DR FIROZ MAHBOOB KAMAL

The most costly enterprise

Freedom or independence has never been attained free of cost. It is indeed the most costly entitlement in human life. It needs a sacrifice of money, life and all forms of physical and intellectual abilities. One and half million Algerians needed to sacrifice their lives to attain independence from the French colonial occupation. More than 2 million Afghans had to sacrifice their lives to get freedom from the Soviet and the American occupation, and the battle continues. The people of Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Arakan continue to sacrifice for the same cause. Whereas, mere physical survival doesn’t cost too much; even insects and animals can meet the necessary needs for such survival.

Surrender to slavery is like floating with the high tide. Such slavery may provide the provision for animal-like physical survival; but takes away the liberty to live with the cherished vision, mission and ideology. That is why slavery to the kuffar is incompatible with Islam; it makes it impossible for a Muslim to live like a Muslim. As if, it is living like a fish out of water. A Muslim needs to fulfil not only the survival needs but also the ideological, educational, cultural and spiritual needs. The road map of Islamic governance, sharia, hudud, khilafa, jihad, shura and many other obligatory components can’t be pursued in captivity; it needs bigger space fully free from the enemy occupation. So, in Islam, it is so important to safeguard the independence of a Muslim state. As per prophetic narrative, working for a moment as a frontier-vigilante is more important than spending the whole night in nafl prayer.

Such independence can never be earned by taking help from foreign kuffars. The foreign forces fight wars only to impose their occupation. The case of the Middle East and Bangladesh gives ample evidence. The Arab nationalists conspired with the British and the French forces to disintegrate Osmania Khilafa and to bring independence to the Arab lands. But, it didn’t bring the promised independence. Instead, fetched slavery of the British and France. It caused terrible fragmentation of the Middle East, installed terrible tyrant on each fragment and gave birth to illegitimate Israel. The case of the Bengali nationalists is no less awful either. In 1971, they invited the Indian Army to get them separated from former united Pakistan. Instead of independence, Bangladesh earned a subdued status in the geopolitical domain of India.

Like fighting for independence, staying independence against enemy onslaught is also highly expensive. Independence of a state can never sustain an enemy’s goodwill; it depends wholly on its defence capability. To attain such capability, it needs the necessary geopolitical potentials of the state and the political will and unity of the people. It also needs a bigger land mass, advanced weaponry and intense military skills of its citizen. Without such capacity, a state easily turns to a slave state. This is the status of most of the Muslim countries in the world. The defence capability of all the Muslim Countries combined hardly matches with that of a tiny Israel.

Independent nations and slave nations

The defence spending of the country indeed works as the most accurate indicator to show how much importance it pays to its security, dignity and independence. All nations –like all individuals, don’t survive with the same agenda. A slave nation –like a slave man or woman, possesses a little esteem need. Hence, such a state spends a little on its defence and dignity. Its priority mostly lies on mere physical survival, at best to get some degree of economic wellbeing -even through cajoling the big powers, as Bangladesh does with India and Saudi Arabia does with the USA whereas an independent nation with a strong sense of dignity spends the lion’s share of its budget on defence to earn prestige and influence on the world stage. They even compromise their economic wellbeing to build up the defence capability –as buoyantly prioritized by late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan that his countrymen would prefer to eat grass but will build a nuclear bomb.

The size of the economy of Russia is smaller than that of South Korea, but its political weight in the world politics match only with the USA. The foreign currency reserve of Pakistan is less than that of Bangladesh, but in the field of defence and world politics, it fights shoulder to shoulder with a seven-time bigger India. The political and military weight of Pakistan owes to its nuclear weapons and other advanced weaponry. To preserve its status in world politics, the USA spends trillions of dollars to strengthen the defence and almost continuously fight wars all over the world. For a similar reason, every man and woman of Israel take military training. Israel has also piled up a huge number of nuclear bombs, missiles, fighter jets, drones and other sophisticated arsenals. The per capita weapons in Israel is indeed the highest in the whole world. Its defence force can reduce all the Arab capitals to rubbles within minutes. That is why the ruling tyrant in Cairo and other Arab capitals cajole Israel for their survival.  

 Absence of strategy & the deviation

But the Muslims, in general, invest a little to strengthen their defence. They seldom possess any defence strategy either. The Arab money is being invested heavily in the West to finance their arms industry and economic boom. This year Saudi Arabia alone declared investment of more than 40 billion dollars in India to strengthen the economy of this kuffar country -where the Muslims are regularly lynched to death on alleged beef eating. Such enormous petro-wealth didn’t help them to build even a good quality gun or bullet. A very few Muslims take military training. As a result, there are the most defenceless people on earth. So, foreign occupation is their fate. Those who join the Army in the Muslim countries, they do it only to conquer their own country and to grab the government offices, the government assets and the lucrative lands in big cities. That is why the military coup is so common in the Muslim World.

 Whereas, in the golden days of Islam, every Muslim was a soldier -including the Prophet (peace be upon him) himself. There was no sleeping or inactive Muslim. And in those days, the per capita weapons in the Islamic state was the highest in the whole world. More than 70 percent of the companions of the Prophet (peace be upon him) sacrificed their lives. As a result, they could raise the finest civilization in the whole human history and the most powerful superpower in the contemporary world. But now, such commitment to the Islamic cause is labelled as extremism even by the Muslims. On the other hand, they label working as partners with the US-led imperialists as modernity and moderate Islam.