Opinion

Reminding Muslims of the deliberately ignored duty at Hajj: bara’ah min al-mushrikin!

Abu Dharr

Dhu al-Hijjah 05, 14322011-11-01

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It is that time of the year again. Muslims from far and near prepare themselves for the lifelong journey to Ibrahim’s (a) final destination, to the emigre home of Hajar, to the life-threatened birth of Isma‘il (a), to the expatriate city of Muhammad (pbuh) and to the cradle of Islam — to Makkah al-Mukarramah.

It is that time of the year again. Muslims from far and near prepare themselves for the lifelong journey to Ibrahim’s (a) final destination, to the emigre home of Hajar, to the life-threatened birth of Isma‘il (a), to the expatriate city of Muhammad (pbuh) and to the cradle of Islam — to Makkah al-Mukarramah. This is the time of year when Muslims from all corners of the earth embark on a mission to express their equality among each other and their humbleness and subordination to the might and majesty of Allah (swt). One of the most important, if not the most important aspects of the Hajj is the bara’ah min al-mushrikin (exoneration from the mushriks).

All Muslims should know, contrary to Saudi official and educational acculturation, that the Prophet of Allah (pbuh) instructed both Abu Bakr (as) and ‘Ali (as), in the year prior to his final Hajj (Hajjah al-Wada‘), to proclaim the first 29 ayat of Surah Bara’ah (al-Tawbah) within which is a declaration to sever all dependency or expedient political and military ties with mushrik power centers. The public mind in Makkah during the Hajj and the ‘Umrah should be one that reiterates and reaffirms this bara’ah min al-mushrikin. Alas, today’s Saudi controlled Hajj is void of this Qur’anic and Prophetic component — or should we call it faridah (obligation)? To the delight and advantage of the mushriks, the Saudi manipulated Hajj has been void of this bara’ah ever since the Saudi royals themselves hitched their security and their rule upon the very mushriks that are mentioned in the ayat of Surah Bara’ah.

This all brings us to a more fundamental question: why have the Muslims themselves accepted such an omission to their Hajj? To spare ourselves a PhD thesis we summarize it briefly: the Muslim public has been de-programmed by the royals in power ever since Mu‘awiyah, the son of Abu Sufyan, to omit anything approaching an Islamic public political mind in matters that pertain to the governance; especially in the area of power acquisition and power distribution. This historical erosion of the Islamic political mind winds up today with a Hajj that has no bara’ah min al-mushrikin component to it.

The popular Muslim mind, though, is catching up. The Saudi-American royals will soon be having their own nightmares knowing that Makkah and Madinah are only years away from becoming what they were intended to be: the Islamic twin-cities of liberation, liberty, and justice for all. Watch out Aal Saud! The Muslims are coming.

If we the Muslims had a healthy and robust Islamic public mind or a culture of confidence, in these history making days we would energetically declare our political, economic, and military distance from the mushriks of the world. As these words are penned, for the first time since the bloody coup d’etat of King Mu‘awiyah some 14 centuries ago, we see with our own eyes the political progeny of Mu‘awiyah either scramble for their lives or retain lawyers-for-hire in their court battles, or face the executioner, or prepare for a life of infamy somewhere in the world that will accommodate their excellencies and their highnesses.

The military clone of Mu‘awiyah, who rode roughshod over his people, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, his chilling execution, as well as his perilous last minutes have definitely sent shock waves through the mushrik-maintained rulers of Arabia and Arabdom. The disease-riddled bodies of their highnesses in Arabia paralleled with their toxic notions of Islam — more rituals than deeds, more customs than ideology, and more sin than sacrifice — are beginning to disintegrate. Crown Prince Sultan ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, a day or two after Qaddafi’s pictures were going viral, could not take it any longer, so he joined his fellow usurper of power.

For the first time since Mu‘awiyah, we have another Muslim country — Tunisia — expressing itself without a sword and a security system smothering its socio-political soul. This is truly history in the making: for the first time in 1,400 years an Arabic-speaking people are going to the ballot boxes and electing the decision makers for their whole country. In Tunisia and certainly in Libya the mushriks are there to try to divert the political future of these two countries — Islamists or no Islamists — to serve their imperial national interests.

