Kurnia Ijazah Doktor Kehormat USM 2001

SHAYKH DR.ABDAL QADIR AS-SUFI :

THE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH AT THE CONVOCATION TO RECEIVE HON. D. LITT. HONOUR

Conferred by UNIVERSITI SAINS MALAYSIA on 9th August 2001



Invocation of Allah and Prayer on the Prophet, may Allah be pleased with him.

Saya amat berbangga dapat bersama dalam perhimpunan akademik yang mulia ini.

Naib canselor dan para hadirin yang dihormati, kita pohon Rahmat Allah untuk Tuanku Canselor dan kita pohon kejayaan untuk universiti.

I was profoundly moved to receive the message from your distinguished Vice Chancellor informing me that this renowned seat of learning had decided to bestow upon me the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature. It is all the greater privilege for me because it represents not only the crown of my lifetime's activity as a writer in the service of Islam, but for the tremendous significance that in choosing me you have recognised the intellectual imperative of placing Islamic knowledge over all other knowledges, indeed, one which defines the parameters of the sciences and the arts. Islam is a Divine instrument whose task is to create just and excellent civilisation in this world and at the same time to guarantee the entry into the blessed Garden of the next world, and that is to say a Garden which holds the meanings of sensory beauty and another which holds the realities of Divine knowledge and witnessing.

There is a further reason that I would like to share with you because of the personal joy it brings to me and for the good news it carries for the university life of this great Islamic state of united Sultanates. Your Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, having served your country over these two decades and having steered the nation to a significantly higher level of development, thanks to his enormous experience and his innate wisdom was able to understand and interpret the massive betrayal which the kafir society visited on the Muslim lands of Nusantara, which resulted in the virtual halving of the country's monetary wealth.

The first Muslim leader to recognise that the solution to escape from the kafir world enslavement was the return to what Allah, glory be to Him, had ordained, the use of the golden Islamic Dinar and silver Dirham as instruments of trade and the only permissible money of Zakat - was the then Prime Minster of Turkey, Dr. Erbakan, who publicly declared, "This is the currency of the Muslims."

The next Islamic leader to recognise this was the late King Hasan II of Morocco, may Allah be merciful to him and reward him for having saved his kingdom from the disasters of republicanism suffered by his neighbour Algeria. In the last year of his life during his Ramadan gathering in his palace at Rabat, he received from my fuqara a gift of the Islamic Dinar and Dirhams. He accepted the gift and was profoundly moved. Two days later he announced his intention of setting up a group of 'ulema to restore the means of a correct and halal Zakat using the Islamic Dinar of 'Umar Ibn al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him.

However, the third and most important step has been taken by your distinguished Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohammad in his now famous public address in which he indicated that only a real money currency, that is the Islamic Dinar, could free the state from the manipulations of its enemy. It was significant at this point that those who opposed the Prime Minister and were removed from office, while pretending to reform, had as their allies the World Bank and the IMF which are themselves the militant instruments of the kafir bid for world government.

Thus Malaysia is at the threshold of a new age both for the world in general and the Muslim nation in particular. In one decision your leader had taken a step into the future in advance of every Muslim leader today.

In the light of this new situation I would like to propose to you that new times demand new ways of thinking, and old configurations of both political structure and method have to be speedily and courageously abandoned in order to achieve the restoration of Islamic greatness and a new vigour for the future of this whole area which is the Muslim heartland in our time.

Firstly, we have already abandoned the twentieth century model of political power. Government no longer has substantive power. It is reduced to the feeble task of taxation and domestic spending on medicine, policing, and basic infrastructure. In an age when individual corporations, including worthless ones like Coca Cola, command annual capital sums vastly in excess of any middle-sized political state, it is now inescapable that power has passed from the political zone to the zone over all others, of finance.

Secondly, we should look now at a new model of power interaction held in tension between a triad of forces-the zone of commodities power, the zone of media power and the zone of financial power. These three groupings of wealth, power and command both interrelate with each other and at the same time are in conflict with each other due to the different primacy of their goals. We could demonstrate this briefly by pointing out that the Balkan War was a media-controlled event under an American presidency, Clinton's, which was media-supported. The abdication of the Indonesian President Suharto, for the first time in history, was made not by the commanding hand of a dictator as France surrendered to Hitler, but to the head of the IMF in the Presidential Palace. The new apparently irrational missile shield of the new American administration, in itself useless, is the vital method necessary to restore power to the commodities sector through the vast programme of missile defence.

Thirdly, I would like to take this opportunity while in the presence of this distinguished gathering, and because of the enormous influence the country's intellectuals rightly wield, to also bring attention to the Islamic dimension of your current situation. There can be no such thing as an Islamic party because in logic that would imply that the sovereignty of the people was above the sovereignty of Allah, glory be to Him, and that if they chose to reject the Islamic party they would be responsible for legalising the right to devolve from Islamic obligation. By the same token a reform party setting itself against the government of the state is a kind of treason, or a Shi'a trying to undermine the authority of the government. If the reformers are allied to the power institutions of kufr, the World Bank, IMF and so on, it is clear that their agenda is the destruction of and not the revitalising of the Islamic body politic.

If I were asked to indicate any grave error that I perceived in the state I could only do it as your guest on the issue of any serious aspect of the Deen that seemed to be neglected. It is here that the 'ulema must bear the full brunt of any such weaknesses and the reason for this is not any defect of their characters, but simply that since 1945 the only version of Islam promulgated inside Malaysia and Indonesia has been one that at its inception has been vetted and approved by the forces of kufr and which stems from the modernist movement, itself the servant of the oil producing states. If we restore to Malaysia a correct 'aqida, that is an understanding of Allah's power and majesty and of the Deen itself, Malaysia and its neighbouring countries will be transformed.

You have all but liberated yourselves from political colonial rule but you allowed your Deen to be colonised and all that was returned to you was the zone of 'ibada, that is you are allowed to fast and to pray. It is the duty of the new generation to recover from kafir colonial power the whole world of trade, financial instruments and practice as well as the separation of Islam from false religions, a recovery of our self-respect which will put an end to the masonic doctrine of Tolerance.

An inexorable and powerful growth of Islam in Nusantara will restore again the proper laws of Jizya paid by the non-Muslims for our protection of them. As your great nation develops along these powerful lines of obedience, defined by strong 'aqida, it will be assured that the next Khalif of the whole Muslim Ummah will emerge from among your people.