I. What Happened This Week
I have been a student of this region for six decades. I have watched, across a lifetime, the Muslim world be dismembered, manipulated, and played against itself by external powers whose strategic interest has always been our fragmentation.
I am writing today because what I have been warning about for years has arrived, not gradually, but with the sudden violence of a plan whose execution was always only a matter of timing.
On February 28, 2026, Israel and the United States launched a coordinated military operation against Iran. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed. Senior Iranian military and political leadership was systematically decapitated. Iran’s retaliatory strikes hit American bases and Gulf states. And, in a detail that must not be buried in the strategic analysis an Israeli airstrike struck a girls’ primary school in southern Iran, killing at least 85 children.
At the same moment the strikes on Iran began, Taliban forces opened conflict with Pakistani military units on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border neutralizing the Muslim world’s only nuclear power at the precise moment it might otherwise have considered its options. This coordination was not accidental. Indian Prime Minister Modi had visited Netanyahu in Jerusalem days before the strikes. The joint statement described a ‘hexagon’ security alliance Israel, India, Greece, Cyprus, and unnamed partners explicitly designed to counter what Netanyahu called ‘radical Sunni and Shia Muslim axes.’ Turkey and Pakistan are named as the next targets.
This is not a war against Iran. It is the systematic elimination of every Muslim state with the capacity for strategic resistance. And it is being executed with a precision and a coordination that should command our most serious attention — not our most emotional response.
The Muslim world is being reshaped not by accident, not by the forces of history, but by deliberate design. Understanding that design is the first obligation of every Muslim leader, scholar, and citizen today.
II. The Architecture — What This Is Really About
Let me state plainly what the evidence shows, because the Muslim world cannot respond strategically to something it has not understood accurately.
The operation launched this week is the latest implementation of a strategic vision that has been articulated openly by Israeli leaders for years: a Middle East in which no Muslim state possesses the military capacity, the institutional coherence, or the regional network to challenge Israeli dominance. The path toward that vision has been methodical. Iraq was destroyed in 2003. Syria fell in 2024. Hezbollah was decapitated in 2024. Hamas was decimated in Gaza. Iran is now the primary target. Turkey and Pakistan are named next.
The coordination with India is a new and significant dimension. The Modi-Netanyahu agreement represents the formalization of what strategic analysts have called the ‘hexagon’ a security architecture that explicitly positions itself around Israeli centrality and that treats Muslim political organization as the threat to be contained. This is not a defensive alliance. It is a vision of a new regional order in which 1.9 billion Muslims have no collective voice, no collective security, and no institutional capacity to protect their interests or their dignity.
There is also a dimension of this story that Muslim leaders must understand and that compromises the independence of the American presidency itself. The Epstein files released under American law contain documented FBI evidence that connects Epstein’s operation directly to Israeli intelligence and contain allegations involving the current American president that have been withheld by his own Justice Department in violation of law. I am not stating this as conspiracy. I am stating it as documented evidence that deserves the attention of every Muslim government that is trying to understand why American policy has become so completely indistinguishable from Israeli policy. A president who cannot say no to a foreign government is not leading American policy. He is executing someone else’s.
Understanding this architecture does not produce despair. It produces clarity. And clarity is what strategic response requires.
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا خُذُوا حِذْرَكُمْ
O you who believe — take your precautions.
Qur’an 4:71
III. The Honest Accounting — Our Own Failures
I have spent my life arguing that the Muslim world’s condition is not solely the product of external aggression. I will not abandon that argument today, even in the middle of a week when external aggression is the immediate reality.
The Muslim world is vulnerable to what is happening this week because of failures that are ours. Not because Muslims are uniquely flawed every civilization has its failures. But because we have not been honest enough about ours, and that dishonesty has cost us the capacity to respond effectively when the moment demands it.
We are vulnerable because 1.9 billion Muslims speak in 57 separate voices or rather, 57 separate silences in the face of a coordinated operation that was designed with precise knowledge of our fragmentation. It is a failure of will and of institutional investment that we have chosen, generation after generation, not to correct.
We are vulnerable because the governments that claim to speak for Muslim peoples are, in most cases, more accountable to Washington and to their own survival calculations than to the people they govern. The Gulf states that are silent this week are silent because they cannot survive without American security guarantees. That dependency was built over decades through deliberate choices choices that prioritized regime survival over civilizational solidarity. Those choices have brought us to this morning.
We are vulnerable because we have invested in emotional responses and neglected institutional ones. Every previous crisis Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria produced enormous emotional mobilization: protests, statements, social media campaigns, declarations of solidarity. And then the emotion subsided. And the next crisis arrived to find us exactly as unprepared as the last one did.
