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DR ISMAIL ADAM PATEL asks the searing question: in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, how does the Ummah convert grief into organised action? In this first of a three-part series he sketches the ‘landscape’ and names the challenge.
Part One
Opening — The Two Prayers
I want to begin with an uncomfortable observation. Every Friday, in tens of thousands of masjids across the world, the khateeb raises his hands and prays for the people of Gaza, for the liberation of Masjid al-Aqsa, for the Ummah in its weakness. Hundreds of millions of sincere hands rise. And then we go home.
For over two years we have watched a genocide livestreamed. A genocide no one can claim they did not see. And the dominant emotion in our communities is not, I think, ignorance. It is anguished helplessness. We feel everything and we move nothing.
So, my question is not ‘do we care?’ We obviously care. My question is harder. Why does so much feeling produce so little force? Why are nearly two billion Muslims, sitting on a quarter of the earth’s landmass and much of its energy, unable to protect one besieged strip of land 25 miles long?
And I want, at the very outset, to warn against the easy answer. The one we are handed by others and have learned to repeat about ourselves: that something is wrong with us. That we are backward, or broken, or not yet ready. That answer is a trap, and I intend to dismantle it.
We feel everything and we move nothing. That gap — between our emotion and our force — is the subject of this discussion.
I am not here to add to our grief. We have enough. I am here to argue two things at once.
First, that the grief is being wasted and that the very size of that wasted feeling is the proof of how much power we are sitting on. Helplessness on this scale is not weakness. It is strength that has not yet been organised.
Second, that the Eurocentric order can neither absorb us nor erase us, and it is that failure of Eurocentrism, not ours, that drives everything they do to us.
Hold that second sentence. It tells us that our problem is not that we are small. It is that we are large enough to unsettle a world order that has no settled place for us as we are.
If hundreds of millions can be moved to raise their hands on the same morning for the same wound, then the raw material of the greatest civil force on earth is already in the room. We are not short of energy. We are short of conversion, from our grief and feeling into force. And conversion is something we can learn.
The Landscape — Naming the Challenge Honestly
Let me lay out the terrain plainly, because we cannot fix what we are too polite to name. The Ummah today faces not one crisis but many. I want to touch on five. They look like five separate misfortunes. They are not. They are five faces of a single structure: a Eurocentric world order that presents itself as universal, neutral, the natural way of things, but which is in truth a particular European arrangement that cannot abide a Muslim political identity standing on its own terms.
This is what scholars call coloniality. This is not the old colonialism of flags and garrisons, which has formally ended, but the deeper hierarchy of who is allowed to be a subject of history and who is permitted only to be its object. These are not five problems, and you can add many other factors to these. They are one structure, reacting to us.
First, Gaza — and what it revealed. Tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, the majority women and children; an entire territory reduced to rubble; and famine engineered as a weapon. The war expanded to reach toward Masjid al-Aqsa itself.
And here is the lesson that should sit in this South African room with particular weight: when the institutions of the Muslim world fell silent, it was South Africa, not the OIC, not the Arab League, not the 57 Muslim states, that walked into the International Court of Justice and said the word genocide.
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The conscience of the Ummah was defended at the world’s highest court by a country where Muslims are two per cent of the population. Let that chastise and inspire us in equal measure.
That a single middle-power state did what 57 could not is the most hopeful fact of this decade, because it proves the obstacle was never capacity. It was will. And will is the one resource no enemy can confiscate. What South Africa did, others can copy.
Second, the algorithm. While we grieve, the ground beneath us is being re-engineered. Artificial intelligence is not a neutral tool arriving to help us. In Gaza, AI target-generation systems were reportedly used to mark human beings for death at industrial speed. In Xinjiang, facial recognition and predictive policing track the Uyghur faithful by their beards and their prayer. In India, the same technologies map and profile Muslim neighbourhoods. And the large language models the whole world now consults were shown, in peer-reviewed study, to complete the sentence ‘two Muslims walked into a…’ with violence two times out of three, a rate the AI systems apply to no other group.
For the first time, Islamophobia is being written into the source code of the century — and almost none of that code is being written by us.
But code is not scripture. It is written by people, and it can be written by us. The same youthful, hyper-connected Ummah that the algorithm profiles is also the largest pool of digital talent on the planet. The frontier of ribat in this century is the dataset, the model, the platform. And understand what the model actually encodes: when it completes ‘two Muslims walked into a…’ with violence, it is not malfunctioning. It is working perfectly and faithfully reproducing a particular Western way of seeing that has been trained to pass itself off as the view from nowhere, as simple objectivity. That is coloniality made executable.
So our task is not merely to ask for fairer treatment from someone else’s machine. It is to author. We were authors of knowledge once, when Europe borrowed its numerals, its optics and its medicine from us. Nothing forbids us being authors again. That frontier is wide open, and it rewards exactly what we have in abundance: young minds.
