“It’s obscene.” That’s how one of the leading Islamic thinkers in the West describes the recent spectacle of Muslim rulers’ fawning deference toward U.S. President Donald Trump.
Over the past few months, political leaders from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan met the American president, praising him for his “peace” efforts in recent conflicts. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif even nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, claiming that Trump “brought peace in South Asia” and “saved millions of people.” As he said these words, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi stood there smiling and applauding.
Even as Trump and his predecessor in the White House provided Israel with intelligence, diplomatic support, weapons and financial aid necessary to conduct two years of genocide in Gaza, the leaders of several prominent Muslim-majority nations took the side of America and Israel, continuing trade and cooperation as if nothing had changed.
University of California law professor and Islamic scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl describes this behavior as “pathological” and “a betrayal of Islamic morality.”
“When you are able to slaughter Muslims to this extent and then, with a straight face, tell them, as a genocide is still going on, ‘let’s talk peace’ – what type of people are you?” says Abou El Fadl, founder of the California-based Usuli Institute think tank.
“Gaza has exposed the thorough de-legitimacy of Arab rulers everywhere,” he tells Analyst News. “Their people could be cheering as they see missiles go flying overhead to Israel, while the king gives orders to his army to shoot those missiles down. Why? Because he thinks his legitimacy rests with the United States and Israel, not his own people.”
Islamic political power is perhaps at its lowest in history, with no major Muslim nation leading the world in military, economic or technological power as they once did. Instead, their leaders pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state while quietly undermining it.
If Muslims don’t unite now and get past their sectarian disputes and misguided loyalties to Western powers, they’ll be subjected to colonial barbarism for a long time to come, warns Abou El Fadl.
“Saudi Arabia is far more interested in fighting with Iran than in presenting any type of united front against any type of colonial overlord. This is the essence of Muslim weakness,” he says. “But Muslim states coming together, it’s a formidable front. The world will be forced to pay attention.”
Analyst News spoke to Abou El Fadl about Muslim complicity in Gaza, threats of neocolonialism, the Islamophobia industry and the moral bankruptcy of Muslim political leaders. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In your 2024 book The Palestine Sermons, you said, “What is happening in Gaza and our powerlessness is a direct lesson from God… after Gaza, everything has to change, and nothing else matters.” What did you mean by this?
It’s a theologically-driven argument. In Islam, God expects Muslims to act as vicegerents, and in the language of the Quran, as agents of the divine, bearing witness to justice for God.
So for us Muslims in the modern age, there was an implied covenant in our relation to the world, and that was at the end of colonialism: that we should place our trust in an international order based on certain principles such as sovereignty, self-determination, non-interference and the prohibition of force except for self-defense.
But what Gaza has shown is that the mask was off, and this entire covenant is a mythology.
What Gaza has shown is that we very much live in a hegemonic world, a world that the same colonial powers that had colonized the world and had completely erased Indigenous people all over the globe continues, in which the colonizer looks at Indigenous people as basically dispensable, that you could kill Indigenous people at will without much regard. In every sense of the word, the mask is off. Muslims cannot count on a post-World War II order.
To put it in simple Islamic terms, this is a state of “Darurah Quswah,” or extreme necessity, as Islamic legal language goes. It’s a situation of desperate necessity where you must act on a set of priorities in order to have any meaningful relationship to justice. If you don’t, you are going to be a consistently dominated group of people in this world of barbarism, because there is no law, and for Muslims to be dominated in that fashion and be entirely powerless, you cannot bear witness for justice, for the sake of God.
After the mask is off, any Muslim who sits there and quibbles about Sunni-Shia is committing a sin. You continue to want to believe in an international order that exists after World War II, that we have a rule of law, that the West has discarded its racism, its view of Indigenous people as subhuman. But you discover that nothing has changed.
When you are in such a desperate situation, from a moral point of view, justice must become an obsession for a people who are denied all vestiges of justice. The only way you can emerge out of your darkness is by clinging on to the light of justice.
U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese mentioned in her reportthat 63 countries were involved in facilitating the Gaza genocide, including many Arab and Muslim states such as Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and the UAE. Why are they so indifferent towards the suffering of their fellow Muslim brethren, and how much are they complicit in this genocide?
