasr.com/content/who-
let-jihadis-out
117
H. Kandil, Sisis Turn, London Review of Books (February 20, 2014) http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/hazem-
kandil/sisis-turn
118
S. Hamid, Was Mohammed Morsi Really an Autocrat? The Atlantic (March 31, 2014)
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/was-mohammed-morsi-really-an-autocrat/359797/
119
#OpEgypt #Egypt: "Prominent activist" comments on Nahda Sit-in
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKlp7VS-yvI&feature=youtu.be
120
121
122
A. Mackell, Noam Chomsky on Egypts Coup, The Moon Under Water (August 2, 2013)
http://austingmackell.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/noam-chomsky-on-egypts-coup/
16

in July outside the Republican Guards club in Cairo in which a peaceful sit-in was brutally attacked by
the police, leading to the deaths of 51 Muslim Brotherhood supporters.
123
Patrick Galey, a journalist
who has painstakingly documented the rise of the violent anti-Islamic counterrevolution in Egypt,
remarked that its supporters would rather see a military junta rule with impunity and autocracy than
see a democratic administration govern with fecklessness and error. Many people who call themselves
revolutionaries and advocates of democracy simply hate Islamism more than they love freedom.
124
In
mid-August came the violent dispersal of the al Nahda Square sit-in and the massacre at Rabaa al
Adawiya Square. Amy Austin Holmes, an assistant professor of sociology at the American University
in Cairo, visited the Rabaa sit-in the day before the security forces placed it under siege. The
atmosphere was relaxed. Children jumped on trampolines. Men were playing soccer, she wrote. A
woman wearing a black niqab embraced me when I told her in Arabic that I lived in Cairo. There was
no sense of impending doom. The massive, peaceful sit-in had become a city within a city. The
propaganda being pumped out by the state security apparatus was that the people in Rabaa were armed,
dangerous, Islamic terrorists. The people there did not have piles of weapons; they had piles of Qurans
and not everyone was a card-carrying member of the Brotherhood. Not a single one of my
interlocutors at Rabaa were members of the Brotherhood, wrote Amy Austin Holmes. A man she
interviewed called Morsi a loser and pleaded, We just want people to know we are peaceful. We are
not terrorists. Banners at the Rabaa sit-in included democratic slogans such as The People Want the
Return of President and The Army Threw Away my Vote. Unlike the re-taking of Tahrir Square in
the spring of 2011 and the protests in support of the coup of June 30, 2013 no horrific gang-rapes or
sexual assaults were recorded at the Rabaa sit-in. Ahmed Ali, the spokesman for the Ministry of
Defense, defended the massacre committed at Rabaa by the state security forces, saying When dealing
with terrorism, the consideration of civil and human rights are not applicable.
125
According to
Brotherhood sources roughly 2,600 people were killed in one day.
126
Human Rights Watch called it
the most serious incident of mass unlawful killings in modern Egyptian history.
127
I was staying in
the Smouha district of Alexandria when the Rabaa massacre occurred. It was only a few blocks away
from me. I witnessed a massive group of non-violent religious Muslim people walk home beneath my
balcony. Many grown men were crying like children and people threw rocks at them from their
apartment windows. I was told by the Revolutionary Socialist members that I was staying with that this
was necessary and that the Brotherhood had it coming. Four days later 37 non-violent pro-Morsi
demonstrators were gassed to death in the back of a police truck. 45 people were crammed into the
back of a tiny police truck parked in the court of Abu Zaabal prison for six hours in the sweltering heat
before tear gas canisters were thrown into the truck.
128
Again, it was the anti-Islamist forces who were
responsible for their deaths, and it was the civilian supporters like RevSoc who were either indifferent
or believed that they had it coming.
The assault on the non-violent Islamist sit-in at Rabaa was painfully reminiscent of the attack
on the non-violent demonstrations organized by Salafists in the Abbaseya district of East Cairo in the
spring of 2012. The police, the army, retired military personnel, and thugs paid by the government
attacked these peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations relentlessly. In late April of 2012 thousands of non-
violent revolutionary Islamist and Salafists, marched all the way to Abbaseya from Tahrir Square and

123
P. Kingsley, Killing in Cairo: the full story of the Republican Guards' club shootings, The Guardian (July 18,
2013) http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jul/18/cairo-republican-guard-shooting-full-story#part-
one
124
P. Galey, The Day the Revolution Died, Blog (July 1, 2013) http://patrickgaley.com/2013/07/01/the-day-the-
revolution-died/
125
A. Holmes, Before the Blood-letting: A Tour of the Rabaa Sit-In, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs
(August 16, 2013) http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=410
126
Egypt's Brotherhood to hold 'march of anger' Al Jazeera (August 16, 2013)
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/08/201381522364486906.html
127
Egypt: Security Forces Used Excessive Lethal Force, Human Rights Watch (August 19, 2013)
http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/08/19/egypt-security-forces-used-excessive-lethal-force
128
P. Kingsley, How did 37 prisoners come to die at Cairo prison Abu Zaabal? The Guardian (February 22,
2014) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/22/cairo-prison-abu-zabaal-deaths-37-prisoners
17

then decided to start the sit-in outside of the government headquarters. Paid government thugs attacked
the non-violent demonstrators with birdshot and machine guns. The Egyptian media claimed that all
these demonstrators were dangerous ultra conservative Salafists that had to be neutralized, even
though they were not violent and were joined by many secular activists from the April 6
th
and Kefaya
blocks. Amr El Desouky, A young man from our neighborhood and a family friend was shot today on
his way to the mosque and then died, wrote Shimaa, a resident of Abbaseya and a witness to the
government led assaults. It was all by the hands of the people in the neighborhood because he was
mistaken for a Salafi ultra conservative supporter of Abu Islamil and they thought he's helping the
revolutionaries against his neighborhood.
129
Still, one would be foolish to deny that there is a violent
element within these Islamist groups that occasionally rears its ugly head and only works to hurt their
campaign for democracy. One week before I left for Egypt in the mid-summer of 2013 a young
American Jew named Andrew Pochter, a young American Jew not very different from myself
considering his interests in the Middle East, was stabbed to death in Alexandria by a pro-Morsi
supporter as he watched the clashes between the pro-democracy Islamists and the anti-democratic
secular forces who supported the military coup. Andrew was an employee of the American cultural
center in Alexandria, he taught English to Egyptian children, and had been active in a dialogue group
on his college campus that addressed the Israel-Palestine conflict.
130

