Ighsaan Taliep – IPSA Wasatiyyah Symposium 2017 re Mitigating ISIS in South Africa

The Name of

Allah, Most Merciful

mosque. Compassionate, we send

greetings and salawat and blessings upon our most noble

Prophet, Muhammad, sallAllahu, alayhi wa sallam, his noble

companions and his family and friends,

our dear honored

guests. It is my distinguished honor to be responsible to welcome

you here this morning, and so in doing so,

we give acknowledgement in the absence of the Minister mbalula,

the esteemed lineup of presenters that we have here who will be

honoring us today, including Ambassador Ibrahim rasool from the

world for all Foundation,

our own professor, Ibrahim Arnold and Dr Sheik Siraj Hendriks

welcome is extended to the director of the afro Middle East

Center, our brother, Mr. Naeem Jina

and Imam Rashid Omar, who also played a central role alongside

and with and within the Mosiah Organizing Committee, IPSA board

members who are also in the lineup a senior counsel advocate, Hafiz

Abu Bakr Muhammad,

and the remaining very, very impressive lineup of speakers that

we have who will be addressing us today.

I acknowledge also our chairperson, Mr. Sharif Abbas, of

the board of epsa, who usually makes his career appearances, and

it just appeared right now.

This is by the grace of the Almighty Allah, our seventh annual

vasalty symposium, a term which is located very, very authentically

and centrally

in the Quran as a descriptor of the Ummah, or the Nation of Islam,

as ummat and wasapa

Translated, perhaps attempts at translation as an ummah which is

justly balanced

the faith of Islam challenges its followers

and humanity to stand up as witnesses

for Allah to justice, and they are some permutation of that concept

in the Holy Quran in more than one Place,

Allah Tala says, yayo, Amanu, kunu, Kowa mean Ali, laisha, Ada,

Abu kiss.

In addition, Allah refers to the ideal state of equilibrium among

human beings

through their relations intersect

and again,

occurring in more than one permutation. And instance, in the

Holy Quran,

Allah, Most High says simply walola, Deaf Allah, He nas bardom

be about LA festival art.

Had it not been that He, God Almighty, keeps one group of

people in check by virtue of another group,

the entire Earth would have corrupted.

The entire earth would have collapsed a collapse.

We can see then that from the Quranic perspective, Islam

conceives of this world to be multipolar,

and it is only through multipolarity

that we will be able to attain and in fact implement those values of

Islam,

of peace

and justice

and mercy

and compassion

and dignity and.

For indeed, the adage holds true that power corrupts

and ultimately also that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The ISIS phenomenon

severely challenges the Ummah in terms of its outward paraphernalia

and idiom

purporting to be representative of the aspirations of the Islamic

nation.

This when its gratuitous and deliberate show of violent force

toward anyone will pose its methods and extremist ideology,

it challenges Muslims to introspect and go beyond the

paraphernalia and slogans

to identify the violent aberrations of the core values of

our faith, the values of peace and justice, the values of Mercy and

dignity and honor for all human beings,

however, notwithstanding the deep emotional trauma that continue to

be experienced by the Ummah

as a result of the ravages in the political landscape in the Muslim

world, in the Middle East in particular, bearing in mind that

the majority of Muslims of the world are not from nor in the

Middle East,

the Quranic imperative of just balance compels that we look

Beyond egregiousness that serve only as fodder

for white capitalist mass media

standing out as witness barriers to justice for Allah

to restore equilibrium among nations require our deepening of

the discourse of the power dynamics among nations,

the South African discourses of decoloniality, as the unfinished

Project of decolonization,

as Maldonado Torres holds,

holds some deep irony for the fact that we are also holding this

symposium for the first time off campus And in this citadel,

iconically symbolizing that historic colonization. I

this forum of civil society needs not only raise its voice, but

commit as witness bearers

to justice to call Western leaders for their complicity in the

destruction of nations, of human being, human beings, lives and

Arab civilization predating the advent of Islam by 1000s of years,

the call for leaders To be held accountable for war crimes must be

what emanates from a forum like this on social media. Very

recently, we witnessed how the former Prime Minister of the of

the of Great Britain, Tony Blair, appears to be apologizing

for their complicity

in the invasion of Iraq in 2003

on what now only, not Only demons dubious grounds,

but downright and deliberate falsifications,

war crimes

and the coloniality of power

and the disequilibrium that we face in the world today is what

allows such acts to go unchecked with impunity.

This is our challenge as the Global South,

and today's proceedings must step up to the challenge of advancing

decoloniality of knowledge and being,

if we were to restore equilibrium and balance and thereby force

inclinations of extremisms to the peripheries of irrelevance.

Our Beloved Prophet, peace be upon him

in that a.

Ideal state.

Describes the relations interseed of human beings

at a spiritual level,

and he references their souls as being mutually reinforcing of one

another.

Al Arwa Juno dun muja,

he says either

Tara fat that when they are acquainted with one another,

they become

well disposed, affectionately disposed to one another,

WA Ida, tanakarat, echtelephat,

but when they

operate

in isolation of one another,

in exclusion to add

that is when they fall into dispute,

this state of ideal equilibrium of human nations and human beings

intersect

cannot be evaluated simply on the basis of principles which are

regarded as universal,

but that have been formulated by systems of knowledge

that in its design, dismisses the other,

dismisses the experience and the history of other nations and other

peoples

and posits itself as the only authoritative source of evaluation

and criteria.

We pray that those

values of dignity and justice and peace and compassion to all people

are what will be the driving guiding beacons of light of

deliberations

among our panelists, among yourselves as the attendees and CO

interlocutors to their presentations, and we pray that

God Almighty infuse and inspire wisdom,

inspire compassion, peace and justice in our minds, in our

deliberations. I thank you very, very much. Zach Mullah hero,

assalamu. Alaikum. Warahmatullahi, wabarakatuh.