The attitude of so many Muslims is very much as people divided along nationalistic lines. You’ll find Egyptians caring primarily about Egypt first; Iranians, Iran first; Saudi Arabia, and so on.
It became undeniable after Gaza that the power of the West continues to act as an ideological unit. Even the racial sympathies, their cultural sympathies, that ambiguous blob that they call the West — they continue acting as a unit. They come together in quite a tribal way, even when they are coming together over something that is clearly immoral, such as genocide.
But the Muslim world acts very much like a defeated people. They remind me quite a bit of crabs in a barrel, constantly snipping at each other. And if a crab tries to get out of the barrel, the other crabs actually hold on to it and pull it back. Many Muslim [governments] are actually affirmatively complicit.
Despite the consistent denials of President Sisi to his own people, everyone in the world knows that the Egyptian government is an active participant in the blockade of Gaza. Not only that, but there is a great deal of profiteering on the part of the Egyptian army in charging Palestinians, if they want to get out of Gaza, as much as $10,000 to $20,000 a person.
Sometimes, [they’re] profiteering off the aid trucks going into Gaza, sometimes even stealing some of the aid trucks and selling the products on the black market. When there were international aid convoys that tried to reach Gaza, Egyptian security forces attacked them and assaulted these aid convoys, actively preventing them from reaching Gaza – in other words, acting as an agent, as a proxy for Israel. Many Palestinians, by the way, have been killed by Egyptian forces because they either drifted out of Gazan waters or attempted to leave Gaza by sea. And Egypt’s excuse in all of this is that, “Oh, we have signed a treaty with Israel that basically makes us agents, protectors of the Israeli state.” The point is that you are actively a part of the blockade; the blockade could not succeed without you.
At the same time, when Israeli supplies and commerce were affected because of what the Houthis were doing in the Red Sea, Jordan — through its own borders with Israel — supplied Israel with everything that the Israeli market was missing. There were demonstrations in Jordan against the convoys of supplies reaching Israel. So while Israel starves the Palestinians in Gaza, the Jordanian government is stepping in and supplying Israel with everything it needs.
The United Arab Emirates increased its flights to Israel manifold during [Israel’s bombardment of Gaza] and perhaps even till today. What is already well-known is that they escalated their shipments to Israel, so that basically the Israeli market is not affected by the war, and the Israeli people are not impacted in any significant way.
Now, what we see is this pathological behavior. Pathological because during the Israel-Iran war, Jordanian forces were shooting down Iranian missiles as they were heading to Israel, basically injecting themselves in a conflict. They would never dare to shoot at an Israeli plane going to bomb Iran or flying over Jordan for whatever reason; same for the Saudis. They felt at liberty to shoot at the missiles on their way to Israel and to down them.
You had a full-scale genocide, a genocide that went on for years, with the entire Muslim world observing and doing absolutely nothing.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman just met Trump and expressed interest in joining the Abraham Accords. What’s your view on the normalization of ties between Israel and Arab states?
You have the American president talking about the Abraham Accords, and not a single Muslim country says, “We are in no mood to discuss the Abraham Accords. Leave us alone because you allowed for a full-scale genocide to proceed in Gaza.”
When you are able to slaughter Muslims to this extent and then, with a straight face, tell them, as a genocide is still going on, “Let’s talk peace” — and all Muslims say, “Oh, yes, of course. Let’s talk peace” — what type of people are you? Can you imagine the Israelis acting this way? Can you imagine any people on the face of this earth acting this way? Can you go and say, “I want to make up with you, I want to be your friend,” as I’m beating on your brother right in front of your eyes? I beat your brother to a pulp, and then I turn around and extend my hand to you and say, “But we are going to be best friends, right?”
Look at the Saudis. They come to the United States — which is fully complicit in the genocide of Gaza, provided financial and military cover and supplied all the weaponry, all the bombs, all the missiles that killed and continue to kill Palestinians. And yet Saudi Arabia comes to the United States and says, “We will invest a trillion dollars.” Unfazed. Unembarrassed, no shame. How could it be that for Muslims, everything does not change?
Gaza has exposed the thorough de-legitimacy of Arab rulers everywhere: the Egyptian president, the Saudi king, the Emirati royals, Mohammed bin Zayed, the Jordanian king and so on.
