TO BE BLUNT:A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY ON WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
hurrah
1863 - 2003
Abdullah Luongo
Wilfred Scawen Blunt knocked, and then walked confidently onto the stage of
politically extraordinary events. He would continue, with unabashed vigour
to write himself into some of the most important conflicts that
characterized the final decades of the Nineteenth Century, with their
far-reaching consequences precipitating such results as have come to defined
the Twentieth. The young Blunt, related, through his marriage to Lady Anne,
to Lord Byron, invented himself in a quasi-likeness of the great poet. His
spirited sense of adventure made him a more than convincing character within
the colourful scripts he wrote for himself. This pioneering breeder of
Arabian stallions was a champion of Irish Independence, the reputation for
which ingratiated him with W.B. Yeats and some of the most promising young
writers who met the old man of English letters. From youth to old age, Blunt
cut a convincing figure as a man's man in a world where the men who held
sway over the political and economic arenas of influence of his day are
still renowned for the avidity with which they demonstrated their will to
dominate global power and trade within the hegemony of the British Empire.
What cannot be underestimated is the cunning and savvy with which they
wielded their dominance in world affairs, and the attraction that that world
of influence held for Blunt. However persistently Blunt would pitch up with
his script in hand, having unfailingly written for himself a leading part
and supporting roles for his dubious adopted 'Eastern' friends, it was he
who was invariably incorporated into far more ambitious scenarios that had
more to do with the expropriation of vast wealth and the lucrative function
of handling the inevitable debt portfolios than with any of his celebrated
causes of national independence. Whether it was Irish Home Rule, Egyptian
Nationalism or supporting the British backed movement for an Arab Caliphate,
Blunt, according to his biographer Elizabeth Longford, is to be most
remembered neither for his poetry, not withstanding a half dozen well
crafted lines pinched from Elizabethan verse, nor his recondite politics,
which his friends in Parliament found rash and his wife rather ridiculous,
but rather his living-out his own extraordinary autobiography. Before
dropping in on the Blunts it is necessary to describe in some detail what
key events were taking place in Egypt, 1863.
Sultan Abdalaziz had installed Isma'il Pasha, an ambitious and clever young
man who expressed an early fascination with Europe, as the viceroy of Egypt.
In 1863, he brought gifts to the Sultan in Istanbul, including a steamboat,
and in return the Sultan visited him in Egypt later the same year. During
the next two years Isma'il was to lend support in the form of troops to
suppress an uprising in Arabia, a struggle in Romania and trouble on the
island of Crete. He was remunerated for his efforts by being made Khedive of
Egypt with the right to run its internal affairs. In 1866, with the
permission of the Ottoman Government, Isma'il began the digging of the Suez
Canal, which when completed, carried with it huge debts to European banks.
These debts, in turn, brought in foreign administrators, and financial
houses in England, akin to those already ensconced from France, bought up
further shares as Egypt was pressed to sell off its stake in the Canal. By
1878 a Minister of Finance had been appointed from England and a Minister of
Public Works from France. This incursion into the affairs of the Muslims was
an unprecedented disaster, notwithstanding the severe blow already caused by
the military defeat suffered at the hands of the Russians in the Crimean
Wars twenty years earlier, and brought about Isma'il's removal, only for him
to be followed by his son Tawfiq, who gained his support through covert
British initiatives. During the next few years, while two sides of a feudal
banking family, one in France the other in England, feuded and intrigued to
gain control over the administration of Egypt's debt, already ten times the
total of its annual revenues, by 1882 Egypt had sunk completely under the
control of the British (banks). As Egypt was unravelling the FO in London
was desperate to keep control and out manoeuvre the French who still held a
stake in the country. France was encouraged from behind the scenes by
Bismarck, while the English wanted no squabble with Germany and its
head-strong Chancellor. All the while the Empire's grip on Afghanistan was
being challenged by Russia, who was advancing deeper into Central Asia, and
whom the British believed was attempting to enter British India through the
back door. To exasperate matters even further, the Boers were restless in
South Africa and resisting the yoke of British colonialism.
As the government in Istanbul catapulted into turmoil, with blame falling
first on the high ranking Sadrazam Pasha, the matter became increasingly
volatile as the naiveté or, more accurately, the unconscionable ignorance of
the machinations of usury-capitalism of Sultan Abdalaziz himself brought
about a further capitulation that resulted in his deposition and then death.