On August 16
th
, two days after the Rabaa massacre, I witnessed an enormous protest in
Alexandria that was dominated by non-violent, pro-democracy Islamists. It mustve been at least
several hundred thousand strong. It included people of all ages and many women. 99% of this
extremely impressive, massive, Gandhian example of civil disobedience was non-violent. The 1% of
this demonstration that was violent killed a man in front of me. A Christian taxi driver whose car had
broken down and was surrounded by the protestors. He was assaulted, stabbed, and beheaded.
Following the Rabaa massacre a lot of retaliatory violence ensued and it has hurt the Brotherhood just
as much as it has hurt the Christian community of Egypt. Churches went up in flames, I could smell
them burning, many Christian-owned businesses were smashed to pieces, and dozens were killed.
Criminal elements within the Brotherhood are playing into the states propagandistic narrative of being
the only thing that stands between religious intolerance and the non-Muslim minorities.
131
One must
keep events in a proper perspective in spite of the chaos; the violence against Egypt's Christians is
partially the fault of their leaders. They have tied the Christian community to the Sisi regime, thus
placing them in the cross-hairs in a similar fashion to how the Christian community of Iraq placed itself
in the cross-hairs by tying themselves to Saddam Hussein.
132
The violence against Egypts Christian
community is also partially the fault of the police. The security forces allow churches to be attacked
and they allow Christian owned businesses to be damaged. They are instructed to allow this to happen.
The state needs Islamist violence in order to justify the brutality it will dish out the next day. There
have been numerous incidents in which Christians have tried to calm down the Islamist riots outside
their churches, and it's the police who kill them.
133
Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State
Inside Out? was written by Paul Amar in 2011 and it looks at the history of sexual assault against
protesters as a police tactic in Egypt that evolved under the Mubarak regime. It also explores how
activist groups have responded, highlighting responses that try to move past using the state security
forces to combat the sexual terrorism that is committed against Egyptian women on a daily basis. Its
the secular security forces, and not the Islamists, who engage in sexual assault against protesters as well
as against prisoners. One of the major contradictions that emerged in a lot of the initial responses by

129
A. Helmy, What's really going on in Abbaseya? In Quest for Justice (May 3, 2013)
http://inalllanguages.blogspot.com/2012/05/whats-really-going-on-in-abbaseya.html
130
By Times of Israel Staff and AP, Jewish college student stabbed to death in Egypt protests, Times of Israel
(June 29, 2013) http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-citizen-killed-in-egypt-identified-as-jewish-college-student/
131
S. John, Coptic Christian cab driver beaten to death, beheaded in Egypt, Tavern Keepers (November 12,
2013) http://tavernkeepers.com/coptic-christian-cab-driver-beaten-to-death-beheaded-in-egypt/
132
M. el Masry, Egypts Secular Government Uses Religion as Tool of Oppression, Religion Dispatches (April
29, 2014) http://religiondispatches.org/egypts-secular-gov-uses-religion-as-tool-of-repression/
133
The Cathedral Martyr, Mosireen Video Collective (April 13, 2013)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N05OHedBos
18

groups that sought to use the police to fight sexual harassment is that they took on an anti-working
class and an anti-Islamist character. These are the kind of individuals who are systematically sexually
assaulted in Egypts prisons in the first place.
134
Consistently, time and again, it is the state, and not the
Islamist organizations, that are responsible for the most violence and the highest death tolls.
In not adhering to non-violent resistance the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters are
helping the state galvanize the propagandistic pretext that is used to justify and normalize the
massacres and repression. Hamas makes this same mistake. It ought not to fire rockets into Israel not
because Palestinians don't have the right to resist and retaliate against Israeli violence and oppression,
but rather because it's a purely symbolic and entirely ineffectual act that is seized upon by Israel and its
supporters as a justification for the terroristic mass murder that gets carried out in Gaza every two to
three years. Violence in these cases is a selfish and painfully irresponsible act, which is what Islam says
violence is in the first place. In a speech delivered before thousands of anti-coup protesters in July of
2013 the Muslim Brotherhood General Guide Mohamed Badie urged demonstrators to remain peaceful.
Our peacefulness is more powerful than bullets," he explained and quoted the following Quranic
verse; "Even if you extend your hand toward me to kill me, I will not extend my hand toward you to
kill you." While the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were acknowledging their mistakes and
working to reaffirm their adherence to Gandhian tactics of non-violent civil disobedience the computer
saavy ill-religious hipsters of RevSoc were trying to convince me that the Brotherhood would kill me if
I left the house. An extensive public record shows that they not merely supported, but played a vital
part in, a political conspiracy against the Egyptian working class, writes Chris Marsden for the World
Socialist Website, published by the International Committee of the Fourth International . This
conspiracy, he continues, consisted of the setting up of a front organization, known as Tamarod by
the Egyptian military and sections of the bourgeoisie closest to the former regime of Hosni Mubarak
and opposed to those sections allied with the Muslim Brotherhood. Through Tamarod, the
Revolutionary Socialist Party maintained its own connections to these bourgeois layers, working to
ensure their triumph in the coup of July 3. Unbeknownst to me and many other American activists
who dont listen enough to what the Islamist masses have to say, RevSoc organized a joint meeting
with Tamarod at its headquarters in Giza in May of 2013 and then issued a statement in late June that
was in support of the military coup of June 30
th
. It very easily, and very quickly, became another pawn
in the counterrevolution designed to abort the Egyptian Islamist campaign for democracy.
135

