State of Exception

The Inverted Metaphysics of Israel and the West

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Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim

“It’s all a checkerboard of nights and days
Where Destiny with men for pieces plays
Here and there moves, and mates, and slays
And one by one back in the closet lays” (Omar Khayam, The Rubaiyat)

If we step back, out of ourselves, we can imagine the world as a cosmic play, a vast unfolding panorama that we can watch from above to see the full extent of an uncoiling plot. We can discern the position each character chooses for themselves or to which they unthinkingly give themselves. Then the play becomes a kind of simulacrum, a revealing mirror that can clarify truth from falsehood, or it can act as a furqan, an impartial discriminator between good and evil. It openly shows, to the keen observer, the reality and motivations that drives nations and individuals, and then says: ‘here is the reality of this dunya (this worldly reality), and here is the inner reality of your own self, examine these and then choose where you stand.’

“This place is a veil, and every event upon it is a sign (a signifier) for those whose hearts are alive and aware (with love of truth, justice, and mercy). The theatre of dunya (this world) is a true trial for the soul: now, who among us will serve God (Haqq/Truth), and who will bow to taghut (deceptive tyrannical powers), serving taghut’s lies and oppression?” (commentary on Tahrir al-Wasilah)

For Muslims today, the implications are clear. The madness that has seized Israel and their supporters has moved the world’s situation beyond state policy into the realm of sheer cruelty and utmost callousness. We are not dealing with mere political crises but with circumstances which (in their intolerable monstrosity) signify a deeper metaphysical struggle underlying the geopolitical and media narratives.

Speaking in metaphysical terms is not to romanticize conflict or make dubious religious parallels (as the Israelis do with their silly but dangerous Amalek (and other dehumanizing) references). Rather, it is to uplift and emphasize the very real (and unnecessary) human suffering they entail. It is to peel back the surface covering and read history, power, and resistance through a sacred lens. The confrontation between genocidal powers and those who resist them becomes not merely a strategic or nationalistic clash, but an unfolding and evolving drama (played out upon the stage of the world) between opposing ontologies. There will be an unavoidable clash between the desacralized machinery of brutal domination and those with the metaphysical will to resist this zulm (intransigent injustice) through upholding the integrity of justice and mercy with unwavering commitment.

Israel’s trajectory today — open genocide, regional expansion, covert terrorist operations, bombing and stealing territory from multiple nations, messianic nationalism, and manufactured wars — seems to be a final expression of an upside-down metaphysics of power divorced from God, a total repudiation of the commandments of Judaism and its transcendent essence.

This is not likely to end with compromise unless the trajectory dramatically alters. The forces of taghut (deceptive tyrannical power) are driven by an accelerating hubris (overweening pride) and are not likely to stop unless decisively confronted by a principled but firm, balanced, and centred resistance.

While Israel imagines it is defending itself, it is, in actuality, unveiling itself. And this Western world, once draped in the language of rights and reason, embraces Zionist Israel’s slaughter of others with deranged enthusiasm. Their combined mania, a type of unhinged geopolitical psychosis, is as clearly evident as a definitive psychiatric assessment would be, to the majority of the world’s population. American politicians bless the bombs and cheer on the genocide and the genocider. European leaders nod in solemn support of war. Humanitarian concerns dissolve into the cold equations of military logistics. Israel, with U.S. backing, has moved beyond Gaza. It pursues simultaneous campaigns in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. This marks a transition to permanent war as normality, and Israel acts within a “state of exception” (as elucidated by Giorgio Agamben), bestowed upon it by its backers — a state of exception that has become permanent.

There’s no other way to say it: present day Zionism has become a “moral obscenity”, a “cachet” it has actively pursued and has now definitively achieved, in conjunction with the Western powers that unwaveringly support its unconscionable crimes.

As for many of the Arab governments — they are unfortunately, if we return to the analogy of a cosmic play unfolding before us — part of a postcolonial simulacra (Hallaq). They speak Arabic, claim Islam, but operate (except for Muslim cultural trappings), within a Western political grammar, as if they are simply acting out a weakly feigned Islam. Their ongoing cooperation with broad Israeli and American objectives is deeply troubling since it displays a profound misunderstanding of consequences that lay ahead. In effect, they seem blind to the reality that they are, in the eyes of a predatory Israel (and the West) little more than cash cows to be milked and then slaughtered. Like cattle grazing and roaming (apparently free) in a field; do they not realize that they will be corralled and delivered to the slaughterhouse at the appropriate time? Do they somehow imagine that cattle can cooperate their way out of the destined fate to be imposed upon them at a future time if they fail to exchange this destiny for a better destiny.