The escalating foreign debt and with it the increasing interference in the
affairs of the Islamic polity by those whose interests were inimical to it,
was not, therefore, restricted to the situation in Egypt, but had already
taken root in Istanbul. By some accounts Abdalaziz had attempted
(unsuccessfully) to hold back the growth of foreign debt being advanced by
officials within the newly liberalized government. Undoubtedly there were
new forces at work as financial instruments previously unknown within the
Muslim world were wrecking havoc. The 'liberalisation' taking place at the
highest levels of government was the shifting away from the modalities of
Islam in the face of these challenges. The short sightedness of this new
class of bureaucrats, already an aberration to the clear modalities of a
historically victorious Islam, kept them from recognising the plague of
usury capitalism and the deception that claimed the keys to modernity and
progress could only be had from the Banks. And all this despite the clear
prohibitions in both the Qur'an and recorded Sunna of the Prophet, may Allah
bless him and grant him peace, against the very financial practices that
were proving far more lethal than any modern military weapon. Upon
Abdalaziz's death, Murad V was made Khalif and Sultan. Neither a strong nor
competent leader, and with controversy still rife over the death of
Abdalaziz, he too was soon deposed.
In 1876, Sultan Abdalhamid II, one of the greatest leaders the Muslim people
were to have, was handed the reins of authority at a time when such a man
could not have been more needed. It was during the first few years of his
rule that the English (banks) were consolidating their hold on Egypt, taking
full advantage of the reckless financial policies of Khedive Isma'il and of
the culpability of the Sultan's predecessors in Istanbul. Sultan Abdalhamid
annulled the adopted 'liberal' Constitution of his immediate predecessors
and began to dismantle the pervasive and corrupt bureaucracy that had been
built up. The situation in which he found himself prompted an exigency that
provoked his enemies, castigating him as an autocratic ruler who was
impeding the tide of change. The desired tidal change was the wholesale take
over of the rich lands of the Muslim people, while allowing a limited
suzerainty within what would develop into newly formed nation-states.
Before the disgraced Isma'il was removed he made a desperate plea for help
from Sultan Abdalhamid. Upon judicious advice from the Ottoman Pasha of
Tunisia, who saw that this would lead to an uprising in Egypt by those who
blamed Isma'il for the interminable woes suffered by the country - and
consequently even more foreign interference - it was decided not to move in
defense of Isma'il. Yet another rash act by the Khedive, his formation of a
new all-Egyptian government, did indeed prompt the English to step in,
instigating the revolt of the Egyptian people led by the nationalist Arabi
Pasha in 1881. A resolute political acumen was needed by the Sultan to
navigate the course through this complex and dangerous situation. He saw
that the nationalist, albeit anti-British, movement in Egypt would weaken
Muslim polity, cut Egypt off from the body of the Umma, and make that much
easier the possession of its wealth and people by those who had already
fastened their grip. As an alternative the Sultan convened a conference in
Istanbul with ambassadors from the creditor countries (banks), although he
did not personally attend, as this would lend legitimacy to their incursion
into Ottoman affairs. It was decided that the Ottoman Government would take
charge of settling the financial crisis in Egypt with no interference from
either Britain or France. The skill of the Sultan had, given the
disadvantageous circumstances, guided the matter to the best possible
solution. He then summoned Arabi Pasha and some of his key followers to
Istanbul while he sent an envoy to Egypt to meet with Tawfiq, the new
Khedive. In accordance with the recently adjourned conference in Istanbul
French warships had left the Bay of Alexandria, although English ships had
remained anchored in the port. While the diplomatic efforts of Sultan
Abdalhamid were on the verge of restoring calm, the continued presence of
British warships sparked riots in Alexandria, which resulted in Admiral
Seymour shelling the city. Faced with the prospect of sending troops into
Egypt, the Sultan held to his promise at the Istanbul Accord to settle the
internal debts of Egypt and then to appoint some of the nationalists to the
government of the Khedive. While his representative was on his way to Cairo
to expedite this prudent plan, one that can be seen to hold the best
interests of the Egyptians and the possibility that they could avoid
precipitating greater catastrophe, yet another intrigue was underway.