Mohammed Badie was sentenced to death last April, along with 682 others, for incitement to violence
that allegedly led to the death of a single police officer on August 14
th
; the day of the Rabaa massacre
in which the police murdered over 2,000 people.
136
"If they executed me one thousand times I will not
retreat from the right path," commented Badie at his sham of a trial. His son was murdered by the
Egyptian police in August of 2013.
137
One doesn't have to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood to
recognize and condemn the ongoing campaign to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood and their
supporters from Egyptian life. However, Badie's case should not be given more attention than the cases
of 682 other defendants also sentenced to death in Cairo by the same judge that used a mass death
sentence to condemn 529 Egyptians to death in March of this year.
138
Its the most severe mass death

134
P. Amar, Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside out? International Feminist Journal of
Politics (August 12, 2011)
http://www.global.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.gisp.cms/files/sitefiles/people/amar/Amar_article_IFJP_Secu
rityStateSexHarassmentEgypt_Aug2011.pdf
135
C. Marsden, How Egypts Revolutionary Socialists helped pave the way for military repression, World
Socialist Website (August 20, 2013) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/20/revs-a20.html
136
Egypt court sentences 683 people to death, Al Jazeera English (April 28, 2014)
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/04/egypt-court-sentences-683-people-death-
201442873249787688.html
137
Reuters, Brotherhood's Badie defiant after death sentence in Egyptian court (April 28, 2014)
http://news.yahoo.com/brotherhoods-badie-defiant-death-sentence-egyptian-court-133635079.html
138
S. Hamid, Time to Get Tough on Egypt Politico Magazine (March 25, 2014)
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/egypts-death-sentences-muslim-brotherhood-105002.html#.U7-
T9-mKC2y
19

sentence in Egypts modern history.
139
The state, and not Islam, is what encourages radicalism,
terrorism, and daily violence in the streets. It was Mubaraks crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood
forty years ago that birthed Al Qaeda. Repression of Islamists in Egypt was an essential stage in the
emergence of contemporary jihadism, Daniel Benjamin, formerly with the US State Department,
explains. As splinter groups that were significantly more radical than the Muslim Brotherhood
formed, Islamists became more violent. The current leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, was
tortured in prison under Mubarak.
140

In 2012 President Morsi placed Nassef Sawiris, the brother of the Tamarod-funder Naguib
Sawiris, on a travel ban for tax evasion and owing Egypt more than $2.1 billion. Nassef settled and
agreed to pay $1 billion between 2013 and 2017. Then the Sawiris brothers helped finance the military
coup that removed democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi.
141
Between July 3
rd
of 2013
and January 31
st
of 2014 over 2,500 civilians were killed by the police during clashes in the street. In
this same time frame over 17,000 people were wounded by the police and another 16,000 were
arrested. The whereabouts of many are unknown. By late May of 2014 the number of the imprisoned
jumped to 40,000. 89% of the arrests were based on political affiliations and over fifty people died due
to torture and medical neglect while in custody during this specific time frame. Over 900 of the
prisoners are children, almost 5,000 of them are college students in my age group, and another 16,000
of the detained are journalists.
142
The number of people killed in political violence in the summer after
President Morsi was overthrown by the military was more than twice as many as those killed in the
legitimately democratic protests that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. This is the work of the savior who
pulled Egypt from the clutches of the Muslim Brotherhood.
143
This is the end result of what John
Kerry called restoring democracy;
144
the worst massacres in the countrys modern history and the
most severe repression since the previous coup in 1952. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Norman
Finklestein at an anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia early in 2014. I spoke to him about the non-violent
resistance I witnessed in Egypt and my dismay at the counterrevolution that worked with the police-
state to crush democracy in its infancy. He offered some priceless insight;
"Fanatical athiests! Those Arab liberals, as the blood was being shed, they were absolutely insane
The absolute betrayal by the secular activists, absolutely shameful... American liberals did not
understand nor see it coming The massive non-violent resistance of the Muslim Brotherhood, day in
and day out, in the face of being massacred; it was admirable beyond words. It was GandhianThe
Egyptian liberals, they think they're so smart, they think the Muslims are so dumb... and it's just
shameful.
Today the Egyptian media is airing footage of coup supporters calling for Field Marshall Sisi to get
rid of the Muslim Brotherhood like Hitler did with the Jews.
145
The courts are sentencing hundreds of
people to death for their political affiliations. The secular fascists running the courts described the

139
A. Speri, Egypt Tries 683 Morsi Supporters a Day After Condemning 529 to Death, Vice News (March 25,
2014) https://news.vice.com/article/egypt-tries-683-morsi-supporters-a-day-after-condemning-529-to-
death?trk_source=homepage-in-the-news
140
D. Bandow, Pharaoh Al-Sisi Takes Control In Egypt: Obama Administration Sacrifices Security, Human
Rights, And Democracy, Forbes (January 20, 2014)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2014/01/20/pharaoh-al-sisi-takes-control-in-egypt-obama-
administration-sacrifices-security-human-rights-and-democracy/2/
141
Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris buys city's priciest co-op for $70M, New York Daily News (June 6,
2014) http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/egyptian-billionaire-nassef-sawaris-buys-city-priciest-co-
op-article-1.1820106
142
Over 40,000 detained and prosecuted since July, Wikithawra reports, Mada Masr (May 25, 2014)
http://www.madamasr.com/content/over-40000-detained-and-prosecuted-july-wikithawra-reports
143
S. Shukrallah, More Egyptians killed post-Morsi than during 2011 revolution: Rights groups, Ahram Online
(Januray 4, 2014) http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/90800/Egypt/Politics-/More-Egyptians-killed-
postMorsi-than-during--revol.aspx
144
P. Oborne, Egypt's 'democratic' referendum is a disgrace, The Telegraph (January 13, 2014)
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100254172/egypts-democratic-referendum-is-a-disgrace/
145
Get rid of MB like "Hitler did with the Jews" - Sisi supporter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixUw3f8F-o8
20