Third, the resurgent right. Across Europe, the United States, India, and even here in Africa, a politics that treats the Muslim as the enemy within has moved from the fringe to the centre. In Germany, a party watched by its own intelligence services as extremist doubled its vote to become the official opposition. In Britain, recorded anti-Muslim hate reached its highest level on record. Hijab bans, masjid restrictions, surveillance programmes that put an entire faith under suspicion, travel bans and immigration crackdowns explicitly aimed at us. This is not a collection of accidents. It is an organised identity politics that needs the Muslim as its useful villain.
The Eurocentric order does not merely happen to dislike Islam. It requires us. A civilisation uncertain of what it now believes steadies itself by pointing at what it is against. We have been cast as the constitutive outsider, the figure the West needs in order to feel like a coherent ‘we’ at all. That is why no amount of moderation ever earns acceptance: the role was never about our conduct. It was about their need.
Yet every demagogue who builds his career on our name has just told us something: that we are not marginal to history. They, in fact, announce that we are central enough to be feared. They organise against us because our presence is permanent and growing. Fear is a backhanded confession of our significance. And the answer to organised contempt is not to shrink; it is to out-organise it. This is what South Africa’s own history proves the morally serious oppressed can do to the powerful.
Fourth, beneath all of these — our own paralysis. Fifty-seven states. Summits that issue statements. Normalisation deals signed over the heads of the very people being bombed. Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Tunisia and Doha are struck, and it produces no sanction, no embargo, no suspension of ties, no deterrent of any kind.
Now, the easy analysis stops here and calls us docile. I will not give you that version, because it is the colonised mind blaming itself for its own chains. Ask instead: why can 57 states feel one wound and still not act as one body? Because they were never built to. The nation-state map of the Muslim world is itself the colonial settlement. These are borders drawn in European chancelleries precisely to break a single Ummah into 57 manageable pieces, each small enough to be patronised, played off, or bought. The summit fails not because Muslims are weak by nature, but because the very container we are asked to act through was engineered to make ummatic action impossible.
We are not a docile people. We are a dismembered one — cut into 57 pieces by a map we did not draw. And what was cut by design can be sewn back by design.
Notice the good news hiding in the hardest sentence. If our paralysis is built into a container designed by others, then the cure is not to beg that container to work. It is to begin acting as one body anyway. We need to rise beneath the states, across the borders, through the networks of conscience that no chancellery can redraw. We do not need 57 governments to agree. We can begin to act as a single political subject ourselves, tonight, without anyone’s permission. The reflex of acting together is the one part of this whole landscape that is already fully inside our own hands.
And fifth — our disunity. Let me be careful about this word. I am not calling for uniformity. Two billion Muslims of dozens of ethnicities in as many countries will not, and need not, be uniform. Nor is unity merely the respect or celebration of differences.
So, what is unity? Unity is when we come to share the same language — and by language I mean a shared common sense of concern. When we hear about Gaza, about al-Aqsa, or the suffering of a Muslim, no one should have to knock on our door and ask us to act. We should act on our own impulse, as a natural reaction.
Consider two images. If you burn your hand, your other hand does not wait to be asked before it moves towards the wound. It moves before thought. That is unity. The Prophet Muhammad (SAW) described the Ummah as one body, not one neighbourhood, not one tribe: one body. A body that must be told its own hand is burning has already lost something deeper than politics. Or consider a mother whose child is in danger on the other side of the world. She does not wait for a news bulletin to confirm her concern. She already knows what needs to be done. That doing before being told is what ummatic unity actually means — not that we agree on everything, but that when certain pain reaches us, we turn to action without needing to be marshalled.
But here is the thing about common sense: it can be trained. The Friday we began with already proves the nerve is alive. It shows the whole body still feels the one wound. We do not have to manufacture the feeling; it is already there. We only have to school it into reflex, household by household, masjid by masjid. Unity of feeling we already possess. Unity of response is the habit we now build.
Dr Ismail Adam Patel is the founder of the UK-based NGO, Friends of Al-Aqsa, and former visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds. He is a leading voice on Palestinian liberation and pivotal in mobilising civil society. His works include A Brief History of Palestine (Al-Aqsa Publishers, 2023), Madīna to Jerusalem: Encounters with the Byzantine Empire (Kube Publications, 2005), The Muslim Problem: From British Empire to Islamophobia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and Treasures of the Holy Sanctuary (Turath Publications, 2026). He is committed to exploring decolonial thought and advancing Critical Muslim Studies.
This is a transcript of a speech given Dr Ismail Adam Patel to Muslim scholars and activists at Monarch Hotel in Rosebank, Johannesburg on June 17, 2026. The event was hosted by Jamiat Ulama South Africa
Coming in Part Two
In Part Two of this series, Dr Ismail Adam Patel examines what he describes as the twin challenges facing the Ummah: the privatisation of Islam and the transformation of a revolutionary faith into what he terms a ‘sedative Islam’. He argues that coloniality confined Islam to the private sphere while discouraging its role as a public force for justice and social transformation.
