Reclaiming Muslim Agency

Opening: The Two Prayers

Every Friday, in tens of thousands of mosques across the world, the khaṭīb raises his hands and prays for the people of Gaza, for the liberation of the Masjid al-Aqsa, for the Ummah while hundreds of millions of sincere souls raise their hands with him towards heaven, sometimes with tears flowing, beseeching Allah in earnest to answer his prayers. And then, everyone goes home, and nothing is done.

For two years the world has watched a livestreamed genocide. A genocide none can claim he or she did not see. And the dominant emotion in Muslim communities is not, I think, ignorance but rather anguished helplessness. Muslims feel everything but move nothing.

Now the question is not: Do Muslim care? They obviously do. The question is: Why does so much genuine Muslim feeling produce so little force or momentum? Why are nearly two billion Muslims, sitting on a quarter of the earth’s landmass and much of its energy, unable to protect one besieged strip of land twenty-five miles long?

At the very outset, one has to warn against the readily easy answer handed out by others, which Muslims have learned to repeat about themselves, i.e. that something is wrong with them, that they are backward, or broken, or not yet ready. That kind of answer is a trap, and I shall proceed to dismantle it below.

One is not here to add to Muslim grief, there is enough of it as it is. One is here to argue two things at once. Firstly, that such grief is being wasted and that the very volume of that wasted feeling is the very proof of how much power Muslims have. Helplessness on this momentous scale is not really weakness, it is rather strength that has not yet been organised. Secondly, that the Eurocentric order can neither absorb Muslims nor erase them; moreover, it is Eurocentrism’s failure, not the Muslims’, that lies behind everything they do to Muslims worldwide. In other words, the problem of Muslims is not that they are weak or insignificant, rather they are numerous enough to unsettle a world order that has no settled place for them as they are. If hundreds of millions can be moved with a mere gesture to raise their hands in prayer, in one instant, and for the same wound, then the raw material of the greatest civil force on earth is already there. Muslims are not short of energy; they are short of conversion: from grief and mere feeling to force and momentum. Such conversion is something that Muslims can learn.