I say this not to condemn but to heal. You cannot build the response this moment requires on a foundation you have not honestly examined. The external aggression is real. Our own failures are also real. Both must be named, because both must be addressed.
The Muslim world will not be saved by those who tell us only what was done to us. It will be saved by those who also tell us honestly what we have failed to do for ourselves, and who refuse to accept that failure as permanent.
IV. The Trap Being Set — Why Rage Alone Will Not Save Us
The designers of this operation are not naive. They understand the Muslim world. They understand that the strikes on Iran, the elimination of Khamenei, the humiliation of Pakistan all of this will produce enormous emotional mobilization across the Muslim world. They have planned for it. The emotional mobilization is, in a specific sense, part of the plan.
Here is why: a Muslim world consumed by rage is a Muslim world that is not building institutions. A Muslim world mobilized around grief and anger is a Muslim world that will produce demagogues who offer simple explanations and simpler enemies, who promise restoration through confrontation, who capture the energy of a billion frustrated people and direct it toward destruction rather than construction. The external powers that benefit from Muslim fragmentation have always preferred to deal with an emotionally mobilized Muslim world rather than a strategically coherent one. Emotion is manageable. Strategy is dangerous.
The trap is this: we are being given every reason to rage, at precisely the moment when rage will serve our enemies’ interests and strategic patience will confound them.
This is not a call for passivity. It is a call for the harder, more demanding, more Qur’anic response the response that says: we see what is being done to us, we will not pretend it is not being done, we will hold the perpetrators accountable through every legitimate means available, AND we will simultaneously begin building what our vulnerability has proven we lack.
The Prophet, peace be upon him, did not respond to the persecution in Mecca with military rage. He built. He formed character. He established community. He created, in Medina, the institutional foundations that made genuine resistance possible. Then and only then did the military response come, grounded in justice and constrained by principle.
We are in a moment that requires the Medinan response, not the emotional one.
وَلَا تَهِنُوا وَلَا تَحْزَنُوا وَأَنتُمُ الْأَعْلَوْنَ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤْمِنِينَ
Do not lose heart, nor fall into despair — for you will be superior if you are truly believers.
Qur’an 3:139
V. What Must Be Done — A Specific Call to Action
I am not writing to describe the problem. I am writing to demand a response. What follows is specific, because vague calls for unity have failed us for fifty years. The Muslim world does not lack passion for unity. It lacks the institutional architecture that makes unity operational. That architecture must begin to be built now not after the next crisis, not when conditions are more favorable. Now.
To Muslim Scholars and Religious Authorities:
- Issue a clear and documented jurisprudential refutation.
The systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure is prohibited by Islamic law as clearly as it is prohibited by international law. Al-Azhar, the Muslim World League, the International Union of Muslim Scholars, and every institution of Islamic learning must issue within days, not weeks a clear, specific, jurisprudentially grounded statement that names what has been done, condemns it by name, and calls on every Muslim government to act. Not a diplomatic statement. A religious ruling. The kind that carries the weight of scholarship and cannot be dismissed as politics.
- Refute the abuse of Islamic authority.
The Taliban government that made Afghan girls’ education illegal claims Islamic authority. The governments that are silent this week claim Islamic legitimacy. The scholars of the Muslim world must make clear, in language that reaches every mosque and every classroom, that neither silence in the face of injustice nor the oppression of women in the name of Islam is compatible with the Qur’an. The abuse of Islamic authority to serve political power is not a new problem. It is time for it to be addressed with the full force of authentic Islamic scholarship.
To Muslim Governments and Political Leaders:
- Convene an emergency summit with binding commitments.
The OIC emergency session that will be called in the coming days must be different from every previous OIC emergency session. It must produce not a declaration but a set of specific, time-bound, monitored commitments: to collective diplomatic action, to economic measures, to the building of the institutional capacity that this crisis has proven we lack. Muslim heads of state who attend and sign commitments they do not intend to honor are not serving their people. They are performing solidarity while practicing complicity.
- Begin the process of genuine economic integration.
The dollar dependency that makes Gulf governments silent, that makes Egyptian governments compliant, that makes Pakistani governments vulnerable this dependency was built over decades and will not be dismantled overnight. But it must begin to be dismantled now. Muslim majority economies that begin serious conversations about alternative financial frameworks, about intra-Muslim trade in non-dollar currencies, about the Islamic Development Bank as a genuine alternative to IMF conditionality these conversations are not utopian. They are strategic necessities whose urgency this week has made undeniable.
- Protect Pakistan.
Pakistan is the Muslim world’s nuclear power. It is currently being neutralized on its own border by a Taliban proxy coordinated with India. Every Muslim government that has any relationship with Afghanistan, with India, or with the powers behind this operation must make clear immediately and unambiguously that the use of Afghan territory to pin down Pakistan during a military operation against a Muslim state is an act of aggression against the entire Muslim world. Pakistan must not be left to fight alone on its own border while the ummah watches.
