The intensity of the struggle we witness in the history concerning the destruction of the Khilafah (as we will see) should not come to us as a surprise. The struggle between Islam and Kufr is as old as time. All the Prophets engaged in this struggle. Nuh (as) struggled against his people for almost a thousand years, whilst they conspired against him and his Muslim followers. Hud (as) struggled against ‘Ad, Salih (as) against Thamud. Ibrahim (as) underwent an intense struggle with his own tribe such that they sought to burn him alive. Musa (as) faced the plots of Firawn, and Muhammad (saw), the final Messenger, was subject to much persecution from the polytheists of Makkah, who sought to finish him and his call to Islam.

Thus we see that the struggle between Islam and kufr is an ongoing one and is an undeniable reality. It is a struggle rooted in ideology, and will necessarily exist whenever two people carry competing worldviews and seek to implement them in life. As Allah makes it clear, in plain language,

“Verily, the disbelievers are ever unto you open enemies.” [al-Nisa’: 101]

That is, those disbelievers who seek to fight against you and seek to take people away from the deen of Allah (swt) are open enemies to you.

In line with the open, the final destruction of the Khilafah State was not the first time the Europeans had attacked the Muslims. The first attack came much earlier in the form of the Crusades. The Crusaders came south into the Muslims lands in search of holy conquest and to fight the ‘infidel’ Muslims whom they considered a ‘vile’ race.

Addressing the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II rallied the Christians of Europe to a religious war against the Muslims, saying:

“Most beloved brethren: Urged by necessity, I, Urban, by the permission of God chief bishop and prelate over the whole world, have come into these parts as an ambassador with a divine admonition to you…O sons of God, as the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked your brethren in the East and have conquered the territory of Romania…On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot- soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends.”

The Christian crusaders won some battles. The Muslims won the war. Salah al-Din sent the crusaders packing with his decisive victory at Hittin in 1187. Importantly, if the Europeans learnt anything from the Crusades, it was that seeking to defeat the Muslims militarily alone was impossible. They learnt, albeit the hard way, that the real strength of the Muslims was their aqeedah, their beliefs, which pushed them to sacrifice everything in the path of Allah, which pushed them to be united under one leadership, which pushed them to have no fear of death and no worldly attachment to life. The next European attack was therefore much more comprehensive, as we shall see.

Destruction of the Khilafah

The Khilafah was officially abolished on the 28th of Rajab 1342AH, which corresponds in the Gregorian calendar to the 3rd of March 1924. However this was not a one- off attack. Rather it was the culmination of three centuries of work by the Western powers. Furthermore, it is important to appreciate that the measures taken by the Western powers were not of any one type. There was a mixture of attacks. It was not only a cultural invasion through missionary work. It was not only a political invasion through incited rebellion. It was not only a military attack through war and invasion. It was not only a legal invasion through imposition of Western laws. It was not only the co-opting of agents. It was not any one of these things. It was all of these together. Only all of these together, over a period of almost three hundred years, and at a time of historical weakness of the Ummah, were the kuffar able to bring down the might and glory of the Islamic State.