Israel and Palestine

A magnificent Palestinian Empire already existed when Moses led the tribes of Israel from Egypt into Sinai. The subsequent Jewish Empires of David and Solomon (regarded by the Muslims as Islamic Empires) were always at loggerheads with the Palestinians who have maintained their national identity over the millennia, although many of them converted to Christianity and Islam. The Palestinians are a freedom loving people who have become aliens and refugees in their own homeland, thanks to the torch bearers of freedom and democracy such as USA and UK.

The thorn in the Israeli psyche is their refusal to accept a minority status. They became unpopular all over the world because wherever they settled, they formed Jewish enclaves and tried to become a local majority imposing their own customs and ideology on others. They also led the money lending trade with all its attendant corruption. However, all Jews are not Israelis. There are still many good Jews living in all parts of the world who would not even dream of forcibly occupying the property of others.

Whereas the Jewish faith has all the paraphernalia of a religion, it contradicts its universality by insisting on its racial uniqueness. Ideologies always transcend racial, cultural and geographical boundaries. The bitter truth is that Israelism is just a fad like Nazism and Fascism. How long it will last depends on how well it can serve the purposes of others. European and specially Eastern European nations can change the course of history to a better direction by offering incentives to Jews trapped in Israel to return to their original homelands.

When the sympathizers of Palestinians see Israelis firing rockets on unarmed Palestinians from an American built helicopter, they hold everyone who was involved in the production of that helicopter, its components, the rockets and the explosives as a party to the gruesome murders. They see traces of Palestinian blood on the hands of every American and most other Westerners. So they attack them wherever they find them vulnerable. The war on terror will never end as it has created an unending vendetta.

Islamic Revivalism

During the past few years there has developed a significant Islamic revivalist movement across the globe. It is not the result of any conspiracy, but the obvious reaction to world events of the near past. The Muslims of the world have observed the failure of Muslim politicians, scholars and statesmen to forge unity among the many Muslim nations with their own cultures and traditions. At the same time, the nonmuslim nations appear to have connived together to deny freedom to a number of sizeable Muslim nations such as Palestinians, Kashmiris and Chechens who have age old distinct national identities. To the more sensitive and less sectarian Muslims the only way to unite the Muslims and pool their resources so that they may stand at equal footing with other religious nationalities is to create an Islamic order based on the traditions of a time before the divisions among Muslims started. This means the institution of the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad himself and the early Caliphs.

Unfortunately, the political model of the early Caliphates does not bode well with the democratic perceptions of modern times. In modern secular jargon the Caliphs were absolute autocrats. They had no ministers and no parliaments. There was no police and not even a regular army. The lack of public security in those days can be judged by the fact that the second, third and fourth Caliphs were all murdered in the public. The great conquests that created one of the world’s greatest Empires of all times were achieved by purely volunteer armies.

There was no economic policy in the Islamic State of Madinah, which most revivalists look up to as the model. Conquests were producing a constant flow of spoils of war that were distributed justly among the people of Madinah making their lives quite easy and comfortable. The only indigenous source of income for the state was charitable donations during the time of Prophet Muhammad and Zakat (2.5 % of accumulated surplus wealth and stock in trade) during the reign of the 4 earliest Caliphs. A certain amount of earning came from the blood money (mistakenly called ransom) paid by the relatives of prisoners of war taken in the battle field. Since there were no prisons in the Islamic state, prisoners of war who were unable to pay blood money were given as slaves in the custody of the relatives of the Muslim soldiers who were killed in the battles. Those conditions simply can not be recreated in the modern world.