Minute with a Muslim #283 – The Effects of Colonialism In The Muslim World

Most Muslims that I meet, they are not sufficiently aware of the effects that colonialism has had on them. Let's take the walk system, right? We're talking about Islamic endowments, okay. The colonial powers realized that dismantling the Waqf system was an essential part of their colonial mission, both to steal resources and get rich quick, but more importantly, to bring the local populations under control. And if you look at you go across the Muslim world, from French Algeria, to British, India to Dutch Indonesia, it's the same playbook, they did the exact same thing, the very first thing, some historians estimate that about half of all Muslim land was tied to a wealth or was set

aside. And in the, in the use of a workflow and Islamic endowment when the European colonists arrived, that's huge. But the thing was, and this is a historical theme, the Europeans, they and it's nothing against, you know, racist or essential, I'm descended from Europeans, but the Europeans of that time they went to the Muslim lands, and what they saw, they saw everything that was going on through their own historical experience. And I assumed that was the same exact thing, because they had experiences with the church owning all the land, the same happened in England, right, the church at one point had owned, I don't know, like, definitely over half of the land of England. And then

they came in, they broke it up, right. So they came to the Muslim world, and they are there because they want to steal real resources. And they see this sort of arrangement. And they don't realize that this is actually how public goods or service, right, this is not an oppressive church, centralized ecclesiastical authority that's depriving the people by tying up all this land. This is actually how the hospitals work. This is how the schools work. This is how the roads get built, right? This is how there are waste stations for travelers and things like this. And it's decentralized, it's not managed by any one single authority. So they come and they seize the lands,

and they seize the wealth and they break them up, they take all those assets as the first move they do everywhere. Even the places that weren't formally colonized, such as the Ottoman Empire, the British pressured them in the late 1800s, to do the same to abolish the Waqf system abolish the system of Islamic endowments. So step one was to take all the assets that helped the bottom line, and step two, was to repurpose the income that those endowments generated. So instead of serving the orphans, and serving the poor and running the messages and running the schools, now it's going to the army. Now it's going to the colonial administration, but the cherry on top and this is something

that I think is very representative of the diabolical nature of European colonialism in the Muslim world. And the point that Muslims need to be aware of is that the European colonial powers busied themselves with trying to produce Islamic scholarship or scholarship in general to discredit the Waqf system. And even so far as the French Orientalist and Algeria went on a public campaign to try to convince the Algerian Muslims that the Waqf was bid on innovation in the religion and something that was haram. So this is way, way worse than just stealing somebody's lying or stealing somebody's money. And this is the thing that Muslims need to be aware of today, that when it comes to those

things, that's, that's, that's normal. We expect that from history and loss as a source of data, it's going to happen, right? You're going to find enemies there. Occasionally, every got hundreds, you know, throughout the centuries, they're going to conquer you, you're going to conquer them, they're going to take your land, they're going to take your life, etc. The real danger is when they're trying to change your religion, when they're trying to change the way that you experience your religion. And this is where we're at today, if you feel oh, why does Islam have all these rules? All these restrictions? Why does Islam say this? This is exactly the same thing. Has there

not been a public campaign to discredit the Sharia to discredit different parts of the Sharia in the Muslim world and outside of the Muslim world, right, the inheritance system or the criminal law or this and that and the other all these sorts of things. They have, you know, non Muslims and particularly powers who have wanted to conquer Muslims have produced scholarship to change the way that Muslims think about their own faith. And for most people that's not even on their radar. They're not even aware of that. So everybody has to check themselves when they they feel like well isn't you know your knee jerk reaction to hearing something for the first time. It may be you

speaking but it may not. It might be the influence of somebody who wants to kind of take your land, take your resources and also change your religion.