Joseph Chamberlain, Britain's Minister of Trade, and one of the Empire's
leading men, wanted further to secure the interests of British creditors and
at the same time sequester all of the high quality yet inexpensive Egyptian
cotton for the textile industry of his hometown, Manchester. The rising
nationalist movement provided the provocation necessary to strike, and -
with the government at home about to change hands from the liberal Gladstone
to the conservative Salisbury - Chamberlain seized the moment and moved to
the attack at Tell-el Kabir on September 13,1882 and defeated the Egyptians,
then moved on, in a brilliant play, to take Cairo! In the aftermath, Britain
insisted that their holding Egypt was 'only temporary, to secure stability,'
and restated their desire to work with the Sultan to this end. Whatever the
Sultan actually may have thought of this promise, he was now unable to
object. The Ottomans were still acknowledged as the sovereign authority in
Egypt, but now all its internal affairs were inexorably in the hands of the
new suzerain power.
Captain Evelyn Baring, of the Baring banking family, was sent to Egypt as
the British Commissioner of the Debt. In 1883, he was appointed British
Agent and Consul-General in Egypt and was thence to be known as (the
formidable and overbearing) Lord Cromer, who ran Egypt until 1907. His
influence would permeate every sphere of society, including the alteration
of certain fundaments of Islamic Law. His personally appointing Muhammad
Abduh, the prime protégé of al-Afghani - an Irani Shi'a turned agnostic and
Masonic 'grand-master'- as the Grand Mufti of Egypt may well be his most
vaunted and pernicious achievement. As Afghani had opened the door to an
esoteric reinterpretation of Qur'an and the removal of established fiqh (the
science of the application of Shari'a Law), Abduh, as Mufti under Cromer and
the Crown's provisional law and through a series of fatwas, would inaugurate
changes in law that would allow the practice of usury: redefining clearly
forbidden business practices based on usury as acceptable, thus allowing the
first bank to open, while utilizing Islamic terms denoting recognized and
established lawful business practices for clearly unlawful ones. Truly
avatars of Islamic Modernism and progenitors of the Islamic Bank, an
institution that was to arise nearly a century later, both al-Afghani and
Abduh opened the door for the degradation and bankrupting not only of Egypt
but also of the entire Muslim world. We can ask who opened the door to these
two feckless yet ultimately destructive characters? It was none other than
that great adventurer of proboscidian proportions, Mr. Blunt.
Blunt had befriended Afghani when they met for the first time in 1883 in
Paris, where Afghani was engaged with leading French Freemasons who had
taken to bed their eager Islamic Modernist friend, and was to promote the
'free thinking eastern gentleman' on numerous occasions during the next ten
years. Afghani's pan-Islamic reforms and his scarcely concealed contempt for
Islam suited the architects of Egyptian Independence. Blunt openly supported
the nationalists, with their fervent anti-British rhetoric, to whom Afghani
and his Salafi school were attached. According to the memoirs of Winston
Churchill's politically unlucky father Randolf, Blunt avidly discussed his
radical ideas at his gentlemen's club in London with Lord Gladstone. Blunt
advanced the need to bring Arabi, the leader of the Egyptian Nationalist
uprising, back into Egypt, with, he urged, the help of the British, and
moreover, saw the thinking of Afghani as highly suitable to reshape the
country.
Blunt supported the Mahdi in his revolt against the British in Sudan, and
when Khartoum fell and Gordon was killed, Gladstone's Liberal government was
unravelling in London. Blunt advocated Afghani as "the one man who could
speak directly to the Mahdi", although Afghani had never met him nor was he
known to have any access to the self proclaimed messianic leader of the
Sudan, and according to Blunt (see My Diaries), rather fantastically, "if
the British would back down on Egypt, he could assure peace in the Sudan."
Blunt had even more friends in the new conservative government of Salisbury,
most notably Lord Randolph Churchill, to whom he eagerly promoted his grand
plan. The avowed radical and liberal champion was now considering seeking
his own seat in (the new Conservative) government.
Egypt's independence from British rule presupposes it being severed from
Ottoman ascendancy, which held the banner of Islam, and, therefore,
protected it. Likewise, Blunt's promoting an Arabian Khalif and supporting
an Arab rebellion against the Ottomans opened the way for the complete
disintegration of the land of the Arabs, which has never recovered and
remains fractured into despotic and unstable nation states. While the
British government had very similar designs, they, for their part, found
Blunt rash and unaware of the bigger picture. Chaotic dismembering of the
Ottoman territory would precipitate Britain losing control of what they saw
as the crown jewels that they alone wanted to retain. While Czarist Russia
was eyeing the Caucasus and the Balkans, and France the Mediterranean rim of
North Africa, it was Egypt, Arabia and the trade route through the Gulf and
the biggest prize of all, India, that Britain was determined to have. They
would, indeed, attempt to placate the Ottomans, while more cautiously
steering the situation to the desired endgame.