Islamist pro-democracy activists as demons who followed Jewish scripture.
146
The previously
mentioned mass death sentences have been praised and celebrated in Egyptian media and the Gandhian
non-violent, massive sit-in at Rabaa has been called a terrorist colony.
147
Saad Eddin Ibrahim,
Egyptian sociologist and chairman of Ibn Khaldoun Center for Human Rights, has called for the Sisi
regime to to turn schools and mosques in Egypt into jails, temporarily, to accommodate the number of
Muslim Brotherhood members, which is 700,000.
148
Those who won Egypts first free democratic
presidential elections are being murdered en masse and a grassroots revolution has de-evolved into a
seemingly endless war on terror. In destroying the Muslim Brotherhood, in engaging in rampant
Islamophobia, the activists who spearheaded the January 25
th
uprising have shattered their chances for
democracy and peace in their country. Dr Khalil al Anani, an adjunct professor of Middle Eastern
Studies at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in
Washington, DC believes that such intense fascism and rampant police state-terrorism is
unsustainable.
149
Unfortunately, today, its the likes of Gigi Ibrahim who is invited on The Daily Show
and lies through her teeth about the circumstances surrounding the military coup. The un-Islamic,
Westernized representatives of Egypts hipster-secularist fringe maintain their position in the limelight
while widespread demonstrations in support of President Morsi are ignored.
150
Its the likes of Sarah
Attia who shouldve been invited to speak on Jon Stewarts show. Shes a Egyptian mother of four
living in Canada and her husband, Khaled al Qazzaz, has been detained without charge in one of
Egypts most notorious torture chambers, Tora prison, for almost a full year. Khaled was invited to
work as the President's Secretary for Foreign Affairs, under Mohammed Morsi, and to work on the
improvement of human rights in Egypt. He was arrested July 3
rd
, the day of the military coup. Sarah
wears a hijab. Khaled has a beard. They are conservative religious Muslims who support the
Brotherhoods campaign for democracy. Such individuals are problematic for Western mainstream
media. Like most average Americans, Jon Stewart uncritically accepted the notion put forth by Gigi
Ibrahim that there are only two choices for the governments of the Arab-Muslim world; Islamist
authoritarianism or military authoritarianism.
151

Another choice for Jon Stewart wouldve been the family of Mohammed Soltan. Hes an
activist with the Anti-Coup Coalition; the umbrella organization led by the pro-democracy Islamist
supporters of President Morsi. Soltan is a 26 year old Egyptian-American, a graduate from Ohio State
University, he was on a Freedom Flotilla to Gaza with an acquaintance of mine from the UK, and he
returned to Egypt to work in the Brotherhoods organization's media center during the Rabaa sit-in. His
father, Salah Soltan, is a distinguished professor at Cairo University and a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood. Mohammed Soltan was arrested in August, remains imprisoned, and has lost over 70
pounds due to his hunger strike.
152
He is the only American citizen detained by the Egyptian military
junta, and he began his hunger strike in January of this year to protest his inhumane treatment and
imprisonment. The police broke his arm. Even at Rabaa, my brother would say [to Brotherhood
leaders]: This is your fault; you put us in this situation commented Omar Soltan, Mohammeds
brother, in a telephone interview with the Washington Post. He would say: When Morsi comes back,

146
Egypt court calls Islamists sentenced to die demons, NOW Lebanon, (June 2, 2014)
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/mena/549589-egypt-court-calls-islamists-sentenced-to-die-demons
147
Egyptian television celebrates mass death sentence Mada Masr (March 25, 2014)
http://www.madamasr.com/content/egyptian-television-celebrates-mass-death-sentence
148
Saad Eddin Ibrahim: 'Turn schools and mosques into jails for Muslim Brotherhood' MEMO: Middle East
Monitor (Januray 26, 2014) https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/africa/9441-saad-eddin-ibrahim-turn-
schools-and-mosques-into-jails-for-muslim-brotherhood
149
K. al Anani, Egypt's unsustainable 'republic of fear' Al Jazeera English (March 1, 2014)
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/02/egypt-unsustainable-republic-fe-201422395249657772.html
150
Top 5 Lies of Gigi Ibrahims @thedailyshow, Not George Sabra, Really (June 5, 2014)
Interviewhttp://notgeorgesabra.tumblr.com/post/87904977473/top-5-lies-of-gigi-ibrahims-thedailyshow-interview
151
S. Attia, My Husband's Been Detained in Egypt 320 Days Without Charge HuffPost Politics: Canada (June
4, 2014) http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/sarah-attia/khaled-al-qazzaz-egypt-jail_b_5445966.html?just_reloaded=1
152
C. Gubash, Hunger-Striking American Mohamed Soltan Faces Egyptian Court NBC News (April 1, 2014)
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/hunger-striking-american-mohamed-soltan-faces-egyptian-court-n68596
21

the situation will be different. You wont be able to make the same decisions you made.
153
A skeletal
Mohammed, unable to stand, had this to say to the judges last spring at his court hearing;
I have been falsely accused, mistreated, tortured, beaten, and humiliated; and I am from a new
generation which refuses to silently accept injustice without resisting it, a generation that defies the
impossible I refuse to give up any part of my Egyptian/American identity. Because I'll always love
this country no matter how much injustice it brings me and I'll always love America even though I
don't expect it to do anything to help me as an Arab/Muslim second class citizen If my life is the
price for freedom then that's a price I'm willing to pay.
154

