Every secular, democratic and capitalist nation existent in the world today has at its heart the concept of the nation state, where identity is primarily defined in terms of a common language, culture, race or even ethnicity.
This is not an accident of history rather it is the route that Western civilisation has by necessity followed. Secularism with its moral nihilism, pluralistic democracy with its tendency to fracture society according to its constituent parts and capitalism with its competition for resources and markets to exploit for the interests of the privileged few, by their very natures fail to provide the ideological glue that can bind diverse people into functioning societies. Without the explicit recourse to the basest of human instincts the collective consciousness of race, democratic and capitalist nations simply fall apart, quicker than they can form.
The question of race permeates through the consciousness of society and into the ruling structures and institutions of Western nations because the concept of nationalism, the near identical twin of racism, is also central to the interests of the elites that govern these nations.
It is the concept of nationalism and race superiority that provided the moral justification for the genocides and mass exploitation that occurred during the period of direct colonisation that humanity had witnessed during the 19th and 20th centuries and it is the same albeit slightly modified understanding that forms the basis of Western intervention in the developing and specifically Islamic world. Robert Cooper, foreign policy advisor to Tony Blair explained in 2002:
“In dealing with the old fashioned kind of states outside the post modern continent of Europe and North America, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era force, pre-emptive attack, deception , whatever is required to deal with those that still live in the 19th century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves we keep the law but in the jungle we use the law of the jungle.”[1]
The US is no stranger to this understanding, the ideas of racialism formed the foundations of the genocide of Native Americans and also formed the justification for the worst form of industrialised slavery that humanity has witnessed. It is also these very concepts that were utilised to dehumanise the Vietnamese in the sixties and seventies and continue to form the basis that lays the foundations for the elites’ justification of their many “interventions” in the developing world.
The US cannot eliminate racism, as in essence in the subjective nihilism that secularism breeds, there is nothing that mandates that it is absolutely wrong. As secular nations may dictate: strangling a man with one’s knee is wrong, but leaving a child refugee to drown in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea is ok, in fact helping him constitutes a crime. Without a call to the nation’s inherent superiority over all others, how are the elite going to persuade a young man or woman from the impoverished ‘hoods’ that they need to go and kill the impoverished farmer in Iraq who happens to live on top of potential profits for corporations and their shareholders? Islam on the otherhand establishes a social order and state where questions of race and nationalism are laid to rest; a fact which is attested by many Western commentators. Arnold J. Toynbee states: “The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, there is a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.” [2]
With the Khilafah (Caliphate) humanity witnessed an era of unprecedented harmony, between a plethora of different races and religions as race does not constitute the basis for relationship among Muslims nor between Muslims and non Muslims, and neither did it form the basis for a perceived superiority over others that is used to justify the appropriation of their wealth. Rather, citizenship of the Khilafah formed the basis of the relationship between those that resided in the state and the relationship of the institutions of state with the populace. Islam has not attached any great importance to concepts of race and nationality, rather it has emphasised the common lineage of man from Adam (as) and their subsequent formation into tribes:
﴿يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقْنَاكُم مِّن ذَكَرٍ وَأُنثَىٰ وَجَعَلْنَاكُمْ شُعُوبًا وَقَبَائِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوا إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِندَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرٌ﴾
“O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Acquainted.” [Al-Hujurat: 13]
Superiority is a matter of one’s adherence to the commands and prohibitions of Allah (swt) only. The Islamic view of humanity is devoid of any racial focus, and the Islamic State which is established on the way of Prophethood will insha-Allah show the world that ethnicity and colour do not define its citizens as it does in the West. In the Khilafah, the door for ethnic and racial division is firmly shut, leaving people to focus on what brings them together rather than what divides them.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/07/1
[2] A Study of History, Arnold J Toynbee
