The visit of US President Donald Trump to Britain this week will be a chance for many people to express their frustration through a series of protests across the country. People are angry with so much about his presidency, from his dangerous posturing with North Korea to his disregard of the rights of American immigrants. His arrogant manner and his apparent support for some of the worst of human behaviour has garnered outrage from across the political spectrum.

Muslims are particularly aggrieved by his pronouncements against their communities, his discriminatory policies against travellers from Muslim countries, and his moving of the American Embassy to al-Quds to show support for the occupying Zionist entity.

With such a wide range of grievances against this truly odious individual, it is quite possible that the focus of protest will be the man himself, rather than the ideas that he represents.

However, it should not be forgotten, for example, that the inhumane immigration policies that he implements so harshly in America are the same policies designed during the Obama presidency. His disregard for the rights of Palestinians and support for the occupying Zionist entity is the same as that of all American presidents before him for the past seventy years. His disdain for the current world order, although more frankly voiced by him, is merely a continuation of American foreign policy since the 1940s. The spilling of blood for American interests in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Egypt is a consistent policy implemented by all US presidents in recent years.

So many Americans are expressing shame at the fact that Trump is their leader, yet his ideology is the same Capitalist ideology of the presidents and governments before him. Its rotten secular capitalist economic system has driven all previous American presidents’ desire for worldwide hegemony and disregard for the rights of humanity overseas. His policies, like his predecessors, aim at the enrichment of a tiny capitalist American elite, at the expense of all others.

It is the same secular ideology that drove the British to colonise so much of the world before the Americans, for the enrichment of a tiny British elite at the time. It is the same greed that drives a tiny liberal elite today to gamble the people’s future with their failing Brexit venture.

The ordinary people in Britain and America have many reasons to be angry with their leaders, just like the oppressed people in the rest of the world who suffer tremendously from the vicious foreign policies of these two colonialist nations.

But misdirected anger which just focuses on individuals such as Trump and May will only prolong the suffering of the world, as long as the poisonous ideology they implement goes unaddressed.

It is important that people wake up to the horrors of the secular capitalist democratic way of life, to recognise that it alone is the cause of all the world’s oppression today, whether embodied in the policies of Trump, Obama, May or any other secular leader. These leaders come and go, but their secular ideology remains.

Therefore, we advise Muslims who will inevitably be interacting with a lot of ordinary people who are frustrated and angry, to take care to remind them of the true causes of the current world oppression. If we are only to add our voices to the undirected anger at Trump himself, then we may inadvertently be supporting another secular agenda, which will inevitably prolong the world’s misery, not shorten it.

Muslims who hold onto the Islamic way of life have a vital role to explain the fallacy of the secular capitalist ideology, and to offer the Islamic way of life as the true and just alternative. This dawah to the Islamic ideology must accompany the work to resume the Islamic way of life in Muslim lands through the re-establishment of the Khilafah on the way of the Prophethood.

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اسْتَجِيبُوا لِلَّهِ وَلِلرَّسُولِ إِذَا دَعَاكُمْ لِمَا يُحْيِيكُمْ ۖ وَاعْلَمُوا أَنَّ اللَّهَ يَحُولُ بَيْنَ الْمَرْءِ وَقَلْبِهِ وَأَنَّهُ إِلَيْهِ تُحْشَرُونَ

“O you who believe! Answer (the call of) Allah and His Messenger when he calls you to that which gives you life; and know that Allah intervenes between man and his heart, and that to Him you shall be gathered.” [Al-Anfal: 24]

Yahya Nisbet,
Media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain,
10th July 2018