Both Mohammed Soltan and Khaled al Qazzaz fall under the mujahideen definition, but the West sees
this as a negative. Meanwhile, both the American and European governments have worked to surround
the new dictatorship of Sisi with an air of legitimacy as he declares the Muslim Brotherhood, the
largest democratic party in Egypt, to be a terrorist organization.
155
In doing so the state-within-a state
that millions of Egyptian people depended upon has collapsed. Such a move has legalized the freezing
of the financial assets of over 1,000 charities, run by the Brotherhood, that provided health care and
food to millions of vulnerable people who had been neglected by the state for decades.
156
One of the
pillars of this community was Zainab al Ghazali; the founder of the Muslim Women's Association who
was very close to the Muslim Brotherhood. As a teenager she joined the Egyptian Feminist Union, but
eventually concluded that "Islam gave women rights in the family granted by no other society. When
she was 18 she founded the Muslim Women's Association. It had a membership of three million
people by the time it was dissolved by the Nasser regime in 1964. Hasan al Banna, the Brotherhoods
founder, invited al Ghazali to merge her organization with his and she took an oath of personal loyalty
to him. Her weekly lectures to women at the Ibn Tulun Mosque drew a crowds of three to five thousand
at a time. He organization offered Quranic lessons for women, published a magazine, ran an orphanage,
gave financial assistance to the needy, and she personally mediated family disputes. She was a
matriarch in every sense of the word.
157
Hasan al Banna was assassinated in 1949 after strongly
condemning the murder of Prime Minister Mahmoud an Nukrashi Pasha by a student member of the
Brotherhood. Hasan al Banna stated that such a terrorist act was blasphemous in Islam.
158
Following
Hasans assassination it was Zainab al Ghazali who worked to regroup the Muslim Brotherhood in the
early 1960s and was imprisoned by Nasser for her activities in 1965.
159
Released under Sadat in 1971
she penned an autobiography, Return of the Pharaoh, in which she details her imprisonment, abuse,
torture, and survival with the help of her faith. The Pharaoh who was murdering her people at the time,
and falsely accusing her of conspiring to violently overthrow the Egyptian government, was Nasser.
Today, the Pharaoh is Sisi. Mohammed Badie makes an appearance in Zainabs book. She writes about
a young boy who was arrested and sent to insult her while she was imprisoned. He refused and the
police beat him mercilessly. Today the Egyptian police state thinks that Mohammed Badie, 50 years
later, can be easily frightened by their terrorism. They are mistaken.
160

153
E. Cunningham, Egypt: American on hunger strike in Cairo prison The Washington Post (May 3, 2014)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/egypt-american-on-hunger-strike-in-cairo-
prison/2014/05/03/d20fc373-22e2-4186-a30e-b5a614d74a1e_story.html
154
Translation of Mohamed Soltan's Speech during his trial (May 12, 2014)
https://www.facebook.com/notes/hani-ammar/translation-of-mohamed-soltans-speech-during-his-
trial/10152129849811342
155
M. Dunne, Legitimizing an Undemocratic Process in Egypt, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(January 9, 2014) http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/01/09/legitimizing-undemocratic-process-in-egypt/gxx4
156
S. Aziz, The War on Terrors authoritarian template, CNN (January 14, 2014)
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/14/the-war-on-terrors-authoritarian-template/
157
P. Lewis, Zainab al-Ghazali: Pioneer of Islamist Feminism (Michigan History Journal: February 2014)
http://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/lewis_pauline.pdf
158
R. P. Mitchell, p. 68-69, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford University Press: 1993).
159
P. Lewis, Zainab al-Ghazali: Pioneer of Islamist Feminism (Michigan History Journal: February 2014)
http://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/lewis_pauline.pdf
160
Z. al Ghazali, Return of the Pharoah (Media Islam: August 13, 2009)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18540888/Return-of-the-Pharaoh-Memoirs-in-Nasirs-Prison
22

Indeed, Egypt has seen its Islamist dominated democratic aspirations crumble before. In
1952 Gamal Abdel-Nasser and his junta staged a coup that overthrew the monarchy, suspended
parliamentary activity, and relentlessly persecuted the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser used his
tremendous popularity to lay the foundations for a military dictatorship and to build a cult of
personality around himself. It was un-democratic, un-Islamic, and certainly very violent. Muslim
Brotherhood members and supporters were subjected to horrific torture in the prisons and the effect on
the country was catastrophic.
161
A few years before Nassers coup, in 1946, a pious intellectual from
the village of Qaha published an article entitled Schools for Handwriting. This was the start of his
intellectual commitment to Islamic thought. In his writing he came down hard on the growing
corruption in Egyptian society and called upon his fellow Muslims to become more active in the
department of public reform. He was adamantly against the status quo, calling it material and deprived
of spiritual values. This was Sayyed Qutb; author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and the leading
member of the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1950s to the 1960s. One of his most widely known
works, Social Justice in Islam, was published in 1948. He came to the conclusion that true social
justice, which is the anticipation of humankind, cannot be achieved unless it is under Islamic order; we
ought to have literature that stems from Islamic perceptions. In 1949, after spending time on US soil,
he described American culture as one that does not care for spiritual values and that Western
civilization was a falsity. Upon his return to Egypt in 1951 he exposed the illegitimacy of the
schools curriculums; they were put in place by the British government, by the foreign occupier
wreaking havoc in his land. Sayyed Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood right before Nassers coup of
1952 and quickly became the most prominent intellectual of the organization.
162
Qutb and the Muslim
Brotherhood the coup at first. After all, it was against the Marie Antoinetts of their society who served
the British occupation forces. Nasser would often visit Qutb to discuss the revolution for hours a day.
The Brotherhood trusted Nasser to establish a democracy based on Islam. government. Soon the
fascistic, secular nationalist ideology of Nasserism came to the forefront, and the Brotherhood would
not kneel.
Sayyed Qutbs mistake was Syrias mistake; falling for the seductive qualities of an ill-
religious nationalism. Again, Islam was not the problem. When Syria gained its independence in the
spring of 1946 its national flag was green, white, and black with three red stars. It had been flown as
early as 1932 and it was an important rallying symbol for Syrians opposed Frances broken promises of
troop withdrawal following the outbreak of WWII. It remains, in the eyes of many, Syrias most
revolutionary flag because its represents a time of armed resistance and self-defense against the savage
violence of foreign occupiers. Upon the birth of the United Arab Republic and Gamal abd al Nassers
rise to power in both Egypt and Syria, the flag was altered; it became red, white, and black with two
green stars. Because of its socialist and pro-Soviet leanings Syrias Baath Party shouldve been seen as
an ally by Nasser, but this is not what transpired. His single party, the National Union, not only
replaced the Baath Party but he also completely rigged the elections. The Baathists won only a small
percentage of the seats in parliament while the elitist urbanized Sunni bourgeoisie was handed the
majority.
163
Meanwhile, Lebanese President Camille Chamoun opposed Nasser and saw the UAR, as
well as the growing personality cult, as threat to the fragile stability in the region, and he was
absolutely right. By the spring of 1958 a civil war broke out in Lebanon between Chamouns Maronite
supporters and those within the Muslim and Druze communities who politically aligned themselves
with Nasser. Many were still pining for a possible unification with Syria. As far as Nasser was
concerned the military coup in Iraq had removed all obstacles to complete Arab unification.
164