In the play of history, they apparently desire to play the role, if not of obedient cattle, of Balaam/Baura — those who once knew the truth but betrayed it for wealth and ease. They cooperate with Zionism not only out of fear, but because they, unfortunately, share in its vision of a future ruled by capital, security, permanent elites, and the weakening of the groups they oppose. Their surveillance states, riddled with American bases, are signifiers of metaphysical decay. Sadly, they have chosen dunya, and are in the process of selling the illuminating light of the Qur’an for imaginary security, comfort, easy wealth, Western approval, and a fantasy of protection from change.

The United Nations (a name that doesn’t mean much when the disuniting power of veto resides in unjust hands) and the International Criminal Court are, sadly, structurally incapable of halting genocide or war when the perpetrators are powerful empires. The reality is we face an epistemic entrapment of Muslim states within a Western legal-political order that was never meant to deliver justice or balance, but only to deliver control.

Step back and look at the situation from a higher perspective. The play is progressing through multiple acts, plot lines converging, and the cast embracing their roles. Seen this way, much is revealed. For we live, not in a time of mere politics or regional conflict, but in a moment of apokalypsis, or a lifting of the veils, as the Greek word indicates, a disclosure of previously obscured or hidden truths. This globe encompassing dramaturgy clarifies the true from the false — it unmasks the murderously ambitious players that “strut and fret their hour upon the stage” (Macbeth).

What is being unmasked and revealed today, in the apokalypsis initiated by the genocide, furthered by the bombing of Iran, and amplified by the literal applauding and celebration of the ongoing holocaust by pretend (and pretentious) democracies, is not simple hypocrisy, but evidence of a Western metaphysical system built on the complete deformation of the sacred and the purposeful diminishment of humanity.

So, what drives the horrors we face is not merely unhinged national ambition, nor even open racism and delusions of supremacy, but, more deeply, a vision of the world in which Being itself is considered dead or irrelevant since it merely gets in the way of this mechanistic, inhuman modern project. And Zionism is a honed and sharpened spearhead driven into the guts of humanity, in service of this debased venture.

This modern project we all are suffering under, desacralizes everything. Nature becomes nothing more than resources ripe for pillaging and exploitation. Human life is devalued to data or collateral — simply a resource to be tracked and exploited, or an obstruction to be eliminated like a data point that is erased without concern. Divine sovereignty gives way to heartlessly brutal technocratic control.

“These (can you not see) are those who know (and obsess in every minute detail over) only the outward of the life of this (ephemeral) world, but they are utterly heedless (because of their spiritual illness) of the Hereafter (the higher worlds).” (Qur’an 30:7)

Zionism and its allies manifest this inverted metaphysics — the sacralization of race, land, power, murder, and exploitation; and the desacralization of humanity, nature, and ethics — an eversion (a turning inside out) of principle and of the remaining remote echoes of a divine connection.

Israel has become, through its furiously energetic rejection of even the most minute traces of mercy, an existential negation of ethical religious consciousness. Its Western backers enable every atrocity, not out of mere strategic interest, but because they have absorbed this inverted metaphysical project of domination without limit. On the surface it appears as geopolitical materialist imperialism, cloaked in a rhetoric of fabricated justifications, but it is deeply rooted in functional practices that make a mockery of the sacred.

These atrocities are the cutting edge of a project acting systematically across the Muslim world to deconstruct and remake the region’s geography, consciousness, and theology; and to ultimately gut Islam of the metaphysics that inhere within the remains of the ummah as a force of resistance to injustice, to zulm and taghut. It is a secular imperial telos of disembowelment and dismemberment. And it is implacable, like a steamroller that desires to crush and flatten whatever is in its path.

But, for all its airs and its brutality, it is not invincible.

Power is the veil of the powerful. It overthrows the propriety of minds and blinds hearts. “For indeed, it is not the eyes that grow blind but the hearts within the chests (within the core of their consciousness) that grow blind.” (Qur’an 22:46) In the face of the ugliness of this purposeful blindness, driven by an infernal malevolence of genocidal action — resistance is not just physical survival — it becomes an adjunct to worship, to ibadah; It becomes the necessary reclaiming of a sacred cosmos from the corrupting and destructive hands of taghut.

If Zionism and the endless Western hegemonic impulse is a politics of tribal/national supremacy, resistance is the struggle to bring back to life the reality of divine justice, rectitude, mercy, and guidance. “He brings forth the living (hearts) from the dead…as he gives life to the earth after its (apparent) death, and in the same manner you (your hearts) will be revived. (Qur’an 30:19)

This is a challenge to the materialist kingship of Zionist Israel and its backers. It is what they fear — and though they run endlessly after domination, it is fear that makes them run. Fear of a just world, fear of a world predicated on mercy and respect for humanity, fear of a world where exploitation is dismantled and human beings are no longer data points to be managed or erased. They fear peace, for their world is built on corpses.

