Allah only forbids you, with regard to those who fight you for (your) Faith, and drive you out of your homes, and support (others) in driving you out,
from turning to them (for friendship and protection). It is such as those who turn to them (in these circumstances) that commit sin.
(TMQ, Surat ul-Mumtahanah, ayah 9)

Another old guardsman answers the inevitable call of Allah (subhanahu wa ta'ala). Yasir Arafat is dead, and already people are debating about his legacy. One thing is certain: after decades of pandering to the Great Powers, and after all the compromises he made, he still died a degrading death. Abandoned by those he ultimately served, he could not find treatment among his own people or die decently in his own "national" hospital.

What will History say about him: terrorist or peacemaker? The answer depends on who gets to write the textbook. We at halalfoodforthought.com want an opportunity to examine both the man and the organization he led through the prism of Islam. Only Allah can judge a public figure's intentions; but in planning for the future, we all must learn and reflect about the consequences of his past actions.

And so, what were the major accomplishments of Yasir Arafat and the PLO? Did they reflect the interests and aspirations of Islam?

Perhaps Arafat's biggest impact on the Muslim world was the creation of the "Palestinian National Myth." Historically, Palestine was a region of Bilad Ash-Sham, the name of the lands to the north of Al-Hijaz in Arabia. It never was a nation; it never had its own government, or anything like the boundaries we find today. However, after years of Muslim political decline, the West saw its chance to colonize the nerve center of the Islamic world. Years before the final catastrophe of the Uthmani Khilafah, the British and French planned to cut Ash-Sham into pieces with the infamous Sykes-Picot treaty of 1917. The northern territory of "Greater Syria" would go under French "mandate," while the southern zone-soon to be called "Palestine" and "Jordan"-would fall to the British.

Recovering from a decimating world war, the two mandatory powers recognized almost immediately that direct colonization, Algerian- or Indian-style, would require too heavy an investment of troops and other resources. Therefore, they decided to use local go-betweens to keep order in the newly carved-out states. These caretakers, often seeming to appear from nowhere, gained kingdoms of their own in return for securing Western interests.

It's very important to recognize here that each new state appearing in the 1920's was founded on a basis of nationalism. This was only possible after the nationalist idea had become firmly implanted in the Muslim mind over the preceding one hundred years. Islam stopped being the basis for political unity in the state. Nevertheless, the new generation of western agents and stooges found it useful to create Arab Leagues and Islamic Conferences to quiet the Ummah's conscience and provide an illusion of unity, even though one unified Islamic State in fact had become weak, failing, fragments.

The people of Ash-Sham, and the rest of the Muslim world, also soothed themselves with the assurance that each of their new little nation-states appeared to be ruled by people who looked like Muslims or Arabs. This false sense of security was severely shaken with the emergence, right at the spot where Africa meets Asia, of the Zionist movement and its Jewish settler state.

The Muslim world, reacting for once as a Muslim world, at first completely rejected the establishment of an Israel at its geographic heart in the 1940's. That would be a major challenge for the Western powers, who wanted their new "Crusader state" established forever. It forced the West to try redefining the Palestine problem as a national and Palestinian cause, instead of an Islamic one. To make this shift, a Palestinian national myth had to be created where there hadn't been any before. Ultimately, the Arab League, serving once more as a puppet organization, invented the PLO as a "Palestinian nation" in embryo. Soon after, the myth began to grow: the PLO was venerated by all for its supposed defiance and suffering-especially its suffering-at the hands of the Israelis. The new "liberation organization" made a number of big promises that would soon be bargained away and forgotten, including "complete liberation of ALL Palestine." Muslims the world over were delighted when they heard about "throwing Israel into the sea, " and overlooked the fact that Arafat was calling for another secular nation-state in Palestine. They had long forgotten that liberation in Islam is not about being ruled by a Big Brother who speaks the same language or has the same skin color as you: it means living under the laws of Allah (subhanahu wa ta'ala) as one Ummah.

The PLO and Arafat had one goal, however, that it never gave up: becoming the Sole Legitimate Representative of the Palestinian People. This had to be so, because only this would give Arafat's organization an excuse to call for a "Palestinian" solution for "Palestinians."

Ironically, the creation of a Palestinian "nation" and its myth was the only thing that made the final surrender of Palestine possible. Before the Oslo accords of 1993, any talk of giving up the lands stolen in 1948 was betrayal and meant political suicide for any Arab or Muslim politician. With the signature of the Father of the Palestinian People, though, all that changed. In due course, the PLO would concede over 75% of 1948 Palestine. Other concessions to the Zionists included helping the Israelis police Palestinians, altering any language in Palestinian children's schoolbooks referring to the removal of Israel, and giving up major parts of Jerusalem.