However, what he saw as solidarity, many Syrians saw as imperialism. The military was festering and
growing restless; an election had been rigged. A group of Syrian Ba'athist officers who were alarmed

161
K. Fahmy, Dripping with Blood and Dirt, Al Ahram Weekly (December 20, 2014)
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/606/31/Dripping-with-blood-and-dirt.aspx
162
Sayyed Qutb: A Profile from the Archives, Jadaliyya (May 11, 2014)
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17654/sayyed-qutb_a-profile-from-the-archives
163
R. Stephens, p. 337, Nasser: A Political Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971).
164
S. Aburish, p. 164-166, Nasser: The Last Arab (New York: St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books, 2004).
23

by the partys poor position and the increasing fragility of the union with Egypt formed a secret
military committee to address these issues. It was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Muhammad Umran,
Major Salah Jadid and an air force captain who had flown over Cairo in support of Nassers
nationalization policies; Hafez al Assad, who would eventually become one of the biggest monsters in
the lives of Syrian people. This military committee was originally formed in an effort to preserve the
Baath Party and the UAR at the same time.
165
The Baath Party's Third National Congress in 1959 had
supported Michel Aflaq's decision to dismantle it, but only one year later at the next National Congress,
in which Jadid was a delegate, the decision was reversed. They wanted to democratize the union from
within. By 1961 Syria shook off the UAR.
166
Syrias union with Egypt and falling for the seduction of
Nasserism, although temporary, had proven to be one of the biggest mistakes in the countrys history.
In secret Nasser created an organization, a counterrevolution, that would place a boot on the
neck of the Muslim Brotherhood; Tahreer. The Brotherhood remained the best blueprint for democracy
considering their popular grassroots support and their extensive social welfare programs in Egypt.
Nasser felt entitled. Once Qutb became aware of Nassers anti-democratic, anti-Islamic, violent
impulses he ended all cooperation with him.
167
In 1954 Sayyed Qutb began his stint in all of Egypts
most notorious prisons; Al-Kal'a Prison, Military Prison, Abu Zabal Prison, and Liman Torah Prison.
He was sentenced to 15 tears in 1955 and served 10 before being paroled. Those ten years is when he
built his greatest weapons; his books. In the Shadows of the Koran, Characteristics of Islamic
Perception, This Religion, Islam and Problems of Civilizations, The Future is for This Religion, and
Islamic Studies were all written behind bars. The Hellish conditions he witnessed in multiple prisons
during his decade of detainment, including the torture and murder of many Muslim Brotherhood
members, left him feeling convinced that only a government bound by Islamic law could prevent such
abominations against God and humanity. To him Nasser epitomized the jahiliyya; the violent ignorance
that Prophet Mohammed fought against. Sayyed Qutb was arrested once again in 1965 with several
other prominent Muslim Brotherhood members on the charge of conspiracy to overthrow the
government. It would be his last arrest. He was sentenced to death and the sentence was carried out in
August of 1966.
168
The intellectual. The proponent of democracy. The jihadist. The mujahideen. The
shaheed. The one who is martyred for his tongue. One needs to look no further than the Ikhwan
whose platform, even now in the face of annihilation, calls for dignity, justice, and reaffirms that these
are Islamic values. The organization still lives and breathes Caliph Omars question; How do you
enslave people while their mothers gave birth to them free?
169

Indeed, the anti-Islamic culture of corruption and fascism that Nasser left behind is plaguing
Egypt all the way up until today. History repeated itself in 2013, Egypt is witnessing the worst
repression since 1952, and the enemy is not Islam. Recently the stated controlled Ministry of Islamic
Religious Affairs announced that they will cancel the annual Ramadan Taraweeh in several big
mosques in Cairo. This is happening for the first time in the country's history. Not even Nasser or Sadat
pushed it this far. Its similar to what the Russian and Chinese regimes do to their Muslim minorities,
but this is Muslim-majority Egypt.
170
Its painfully reminiscent of the Syrian Baathist restrictions
placed on mosques by the Assad clan over the past few decades beginning with Hafezs coup in 1970.
The political career of Syrian President Hafez al Assad illustrates the inability of the Arab bourgeoisie
to realize the aspirations of the Arab masses for freedom from foreign domination, democracy and
social justice. His strong measures were clearly the end result of a weak regime, and the mosques are
where religious leaders spearhead the growth of civil rights movements, from Syria to Egypt to

165
S. Moubayed, p. 260, Steel & Silk: Men and Women Who Shaped Syria 1900-2000 (Seattle: Cune; 2006).
166
P. Seale, p. 60, The Struggle for Syria (Royal Institute of International Affairs: Oxford University Press, 1965).
167
A. Rahnama, p. 175, Pioneers of Islamic Revival (Palgrave MacMillan: 1994).
168
Sayyed Qutb: A Profile from the Archives, Jadaliyya (May 11, 2014)
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17654/sayyed-qutb_a-profile-from-the-archives
169
170
Egypt tightens grip on mosques, World Bulletin (June 8, 2014)
http://www.worldbulletin.net/headlines/138461/egypt-tightens-grip-on-mosques
24

