A hundred years ago, the West imagined that they had finally defeated Islam by bringing an end to the Khilafah (Caliphate) State that had continued uninterrupted from the time of the Prophet (saw). In the decades that followed, the West cemented their victory over Muslims, implementing Western systems of government, enforcing the European Westphalian nation-state model and developing a new secular national culture in each amputated Muslim state. And when overstretched European nations were forced to withdraw their armies, they confidently handed over power to a local ruling agent class that owed its loyalty to the West, safeguarded Western interests and continued to impose the secular liberal lifestyle in Muslim lands, thus ensuring the preservation of the Western scheme. Indeed, so confident were the West in their defeat of Islam that they opened their own lands to the resettlement of millions of Muslims, in the expectation that they would fully adopt the secular liberal Western culture and lifestyle, just as their traitorous leaders had before them. But within fifty years of the end of the Ottoman State, renewed stirrings of Islamic revival began to surface. In response, agent rulers either superficially acquired Islamic embellishments or resorted to tyrannical dictatorships to preserve their rule, or practised both. In the West, Muslim immigrant communities were first placated with ‘multiculturalism’ but then increasingly intimidated into full conformity to Western secular liberal norms. Finally, in the last two decades, in the name of its so-called ‘War on Terror’, the West began its overt, co-ordinated global campaign to use all possible means to arrest the further rise of Islam and block the Muslim Ummah from retaking charge of its own affairs. Yet still the rise of Islam continues, the Ummah becoming increasingly conscious of its own identity, its glorious history, and its great responsibility to itself and to all of humankind. The West fears the return of Islam, not only because it will lose its current access to vast Muslim lands and resources but also because the West knows well the actual limits of the fragile, momentary supremacy of its own defective and fundamentally flawed civilisation.
Western civilisation presents itself as the culmination of centuries of progress and development and, through its claim to be the descendant of Rome and Greece, as the consummation of thousands of years of human achievement. But the truth is that Western civilisation is built on nothing but lies and deceit, the result of mistaken choices and twisted compromise. The dire consequences of Western expediency are becoming increasingly evident in the decaying economic and social conditions, declining media and education standards, corrupt ruling and destabilising foreign policy.
The West’s Capitalist economic system has actually already failed but its flaws have been masked by recourse to a series of improvised supports. Building an entire economic system on freedom of ownership can only lead to the powerful exploiting the weak and the rich exploiting the poor. Initially, economic activity is boosted, like the fever from an illness. But as the wealthy drain out capital from the economy, and commerce is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, economic activity weakens and diminishes, like a cancerous body devouring itself. Capitalism had effectively failed within a century of the industrial revolution, and then had to be rescued by a series of modifications and adjustments. Keynesianism was introduced in order to at least partially redistribute wealth, though because of the parallel introduction of fiat money, real wealth remained with the elite while increasingly greater volumes of fake money were circulated among the masses. Governments switched from Keynesianism to Monetarism to control the resultant high inflation, while new avenues of wealth creation became available to the elite through the expansion of private financing and the construction of a parallel elite economy. Capitalism achieves the full manifestation of wealth circulating only within the few, while the rest of society is abandoned to economic stagnation. If Western countries are still relatively prosperous then it is not because of the strength of their domestic economies but because of their imperialist foreign policies that give them access to the wealth and resources of the entire world.
Concurrent to the West’s failed economic system is the West’s failed social system. As freedom of ownership leads to economic exploitation, freedom of the individual leads to social exploitation. The strong and the powerful, those in their prime, enjoy their lives to the full, while the weak and neglected, the very young and the very old, are left to struggle, with almost non-existent support from family and community. Fearful of the political consequences of such a vast underclass, Western governments have massively expanded what they call ‘social’ spending, making this their largest budgetary expenditure. Combined American government expenditure is estimated at ten times its military budget, an impossibly high burden on public finances, yet still so many within the West live precariously, only one or two salary payments away from destitution. It has become normal for the American Congress to be ensnared in annual infighting over budgetary allocations, to the extent of even shutting down government functioning until some new compromise can be worked out. With the ongoing demographic shifts, the growing number of the elderly will have to be funded by government revenues raised from an ever-shrinking workforce, an impossible equation. But still individualism continues to even further erode social relations. No civilisation can survive without strong families and communities.
Much of the deficiencies of Western civilisation are obscured by their education and media, which are employed for deceitful indoctrination and malicious propaganda in support of the alleged superiority of the Western lifestyle. But the credibility of Western media is increasingly exposed both at home and abroad, its commercialisation deviating it from any serious mission to convey factual truth, a deviation made easier by establishing the media not on the idea of conveying truth but on the idea of freedom of speech. Education is also closely controlled to imbue each new generation with false conviction in the erroneous principles underlying Western civilisation. But Western education is also being constantly undermined by Western Empiricism, which understands the importance of sensed reality in the thinking process but fails to recognise the requirement for previous information in order to make sense of that reality. Thus, Western teaching has become increasingly minimalist, remote and indirect, seeing its role as not the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next but as somehow merely facilitating students in their own independent engagement with reality, as if humans are mere animals unable to conceptually learn from their predecessors.
