Rebellion and Civil Disobedience in Islam The Need for a Paradigm ...

Prophet about how honesty can be lost. He answered, “If incompetent persons are grantedthe power to manage people’s affairs, then honesty is lost.”3) On the economical level, tyranny always undertakes useless economical projectsthat waste the people’s money and deprive them from what they really need in their lives.Money is spent to gratify the capricious whimsies of the ruler and his nomenklatura. Themega-projects of the despotic regime are concerned with either diverting the masses oroppressing them. Security apparatuses are granted enormous clandestine budgets tosafeguard the system and smash mercilessly all forms of dissention. Spending hugeamounts of money on prisons is also a notorious feature of oppressive regimes. Prisons,rather than being the place of criminals, become the abode of the thinkers, intellectuals,and the sincere citizens whose only sin is their aspiration to justice and freedom. Also, alarge proportion of the wealth of the nation, which is supposed to be utilized for theirwelfare, is given to the external forces that support the tyrant and delight in seeing himperpetuating the state of backwardness and misery of his people.4) On the moral level, tyranny demotes all virtues and promotes all vices. Hypocrisy,mendacity, treason, deceitfulness, obsessive fear, and self-indulgence become rampant inthe society.5) On the religious level, tyranny undermines the foundations of religion. It eitherfights religion vehemently or at least encourages a sort of passive religiosity. Islam isemptied from its core tenets and code of ethics and is ultimately reduced to a number ofrituals that are performed without any impact on the one’s worldview. Salvationistmessianic discourses become prevalent among the overwhelming majority of people.People become obsessed by the ‘end of days’ scenarios and wait for their fates in acompletely helpless and powerless manner. People never think about changing the statusquo and eventually espouse, even unconsciously, the doctrine of unqualifiedpredestination in which man has no choice, no free will. Tyrants are the happiest personsto see the society adopting such a doctrine, for their heinous acts will be perceived as apart of Allah’s scheme. The plight of religion was aggravated, in the modern era, whenthe religious institutions lost their endowments and hence their autonomy, which they hadenjoyed throughout most of the Islamic history even in the presence of tyranny. Religiousscholars lost their dependence and became on the payroll of the corrupt nation-state.6) On the military level, the main objective of the army is to protect the regime. Theconcept of Jihad, which is of paramount importance in Islam, is obliterated. The corruptregime never thinks about fighting from a purely Islamic perspective. Instead of fightingthe true enemies of the nation, the corrupt regime allies itself with them and uses thearmy to crush any internal propensity towards genuine reform and modernization. Whenthe army is used against an outside nation, it is done to pillage their resources or tobestow fake glory on the personage of the great leader.5