To Muslim Civil Society, Educators, and Professional Networks:
- Build the institutions now.
Governments will not lead this work. They have proven, this week as in every previous crisis, that they are too dependent, too fragmented, and too focused on their own survival to lead civilizational renewal. Civil society must lead. The scholars, the educators, the lawyers, the doctors, the engineers, the business leaders who make up the Muslim world’s professional class must begin building now, not eventually the cross-border networks, the shared institutions, the educational frameworks, and the professional connections that make Muslim solidarity operational rather than rhetorical. IQRA’ commits to making its platform and its networks available for this work without reservation.
- Invest in education as a strategic priority.
The Muslim world’s greatest vulnerability is not military. It is educational. A Muslim world that produces critical thinkers, civic-minded professionals, and Qur’anically formed citizens is a Muslim world that cannot be permanently subjugated because its people will not accept subjugation, will understand it clearly when it arrives, and will have the institutional tools to resist it effectively. Every Muslim family, every Muslim institution, every Muslim government that invests in genuine education in the Qur’an and STEAM framework, in critical thinking, in civic formation is making the most important strategic investment available to them today.
VI. The Qur’anic Foundation — Why We Must Not Despair
I have been asked, in the conversations of these past days, whether I still believe in the scenarios of hope that I have spent my life building toward. Whether the federation vision, the normative ummah, the educated and just and unified Muslim civilization whether any of that is still possible after this week.
My answer is yes. Not despite what has happened this week. Because of what has happened this week.
Every empire that has tried to permanently subjugate a people of 1.9 billion, with this depth of civilizational identity and this clarity of divine guidance, has failed. Not quickly. Not without enormous cost to the people being subjugated. But it has failed. The British Empire dismembered the Muslim world in 1916 with Sykes-Picot. A century later we are still here. The Soviet Union thought it had solved Afghanistan. It did not. The Americans thought they had solved Iraq. They did not.
The people who launched the strikes this week are, in their own terms, effective. They have done what they planned to do at least in this moment. But they have made the mistake that every external power makes in this region: they have confused the elimination of governments with the elimination of peoples. Khamenei is dead. Iran is not dead.
History is not over. This chapter is dark. Dark chapters do not end stories. They reveal whether the people inside them have the character to continue.
The Qur’an was revealed in darkness. The first Muslim community was formed under persecution. The Constitution of Medina was written by a people who had been driven from their homes. The greatest achievements of Islamic civilization the House of Wisdom, the constitutional principles of Shura and Takreem, the tradition of scholarship and justice and beauty that the Muslim world gave to humanity all of it was built by people who refused to accept that the darkness was permanent.
We are their heirs. That is not a sentiment. It is a strategic resource.
إِنَّ مَعَ الْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا
Indeed, with hardship comes ease.
Qur’an 94:6
VII. A Personal Word — From a Grandfather to His Ummah
I have no national interest to protect and no political career to safeguard. I have nothing left to lose except the truth.
So let me speak it plainly.
The Muslim world is in the most serious strategic crisis it has faced since the colonial dismemberment of a century ago. The operation launched this week is not a response to Iranian aggression. It is the implementation of a plan to ensure that no Muslim state can ever again challenge Israeli regional dominance and that the Muslim world’s 1.9 billion people remain fragmented, dependent, and incapable of the collective action that their numbers and their tradition should make possible.
The response this moment requires is not the one our enemies expect. They expect rage. They expect fragmentation. They expect emotional mobilization that burns itself out without producing institutional change. They have seen this response from us before. They have planned for it. They are, in a specific sense, counting on it.
I am asking for something harder. I am asking for the response of people who have read the Qur’an and understood it not as a comfort, not as a political weapon, but as a guide for exactly this kind of moment. The response of people who are angry and strategic simultaneously. Who grieves the innocent victims and build the institutions that will protect the next generation. Who condemn the operation and begin the work that makes the next operation impossible.
I am 82 years old. I will not see the full fruit of what I am asking for. But I have grandchildren. And the world I want them to inherit is not the world being built in Washington and Tel Aviv this week. It is the world that the Qur’an describes — just, knowledgeable, free, and worthy of the dignity that God has given every human being.
That world is still possible. Its possibility is being built right now, by every scholar who speaks the truth when silence is easier, every educator who teaches a child to think rather than merely obey, every Muslim professional who builds a cross-border connection that the architects of fragmentation would prefer not to exist, every ordinary Muslim family that raises its children to believe that their tradition is a gift to humanity and not a problem to be managed.
The dream did not die. It was interrupted. Again.
Let us resume it — this time, with full understanding of what we are up against, and full faith in what we are capable of building.