Islamic Unity Week: How Western imperialists thrive off disunity among Muslims

By Shabbir Rizvi

Islamic Unity Week is again here, an annual event that marks the birth anniversary of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), the apostle of God and the mercy of mankind.

The annual event was conceptualized shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, calling to unite both Sunni and Shia Muslims in common struggle, joy, and loving devotion to Islam.

Since the early days of Islam, Islamic unity, or rather the unity of the Ummah, has been tested by the enemies of Islam. From the Quraysh forces and the Byzantine Empire to English and American imperialism, many foes have tried to divide Muslims in order to eradicate Islam completely.

Particularly since the middle of the 20th century, things may have appeared particularly bleak for the Muslim world amid greater hostilities and the wave of Islamophobia gripping the world.

But the fact of the matter is Islam is still here and it is growing. Despite the enforcement of secular and Western “values” by the United States and its client states, Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion in the Western world, according to many surveys.

Even within the United States, which pushed vehemently racist attitudes towards Muslims after the September 11 attacks and fueled Islamophobia, Islam is the fastest-growing religion.

This very growth is something the modern-day enemies of Islam fear, and that is precisely why the Islamic Unity Week is so important - because if we are fragmented, we are easier to conquer, even with our growing numbers.

The West, led by the US, seeks to wage a multi-front war on the followers of Islam. Both fronts utilize tactics that range from crude, dehumanizing violence to sophisticated, systematic violence.

One front of this war is physical: invasions, occupation, seizure of land, and theft of resources, all accompanied by the physical destruction of Muslim populations from thousands to millions.

This is a rather crude front, albeit the mechanisms of invasion and colonial plunder are systematic and sophisticated as they use the West’s so-called “rules-based order” to conduct this warfare.

The second front is a mental-spiritual front: sowing discord and confusion in the Muslim mind by deploying racist caricatures and insults of Muslims within media and television, then insisting Western liberalism is the dominant and perfect ideology and the racist media is therefore protected.

This all leads to the very desecration of the Holy Quran itself, as the world has seen numerous times this year, with Western governments protecting these horrific acts as signs of “free speech and expression.” All this while their Western neighbors hypocritically ban the Islamic hijab.

These psychological attacks represent a forced assimilation of the Muslim mind, a way to shackle Muslims to the system of the West while that same system invades and plunders Muslim-majority countries and forces some Muslim states into alliances with promises of wealth and power.

This is a long-term strategy toward normalization of Western ideology as the dominant ideology. It seeks to either have Muslims give up Islam completely or create a Western-imperialist “understanding” of Islam, which is a distortion of the true essence of Islam and its teachings.

However, we continue to witness acts of Muslim unity that have thwarted the West’s divisive plans, revealing their discontent with unity and laying bare their plans of division.

Take for example the case of Syria. For nearly a decade, the US and its allies lead a horrific war against the Arab country, seeking to overthrow the democratically-elected President Bashar Al-Assad who refused to bow to the West’s commands and have Syria become a comprador state.

Syria was backed militarily and politically by Iran and was successful in ridding its country of Takfiri terrorists who were deemed “moderate rebels” by the Barack Obama administration.

Syria is now slowly repelling the last of Western-backed insurgents and invaders, and its neighbors that once either financed its foes or isolated Syria from the world are now forced to welcome Syria back into the fold, such as they did in the Arab League, promoting an open dialogue with Syria.

Imperialists within Washington were quick to condemn this move. The US Foreign Affairs committee immediately slammed the move, calling it a “grave strategic mistake.” 

They displayed the same shock and horror when China helped mend the seemingly permanent divide between Iran and Saudi Arabia earlier this year.

Within the Atlantic Council, an imperialist think tank, one analyst described this diplomatic embrace as a “bloody nose” for the US, a clear admission that unity between majority Sunni Saudi Arabia and the majority Shia Iran is an unwelcome development.

This division was long exploited by the West to advance its goals, such as the Saudi coalition’s war on Yemen which has resulted in the world’s largest humanitarian disaster.

If dialogue and unity had instead been the norm, this entire aggression could have been avoided. Instead, the US military industrial complex made billions of dollars selling arms to Saudi Arabia to carry out horrific bombing campaigns while the Western world watched as mute spectators.

The imperialists thrive off the disunity of Muslims. Right now, the disunity of some parts of the Muslim world prevents the Ummah from overcoming its numerous hurdles. If we flip this equation over on its head, the unity of the Muslim world can go tremendously far.

As a united front, the Muslim world can work together to solve many issues not only within the region, but globally: mending the scars from colonialism, distribution of resources and land based on Islamic political principles, evicting invaders and imperialists, combating and condemning racist acts of hate and violence in the West,  and most importantly, the issue the West fears will be reckoned with the most: the question of Palestine.

If Muslim nations acted as a united front and threatened to boycott and isolate Western countries that allow the desecration of the Holy Quran, those Western countries would clean up their act very quickly. After all, years of colonialism and invasion prove that the West needs the Muslim nations, and not the other way around.

This principle of a united front can be used to disarm the West’s war on both fronts mentioned - the physical front, and the mental-spiritual front.  It is then clear Muslim unity starts with dialogue between Muslims.

Many Muslim states can solve issues or contradictions between them through dialogue with each other. The division will only result in the advancement of the West’s goals, and the people who lose most are all Muslims globally.

Prioritizing acceptance and unity with the declining West and liberal democracy rather than other Muslim communities is to accept humiliation. One only needs to turn to Western Europe to observe this: in a world previously dominated by US hegemony, the allies of the US are now treated like subordinates. They are cannibalizing their own economies to serve the US’ proxy war against Russia and are doing so with mostly full state support.

Essentially, allyship with liberal democracy is a temporary, one-sided contract that has short-lived gains. The West does not have allies. It has interests.

Let the Islamic Unity Week be a reminder of the power of Islam, the true unifier, and what a united Muslim world can mean. With Islam’s growing numbers and growing influence, Muslims should prioritize unity and brotherhood, which is the only way forward toward peace and prosperity.

Shabbir Rizvi is a Chicago-based political analyst with a focus on US internal security and foreign policy.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)

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