In agreeing to all this, the PLO did not actually serve the interests of "its" people. Instead, Arafat's people were following Washington's "peace" plan that would allow Israel to split the Arab world, yet keep the Jewish state from getting too powerful. This required an isolated, fenced-in Israel surrounded by unfriendly Arab states (i.e., Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian Bantustan) that would withhold their markets and cheap labor. This also frustrated the British, who had hoped that their own agent, King Hussein of Jordan, would get the West Bank back. The defeat of this proposal showed very well how successful the Americans had been in fostering a "Palestinian national myth".

Many may try to defend Yasir Arafat and the PLO's compromises as something they were forced to do. Some even dream that this is only a first step to liberate all of Palestine. In fact, the peace process, if it succeeds, will guarantee western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs for many, many years. Future struggles by a unified Ummah to liberate all of Palestine would be met with objections from the rest of the world if Israel is seen as a legal state. There is a clear difference between being incapable of achieving one's goals and abandoning them altogether. A politician with integrity, faced with failure, should have stepped aside and given his post to others who might succeed. Instead, to preserve his position, Arafat abandoned the goal of winning all of Palestine back from the Jews. As a result, the idea of liberating lands taken in 1948 has become the "extremist" or "terrorist" position, even for Muslims. This represents a clear victory for the West.

Even after Arafat, other PLO leaders still sell themselves and betray their people to western masters. While Marwan Barghouti was led in handcuffs from the Israeli courts back to jail, he shouted repeatedly his campaign slogan, "I believe in the Two-State solution! I believe in the Two-State solution!" The present situation resembles a train set upon a track and riding through compromise after compromise. Changing engineers-from Arafat to Abu Mazen-will not change the train's direction. For every "solution" the PLO agrees to, our children eventually will pay a price in blood. We need to get off this train and switch to a train of true change.

Today, it is sad to see that people still fight and die for Arafat's legacy of betrayal. Even some Muslim organizations in Palestine have recently considered joining the PLO, gushing that it is "one of the greatest achievements for the Palestinians."

But they're wrong. For us Muslims, Palestine cannot be simply a "Palestinian" problem; and no "Palestinian" organization has the authority to give any part of Palestine away. Our only true representative is a Khalifah, and even he wouldn't be allowed to give up Muslim territory. No one has a right to bargain over Palestine, especially a corrupt organization created by the Arab League.

If we are too weak to liberate Palestine this very day, what can we do? We must start by understanding our reality, apply the correct Islamic concepts to it, and educate those in our Ummah who don't know yet. We must admit to ourselves that our understanding and handling of the Palestine-Israel issue so far has been a disaster. The establishment of both Israel and the Palestinian myth has diverted us Muslims from facing our real problem (imagine a doctor focusing on a headache while the patient has cancer). Israel's existence-and that of the 55 or so Muslim mini-states-are just symptoms of the root problem: the absence of the Islamic ideology acting fully in all spheres of life. Until we reestablish Islam completely, anything we do regarding the problem of Israel will most likely exhaust our resources and hold us back from becoming an enlightened society.

Palestinians now are like prisoners in jail, and you cannot ask a prisoner to free himself. Muslims in Palestine can only be liberated when a state representing the values of Islam and the interests of Muslims comes to their rescue. Kings and presidents who sleep soundly at night, while children in Palestine are massacred, definitely will be of no use. Keeping them in power and asking them to solve our problems aren't an option, let alone giving big dinners rewarding visiting queens and ambassadors for their silence and incompetence.

All liberations begin with ideas and vision. Unity of ideas means strength within a group, and it is a necessity for true change. In the US, for example, we have a society sharing a set of ideas that brings it together. This unity, hard won, makes America strong, and gives it the ability to spread its hegemony, for good or evil. In this day and age, we Muslims do not have such a unity of ideas: there is still confusion about what we need to do, even about what is "true Islam".

Some things we must agree about are these: Palestine is not the root cause of all our problems. The PLO does not represent the Muslim interests, and in fact it has sold nearly all of Palestine. Our misery comes instead from the existence of the weak mini-states that serve Western interests and whose "leaders" sit back and watch as Muslims die. Our Ummah must demand the end of our POLITICAL divisions, and we must educate ourselves about the Islamic ideology in depth. We cannot keep talking about the 5 pillars of Islam while the children of the West Bank (and Fallujah) are being killed.

We must become ideologically and politically savvy in order to understand our situation and deal with our problems as Muslims, in sha' Allah. For if we do not do this for ourselves, rest assured that the enemies of Islam will do it against us. Already, they are studying political Islam, and not our books that deal with adab or salah. They are doing this in order to learn how to dress kafir social values in the clothes of Islam, the better to prevent our revival. (Submitted 1/10/2005)