On another front, or foot, Blunt had travelled through Iran, 'looking,' he
said, 'for a stallion,' and would not meet the Imperial Shah (although he
claimed in his Diaries to have done so), ruler of the Shi'a, a bane within
the Muslim world from the moment they emerged as a splinter (etymologically
the correct word would be splitter although not found in the English
dictionary). He did join up with some 'impoverished pilgrims on the way to
the Hajj,' and shot six wild boars for them to eat, the last one nearly
killing Lady Anne and her prized stud. They were next visited by a 'lost
tribe, worse off than the pilgrims,' who offered to be their guides and
'turned out to be forty thieves,' as we learn from Blunt's own account.
Afghani would visit Iran after him, seeking directly from the Shah, whom he
did meet, a high ministerial post. This is an egregious anomaly for an
Iranian born Shi'a who had built his identity on pretending to be an Afghani
Sunni scholar, and who now hoped to stage a rebellion against the Shah of
Iran. The encrusted Peacock got wind of Afghani's smoke and would have none
of it, and threw him out of His Royal Highness' Persia.
An Arab rebellion in the Hijaz would in time be advanced by Britain, as the
hidden wealth that lay under its sands was becoming known. It was, of
course, T.E. Lawrence, the man who loved the romance of the desert just as
he had a fond predilection for Arab boys and who called W.S. Blunt his
"prophet and role-model," that would incite the ignorant Bedouins to
rebellion and who eventually installed the family of Ibn Saud as the Kings
of Arabia. It was an inebriated Churchill - his normal condition - who
congratulated the King on his new job, for which the monarch was to receive
a stipend from the British Government. While they sat together on a British
frigate, with Churchill mulling over the future of the region as he ate his
pork-chops, the newly appointed King of Arabia declared "Saudi Arabia."
Muhammad Abduh would be introduced in London, as had been his mentor Afghani
before him, by Blunt to his friends in Government. On returning to Egypt
Blunt would sit with the impressive Lord Cromer, stalwart of British
Imperialism in the East. In 1899, while Blunt was ill and unable to travel,
he asked Cromer to 'give away' his daughter Judith in marriage. Blunt's
wife, Lady Anne, found this "extraordinarily bizarre," as Cromer had,
"apparently!" been her husband's nemesis for years in Egypt. She admitted to
having never understood Wilfred's politics. The same year found the head of
the Mahdi severed from his entombed body, which was then thrown into the
Nile, with the head brought back to London to be used as an inkwell or
drinking cup. Lord Kitchener ordered the act, while it was the young Major
William Gordon, nephew of the avenged General, whom he put up to it. Blunt
was incensed by the act as well as Kitchener's shirking responsibility for
it. Blunt wrote, "An abominable world it is, an abominable century, and an
abominable race." The Boer War broke out and Blunt became an advocate for
the "fate of the blacks" in South Africa. Then the Boxer Rebellion in China,
and in contrast to the 'Yellow Peril' scare-mongering that was popular
amongst his countrymen, he wrote: 'The Chinese, after a long course of
bullying by the Powers, worrying by the missionaries, and robbing by
merchants and speculators, have risen, and are, very properly, knocking the
foreign vermin on the head.'
With the beginning of the new century Blunt was still expressing his
bitterness about the last one. Nevertheless, he remained somewhat optimistic
that the age of British Imperialism was to end, and with it its incessant
wars. 'The Shame of the Nineteenth', wrote Blunt, had to be put aside for
the shame of the Twentieth, and while he was moving into old age, and his
causes of conscience more obtuse, he was keeping closer to home and his
growing grandchildren.
In 1914 a group of poets in England went to pay homage to Blunt. Among them
was Yeats, advocate, like Blunt, of Irish Home Rule, and also young Ezra
Pound, who was writing (and dressing) in the style of an Eighteenth Century
romantic poet, steeped in Greek Classicism and Medieval Literature. Pound's
poetry and politics would, during the next two decades, mature, and with it
an understanding that would place usury as the most pernicious and
destructive force against nature. In the poet's words, repeatedly expressed
in both his prose essays and epic poem The Cantos, usura was Contra Naturum,
destroyer of the highest aspects of human civilization: 'its culture,
religion, art and the ability to establish justice.' (Collected Essays).