The mother of all mushriks — the United States government — is trying hard to co-opt these populations who are breaking away from dictatorships and autocracies that were in the span of their own terms of office the clients and agents of imperialism and Zionism. It does not surprise us that the mushriks do not want their former political couriers and economic brokers to be brought to a court of law where the Muslim citizens can take a look at what was really happening between slave and master, between imperial powers that dictate and client regimes that implement. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi owe their people an explanation and a detailed account of their reign. But the mushriks will not allow it.

Never has there been anger and odium against the mushrik imperialists among the Muslims of the world as there is nowadays. From the most deprived rural areas to the most sophisticated metropolises in Asia and Africa the US government is public enemy number one. Can anyone blame them? Some of them are occupied by hundreds of thousands of US military forces, others are victims of a new form of US warfare: drones in the sky. Still more are subjected to economic terms and conditions that serve the US and do disservice to the Muslims, while the remainder are living with American military bases scattered all over: on land and sea, as well as orbiting satellites above. The mushriks (and the word mushrik does not mean polytheist or unbeliever) in corporate America cannot contain ordinary (non-Muslim) Americans from declaring their bara‘ah. The Occupy Wall Street Movement might be the harbinger of a worldwide rebellion against the mushriks: the rebellion of the world’s 99%.

Our Hajj, by imperialist design and by Saudi enforcement, does not have a bara’ah element associated with it; but the world — without Islamic rituals — is expressing this forcefully hushed-up bara’ah. More courageous than many Muslims who do not want to be arrested in the Hajj for this bara’ah, many non-Muslims are being arrested in the US and around the world because they have the kind of political mind and thinking that has been taken away from the Muslims by illegitimate rulers in all these years.

Can anyone do the math? In the US, it is said, 1% of the population has 25% of the wealth, and 5% of the population have around 45% of the wealth; that leaves more than 90% of the American population with less than half the wealth. In Arabia, we are sure the contrast is even sharper and more severe. Yet, we have a people’s movement in America but we do not have a people’s movement in Arabia. Why? Because you can comfortably say that America has never had its Mu‘awiyahs, its Saddams, and its Qaddafis. This is not to say that the US does not have its own evil rulers; it does. But they are more sophisticated and more subtle about their injudiciousness and tyranny. They know how to manage their colonial and imperial projects well. But it appears like they do not know how to manage their decline.

The US government officials do not appear as confident in front of the cameras as their predecessors. They look edgy, troubled, and sometimes undiplomatic, scrambling for the appropriate words. You only have to look closely at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the kid to know what is being talked about.

For all of those politically naive Muslims who were happy with Obama’s election, or the other Muslims who said that a “brother” has been elected to the White House — to all these callow Muslims: do you now know why Obama was elected to be Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief? It is because the mushriks needed a black man in the White House to give them a grand publicity head-start on the war(s) they have been plotting against Africa and against the Muslims. How does Obama, the political slave of mushriks, appear to you today? There is not the slightest fiber of integrity in the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. His impresarios and handlers now have him reading a scripted diatribe against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel are all working in tandem against the Islamic Republic of Iran. If only now 99% of Christians could see the destructive foreign policy of the US, and if only 99% of Jews could see the calamitous foreign policies of Israel, and if only 99% of Muslims could see the ruinous foreign policies of Saudi Arabia, the world would certainly have reached its age of maturity and rid itself of the evil 1% that has divided humanity into ethnic conflicts, race wars, and corporate conflagrations.

The US and Israel (with Saudi connivance) are trying to instigate majority versus minority wars in Muslims countries. And as Providence would have it, they themselves are beginning to realize that their 1% “majority” is beginning to face off with the 99% “minority”. The US decision makers are trying to divert American and worldwide attention away from their banking failures and economic problems to what they call the “Arab Spring”; and the way things are going the Arab Spring is turning into an American Winter.

How many more poor Americans are needed to kill poor Muslims after which all economic potentials are drained and the warmongers wake up and realize that nothing much has been accomplished or that the whole policy is coming back to haunt them?

If only we could put the justice seeking minds of Americans on the ritualistic inhibited body of Muslims we would come up with a bara’ah min al-mushrikin extending from Makkah to New York and from the Haram to Wall Street,

“Bara’at from Allah and His Rasul [is herewith declared] to those mushriks with whom who have accords [and treaties]…” (9:01).

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