Asim Latić, a restaurant owner in Velika Kladuša, a Bosnian border town with Croatia, said: “In February I saw a man standing in the street in the snow. I asked if he was hungry, and he said he didn’t have any money. “I said it didn’t matter and fed him. That guy texted his friends and the next day they came. More people came, and I had to close the restaurant. Since then, we’ve given out 68,000 meals.”
After the liberation of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, Jewish refugees from all over Europe were encouraged to settle in the country and to take advantage of the liberal treatment accorded them by the Sultan. When the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid heard about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by King Ferdinand, he said: “Can you call such a king wise and intelligent? He is impoverishing his country and enriching my kingdom.”
When Charles De Gaulle, was Minister of Algerian Affairs in Occupied Algeria he tried an experiment to force French values on Algerian Muslims. It ultimately failed because Islamic thought is too powerful to be defeated by kufr (disbelief). He responded to his critics, “What can I do if the Qur’an is greater than France?”
Among the teeming and terrified crowd of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in January 2011, a young man and an older man crouched huddled next to each other as bullets from the security services whizzed overhead. In the din, the two spoke of how the Prophet Muhammad had once declared that whoever dies speaking truth to a tyrant will die a martyr.[1] They spoke of the great martyrs of the Prophet’s day, who awaited those latter-day believers who would one day join them in Paradise. Seized by inspiration, the young man cried, “I will greet them for you,” stood up and was shot in the head. “I touched his blood with my hands,” the elder man, a famous Muslim preacher, it turns out, recounted later in a TV interview, “It smelled like perfumed musk.”[2] Notes [1] Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said: “The master of the martyrs is Hamza ibn Abdul Mattalib, and a man who stands (in front of) an oppressive ruler and enjoins the good and forbids the evil and so is killed …
Introduction The Ottoman Sultanate which later became the seat of the Caliphate in 1517 was by no means perfect. A decline in Islamic thought, weakness in the Arabic language and closing the doors of ijtihad all had an impact on the implementation of Islam across the state. Yet despite this, the Ottoman State remained an Islamic State, and its concepts, criteria and convictions were Islamic. Legislation and administrative laws (kanun) were based on sharia, even if this was a tenuous link in some cases due to the decline in ijtihad, such as the devshirme, hereditary bay’a and tanzimat reforms.
This is an extract from the book ‘The Islamic Khilafah: A Manifesto for Change’ by Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain. PART V: REALISTIC AND PRACTICAL – Transition to an Islamic state 1. NO VIOLATION OF SHARI’AH IN TRANSITION TO ISLAMIC STATE In any transition process the Shari’ah cannot be violated and a transition process has to be fast. In particular power sharing with a regime, that does not rule by the Islamic System or pays some form of lip service (e.g. the current Egyptian or Saudi regime), is not permitted even as a means to an end.
This is an extract from the book ‘The Islamic Khilafah: A Manifesto for Change’ by Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain. PART IV: SOCIAL HARMONY: STRONG – Strong Families and a Strong Society 1. BUILDING A HEALTHY CO-OPERATIVE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN a. HEALTHY INTERACTION IN THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE The Shari’ah encourages co‐operation between men and women and places intimate interaction securely within the confines of marriage. This allows the sexual relationship to play a positive part in binding together husband and wife as a team in raising a family. It also prevents the detrimental effect of extra‐marital affairs and their destructive impact on family stability.