Nevertheless, the seventy-four year old Blunt was still an impressive
figure, and Yeats and his young friends were not disappointed with their
famous 'Peacock Dinner' (Pound's idea and I believe he cooked it) in honour
of the man of action with 'a fine old eye', as he was referred to in The
Cantos. Ten years later Pound would preach the necessity of going to the
roots of meanings, it was part of his Confucian education and a quality he
attributed in his epic poem to the Prophet Muhammad.
The relevancy of the reference to the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant
him peace, can be recognized by referring to his last formal address during
the Farewell Hajj which took place not long before he, peace be upon him,
died. Three salient topics were discussed: the unequivocal prohibition
against usury (riba) and the imperative to protect against it; the equitable
and honourable treatment of women within society; and a profound
understanding of tawhid (the unity of God). This auspicious, deeply moving
and most crucial address was a safeguard for his community, then and for
future generations. Loosing hold of these things has not only precipitated
the loss of their lands and wealth but to some extent, their very humanity.
The taking as 'friends and protectors' those whom they have envied, feared
and hoped for help from - has left them lost in a dark desert storm.
Wilfred S. Blunt did not delve deep into the root causes of the wars,
conflicts and confrontations that he was to witness and often champion in
his lifetime. He was, all the same, a rare English archetype that appears a
cut above the rest. He became the first Englishman to be sent to prison,
albeit for a short stay, over the conflict in Ireland. At the other end of
his political spectrum, in 1915, he sat for hours with his young friend,
Winston Churchill, who was utterly distraught over Asquith's Liberal Cabinet
having fallen apart and taking him, as part of the coalition, down with it.
On top of that Winston was haunted by his responsibility, as First Lord of
the Admiralty, for the horrendous loss of life at Gallipoli, and Blunt would
spend whole afternoons watching him paint a portrait that he ever so much
tried to praise. Five years later, after a conversation with the
Churchill's, Blunt would write that he thought Winston had caused the war
even more than Gray, and then in My Diaries: 'There is much of the schoolboy
in Winston notwithstanding his crimes...'
Lady Anne died in 1917 and is buried in Cairo, and in 1918 Judith, the
Blunts' daughter, defeated her father's contesting her mother's will that
left the ownership of all the stud horses to her. The final years became
clouded with morphine and there was no reconciliation with his daughter
although he said he was satisfied that the horses would end up with his
grandchildren and he had been relieved of the responsibility. The
publication of My Diaries met with some critical acclaim, which he certainly
enjoyed, although one senses that when he was up to it, it was his private
conversations that provided him with pleasure. Blunt died on the tenth of
September 1922 at the age of eighty-two.
The Great Game, a term first used by a Russian officer engaged in
reconnaissance in Central Asia and coined in English by Kippling, was a
British invention. It was a far more ingenious game than many of the players
were aware of. The vast horizons of the most prodigious men became a
circumscribed wasteland of wrecked private ambitions and puerile fantasies.
The major players have slipped into a ubiquitous obscurity. Wilfred Blunt
played, with conspicuous flare, his part. He was indubitably a man of
conscience. Ultimately the Islamic Caliphate was bankrupted, and the spoils
divided. By the end of the First World War the job was done, the Caliphate
ended, and today, at the beginning of another new century, all its lands
divided into corrupt nation-states, indebted and with despotic regimes run
by 'b-movie' gangsters. Britain, no longer great, has yet to resolve the
conflicts of Northern Ireland, and as of July 2001, bombs continued to
explode in the streets of London, leaving a trail of blood and shattered
glass. In the same summer cities in the Midlands of England provide venues
for conflicts of racial unrest, as the Government and police join forces to
drive an already alienated and disenfranchised population of youth into
futile battles. The great prize of India comes down to a street fight in
Manchester between the police and the (British) Indian youth.
Abdullah Luongo
POSTSCRIPT
In the Fall of 2001 an event took place in the United States that very few
will soon forget, and not since the Iranian Hostage Crisis some twenty years
earlier has the world of Islam been so much in the news.
