Arab rulers and their opposition both claim Islam as their source of legitimacy

Throughout history, the tyrannical rulers have used religion as a means of controlling their people and leading them like herd animals. The most important reason that totalitarian rulers depend on religion is that it is a successful, cheap and guaranteed way to stabilize their regimes and to ensure their longevity by divine orders that cannot be discussed at all, but obeyed, and where any one who opposes this would be considered as an infidel and would be intimidated and threatened to be judged in the afterlife, not to mention the society s perception of him as a outsider to the majority culture. In such regimes, a mutual interest arises between the religious establishment and the ruling regime, where a tyrant provides the clergy with power, money and infrastructure, and in return, the clerics exploit religious sentiment of the people to give the ruler divine authorization and justification to his rule, including enslaving his people.
In the Middle Ages, the totalitarian kings used the Church in order to make the people give blind obedience to the king and the monarchy. European peoples got rid of the authority of the church and the monarchy together. First, they separated the church from the state and established secular civil laws, where the title of monarch remains mostly ceremonial, without political power, and the people governed themselves through their representatives, chosen in free democratic elections.

Unfortunately, the Arab states have been governed by religious totalitarian racist rulers for the last 1430 years, when the first Islamic state was born. We can say that the apparent form of governance in Arab countries has changed during this period, but in terms of content, it has retained the same style of governance of religious totalitarian dynastic racial and sectarian rule. One of these phony changes is the creation of a sort of opposition, since it is required for every government nowadays. The Arab opposition, in their turn, also used the religious card to play politics because the religious card could make them popular and enable them to play on the same political playing field as the government in power, using the same tools and tricks. And thus, both the rulers and their opponents started to compete to claim legitimacy using the Islamic religion in order to put Islam on their side and thus to use the advantages of this religion in order to gain a majority by the exploitation of religious emotions. In this article, we will address the problem of claiming legitimacy through Islam among the Arab rulers and their opposition through the following points: exposing the ways of using the Islamic religion by the rulers of the Arabs, exposing the methods of using the Islamic religion by the opposition, exposing criminal competition between Arab rulers and their opponents in the exploitation of the Islamic religion, and we end the article with a conclusion.


