News Review: Kyrgyzstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, France

Kyrgyzstan

The resignation this week of Kyrgyzstan President Sooronbay Jeenbekov, despite Western criticisms, manifests the essence of the Western democratic system. Amidst public riots over fraudulent 4 October parliamentary elections, imprisoned opposition leader Sadyr Japarov was able to flee prison, where he had been serving an eleven year plus sentence for kidnapping a regional governor in 2013. As anger mounted against President Jeenbekov, the newly released Japarov on Wednesday became Prime Minister, resulting in the resignation of Jeenbekov the next day. Kyrgyzstan is generally viewed as the most ‘democratic’ of the Central Asian states, where elections result in regular governmental change, Jeenbekov being the sixth president since the breakup of the Soviet Union. But the real reason for this is the ‘buffer state’ phenomenon. Kyrgyzstan is a small state adjacent to China’s Uighur region and so directly caught in the balance between Russia and China. In such cases, major powers tend to move cautiously, and so ruling is usually a localised affair. But it is wrong to think of it as ‘real democracy’, as democracy is a fanciful idea that was only superficially adopted by the West under pressure from left-wing mass movement. Western democracy is in practice the oligopoly of an elite built on deep vested interests whose factions contest each other for power. ‘Real democracy’ would require that the entire population engage in the legislation of its laws, a task that even experts fail to do, simply because it is beyond human capability for man to devise a system to govern himself. Such a system can only be properly designed by Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala. With Allah’s permission, the Muslims of Central Asia shall soon eject these foreign man-made systems and return to rule according to the Islamic Shariah.

Nagorno-Karabakh

Developments in the Caucasus again show up the political impotence of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who publicly presents himself as a great leader but privately has firmly committed himself to humiliating service as an American agent. According to multiple media reports it was Turkey that ignited the latest clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. But Erdogan has no interest in genuinely helping to solve the issue. In this respect, the role of Erdogan is similar to that of other Muslim rulers who exploit issues such as Palestine or Kashmir only to further the aims of their masters. Russia has now intervened directly in the conflict, sponsoring ceasefire negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan but Turkey is completely absent from the field politically, despite being involved on the ground militarily. On Thursday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even chose to publicly humiliate Turkey over this issue, saying, “We now have the Turks, who have stepped in and provided resources to Azerbaijan, increasing the risk, increasing the firepower that’s taking place in this historic fight”, even though it is quite evident that this was done under American instruction. But agents such as Erdogan view such humiliation as a great honour, swelling with pride at their mention on the tongue of their master.

France

Just two weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron’s key speech outlining measures to defeat what he called ‘Islamic separatism’, the use by a Paris school teacher of anti-Islamic caricatures in classes that included young Muslim teenagers led to his later death at the hands of an 18-year old Muslim who was subsequently gunned down on the streets by French police. The school teacher used the caricatures published by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo to explain the values of freedom of belief and speech as part of his teaching of the obligatory courses in “moral and civil education”. That the clash of values should lead to death is a matter that the West claims to be astonished by, even though it is this same clash of values that they use to justify their invasions of Muslim lands, killing millions. Like democracy, the ideas of freedom of belief and speech were adopted by the West under pressure from left-wing movements incited by materialist thinkers and activists. In deterministic materialist thinking, freedom is necessary for man to manifest his inner material nature though the Western compromise between religion and materialism resulted in the West repurposing freedom and democracy in accordance with a more religious understanding of free will. This divergence in the understanding of freedom persists in the West with materialist determinism gaining ever greater ground with each passing generation, simply because the West chose to compromise with the materialist threat instead of defeating it. Freedom is a false idea, no matter how much it is repurposed to agree with free will. Living in society with others requires acting responsibly towards them, which includes respecting different religious beliefs. Allah (swt) says in the Noble Qur’an:

[وَلاَ تَسُبُّواْ الَّذِينَ يَدْعُونَ مِن دُونِ اللّهِ فَيَسُبُّواْ اللّهَ عَدْوًا بِغَيْرِ عِلْمٍ]

“˹O believers!˺ Do not insult what they invoke besides Allah or they will insult Allah spitefully out of ignorance.” [al-An’am: 108]

Instead of adopting freedom, the Christian West should have remained firm on the understanding of tolerance and difference of opinion, which they had adopted from Muslims. But the materialist threat was too much for them to counter, particularly after the fall of the Ottoman State from its position as the world’s leading power. Muslim scholarship had of course soundly defeated materialist thinking a thousand years back but the discarded writings of philosophers from Muslim lands resurfaced in the West due to the misplaced Christian obsession with Greek philosophy, and it was this that incited renewed materialist thinking in the West. With Allah’s permission, the Muslim Ummah shall soon re-establish the righteous Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet (saw), restoring the Islamic way of life in Muslim lands and carrying the intellectual leadership of Islam to the entire world, rescuing humanity from the worship of matter and returning religion to its rightful place at the centre of man’s affairs.