The resistance is far from perfect — its actors are flawed, its weapons are limited — but it contains something eternal; a refusal to bow to injustice, a cry that they are bound to God, and that His name is not America, nor Israel. “To truly stand firmly (in resistance) against injustice, is prayer. To fight the oppressor is to polish the mirror of the soul.”

The Qur’an likens the inversion of moral qualities to a worldly ”istibdal al-kalim” (Qur’an 4:46) or the changing of words from their rightful meanings to twist and deform their import. What we are witnessing is an entire “civilization” that lives on twisting and inverting moral qualities and meaning, that no longer recognizes the difference between right and wrong, and incredibly, has declared evil to be a moral necessity. Genocide became not just possible but necessary, not simply because of hatred, but because of the moral erasure of, or inversion of, the humanity of the victim.

We should all realize very clearly, without a trace of illusion, that the modern world’s violence is not a glitch or temporary error; it is the fulfillment of its upended metaphysical assumptions. In this era, there is no longer any Western “civilization”. There are only the inheritors of Pharaoh, Nimrod, and Herod. To challenge uncontrolled violence, our duty, the imperative to which we must turn our every effort and to which we must shape our lives, is not to merely react to it, but to dismantle its very foundations. And this cannot be done by a people who have thrown away or take lightly their own metaphysics and their connection to God and the very serious demands He makes upon us in our journey within this world of trial.

“(In the case of) those who have been expelled from their homes for affirming: ‘Our Lord is God.’ Had God not repelled the aggression of some people by means of the active protection given to them by others, destruction would surely claim…places in which God’s Name is mentioned often. God will certainly help those who stand up for Him….” (Qur’an 22:40)

Our task is so clear — standing up for the oppressed is standing up for God, so how can we not strive to our utmost to fulfill this task. We must stand in active opposition to a world which has been ontologically flattened by the West, such that humans have no inviolable essence, no sanctity, no relation to the divine mystery of Being. “It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn’t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels.” (Benjamin Lahut)

Resistance is the active, determined, uncompromising restoration of meaning and of protection from the “civilizations” that know only destruction. And it means remembering that truth is not something we construct and manufacture, but an elevated standard to which we submit. Revolution is not only physical resistance, but the transfiguration of the soul, and from this, a deep resilience and endurance arises. Fighting injustice without inner purification is to be enticed by injustice when the way becomes difficult. Politics without true principled attachment to God can easily become a downward road and Israel certainly will not be subdued only by battle, but by the return of metaphysical certainty and by the transformation of individuals and societies.

Look, we are all sick of the charred theatres of Gaza. We are sick of the unprovoked attacks on Iran, sick of the pursuit of more and more murderous destruction, sick of lies and propaganda, sick of a boastful empire that knows only how to kill and kill, sick of the gaslit proclamations of Israel and Washington. Bewildered at the glassy-eyed kings in Riyadh, the deluded ruling families across the UAE, and the submission to Zionism across the Arab states.

What we see unfolding is not just a deliberate political campaign of extermination. It is a drama of Being, in which every state, every destructive callous ideology they back, every bomb, and every cry from under the rubble has true metaphysical weight.

We are called to act, to align ourselves not only with slogans, but with haqq, with the oppressed, with God. This is a confrontation between those who bomb in the name of fear and a pretence of security, and those who strike back in the name of justice. Between those who want the world to forget the sacred and those who bleed to remind us of it. As the Qur’an says:

“And what is wrong with you that you do not fight in the path of God for the oppressed among men, women, and children?” (Qur’an 4:75)

The revolution is inward and outward, cosmic, and ongoing. This immense drama is still being enacted. Step back and understand the manner in which it is unfolding and then decide your part in it, for we must all inevitably have a role. Remember that every act of haqq by even the smallest player generates a crack in those who have embraced the persona of the empire of lies. The play still unfurls, Many pages are yet to be written, outcomes are yet to be determined. Plot twists are inevitable. The characters plot and plan, but the best of plotters is the playwright.

“But they (burrow and) plot (and plan), and He, Allah plots. And Allah is the best of all who plot. (Qur’an 8:30)

What is this world? The world is not of power alone, it is a place of the descent of Divine truth and the place of humans seeking connection to that truth and of humans who wish to deliberately forget that truth and raise themselves to usurp its place. For the ones who struggle to overcome forgetfulness and to remember God, this world is a place of questions of consequence. And, it is the archive of their answers. How shall we answer?

“So if they fail to answer, then know that they only follow the changing whims of their desires. And who could be more astray than those who follow such evanescent desires with no guidance from God?” (Qur’an 28:50)

-Irshaad

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