Exposing the ways of using Islam by the Arab rulers

Arab rulers insist on having in their constitutions an article that says that the constitution is derived from Islamic law and also they assure that their constitutions do not violate Islamic Sharia. They do the same thing when they sign international treaties where they add a condition to any international treaty which says that it will be obeyed if the articles do not conflict with Islamic law and thus they avoid obeying international law. This item in the constitutions of Arab and Islamic countries forces a racial discrimination against non-Muslims citizens. The seriousness of this item comes from the fact that it codifies the discrimination against those non-Muslim citizens and makes their persecution legitimate and constitutional. In spite of the fact that these regimes claim that they consider all citizens equal, they keep this item in the constitution just as a playing card to claim legitimacy through Islam against their Islamist opponents and thereby pulling the card of Islam from the their hands and to attempt to monopolize this card to serve their own interests only.
Assassinated ex-president of Egypt Sadat took on the title of the "Believer President, for a Muslim state" and had television coverage of his attendance at daily prayers, pushed for increased Islamic programming in the media, as well as established religious classes in schools. The Sadat government funded the construction of new mosques, used Islamic rhetoric in public statements, and promoted the formation of Islamic student organizations in schools and universities nationwide. One of Sadat s famous political games is that he exploited Islam and Islamists and launched their hand against his leftist and nationalist opponents since these groups are the opponents of the Islamists also. Islamists responded to Sadat’s favor with a favor and they supported the well-known peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Even though this peace treaty is 100% against the Sharia and Islamic culture and values, the Islamists still were able to justify it divinely because the Sharia text can be easily taken out of context and manipulated to serve their own political interests and agenda.
The rulers of Saudi Arabia have monopolized the title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and they govern their country without a written constitution, where the Saudi Arabian legal system is based on Islamic law, the Sharia, with the Quran providing the most important source. The rulers of Saudi Arabia tried to spread Wahhabism in the world in general and the Arab countries in particular. The Saudis would have stayed obscure Bedouins and Wahhabism little more than a cult. But because of their oil wealth, the Saudis were able to spread Wahhabism s seed worldwide, making it far more mainstream than it would have been otherwise. The reason for spreading Wahhabism was to respond to Nasser’s ambitions of ruling the entire Arab world, since Nasser threatend their thrones by adopting Arab nationalism. They have invested for this purpose billions upon billions of dollars of oil, known as petro-dollars. This has resulted in Wahhabism taking control of the biggest Islamic school in the world, Al-Azhar, and so they were able to recruit Egyptian Islamists and fool them into accepting al Qaeda, from whose terror the world in general and the Arab world in particular still suffer.
The rest of the Arab leaders such as Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, King Hussein and others are fooling their people by claiming that they are descended from the family of the Prophet of Islam and consider themselves superior to common people. Saddam Hussein forced Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Baath Party, to be converted from Christianity to Islam so that he would not look bad in the eye of Islam and to avoid the potential criticism of the opposition of joining the party that is founded by a non-Muslim. In addition, he ordered a copy of the Quran to be written using his own blood as the ink and he added an Islamic slogan taken from Quran, “No god but Allah”, on the country s national flag. The world still remembers him pretending that he was a sort of Islamic holy saint and pretending that he had been visited by an angel in a dream and he had been ordered by God to wage war for eight years against Iran, in order to satisfy his ego and paranoia.
Another aspect of claiming Islam is demanding that Muslim clerics pray for Arabic leaders and praise them at Friday sermons. At the same time, they close their eyes on the insults, in the Friday prayers, to non-Muslims and particularly Christians by the Islamic clerics through their Mosques’ amplified speakers that hurt the ears of passers-by, including Christians, in the street, because Islam encourage insulting Christians. Not to mention, of course, that these preachers have been ordered to urge the faithful to download all their economical, political and social problems onto the shoulders of what they called their enemy Israel, imperialism, and America and the west, whose people they call “sons of apes and pigs”, as it is stated in Islamic culture.
This generosity in financing the building of mosques, Islamic universities, the ministries of Awqaf (religion) and Islamic affairs and the salaries of imams is a special policy of the Arab rulers and it is given a high priority in their politics. The religious police, or what is called the “Commission of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice”, is the cheapest and lowest way that used by Arab dictators to terrorize and intimidate their own people and to keep them under control and lead them like a herd.
In other words, our rulers are the ones who cause underdevelopment in our countries, and promote ignorance and superstitions, and despit this, they dare to boast in closed rooms, when they meet their peers in Western diplomatic circles, that their people are still backward and they have precedence over their own people in terms of modernization and urbanization, and thus persuade the West to deal with them and not to deal with the backward and closed opposition, and thereby mislead the West and keep them away from supporting their people’s real issues such as freedom, democracy and human rights.
From all the above, we see that the Arab rulers do not give development, education and human rights the attention they deserve, but the bulk of their focus is on the stability of their rule and the enslavement of their people by claiming the legitimacy of Islam.


Exposing the ways of using the Islamic religion by the opposition

The Islamic opposition and their adopted Islamic values and hidden agenda frightened the secular, nationalist and non-Muslims and caused them to prefer to support their current authoritarian regimes than to fall directly under the backward rule of Islam.
We believe that the corrupted systems that use religion to ensure the continuity of their rule would need even a form of opposition that would be seen as even worse, so that the governing regime would look good compare to their opposition. Thus, the Islamic opposition provides, intentionally or not, the ruling regimes with an enormous favor by adopting Islam, so that we suspect that the Islamic opposition is constructed by the authoritarian regime itself, even though we do not believe in the conspiracy theory.
Even the left-wing oppositions that usually have atheistic values and whose members are non-religious are allied with the Islamists, and furthermore, they try to islamize their principles and ideology in order to comply with Islam. The researcher Ahmed Alqadhy did excellent research on the subject of islamization of leftist ideology. His article can be found on the ahewar.org website, in Arabic.
Instead of betting on the electoral platforms of each party and competing on their electoral programs that include development and improvement of the economy, education and respect of human rights and freedom, the opposition is betting on Islam by encouraging islamization of all aspect of life including transportation, banking and all kinds of media, not to mention the islamization of fashion such as wearing veils and headscarves and Islamic robes. Unfortunately, these styles of Islamization are the most important political slogans and symbols that characterize the Islamic opposition. This, along with the preaching of Islam in public squares and facilities, and praying during working hours, excessive prostration and even prostrating in stadiums after every goal scored by a Muslim team are also political symbols of the Islamic opposition.