The people of the West are told that they are in charge of their own affairs but the Western ruling system actually serves not the people but the elite. The Western ruling system of ‘mixed government’ was originally designed to explicitly value the interests of the aristocracy, while allowing executive power to be wielded by a singular monarch as well as supposedly caring also for the interests of the common man. After facing attempted revolutions in the nineteenth century, the West began claiming that they were transforming their ruling systems in accordance with democracy but, in truth, the same systems continue with minor superficial adjustments. Many Western leaders know that the idea of democracy is a nonsensical, impractical fantasy, useful only for keeping the masses aligned with the government or, at best, for making politicians display superficial concern for the masses to deter their anger from being channelled into revolution. While it is necessary that people as a whole take charge of their own affairs, it is not possible that the people collectively legislate their own laws. Ultimately, in every democracy, laws are made that favour a vested elite, resulting in systems of government that only further facilitate the exploitation of the masses.
But perhaps the greatest evil perpetrated by the West is through its foreign policy. In the name of building a peaceful world order, the West actually replicated the European imperial model on a global scale. The purpose of those historic empires had been to expropriate the wealth and resources of their colonies for benefit of the imperial nation. For example, Muslim India had been the largest, most prosperous and most advanced economy on Earth but under British rule, India became one of the poorest regions of the Earth, while Britain vastly enriched itself thereby becoming the global superpower. But when the West were forced to dismantle their empires, partly because of rivalry and infighting between Western nations themselves, then the West created in their place a comprehensive global political, economic and military architecture to perpetuate Western imperialism in covert form. The political hegemony of the Western powers was preserved through the concept of international law built on Western legal theory, thus providing never ending opportunities for interference in the affairs of non-Western countries to force them to conform to Western laws and norms, this hegemony being backed by organisations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the NATO military alliance, and others, all designed to preserve the superiority of the West. The global economic and trading arrangements have been meticulously designed for the West to benefit from the wealth, resources and economic activity of the rest of the world, institutions such as the IMF ensuring that the West is provided full access to what effectively remain colonial states despite their formal independence. And to ensure continued Western military superiority, ‘defence’ agreements are designed between Western and non-Western countries. Where such arrangements fail, then the West resorts to invading and occupying incalcitrant countries in the name of world peace, at that time not caring whether they attack soldiers or civilians, young or old, men or women; indeed, their military doctrines encourage them to deliberately develop styles and means by which they are able to directly target the entire enemy population.
It is not possible for the West’s audacious hegemony to continue for ever. Nor is it possible for the West to reform itself as long as it is built on the false secular liberal creed. This creed was not arrived at after sincere thought and enquiry but as a compromise solution to forestall the insurrectionist materialist movement that was the forerunner of Communism and that undertook intellectual struggle against the Christian creed and political struggle against the dual tyranny of Christian Europe’s kings and clergy, finding their opportunity in the aftermath of Europe’s sectarian conflicts. Unable to intellectually defeat materialism or quell materialist political agitation, the Western ruling classes adopted the secular liberal creed, compromising their religion to save their positions of power.
The Christian West had been following the method of thinking from Greek Rationalism, which presumed that it was possible to prove any thought through the exercise of logic, deriving conclusions from self-evident axiomatic general premises chosen in order to produce required outcomes. Not only was the complicated logic itself questionable, but the Greeks assumed that the general premises didn’t require independent proof, as they held that the mind was capable of discovering truth through mere contemplation, independent of sense perception or previous information. Consequently, all the Christian so-called proofs for the existence of the Creator, whether cosmological, ontological or teleological, were really little more than conjectural. The materialists were able to easily counter these with ‘proofs’ of their own that supported the eternity of the universe using the same method of Greek Rationalism that the Christians themselves had been using. It was in response to this that Christian thinkers resorted to changing their method of thinking from Rationalism to Empiricism. The secular aspect of the Western creed is due to this adoption of Empiricism, according to which it is only possible to definitively know what is directly sensed; since religion is built on knowledge of what is beyond this world, all religious matters were rendered speculative and beyond the scope of intellectual discussion, thus silencing the materialists’ intellectual attacks on religion at the cost of separating religion from life.
Politically, Europe’s kings and clergy had long collaborated together on exploiting the masses, retaining power and wealth for themselves alone. The Western ruling classes countered this by affecting to themselves also adopt elements of materialist political thought. The liberal aspect of the Western creed comes from the modified adoption of materialist freedom and democracy; the materialists believed in a deterministic eternal universe and called for freedom and democracy in order that man could fully express raw selfish impulses and urges that the materialists presumed constituted the entirety of human nature. By adopting liberalism, the West were able to silence the materialists’ political attacks on Europe’s ruling establishment.
