Getting back to the original reason for this blog: as a repository for articles about Islam that I found interesting.
Here's one below, by a British-Palestinian, musician and "peace activist", John Aziz. He writes factually and well. Good luck with the overall message, though. Which is his hope that Jihadism can convert to an Islam that is "love your neighbour".
EG, snip:
Pan-Islamic or pan-Arab dominance is not going to work for the Middle East—or anywhere else—in the modern era. Islam is not the only religion in the region, and Arabs are not the only local people who deserve freedom and self-determination. Indeed, there are many differing interpretations of Islam itself, and many Muslims who do not want to live under a theocracy. Respect for the self-governance of minorities is the real pathway to progress. We cannot create unity by forcing our rule upon people who do not want to be subjugated. That has proven again and again to be the road to hell for the entire region, both for Palestinians and others.
That's the opposite of what every single Muslim Arab state around Israel thinks. And in the case of Hamas, Fatah, Palestinian Jihad and the dreary rest of them, their whole idea is: "Kill the Jew".
Sigh... Oh, well. I guess we can live in hope.
Below is John's good piece, with thanks to Unherd:
The eruption of anti-Hamas protests in Gaza is not merely an internal Palestinian power struggle; it represents an ideological reckoning. As Gaza’s citizens courageously defy Hamas rule and protest for an end to the war and the end of Hamas rule in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza are having to reckon with the same forces that have caused chaos and destruction across the wider Middle East for many decades.In December 2024, the Al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which has controlled much of Syria’s Idlib province for nearly ten years, led a coalition of rebel forces who captured Damascus, ending the Assad family’s five-decade rule and a brutal civil war that claimed 600,000 lives and displaced over half of Syria’s population.
Many Westerners, including myself, tried to hold out hope that the interim government led by HTS leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa would rebuild Syria as a normal and peaceful country after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. But since then entire families of Alawites have been killed in areas such as Latakia, Tartus, and Hama governorates. While these killings have been variously attributed to supporters of Syria’s interim authorities and to former government elements, reports indicate that, in the latest wave of violence, HTS fighters and other extremist factions carried out mass executions, kidnappings, and ethnic cleansing against Alawite civilians in areas near the front lines.
These massacres have been underreported by mainstream media, as global attention remains fixated on Israel and Palestine, while missing the bigger regional picture. This is a shame because many of the problems in the region are deeply interconnected. While jihadists rampage in Syria, a different set of jihadists rampage across Yemen, and another set in Sudan, and so do Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Jihad also keeps continuing to bubble up in Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, and across the region. In 1990, just five percent of civil wars worldwide involved jihadist groups; by 2017, this figure had risen to over forty percent. Acknowledging this is not whataboutery—it is diagnostic.
This has not been a popular view among Palestinians, at least historically. One of the first and most unquestionable dogmas interwoven into the fabric of Palestinian nationalism is the idea that Zionism is to blame for our problems. We can see a neat encapsulation of this tendency in the work of Edward Said, which has been pivotal to the development of modern Palestinian nationalism. In Said’s essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” he argues that Zionism was fundamentally responsible for the dispossession and suffering of Palestinians. He views it as an ideological and political force that deliberately overlooked the rights and presence of Palestinians in pursuit of establishing a Jewish state. To Said, Zionism was not just a Jewish nationalist movement or a struggle for indigenous rights: it was a form of Western imperialism on the basis of which Palestinian hardships—displacement, statelessness, and ongoing conflict—were constructed and perpetuated.
It is possible that at least some of these narratives are starting to be questioned, especially now that we have begun to see protests against Hamas in Gaza explicitly calling them a terrorist group, demanding that they leave Gaza, and calling for peace between Israel and Palestine. Hamas has totally failed as a political force and as a government for the people of Gaza, and it can be no surprise to see Gazans and other Palestinians starting to question the narratives that Hamas and their fellow ideological travellers have perpetuated.
Nonetheless, blaming Zionists for everything bad that has happened to Palestinians is a deeply rooted tendency in Palestinian history. Palestinian nationalism emerged and evolved as a response to Zionism. But Zionism is not colonialism because there is no other Jewish mother country. The early Zionists—even though they often called themselves colonists—did not move to Palestine to colonise the land on behalf of some external or foreign power, but to establish an independent, self-governing Jewish state. This is an important contrast between Israel and actual colonial projects such as French Algeria.
There is neither Zionism, nor Israeli occupation or settlements in Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and many other places currently undergoing jihadist strife. The religious minorities persecuted by ISIS—including Syrian Christians, Druze, and Yazidis—are not Zionists. Edward Said wanted to talk about Zionism from the perspective of its victims, but surely when the wider region is being overwhelmed by jihadist wars, we should take a moment to talk about jihadism from the perspective of its victims. This is the real, underlying source of the suffering of Palestinians.
At the root of jihadism is an endeavour to undo the collapse of a former empire, the wholesale dismantling of the Islamic caliphate. From the rise of Islam as an imperial force in the seventh century until its demise after World War I, the caliphates unified vast territories under Islamic political and religious authority. The official abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 is seen by jihadists and their ideological fellow travellers as a catastrophic historical defeat marking the onset of Western dominance.