Exposing the criminal rivalry between Arab rulers and their opponents in the exploitation of the Islamic religion

In civilized countries, political parties compete based on their electoral platforms, where the parties present their economic policies written in scientific and economic language, in order to show their people that they would use all means available to their homeland to best serve their people and the interests of their country, including economic prosperity, freedom, human rights and development in all fields such as the economy, politics, science and national culture and heritage. Whereas the Arab opposition’s duty is a lot easier than that because their main game is to fawn to Islam and to lay claim to the Islamic religion, even if that ends in committing unspeakable crimes of cruelty against their fellow non-Muslims citizens, that would turn a newborn s hair gray. All the international independent credible media have documented the crimes committed by the military wings of the Islamic opposition. Actually, there is a secret competition among these military wings for committing terrorist crimes against Christians, such as the bombing of churches and worshipers, the genocide of the small, peaceful Christian community, the intimidation of peaceful Christians and forcing them to emigrate, or the abuse and kidnap of their minor daughters and forcing them to be converted to Islam. Of course, the long-term goal of the kidnapping of their minor girls is to minimize the opportunities for Christians to marry and multiply their offspring, and this is another criminal way to eliminate Christians and clearing the regions of them even though the Christians are the original residents and citizens of this region since ancient times.
Another action of the Islamic opposition is the robbery of non-Muslim’s shops and workshops to eliminate their income and their ability to earn a decent living. In fact, there are many such crimes against minorities, which have become a daily routine.
In these situations, the governments, whose duty it is to protect its citizens, is in an awkward position, because if they were to arrest the criminals they would lose their popularity among their citizens, because what the terrorists have done is a basic practice of true Islam; to avoid this embarrassing situation and keep their appearance as a government that respects Islamic values and practices more than the opposition, the government tries not to arrest or to try the criminals using misleading arguments and claims. One of these misleading ways to help Islamic terrorists avoid justice is to claim that the perpetrators of these crimes are mentally ill and thus avoid punishment. Another form of these misleading ways to help Islamic terrorists avoid justice is through the imposition of customary reconciliation sessions or so-called Arab sitting sessions of reconciliation, and thus the blood of Christians is wasted with impunity. These are very dangerous acts because the state gives impression to the rest of the people that killing Christians passes without punishment because the killing of non-Muslims is legal in Islam.
In order to increase their oppression against the Christians, then Muslims openly glorify the terrorists that killed Christians as Islamic Champions and their families are glorified also and thus the terrorists and his family become glorified holy Islamic saints, because their fate is to enter the afterlife in Paradise, where they are promised to sexually enjoy 72 untouched beautiful virgins (houris) and pre-pubescent boys.
Thus, because of this competition to lay claim to Islam between the government and the opposition, the massacres against Christians in Arab countries became so cheap, such that the princes of Islamic terrorism just need to find a poor, unemployed Muslim man who is living in misery, and to brain-wash him with the Islamic commandment to kill Christians and infidels as a holy virtue and to promise him paradise and virgins and pre-pubescent boys. Besides these promises, they assure him that justice will not reach him and that they would hire, for his case, the best attorneys, and they would support their promises with examples of what happened in previous similar cases when crimes were committed against Christians. And indeed, they usually fulfill their promises and hire the best attorneys and the end result would be either that he would be cleared or the case would last forever. Or, in other scenarios, as we previously mentioned, the case would be settled by custom or a medical report about mental sickness would be fabricated. Thus, committing crimes has become easy and cheap so that the criminal goes to the implementation of the crime with a smile on his face and with reassurance that no harm would happen to him and not even one hair of his head would be touched.
Unfortunately, the Arab rulers do not treat Christians as citizens but as a political card for bargaining and negotiation to be used when needed. If the interest of these regimes were to play the sectarian card for one reason or another, they would not flinch at that. For example, these regimes can play the sectarian card whenever they want to send a message to the West that the opposition is the worst option, and dealing with their regimes are the best options and thus they beg for the west to support their regimes. Another example of the use of the sectarian card is to send a message to their people that the options of the opposition are very bad and to remind them about the evils of the Islamists compared to their current regimes.
What happened and is happening in Egypt and Iraq could happen in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan because, as mentioned above, for the Arab regimes the Christians are political cards for playing as needed in order to stabilize and continue their rule, even at the expense of killing Christians.
We see that the Arab rulers and the opposition in the Arab countries are, in fact, competing in laying claim to Islam, and every party wants to adopt Islam as their own franchise company and to use it for their service and interests and for preserving power in the case of the party in power, or to come to power in the case of the opposition. Unfortunately, they have succeeded with their mean policies.
The biggest losers of this criminal competition are the homelands, the people in general and minorities in particular, and especially the Christian minority. Thus, by this cheap way, our people are kept away from modernity, democracy, scientific progress, human rights and prosperity.
In conclusion, the religious issues that all other nations have put on the shelves of museums and history, have quarantined within their temples, and have made a personal matter for individuals by separating religion and state, are still the way of ruling and living and are popular and have highest priority and receive large investments in Islamic and Arab countries.

Rate the article
Bad	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Very good
Result : 97%							Participated in the vote : 71