The Elephant in the Room – Abdassamad Clarke

The elephant in the room is of course not Islam, since the Muslims are everywhere under occupation, being bombed, killed and driven from their homes by warfare or famine, often the consequences of geo-politics or globalisation.

The issue that will not go away is the imperial power of the US as the foremost representative of the banking hegemony. It is easy to get this out of perspective and only see it as an issue of nation-states, which is a kind of modern personality politics, but there is no avoiding first of all looking carefully at the US and its role in geo-politics.

Until extraordinarily recently historically, the US was slaughtering its native peoples and driving the survivors onto reservations to eke out their existence in humiliation and poverty. Now the market economy has rewarded them with casinos and nuclear waste dumps.

At the same time, utilising the racist early version of manifest destiny called ‘the white man’s burden’, untold numbers of black people were taken as slaves in brutal conditions to the Americas where they were to languish right until today, still being regarded as slightly less than human in spite of the language of civil rights and the successes of people whom black people themselves regard as ‘coconuts’: Colin Powell and Barak Obama et al.

Since its civil war, the US has basically insisted on being at war elsewhere on the planet rather than face the divisions in its own society. I don’t think there has been a year since in which the US has not been in multiple theatres of war across the earth.

That the absurd and now belligerently violent conviction of manifest destiny should have grown out of the religion of ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘love those who hate you, and do good to those who mistreat you’ is something much more significant than mere hypocrisy, although hypocritical it certainly is.

It has grown out of three key elements of perverted Christianity: Pope Urban’s decision to launch the Crusades because he recognised that without them the young second sons of the European Normans would cause civil strife, but in the process legalising a barbaric attitude to the ‘other’, of slaughter ill-befitting the religion of love. Thus when Vasco da Gama burst into the Indian Ocean its inhabitants were simply unprepared for the barbarity unleashed on them, just as the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas were in no way prepared for Columbus and Cortes.

The second element, though less dramatic, is indeed more serious. With the ‘reconquest’ by christians of Andalus, the ‘reconquista’ being a myth based on the lie of occupation by Arab Muslims whereas the indigenous people had gladly embraced Islam, a new principle emerged that was to mark out christian politics from that day onwards and which we have not yet learnt to deal with: the lie. Christianity learnt to lie and justified it to itself as a part of its manifest destiny. Of course, such a course of action can only redound upon the liar, and to all intents and purposes genuine christianity as representing the teaching of Jesus, peace be upon him, no longer exists except, paradoxically, among the Muslims who are the only people who could really be said to love and follow him.

The third principle was to break contracts. Every deal that Ferdinand and Isabella made with the Muslims was broken at the behest of the church and with their holy sanction, and this has continued as a principle of ‘christian’ power politics to this day, one of the most shameful episodes of it being the breaking of every single treaty made with the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

The unexamined issue here is the motive force of usury finance, the loans made by Italian bankers to the Crusaders, by Dutch bankers to the Conquistadores, and now the massive banking finance that finds one of its most profitable outlets in military hardware (more than half of the US economy, the other half of which is credit/debt) and the other in simple inflation of the money supply through various types of leverage. This is a weapon that was unleashed against the ‘enemy’ but which has simply devastated the host body.

Since it is Islam that still holds to the prohibition of usury that would outlaw this monstrous system, then it is Islam that must be demonised even if few Muslims have deeply understood the issues involved and even if most Muslim states and business, and many individuals, are as involved in usury as anyone else.

So this calls into question the source of this co-ordinated campaign of lies against Islam and Muslims which is not at all what it seems to be.

Interestingly, some of the people who have suffered most from this history have been ordinary European and American christians, who have been treated as cannon-fodder and virtual slaves and who today are basically consumer outlets for banking debts, and who are now seeing the vanishing of jobs in the usurious industrial culture and the repossession of their houses.

So my only counsel in the debate with the new rightists and their hate-filled rhetoric against Islam is that you cannot argue with liars, although you can certainly discuss with intelligent people who have genuine doubts and critical points to make, and you cannot make contracts with people whose religion forgives them in advance for all sins and which sanctions every lie and crime against the ‘infidel’, i.e. the ‘other’.

Again, the lies against Islam are becoming increasingly desperate since perfectly ordinary black, red and white people everywhere are beginning to see through them and are flocking into Islam in ever greater numbers. An even greater number of ordinary Christians and Jews, who are not convinced about Islam as the choice they must make for themselves, are now aware that the Muslims are not their enemies and that an amity is more than possible between them. All these people are much more convinced by their own experience as neighbours than by the rantings of the propagandists and their hate-filled rhetoric, because the world is tired of hate and tired of lies.

 

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Abdassamad Clarke is from Ulster and was formally educated at Edinburgh University in Mathematics and Physics. He accepted Islam at the hands of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi in 1973, and, at his suggestion, studied Arabic and tajwid and other Islamic sciences in Cairo for a period. In the 80s he was secretary to the imam of the Dublin Mosque, and in the early 90s one of the imams khatib of the Norwich Mosque, and again from 2002-2016. He has translated, edited and typeset a number of classical texts. He currently resides with his wife in Denmark and occasionally teaches there. 14 May, 2023 0:03

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