Ummah of two billion paralysed before Gaza’s genocide

How can an Ummah of nearly two billion — stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, overflowing in resources, history, and faith — watch with hands tied as a genocide unfolds in front of its eyes?

How can it fail to act, fail to halt, fail to resist the butchering of its children, the destruction of its cities, the humiliation of its dignity, and the desecration of its holy land?

What happened to us? What illness has hollowed out our resolve? We are not weak, yet we act as if we are! We are not helpless, yet we behave as if we are handcuffed and shackled!

Our paralysis not a result of physical limitation

It is psychological, spiritual, and ideological — a form of collective trauma and paralysis inflicted over decades.

To understand our condition, one must look beyond military might and economic statistics. One must peer into the shattered mirror of our collective identity and see the devastation that is hidden behind our silence.

If you want to understand the soul of this Ummah in chains, don’t count its mosques or its flags — look into the hollowed eyes of a woman who’s forgotten she can leave.”

I want to draw a parallel here — as a mirror for the Ummah, not just as a metaphor but as a lens to view our condition. This is what psychologists call the “battered woman syndrome”: a condition of psychological captivity where the victim not only endures her abuse but begins to believe she cannot live without it.

She starts to think she deserves it. That she is too weak to leave. That resistance is futile, and that escape would only make things worse.

This syndrome doesn’t just describe individual trauma. It eerily echoes the collective condition of our Ummah today.

We too have been systematically broken, through invasions, colonisation, ideological indoctrination, propaganda, and betrayal. We’ve absorbed the voice of our oppressors until it became our own.

We question our own strength. We doubt our right to freedom. We live in fear of stepping outside their system, even when it is the very source of our suffering.

We’re the battered woman — on a global scale

I’ve met women like this, I’ve watched them fold into themselves, breath by breath.

She’s the woman whose sense of self has been so thoroughly dismantled, so eroded by constant blows — emotional, physical, psychological — that even her inner voice no longer belongs to her. Her thoughts echo her abuser’s words. Her will is indistinguishable from his control.

He abuses her. He isolates her. He tells her she’s nothing without him. And then, once the damage is done, he buys her forgiveness with flowers. Whispers sweetness into the wounds he himself opened. She believes, desperately, that this time he means it. That this time he’s changed.

She tells her friends about the horror, the humiliation, the bruises… but she won’t leave. She can’t. She’s trapped in the psychological vice of learned helplessness, the belief that even when the door is open, escape is impossible.

Instead of using what little strength she has left to break free, she exhausts herself pleading for him to see her pain — clinging to the delusion that if he just understood her suffering, he might grow a heart.

He fears the day we realise our strength

Keeping her trapped gives him strength and power.

He lives off of her resources, her sincerity, care, and love, while giving her crumbs — just enough attention, praise, and admiration to keep her going.

When she expresses any real disagreement with him, he rains abuse on her, breaking her down with physical or emotional brutality, dismantling her sense of self.

He fears the day she manifests her true and full strength, because her awakening would cause his fragile ego to collapse.

His power is parasitic. He must syphon her brilliance, her compassion, her capacity for life, and wear it like a mask to hide his own hollowness.

The Western world is our abuser

Today, the Muslim Ummah is that woman, and the West is the abuser.

It is an empire that could not survive without syphoning from our strength, extracting our wealth, exploiting our divisions. This is how it keeps the Ummah subdued — through hard and soft power, violence and illusion.

Hard power in the form of military invasions, drone strikes, genocide, and the imposition of brutal regimes that serve foreign interests. Secular liberal “democratic” systems are installed in countries through puppet tyrants like viruses — disguised as modernity, designed for obedience and compliance.

Soft power is more insidious. It comes dressed as friendship, as aid, as “shared values”. It rewrites our story through media, education, and culture. It infiltrates our universities with think tanks and foundations, reshaping our intellectual class into echo chambers of Western thought. It co-opts our artists, our influencers, our reformers — turning them into mouthpieces for agendas not our own.

Through film and television, it sells us self-hate wrapped in slick visuals. Through development grants and NGO partnerships, it funds the fragmentation of our social fabric. It teaches our children to admire the hands that bomb us, and to scorn their own faith as backward. It deconstructs the Muslim mind — not by force, but by seduction.

We must stop mistaking control for care

International organisations enforce asymmetrical rules, those that never benefit us.

The UN, the ICC, the ICJ, the World Bank, the IMF — these are not halls of justice. They are tools of containment that enslave nations in the quicksand of debt and slavery.

It lives off our resources. Nearly 80 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves and over 40 per cent of its natural gas lie under Muslim lands. The Gulf states alone sit on trillions in sovereign wealth funds.

The Muslim world is home to some of the youngest populations on Earth — with over 60 per cent of the population in many countries under the age of 30, brimming with energy, potential, and a thirst for meaning.

How is it that we are rich in land, people power, minerals, intellect, and faith… and yet we beg for protection from the very powers who profit from our dependence?

It’s because the system is rigged. It was never built for us to win, only to play endlessly and lose quietly. Just as the abused woman will never find real love, respect, or recognition from her abuser — no matter how many times he professes his affection or apologies — the Ummah will never be liberated through the institutions of those who profit from her subjugation.

Her only option is to leave. Completely. Decisively. Painfully. Just as the Ummah’s only hope is to extract herself from this gilded, rotting cage of a system and build anew.