If the West has continued to function this long after such an ugly compromise, then it is only because of the very slow pace at which it has permitted itself to transform the legacy of thoughts and rules that still remain from its previous age. This previous age was the heritage of neither Rome nor Greece but of Islam. The West owes to Islam not only its progress in mathematics, the physical sciences and technology but also its achievements across the arts in their entirety as well as in thought, philosophy and the systems of life, which they largely appropriated from Muslims but recast within a non-Islamic Christian framework. It is not possible to know how much Greece actually contributed to human learning, as the records of civilisations previous to it are no longer available, for example because of the loss in ancient times of the great Egyptian library in Alexandria. And although Rome was indeed the leading power of its day, the early collapse of the Western half of the Roman Empire, along with its original capital of Rome, left the West in uncivilised backwardness. It was in fact the rise of Islam that revived the West, through its contact with Muslims in Andalusia, where Islam resulted in an astonishingly advanced civilisation; then through contact with Muslim civilisation in Sicily, which its subsequent Norman rulers transported to Britain after the Normans invaded that land also; then through deep contact with the heartland of Islam during the crusades; and then through contact with the Ottoman State, which could be considered the first truly global superpower, with complete dominance over land and sea. The West continued to live in the shadow of Islam until internal weaknesses caused the fall of the Ottoman State from its position as leading state. It was only at that time, in the late eighteenth century, that the West was able to overtake Muslims, its nations entering the ranks of great powers and its civilisation emerging from Islam’s shadow to follow a very different and very irreligious path, having already made its evil compromise with materialist thought. The faltering missteps of the West are evident to those who are able to see beyond Western indoctrination and propaganda. The false creed that the West has adopted continues to erode away at any good that remained in it from its contact with Islam. With every new generation, the West adopts fresh abominations in the name of following freedom and democracy, the youth rejecting the norms of their elders, and the elders unable to recognise or accept the trends followed by their youth. For those who are able to see, Western civilisation would not be able to retain its supremacy if Islamic civilisation existed as an alternative.
The previous loss of the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State was not due to some inevitable civilizational decline. Unlike the disbelieving West, the Islamic creed is true and remains valid. It is wrong to consider religious thoughts to be speculative. The correct method of thinking is able to produce definitive intellectual conclusions beyond one’s immediate sense perception. The Islamic creed is neither dependent upon speculative inductive generalisation nor unproven axiomatic premise. Instead the Islamic creed builds definitive specific intellectual conclusion from definitive direct sense perception, without the intermediation of any speculation. The decline of Islamic civilisation was not due to some fault in its creed but because of the accumulation of corrupt alien thoughts surrounding the creed like weeds gathering around roots that are otherwise alive and strong. It is this pure Islamic creed that is now burning through the accumulated decay of the ages and triggering a fresh renaissance within the Muslim Ummah. Renewed comprehension of the truth of Islam is spreading within the Muslim Ummah, as is awareness of the deceit of the West. The Islamic systems of government are far superior to those developed by the West. It was the Islamic economic system, implemented in Muslim lands, that produced unparalleled prosperity that enriched even the West through their trading in Muslim lands. It was the Islamic social system that created the harmony in Muslim society building strong families and communities. It was the Islamic education system that laid the foundation of a civilisation built on knowledge and learning, that attracted the Western elite to Muslim lands. It was the Islamic ruling system that enabled vast and diverse peoples to live together in peace and justice, secure in the knowledge that their rights were protected. And it was Islam’s foreign policy that calmed and stabilised international affairs, favouring political reconciliation above military engagement and limiting wars to professional engagements between trained armies.
The West now know that they have failed to defeat Islam intellectually, and that it is only a matter of time before Islam is triumphant politically also. America, the present leader of the West, made one last attempt to stop Islam with its so-called ‘War on Terror’, bringing hundreds of thousands of its soldiers to Muslim lands. But Western armies failed to command Muslim populations and were forced to depart as quickly as was safely possible for them. America today again discovered what its disbelieving Western predecessors had long known, which is that Muslims cannot be defeated on the battlefield. So, after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, America adopted a new style, employing the armies of Muslims against each other, using Turkey to intervene in Syria, Saudi Arabia to intervene in Yemen and Egypt to intervene in Libya. Fearful even of countries ruled by its own agents, it balances them against each other, inciting Saudi Arabia against Iran and Turkey against Egypt. But how long can the West maintain such machinations from afar when they are unable to rule directly over Muslim lands. With Allah’s permission, the Muslim Ummah shall soon overthrow the agent ruling class imposed upon it and re-establish in its place the righteous Islamic Khilafah State on the method of the Prophet (saw) that shall fully restore the Islamic way of life, unify all Muslim lands, liberate occupied territories and once more work to carry the light of Islam to the entire world.
By Faiq Najah – Wilayah Pakistan
Translated from Al-Waie Magazine Issue 418, Dhul-Qi’dah 1442 AH / June 2021 CE