Strategize According to Their Weakness

Everyone is familiar with the statement of Amr Al Maktar. They are not our teachers. We don't learn how to behave and how to deal with our, challenges, from, our enemies. The West has their own frame of reference, and then they project it onto the world, and they think that everyone thinks the way that they do. They think that the way that they did slavery is the way that everyone did slavery.

The way that they think is the way that everyone thinks, and so forth. And to a certain extent, all people are guilty of that because you have your own frame of reference, and so you tend to think that other people must be like you. And I think that our problem has been the Muslims and the people throughout the global South are unquestionably more civilized than the people in the West. Unquestionably. That's just evidence by the fact that we're the ones who have been oppressed by them.

We are the ones whose whose countries have been exploited. We're the ones who have been enslaved. We're the ones who have been genocided and subjected to their violence. So just this alone shows you which nations are more, civilized than the other. So our mistake is projecting upon them that they are civilized like we are, and that when they, for example, express values and principles and morals, that on some level they must mean it, and that we can deal with them the same way that we deal with each other, which is in a civil, dignified, decent, honorable, respectable way.

So we think that we should be able to deal with them that way. And we don't understand, that there are people in this world coming mostly from that hemisphere, who simply do not believe in harmony. They simply do not believe, in mutual benefit. They have this binary zero sum mentality where I have to have everything and you have to have nothing, and that's just the way the relationship has to be. They don't understand the idea that we can actually just get along and both of us can prosper.

They feel that if anyone is prospering other than them, they're losing something. So we have to just adjust our mindset, our mentality, and understand that we are not in a situation in which we can compromise with them, in that way, that we can we cannot deal with them, expecting a level of civilization from them that we expect from one another. In other words, we have to accept the reality that we are in a situation of confrontation with these people. Now once you have once you have made that adjustment, then you have to determine how you are going to approach that confrontation. And the way that you approach that confrontation has to be dictated by your morals, by your principles, by your beliefs, by your religious law.

If you're a Muslim, it has to be determined according to Sharia. And then furthermore, it has to be determined according to your own intellect. You have to use your own intelligence to know how to approach this confrontation in a way that will be successful. And speaking as someone who used to be a boxer, I know that when you're getting into a fight with someone, you don't target their strengths. You, base your strategy and how you approach that fight based upon their weaknesses and their vulnerabilities, the things that they're not the strongest in.

Well, the West is very strong in violence. They try to push you and and and put you in a position to where they can justify being violent towards you. This is a very losing strategy, and this has been a mistake that we have made. We have to approach this challenge. We have to approach this confrontation.

First of all, understanding that it is a challenge, that it is a confrontation, and then we have to approach it in a way of strategic thinking and understanding, for example, what they value versus what we value. For example, as Muslims, what we value more than anything else is our. We value our iman. We value our morals and principles. So they try to target that in us to try to bring us down away from our values, to try to corrupt us, to try to make us more interested in Dunya, which is what they're interested in.

They're interested in the Dunya. So for example, if you're looking at the West, if you're looking at particularly America, I think that at at some point within the last say thirty years or so, a lot of the Arab countries had a kind of an epiphany that, all this time we thought that they believed in all of these so called enlightenment values that they talk about. And and we thought that that meant that we had to sort of tiptoe around their values because they'd be offended. But then at a certain point, I think over the course of what Americans call the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War, the occupation of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan, I think the the the Muslim world and the Arab world had this collective epiphany of, oh, actually, they don't mean a single word they say. And actually, the only thing they care about is money.

The only thing they care about is money. The West are nothing but prostitutes. They'll go to bed with anyone who's got the money, and the Gulf has realized that, and they've been able to buy a tremendous amount of influence in the West through investment, through investment strategies, through what you can call economic conquest. And this is a a wise approach. It's a confrontational approach, but if someone has it in their mind that the only means of confrontation is through violence, I'm afraid that that's a confrontation that you're going to lose because that's exactly the way they want you to fight because that's the only way they know how to fight.

But this isn't the approach in Islam. This isn't the this isn't the approach of Rasulullah If we're talking about, for example, Islamic terms that are misused by the West, one of the the main ones is the term jihad. Well, Rasulullah fought against his enemies, yes, by targeting their caravans, but you may have to think about what that meant. That wasn't just a a war, that was economic warfare targeting their caravans because that's what the Quraysh cared about, was their money. They cared about their money, their material lifestyle, their material prestige.

Rasulullah fought against his enemies by digging a trench around Medina. That was Jihad. He fought the he he fought his enemies by, the well of, Rumat Al Dufari. That was Jihad. He fought against his enemies by burning down the trees of Bani Nadir.

That was Jihad. And he fought them through espionage. He fought them through cunning. He fought them through diplomacy. He fought them through, freeing of slaves that his enemies owned.

That was jihad. This is strategy. And he even you can even say that the treaty of Hudaybiyah was a form of jihad because that gave the Muslims an a huge advantage when he did that. And it and it put the the the enemies of Islam at a huge disadvantage. This is strategy.

This is approaching your confrontation with your enemies in an intelligent way, in a way that you are determining based upon your principles, your values, your beliefs, and what Allah has revealed. Not learning from them how to act like them because they're gonna do that that form of confrontation better than you because that's what they've that's the only thing they've ever done. That's the only thing they've ever been good at is violence. That's the main thing that they know how to manufacture and that's the main thing that they know how to export. If you wanna be in a confrontation with them, well, you're gonna have to find another way to do it.

And don't do it their way because that's the one thing they're good at. And you as I said, if you're gonna get into a fight with someone, you don't fight them, according to their strengths, you fight them according to their weaknesses.