Palestine.
171
Even though Egypts Muslim Brotherhood represents the majority and would win
democratic elections time and again, theres a reason why they are, and continue to be, annihilated by
the Egyptian security state with American weaponry.
172
Theres a reason why ethnic cleansing,
genocide, and wide scale repression against Muslim-majority people does not illicit much international
condemnation; the masses are a threat to the established order, and their weapon is Islam.
173
Obituaries
of political Islam are only wishful thinking on the part of fanatical secularists. Shadi Hamid writes,
The lesson of the Arab Spring isnt that Islamist parties are inimical to democracy, but that
democracy, or even a semblance of it, is impossible without them.
174
Ironically to some, it was Egypt
under Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in 2012 who proved to be beneficial towards conflict
resolution in regards to Israels assault on Gaza that particular year. He did not bend to the West but
supported the Palestinians at the same time, and without upsetting the Israelis. There was finally some
balance in the region; a neighboring Islamist pro-democracy government successfully brokered an
agreement between Israel and Hamas. Its July 2014; Israel is committing a massacre in Gaza again,
and Morsi is not here to get the warring sides to speak to one another while easing traveling restrictions
for Palestinians fleeing for their lives across the Rafah border.
175
The secular hipster Twitteratti of
Egypt labeled Morsi a Zionist collaborator for such a heinous transgression. The coup and its
supporters represent everything that Prophet Mohammad fought against; a violent ignorance. The best
option now is, again, the Palestinian option, which is also the Islamic option; non-violent resistance, a
widespread unarmed intifada, a civilian jihad.
As previously mentioned, one certainly does not need to be a devout practicing Muslim to be a
servant of God. A non-Muslim example of a true mujahideen would be the fire fighters who ran,
without question, into the collapsing Twin Towers in effort to rescue people while knowing they were
running towards an inferno from which they would not come out alive.
176
Indeed, to live a life in
service of ones fellow human beings is a priority within Islam.
177
It highly values human life and
bodily protection for each and every individual. Sura 5, Ayat 29, describes how God has breathed his
spirit into every person, thus making them alive. This suggests that every individual is a vessel for
God.
178
The only times the Quran actually permits a call to arms is in self-defense against religious
persecution or in the defense of others who are facing down a catastrophe and are screaming for help.
All aggression is to be viewed as a last resort and only in the face of utter annihilation. Sura 4, Ayat 75
states the following;
And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak are ill-treated (and
oppressed)? Men, women and children, whose cry is Our Lord! Rescue us from this town, whose
people are oppressors; and raise for us from Thee One who will protect; and raise for us from Thee One
who will help!
179

Sura 5, Ayat 32, cannot be said enough; And if any one saved a life it would be as if he saved the life
of the whole people.
180
Man-made death machines, such as nuclear warheads, constitute a severe

171
172
M. Stephan, p. 74-75, Civilian Jihad (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009).
173
174
S. Hamid, The Brotherhood Will Be Back (The New York Times: May 23, 2014)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/opinion/more-democratic-less-liberal.html?_r=0
175
A. Taylor, The man the Israeli-Palestinian crisis needs most? Egypts Mohamed Morsi, Washington Post
(July 9, 2014) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/07/09/the-man-the-israeli-palestinian-
crisis-needs-most-egypts-mohamed-morsi/
176
Transcript of Interview with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson by Michael Enright on the September 11
Tragedy, (September 23, 2001). http://www.ihyaproductions.com/articles/hyCBCtranscript.htm
177
178
179
180
25

violation of divine law because they have the power to destroy the world. The argument can be made in
an Islamic context that all modern weaponry should count as being weapons of mass destruction, from
the simple handgun to the fighter jet.
181
Because Islam permits only the bare minimum of physical
violence, and the typical WMD cannot distinguish between combatants and non-combatants (plus
having the capability to destroy the entirety of Gods creation hundreds of times over) such modern
weaponry is a grave offence to the Almighty.
182
On the contrary, conscience and courage are defined as
weapons in Islam.
183
Defending the Islamic faith is synonymous with resisting against external
oppression and ones own potential for violence.
184
Gods laws are highly valued because these
restrictions are necessary to guide and keep human nature in order and under control.
185
Working
towards external justice is a struggle that parallels the fight against the evil within each individual
human heart.
Repression of Muslim people by the governments ruling over them is done in the service of
the West and with the backing of only the most fascist, ill-religious elements within their society. What
remains consistent is the Arab despots who work to support American and European security and
economic interests in the region in exchange for keeping their authoritarian dictatorships standing
tall.
186
This is the main modern Arab political problem; entire countries are run by a wealthy, ill-
religious, elitist set of minorities as if these lands are private clubs and the democratic desires of the
majority population remain subverted. Rami G. Khouri explains further;
From the perspective of ordinary men and women and faith-based political groups throughout the
Arab world, the citizen activism, resistance, defiance, and religious based leadership of Islamist
movements that have challenged the prevailing Middle Eastern Order echo many of the sentiments that
drove the US civil rights movement two generations ago. Israeli, Arab, and US and other Western
leaders view the Islamist mass movements across the region as a serious threat that must be fought,
isolated, and contained.
187

By todays standards of police state expansionism, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. would be labeled a
terrorist in American media. He would become the title of Moazzam Beggs autobiography; an enemy
combatant. Felony charges against Dr King, if he was around and active today, would lock him up for
the rest of his life, hed never have gotten the opportunities to engage in so much civil disobedience in
the first place, and hed probably never even have his day in court. Thanks to the Patriot Act the
relentless FBI harassment that tried to suffocate Dr King throughout his entire adult life would be a
hundred times more malicious today, and thered be no judicial oversight.
188

As much as we are all praying for the next Martin Luther King, or perhaps the next
Salahuddin, Muslims and non-Muslims alike must not fall prey to ill-religious idol worshipping, thus
succumbing to inferior man-made authoritarian methods of, dare I say, a faux jihad . Human leadership
must not be romanticized. Cults of personality are severely counter-revolutionary. Sura 2, Ayat 216
warns it may well be that you hate something that is in fact good for you, and that you love a thing
that is bad for you.
189
What is of the utmost importance is that the people are empowered in such a
way that their spokesperson must bend to their will. This is an Islamic value, as well as a democratic