We will remain in this cycle of humiliation as long as we keep placing our hope in their structures. As long as we keep mistaking their gestures, their summits, their resolutions for change. Hope, when misplaced, is not a virtue. It’s a poison. A slow, paralysing death.

Our leaders are groomed and installed by foreign hands to serve foreign interests. When one of them attempts to stray — whether it was Mossadegh in Iran or Saddam in Iraq — they are removed, imprisoned, or assassinated. The message is clear: independence will not be tolerated.

Abuser’s dominance based on illusion of weakness

Like the abuser who fears the day his victim realises her power, the West fears nothing more than a unified, self-aware, and politically independent Ummah.

Because it knows — if we stand up, if we believe in ourselves again — its control collapses. Its dominance is not built on invincible strength, but on the illusion of our weakness.

The West must keep us afraid — afraid of change, of independence, of Islam itself, the very source of our power.

It bombards us with images of failed states and chaos, whispering that without its guiding hand, its leadership in the world, its international institutions, we will spiral into darkness.

It sows division, hatred, and fear of each other between us through mischief, psy-ops, and nationalism… just as the abused woman is isolated from those who would love and protect her.

It celebrates our artists, our athletes, our engineers, but only if they disavow their political and spiritual convictions. It offers us platforms and praise, as long as we don’t speak of Gaza, or Sudan, or Yemen, or Kashmir. And when we do, the mask falls, and the brutality returns.

Look at how the world responds to Gaza today

Over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, over 70 per cent of them women and children.

Hospitals have been erased, journalists murdered, water and food denied, entire cities razed to dust.

It is obvious genocide, by every human, legal, and moral standard. And yet the so-called “international community” offers only empty words — while continuing to arm and fund the killers.

What has the Ummah done in response? We have marched. We have tweeted. Some governments have recalled ambassadors. Thousands of brave voices have spoken out.

But the machine rolls on. Because the truth is, we are not fighting only an external enemy. We are battling a psychological cage within the Ummah that has made us believe resistance is futile.

Some don’t leave their abusers except in body bags

Some nations don’t either.

But this is not that nation. Because we are a nation built on an immutable truth and rock-solid belief, on the foundation of a revelation from the Creator Himself, and on the transformational Model of the Prophet ﷺ.

By holding on to that truth firmly in its grip as burning embers, Gaza has proven its commitment to Allah. Despite the bombs, the siege, the starvation, our Ummah there has shown the world what it means to stand with dignity.

They are the penetrating beam of light in our darkness. The world has seen the diamond of faith in the face of unimaginable barbarity. Gaza has shaken the world but it’s not enough.

The sacrifice of Gaza is a call. A piercing cry that rips through the silence of our sleep. A shot fired into the Heavens, echoing across the minarets and mountains of the Muslim world, demanding that we awaken.

They are asking us on livestreamed media,

Why do we stand alone? Where are the Muslim leaders? Where is the Ummah of Muhammad ﷺ? Why do they watch from behind locked gates?”

Because, like the abused woman, we have convinced ourselves that leaving the abuser is too dangerous, too risky.

We fear sanctions, war, isolation, chaos. We fear personal loss, financial loss, social stigma, and losing our comfort. The fear is not imaginary. The system we live under has been constructed to punish any attempt at dissent, resistance, and true independence.

When Saudi Arabia leads an Arab coalition to bomb Yemen but refuses to lift a finger for Palestine, when Egypt seals Gaza’s only escape route while claiming solidarity, when Muslim leaders attend summits and return with nothing but statements, it is not incompetence — it is collusion in genocide.

For those among the wealthy elite in the Muslim lands, or those living in the Western lands, there is a clear danger that we have grown comfortable in our gilded cages. We benefit from Western alliances, send our children to Western schools, invest our wealth in Western markets, and build our image through Western media. We have learned to play the game, and we fear what will happen if we stop playing.

But this game is rigged. We will never win it. The battered woman will never be loved and respected by her abuser. She must leave. And so must we. Not with rage or recklessness, but with clarity, wisdom, and determination.

Quit this abusive relationship now

The time has come for the Ummah to extricate itself from this abusive relationship, to break with the ideological shackles of the West.

From the IMF and its economic strangleholds, to international bodies that serve imperial interests, to stopping our reliance on tyrant puppet regimes and instead building leadership rooted in the Method of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

To revive that model will require sacrifice. The road to dignity is not paved with comfort. The woman who walks out of her abuser’s house may face fear, loneliness, and hardship — but she walks toward life. Toward healing. Toward truth.

And the Ummah must do the same. We must be willing to give up the false security of Western approval, the illusion of stability offered by corrupt regimes, the comfort of silence.

Remember just who we are!

So who are we?

Pawns in someone else’s game?

Or heirs to a civilisational legacy that transformed the world for over a thousand years (and can do so again)?

We must extend ourselves, and believe, and truly trust, that the strength we seek is already within us — rooted in the Sunnah, in Allah’s way, etched in our history, and alive in the blood of those who are martyred while the world shrinks away.

We are not weak. We are not powerless. We are just afraid. But courage is not the absence of fear — it is the decision to act in the face of fear.

And when the Ummah finally remembers who she is, the chains will fall, the locks will open. The abuser will tremble. And the world will witness the return of a people who were never truly defeated — only deceived.

And once we believe again, nothing will stop us!

Source: Islam21c