Their legitimacy is not derived from the people they rule over. They don’t care about what the people they rule over want or do not want. Their people could be cheering as they see missiles go flying overhead to Israel, while the king gives orders to his army to shoot those missiles down. Why? Because he thinks his legitimacy rests with the United States and Israel, not his own people. Same thing for the mess that’s in Sudan and the role of the United Arab Emirates.
When this is so blatantly clear, for believing Muslims to continue saying, “Oh, you know, I like this [American] president, oh, I’m okay with this ruler” — it’s a betrayal of Islamic precepts and Islamic morality.
Saudi Arabia claims it won’t normalize relations with Israel unless there’s a guarantee of a Palestinian state. Can these words actually be trusted?
They’re speaking out of both sides of their mouth. “We want a Palestinian state. We insist on a Palestinian state.” But at the same time, you’re allowing Israeli planes to fly in your airspace. You give lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state; how could any of that be serious?
When people started demonstrating against Israel in support of Palestinians, even in Pakistan, they were oppressed, they were attacked. You can’t dare raise the Palestinian flag in Saudi Arabia. How is it that if you raise the Palestinian flag in Saudi Arabia, you will be immediately disappeared? Same thing in Egypt, same thing in the Emirates. And at the same time, you say, “Oh, I’m in support of a Palestinian state.”
What goes through your mind when you see Muslim political leaders trying to curry favor with Trump?
This nomination for the Peace Prize is a new level of obscenity. You have a president who very openly said, “I will not restrain Israel. I will supply Israel with everything.” Even the messaging that Israel can annex all of Jerusalem: [Trump is saying] I put no priority as to Muslim attachments, Muslim values, Muslim narrative, Muslim history; all I consider relevant is Jewish history, what the ‘Judeo-Christian’ normativity says.
For Muslim countries to turn around and say, “Oh, you are such a good human being. I’m going to nominate you for the Nobel Peace Prize” – it’s obscene.
Muslim countries in many ways appear to be vassal states for America: They have American influence, American bases and use American weapons. If they’re not subservient, they’ll be bombed and ousted. What are Muslim countries supposed to do?
They are stuck precisely because their power does not come from their own people. These rulers act very much like thieves at night. They know they are illegitimate. Their illegitimacy and their non-representation of anything legitimate or any institutions in their country. They know that they can disappear tomorrow, and the vast majority of their own people will celebrate. And that awareness makes them act as if they are like vassals of the colonizers.
It’s like the president of Afghanistan. He was a great hero until American forces withdrew. And then suddenly he turns out to be completely irrelevant to Afghan society. If anything, he was just a great weight and a great burden on Afghan society until Afghan society got rid of him.
Now, why are Muslims so weak? It’s because Saudi Arabia is far more interested in fighting with Iran than in presenting any type of united front against any type of colonial overlord.
The Netanyahu government is interested in Greater Israel. The game that Netanyahu and his allies are playing is for Israel to be a superpower in the region. It is clear that they’re not done annexing Arab lands, and they’re not done flexing their power. But a hegemonic Israel means basically you are going to live under the overlordship of the Israeli state. Israel is going to be the superpower of that region without anyone having the ability to defy it.
And yet I am sure they [Muslim rulers] are aware of that. And yet they know that the only solution for this is for their people to unite; in other words, for Muslim populations to find unity and to coordinate their trade and their infrastructures and build bridges to one another. And that is the only possible counterbalance to the growth of Israeli power in the region, to not divert their resources to inter-Muslim hostility.
That completely insane conflict between Sunni and Shia, for example. As long as there is a conflict between Sunni and Shia, Israel will exploit that and will dominate and become a hegemonic power. Why won’t these countries come together and unify for Muslims to present some type of united front?
It was so telling when the United States bombed Iran right after Muslim states met in Türkiye. It was quite embarrassing. Muslim states had [given] all these speeches about how Muslims are one and about the ummah and how Muslims should protect each other. What is the U.S. response? Right after they were done, they bombed Iran. Could you have a greater commentary? It’s like, “We know you guys just have rhetoric.” Can you imagine bombing a single European country without all of Europe responding?
History consistently teaches that when Muslims are as divided as they are now, their enemies defeat them. This is the essence of Muslim weakness.
None of the Muslim states have the economy or the resources or the technology to constitute any type of serious power by standing alone. But Muslim states coming together, it’s a formidable front. The world will be forced to pay attention.