Just four years after the abolition of the caliphate in 1928, Hassan al-Banna and other likeminded Islamists in Egypt founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Their aim was to purge Egypt and the wider Middle East of rising Western cultural influences and re-establish Islamic rule in accordance with strict Sharia law. Their stance drew on highly selective, literal interpretations of Islamic texts, which glorify past Muslim military conquests and encourage martyrdom as the ultimate act of spiritual devotion.
Initially, the Brotherhood gained popularity by providing on-the-ground community services: running schools, hospitals, and social welfare programs. This grassroots work won the group a modicum of local support—just as similar programs did for Hamas and HTS in more recent years in Gaza and Syria, respectively. But beneath these endeavours lay a deeply confrontational ideology, built around the desire for holy war and conquest to purge the world of non-Islamic influences and reshape society entirely under strict Islamic authority.
This ideological foundation evolved further with Sayyid Qutb—who was radicalised following his travels in the United States in the 1950s and ’60s, where he developed a weirdly racialised dislike of jazz and American football. Qutb claimed that contemporary Muslim societies had descended into a state of jahiliyya (ignorance) and called for a violent struggle against all non-believers to restore a “pure” Islamic order. In his worldview, might makes right, and the only language the enemies of Islam are capable of understanding is force.
Qutb’s writings set the tone and shaped the minds of future jihadists. The violent actions of groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and HTS, which all emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, are not a series of random or impulsive kneejerk responses to oppression by a mindless group of desperate victims. The violence of these groups is a calculated choice: they seek to reverse the end of the caliphate by any means necessary, restore Islam’s lost prestige, erase borders imposed by Western powers or by the creation of Israel, and reinstate Sharia as the sole basis of law. For them, violent jihad is the sacred method for reclaiming Islamic power and dominant political status.
Jihadists constantly invoke past Western interventions and the failures of various secular Arab governments as proofs of a conspiracy to suppress and degrade Islam. Modern Middle Eastern states—especially Israel—are portrayed as illegitimate creations of Western imperialism that must be violently toppled and replaced by a restored Islamic empire. Thus, at their core, jihadists are a remnant of a group of defeated imperialists desperate to reclaim a lost empire, complete with supremacy over religious minorities—both Jews and other religious communities across the Middle East.
But in the West, far too many people misunderstand jihadist groups like Hamas, HTS, and the Muslim Brotherhood, seeing them instead as oppressed victims, struggling to liberate themselves from the death grip of Western imperialism. This is bizarrely ahistorical; it ignores thousands of years of conflict.
Of course, it is true that the collapse of the Islamic empire created a power vacuum in the region. Nationalist secular governments in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq attempted to fill this void, but, owing to corruption, criminality, and a lack of economic development failed to do so, thus creating fertile ground for the rise of Islamists. No doubt, the unresolved displacement of the Palestinians in 1948 also contributed to the rise of the Islamists and to the general economic malaise in the region.
Into these power vacuums stepped the jihadist movements, the offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, claiming to offer stability, development, unity, and the restoration of past glories beneath the banner of Islam. But instead of unity or progress, what has emerged is widespread chaos, sectarianism, and bloodshed. Far from liberating people from oppression or foreign domination, jihadist ideology deepened regional divisions and intensified internal conflicts, while its proponents not only victimised religious minorities, but even targeted fellow Muslims who rejected their extreme interpretations.
Jihadism is a doomed endeavour. Nor does it have any moral legitimacy. Nobody has a right to an empire, or to domination over minority groups. Nobody has a right to impose an ideology or religion onto people who don’t want it. Waging a war to bring about a new caliphate makes about as much sense as it would do if descendants of Genghis Khan set off on horseback to try to found a new khanate across central Asia or if a gang of young Brits sailed off to India and demanded the right to re-establish the British Raj and rule over more than a billion Indians. Mongols, Britons, and Muslims have a right to govern themselves, of course. But so do Jews, Yazidi, Druze, Alawites, Hindus, Kazakhs, Azeris, Ukrainians, Georgians, and every other group that might otherwise face subjugation at the hands of a vast empire if it were given the opportunity to rule over them. My rights and freedoms should not come at the expense of your rights and freedoms—or vice versa.
Pan-Islamic or pan-Arab dominance is not going to work for the Middle East—or anywhere else—in the modern era. Islam is not the only religion in the region, and Arabs are not the only local people who deserve freedom and self-determination. Indeed, there are many differing interpretations of Islam itself, and many Muslims who do not want to live under a theocracy. Respect for the self-governance of minorities is the real pathway to progress. We cannot create unity by forcing our rule upon people who do not want to be subjugated. That has proven again and again to be the road to hell for the entire region, both for Palestinians and others.
I am overjoyed to see Palestinians in Gaza starting to talk about the possibility of a future without Hamas. But the pathway to peace needs to go beyond just rejecting Hamas, or any one specific group. We need to find ways to come together as equals, to create mutually beneficial relationships that involve trading, cooperating, sharing, and coexisting. A framework of mutual respect and consent is the blueprint for a brighter future. Rejecting the ideologies of jihadism and theocracy is the best way forward.