The age of British Imperialism and its array of colourful and intrepid
characters, which one might disparage as much as admire, has been superseded
by the age of American ascendancy and world power. The petro-chemical
companies which were in their infancy at the beginning of the twentieth
century have come of age, and their marriage to the financial institutions
that manage and control the world's wealth has produced a progeny with no
national loyalty or fealty other than to their own bottom line. A bottom
line, one might add, counted in US dollars - as all oil is traded through
the US dollar, an imposed Bilateral Payment Agreement (BPA) and held in
place by force.
There is a struggle between the euro and US dollar, as Germany and France
manoeuvre for a larger share of the spoils from the rich Iraqi oil fields
and at the same time hope to hedge their currency on the world market. This
would mean breaking in on the oil market with the euro as currency within
Bilateral or Multilateral Payment Agreements, instead of the 'exclusive'
dollar.
No country can afford to alienate the US consumer market, as other economies
are presently dependent on it. Special trade concessions have been extended
to countries in Europe (Italy and Spain) and Asia that signed on in the US
led War in Iraq. When a coalition of America's traditional allies could not
be materialised the US resorted to threats against countries in Eastern
Europe, Africa and Asia, threatening to cut aid and, most cynically,
co-operation between those countries and the IMF and World Bank. Don't think
that the US Government can unleash the dogs of the World Bank, they cannot.
It is the other way around.
The United States is the largest outlet for consumer goods in the world and
many are ready to kill in order to protect it. For Americans it is
protecting what is their inalienable right. Some countries supplying goods
to the US market are equally willing to endorse unilateralist adventures in
exchange for 'privileged trade status,' or to avoid loosing aid or the
threat of having their outstanding loans called in.
The current acceptable political spectrum in the US is one that places radio
shock jocks on one side and CNN, NBC and CBS on the other. There is simply a
mater of taste involved, or lack of it. The idea that there could be people
who are not prepared to go to war to protect their privilege of paying
taxes, watching endless re-enactments of "true life crimes" on television
and shopping at Wal-Mart is something that the present US administration is
not prepared to entertain. "Racial profiling" has replaced the old racial
stereotyping, as civil liberties vanish behind the smoke screen of "Homeland
Security." There is an other level of journalism that can be found in
Europe, for example Le Monde Diplomatique from France or on occasion and by
specific journalists, The Guardian of the UK. There has always been a wider
spectrum of both ideas and positions within Europe than in the US,
necessitating periodic liberation forces to save the former by the latter.
The US is accusing France, Russia and Syria of supplying various materials,
from medicines to munitions, to Iraq. This violates UN Sanctions Against
Iraq, having been held in place for twelve years by US insistence. During an
eight-year war between Iraq and Iran the US and Britain armed Saddam against
the dangerous and fanatical Shia of Iran and those living within Iraq. They
were a threat to the oil rich Gulf, where American Interests were at risk.
Donald Rumsfeld embraced the Iraqi President with open arms. Mrs. Thatcher's
son Mark made his fortune as an arms dealer, and nearly all weapons of mass
destruction used in the first Gulf War were made in the USA ... or Britain.
With considerable dissent in Europe, Africa and Asia against the US War,
groups of Muslims have been found participating in demonstrations of civil
disobedience. It should be clear that in no way is the activity of protest
able to be associated with Islam, as it has no historical role in either its
teaching or accepted practice. It is, nevertheless, evidentiary proof of the
collapse of anything resembling the highly vaunted ideals of Democratic
Process, as these activities not only do not impinge on economic imperatives
(code named National Security) but that dissent is characterised (at least
in the US) as un-patriotic and even treasonable. A brave if not politically
naïve Democratic Presidential hopeful from New England has called for a
"regime change in the US," the same catch phrase used by the Bush
Administration for bringing down Saddam, prompting an immediate backlash
from the White House Press Secretary and an apology from the Senator.
Upon a closer examination it is the monopoly imposed by the US dollar that
has given such unlimited (purchasing) power to the United States and allowed
it to act with impunity throughout the world. This proliferation of US
dollars throughout the world is based on their being 'checks written for
cash' that will never have to return to the bank on which they are drawn for
payment!
The relentless quest for control of the world's oil supply drives the
machine of global conquest with the same ruthlessness and cunning, while
lacking something of its sophistication and style, that was the hallmark of
the great imperial aspirations of the late Nineteenth Century. The inciting
of a crude and uncultured band of brigands and traitors to rise up against
the rule of the Ottoman Caliphate has become the lore of legends, as T.E.