Why are Muslim countries so defenseless against American and Israeli aggression?
I grew up in the Middle East with the memory of constant news reports of Israeli planes bombing this site, that site. I don’t remember, except in the 1973 war, of Israeli planes ever being shot down. They bombed and went back. I’ve always wondered since childhood, what is this?
I discovered that air power played a decisive factor throughout the colonial history of the Muslim world. The West used air power consistently as a sort of trump card. And yet Muslim countries, in all these years, have never developed the technology to properly defend themselves. It reaches the point of insanity when a people are struck in the same way from the same weapon, again and again, and they fail to defend themselves.
The former Malaysian prime minister [Dr. Mahathir Mohamad] was once interviewed, and he said that Malaysia had imported F-16 planes from the United States. He said that he realized that the F-16s that they got from the United States were only good for airshows, not war, because they had to be programmed by American engineers. And without this programming, there were just air show pieces. They couldn’t be used militarily.
Saudi Arabia is spending millions and billions of dollars to get these warplanes. And not only Saudi Arabia, but Egypt and Jordan – they’re completely reliant on the U.S. You’re bringing in weaponry where the control button is with the United States.
The world we live in is a technological race, and it’s imperative not to waste millions of dollars, as Saudi Arabia does, bringing in rock stars and putting on these glamorous concerts and shows. If you actually cared about your people, you would be investing in technology. You’d be investing in knowledge. You would be investing in education.
But that is the nature of an illegitimate ruler. All they care about is holding on to power and fearing an educated people. They don’t want to rule over an educated people, because an educated people are difficult to control. They’re going to start having opinions. They’re going to start saying “this is not the best way to do things,” and you don’t want to hear that. So you keep your people effectively ignorant.
Within Western countries, too, anti-Muslim sentiment continues to increase and is reaching record highs. Who is responsible for this rise in Islamophobia, and what is the best way to tackle it?
The reason we refer to it as a phobia is an irrational insistence that what came from the heart of the East, what came from the South, is by definition nothing more than a cultish heresy, which is the initial response of the Christian West to what they viewed as the Islamic heresy coming out of the East.
The irony is, even before Christianity, there was always this tendency of the Romans to look at the Persians coming from the East as an irrational, barbaric threat. The idea that we, the Romans and the West, represent civilization and everything that comes from Persia or North Africa – they’re the barbarians. There’s nothing better than animals there. They’re primitive to the extreme.
Does that kind of mindset still exist in America today – and who is behind it?
Throughout the history of the West, co-mingled was a deep-seated racism. Once the West adopted Christianity, the whole theological outlook was that there was a cursed genealogy to Adam. And that dark skin is a punishment from God, and you are rewarded by being light-skinned and being white. That idea took hold and became part and parcel of the legacy of colonialism.
And when you colonize all these indigenous people, the white man looked at them, building on these medieval roots, with the same outlook that these are the barbarians, they are less intelligent, less sophisticated. They need civilizing. This is the whole white man’s burden thing.
In the case of Islam, that mindset of the indigenous barbarian who poses a threat to the white man continued unabated. Why has it proven so resilient against change and so resistant to deconstruction? Here is the stark, naked, vulgar role of money.
The Christian right fantasizes about converting Africa to Christianity and dreaming of Muslims becoming Christian. Add to this Zionist money that believes that Israel’s conflict is not with Arabs but with Islam, and that as long as Muslims continue to adhere to their doctrines, as long as their relationship with the Quran and the traditions is a healthy one, they will continue to pose a danger to Israel, if not now, then tomorrow.
Israel relies on Islamophobia to cover up its own crimes and its own delegitimacy. Every time Israel sees that its support wanes, what does it count on? Islamophobia. Maybe I can’t convince people to like me as a state because of my human rights violations and my atrocities, but what I can do is get them to fear Islam much more than they dislike me. So Israel invests in Islamophobia.
And so that type of thinking, which is on the Zionist right, is that we must deconstruct Islam and we must weaken the relationship of Muslims themselves to their faith.
And that has led to millions and millions of dollars being invested in the Islamophobia industry in funding people like Daniel Pipes, who was among the pioneers of Islamophobia.