181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
G. Parrish, Martin Luther King: Terrorist? Alter Net (January 18, 2004)
http://www.alternet.org/story/17594/martin_luther_king%3A_terrorist
189
26

one. The people are the revolution, and therefore, God is with them, and not with this party or that
leader, and most definitely not the state. Todays Arab despots and dictators continue to legitimize their
sham elections not with Gods help, but rather with assistance from regional and international powers
who are interested in maintaining the status quo.
190
Indeed, as Gandhi said, The state represents
violence in a concentrated and organized form.
191
The will to disobey, to shake the earth when tyranny
rises, and to speak the truth even if it means ones torture and death are imminent are all prominent
Islamic values.
192
However, the state, the regime, the Western puppet, subverts the revolutionary
potential of Islamist states-within-states as soon as they begin to make compromises.
193
Working for
peace does not have a finish line. Justice is the final result of an endless struggle to keep oppression at
bay.
194
Peace is not only the absence of violence. Peace must be just and we must tirelessly work to
eliminate the factors that set the stage for war in the first place. This is not a hobby; this is a
commitment. Verses 23-45 of the Sura al Ghafir exposes an obscured part of the story of Moses. Its
about a man who served the Pharoah and kept his support for Moses hidden. Eventually the wall of fear
breaks down and he comes forth with his beliefs;
195

And O my people! How is it that I call you to salvation while you call me to Hellfire? You invite me
to disbelieve in Allah and to associate partners in worship with Him of which I have no knowledge
[whereas] I invite you to the Omnipotent, the Forgiving!
196

Moses victory against the tyrannical Pharaoh includes the destruction of the tyrant by drowning in the
ocean with his supporters and with the salvation of the believers.
197
Sura 28, Ayat 4-6 of Surat al Qasas
summarizes the immense tyranny that Moses was up against and how righteous his battle was;
"Pharaoh exalted himself on earth, and divided the people into factions. He persecuted a group of them,
slaughtering their sons and sparing their daughters. He was verily a corrupter. And we wished to
bestow grace on those who were oppressed, to make them leaders and make them inherit the earth, and
to grant them power and, at their hands, show Pharaoh and Haman and their soldiers what they had
feared."
198

Moses had to tirelessly work to enlighten the enslaved and to win their trust in the face of immense
authoritarianism. Moses victory did not happen overnight. The anonymous man mentioned in the Sura
al Ghafir, who eventually sees the light, personifies the struggle of the oppressed whom only non-
violent resistance can free; to be torn in half between the tyranny of the oppressor and the injustice
committed by the oppressed in a misguided effort to free themselves. Every dictator, every despot, will
have an ocean of frightened collaborators who will be the first to condemn a Prophet and the last to
become one of his followers. Indeed, if a dissident concerned with human rights does not encounter a

190
R. G. Khouri, Blame the State for Sham Arab Democracy, The Daily Star (June 7, 2014).
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2014/Jun-07/259203-blame-the-state-for-sham-arab-
democracy.ashx#ixzz33xraCsVa
191
192
193
194
195
O. S. Summary of the Surah Ghafir, Institute of Knowledge (June 7, 2013)
http://www.instituteofknowledge.com/index.php/education/school/item/217-summary-of-surah-ghafir/217-
summary-of-surah-ghafir
196
Surah al-Ghafir, Verses 23 45. Al Islam http://www.al-islam.org/enlightening-commentary-light-holy-quran-
vol-16/surah-al-ghafir-verses-23-45
197
O. S. Summary of the Surah Ghafir, Institute of Knowledge (June 7, 2013)
http://www.instituteofknowledge.com/index.php/education/school/item/217-summary-of-surah-ghafir/217-
summary-of-surah-ghafir
198
Quran. Surat al Qasas 28:4-6 http://quran.com/28/4-6
27

pushback from the unenlightened masses, he or she is doing something wrong. This is what it means to
surrender to God and do His work in an Islamic context.
199

The issue of violence remains at home in Islams moral realm, only the bare minimum of it is
actually permitted by the Quran and the Hadith, and a violence that is incapable of discriminating
between combatants and non-combatants is absolutely blasphemous.
200
Although violence is not ruled
out 100%, the only episodes of violence that are even remotely acceptable must be miniscule and
defensive.
201
Sura 6, Ayat151 commands Take not life which Allah hath made sacred, except by way
of justice and law.
202
Non-violent resistance is a synthesis of religion and politics. It is, dare I say, a
political Islam. True conflict resolution occurs only when people have their basic needs met. This is a
matter of dignity and security above all else. Those being victimized by the conflict around them are
the only ones who can correctly define what their needs are.
203
One factor that prevents campaigns of
non-violent resistance from being as effective as they could be in the Arab/Muslim world is that the
international condemnation of their repression remains to be seen. International solidarity and
widespread public outrage at the subsequent repression are essential to the success of a civil
disobedience campaign.
204
Unfortunately, Arabs and Muslims do not fit the Western definition of
human. The enemies are the same for everyone; the tribalized imperialism of the merciless Arab
dictators who turn entire countries into prisons above ground and mass graves below ground, the
severely detrimental effect of Zionism on peoples security and stability, and the terribly irresponsible
US foreign policy that usually does more harm than good.
205
Because the oppressors are the same, and
because of the adherence to tawhid; the Islamic value of unity, an internationalism has the potential to
prosper. Today its Rajmohan Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhis grandson, who spends time in the
Palestinian village of Bilin where there are daily non-violent protests against Israels aggression in the
form of the construction of the separation barrier.
206
Today its Sheikh Hamza Yusuf who sends
condolences to the parents of Rachel Corrie following her death, writing that a just and merciful God
would not allow what she did for the voiceless, homeless and forgotten to fall into oblivion.
207
To find
strength we only need to look in the mirror and realize our power. In the words of Ghaffar Khan;
I want to create for them a free world, where they can grow in peace, comfort, and happiness. I want
to kiss the earth heaped on the ruins of their homes devastated by brutal people I want them to stand
on their legs with heads erect, and then want to throw this challenge: Show me another decent, gentle
and cultured race like them!
208

199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
R. Mackey, Gandhis Advice for Israelis and Palestinians, The New York Times (July 12, 2010).
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/gandhis-advice-for-israelis-and-
palestinians/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1
207
Hamza Yusuf, Facebook post (March 16, 2012).
https://www.facebook.com/ShaykhHamzaYusuf/posts/10152231783966544
208

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