Lawrence rose to fame and infamy as a provocateur of British Imperialism.
This adventure culminated in the family of Saud being placed on a throne by
the British, and the Wahhabi doctrine - a harsh and heartless monotheism;
puritanical, misogynistic and devoid of love of the Prophet Muhammad and his
noble Sunna (practice), being installed by brutal repression over all the
remaining tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. These are the people who went to
bed with the American Oil Titans, whose first born was ARAMCO, followed by a
brood of other joint ventures.
In the nineteen eighties the CIA would arm and train the Afghan Mujahideen
to fight against the Russians, their opponents of a forty year Cold War who
were now to suffer a Vietnam of their own. From 1995 onward both the CIA and
US State Department were actively endorsing the Taliban as the group that
could maintain 'zone control' within the region, a vital prerequisite for a
pipeline that is crucial to American interests, without which they would be
obliged to use either Russian or Chinese facilities. The War Against Terror
launched against Afghanistan has settled the pipeline issue - assuming that
the US will succeed at what the Russians in the late twentieth century and
England in the late nineteenth failed to be able to do.
Both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan formally acknowledged the Taliban Government
of Afghanistan. With one country an annex of the petrol chemical companies
and (in part) under receivership due to the enormous cost of underwriting
the Gulf War and the running (12 years) tab for their being an occupied
territory by Saviours who won't go home - and the other addicted, not unlike
its millions of heroin addicts, to US aid and needing to act in strict
compliance with their benefactor's policies - it is inconceivable that
either country could have made such a declaration without explicit
instructions. Through their two vassals the US was letting the Taliban know
how to play ball, and if they did that everyone would make a lot of money.
Meanwhile Wahhabi fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia had inculcated
themselves into the Taliban leadership, and were joined by outcasts from
various Modernist States, many of whom had been active in the previous
Afghan War with the Russians, and who had been the recipients of specialized
training and military hardware from the CIA. The Saudi dissident Osama Bin
Laden, renowned for his having no Islamic education, was a major beneficiary
of the American plan, who then emerges as 'public enemy number one.'
Meanwhile, we are told that the Bin Laden family is 'highly reputable,' owns
a major construction company and has diversified business interest that
include investments with another highly reputable family, this one from
Texas.
The advent of Islamic Modernism arose as a virulent virus out of the
intercourse between Afghani and Abduh and leading French and English
freemasons of the late eighteen hundreds. We are reintroduced to it as it
rears its obdurate anti-Islamic head today in Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Pakistan
(to name only a few), all of which beg for international acceptance and
foreign aid with one hand while they bite the other in bitter rage against
the hand that feeds them but will never accept them. The twenty-first
century has delivered the mutant offspring of archaic Wahhabism and a failed
and outdated Islamic Modernism. They are known to the world as Terrorists.
While the paternity of the modern terrorist may remain a subject of
controversy, with all parties concerned inveighing against each other, their
actions or reactions make themselves known around the world. What appears
most clearly is that they have no direct relationship to the legacy of
historical Islam, which appears (for the moment) to have disappeared from
the face of the earth. While there are numerically more Muslims today than
ever before, there is no extant Islam on the face of the planet. Its
restoration is contingent on the return of the Islamic Gold Dinar as
currency, the return of Khalifate with Sultaniyya as its proud leadership
and the restoring of Zakat - the fallen Pillar of Islam. Political Islam, in
all its aberrant forms, has failed, and with it the tired paradigm of
tradition vs. modernity, itself a false dialectic that has only yielded
defeat and humiliation for those unfortunate 'educated' Muslims who bought
into it, and most tragically, the deaths for the thousands of poor souls who
died defending it. It is time for the Sufis to begin by rebuilding from the
core of men new hearts. What will, insha'Allah, emerge are men and women who
obey Allah and His Messenger and in doing so will build a new post
capitalist society. That society will be set on the firm foundation of
tijara (trade) without riba (usury) and ibada (worship) without shirk
(association).
The destruction taking place today in Iraq is the playing out of the final
stages of a squalid game (hardly a Great one), and while the terrible toll
of human suffering can not be ignored, it must be seen beyond. The Arab
Muslims in particular must recognise that what is happening is by Allah.
Abdullah Luongo
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