People don’t realize how much money is invested in this industry where so many people can dedicate their full career, full-time, to maligning and attacking Islam.
So it’s the Christian right, plus the Zionist right, plus some age-old colonialists who feel that the West has nothing to apologize for when it comes to colonialism and believe that Islam poses a civilizational threat to the West.
Why aren’t Muslims who have so much oil wealth and resources responding to that?
It’s selfish interests, and they just don’t care. Muslim capital is cowardly. I’ve known very rich Muslims who would say things to me like, “We agree with you fully. We would love to support you. But if there was a way to do it in secret, we would do it.” What are you afraid of? You’re a multi-millionaire. You could afford the best lawyers in the world.
They exhibit the typical mores and morals of a colonized people. Bravery is often exhibited by those who have the least to lose; those who have the most to lose, because they’re very rich, often fall in bed with the colonizer. And it seems that even after they leave their homelands, that cowardly attitude continues.
I had the direct experience where good, pious, very rich Muslims initially are interested in supporting me or supporting the Usuli Institute. They’re very gung-ho about doing something about Islamophobia. And soon after, the gossipers and the naysayers come and whisper in the ears of the millionaire, “If you support this Islamic outfit, you don’t know if they’re Shia or if they’re Mu’tazili or Sufi. You don’t know if they’re liberal. Maybe they’ll be a source of a headache.” So what happens is, because Muslim capital is cowardly, the rich person disappears.
Your enemy is spending a billion dollars, and you’re spending hardly 10 million dollars. What results do you expect? How do you justify this before God? What are you going to tell God in the hereafter?
It’s as if we are waiting for Muslim governments to come in and spend on responding to Islamophobia, while in reality, Muslim governments are not just not interested.
The U.S. administration under President Trump has initiated a brutal crackdown on immigrants. Anyone standing up for Palestine could be detained. Do you feel that Muslims are particularly under threat?
While Trump is unpredictable because he’s expressed a number of conflicting things, people around him — like David Miller — want to target Muslims who are naturalized citizens. In other words, to try to take American citizenship away from them under the guise of proving that they are disloyal to the United States.
And the logic is very strange because they will say, if you criticize Israel, then that proves that you are antisemitic. And if you’re antisemitic, then you’re not loyal to the U.S. Constitution. And if you’re not loyal to the U.S. Constitution, we should be able to denaturalize you.
Ultimately, I think this will fail, but not before causing an enormous amount of suffering to a large number of Muslim citizens who will find themselves in denaturalization proceedings; you are taken into custody and rarely allowed to be freed on bail.
The whole purpose of this is to send a chilling message to American Muslims: “Keep your mouth shut, mind your own business. Stop being active. Don’t support civil rights organizations.” That chilling effect is what the Trump administration ultimately is looking for.
That might not come to pass if the troubles of the Trump administration continue and they become diverted into the Epstein file problems, for instance. Then their plans to target Muslims might be derailed.
Are you worried that America could be heading towards fascism?
Chris Hedges, who has had a very good batting average in predicting what will happen in foreign relations and what will transpire in America, is very pessimistic. He thinks that the U.S. is on the road to some form of fascism, and I am extremely worried as a law professor, because that’s my profession. Our democratic institutions, the institutions of the rule of law, are under imminent threat.
There was a video recently made by a number of members of Congress, where they tell the military, “If you receive an illegal order, do not obey it.” All of them are ex-military. Trump blew a gasket when this video was released, and he even called them traitors. He said that this is sedition. He even called for their execution. He actually brought charges against one of the senators. What propelled them to take that very unusual step?
People around Trump are preparing for a right-wing coup within the military. They want to overhaul the military to a repressive political unit that, for the first time, has the military actually playing an active role in domestic politics. If that happens, then I 100% agree with Chris Hedges. If you do that, you’re heading to fascism directly. No questions.
The history of militaries is not good when it comes to the rule of law. Trump built all these concentration camps in the desert. If you build them, you’re going to fill them. But in order to fill them, he can’t rely on the state police. And the federal police are not enough. He’s going to have to rely on the National Guard and the military.
If that happens, then absolutely the U.S. is going to become a fascist state for the foreseeable future. If that doesn’t happen, then I think the rule of law will be corrupted, at least for the duration of Trump’s presidency, but there would remain a chance that the U.S. can recover.
