The feast, Gaza, East Turkestan, Sudan and Ghannouchi

We have left one more Ramazan behind. Like last year, like the year before it and the one before that, it came and went. Compared with last year and the years before, when we observed the Ramazan Bayram, Israeli aggression was once again on the agenda, and something even more crushing than this aggression: the unresponsiveness of the Islamic world. Today it is Bayram again, and this aggression and this unresponsiveness are present once more, in far more exorbitant proportions.

When we observed Bayram last year, there was also a civil war continuing in Sudan, and a serious problem of hunger resulting from it. Even if we call it a "civil war," unfortunately it was nothing other than a proxy war whose actors were certain Islamic countries. Just like in Yemen, just like earlier in Libya and in Syria.

Even the month of Ramazan, which is hoped to unite Muslims with past generations of Muslims and with all the Muslims in the world we live in, could not bring about this union. Perhaps all the believers in the world, with their fasting, their tarawih prayers, their zakat and their charity, deeply felt this unity of hearts, and felt the pains suffered in Gaza, in Sudan, in East Turkestan, in Myanmar, in Kashmir as their own pains. In the spiritual climate of Ramazan, the pains and troubles secured this unity at the level of the ummah. But this unity was not enough to stop these pains.

As of today, on the 187th day of the genocidal Israeli aggression against Gaza, the number of Palestinians killed has exceeded 33,137; 75% of them are children, women and the elderly (+14,500 children and 9,560 women). More than 7,000 Palestinians, including more than 5,000 children, are still living under the rubble of demolished houses. According to the Ministry of Health, the number of wounded, mostly children and women, has exceeded 75,815. More than 2,937 massacres have been carried out against Palestinian families, whose homes were bombed while they were inside. In the bombing of the Baptist Hospital on 17 October, 471 people lost their lives. More than 65 members of the civil defense rescue teams were killed in the line of duty. Among the dead are also 162 UNRWA personnel killed by the Israeli occupation army, with 26 wounded. 484 health workers, including doctors, nurses and paramedics, were killed by the Israeli occupation army, and 440 were wounded by the Israeli army.

More than 310 health workers abducted from hospitals while on duty, including the directors of three hospitals, were arrested. Schools, universities, mosques, churches and hospitals were bombed with the people inside them. Humanitarian aid workers were targeted and killed. More than a hundred university professors were killed. This is the summary balance sheet of a situation that has now gone beyond six months. The details unfold every day before the eyes of the whole world. Unfortunately, in the face of this balance sheet, the unlimited support of the USA and the EU continues, and the shameless silence of the leaders of the Islamic world, once again, ends up supporting the continuation of these crimes against humanity.

Yet every bomb that falls on Gaza falls on the heart, the honor, the chastity and the dignity of the entire Islamic world. And those who put on shows of splendor in their own countries under these bombs: what are they putting on airs about?

In the previous year, on the Night of Qadr in the month of Ramazan, the leader of the Nahda movement and former Speaker of Parliament Rashid Ghannouchi had his house raided, just before iftar time, by 50 police officers; his house was searched for two hours, and then he was taken into custody and brought to headquarters. Ghannouchi, 82 years old, who was not even allowed to meet with his lawyers, was arrested after a two-day detention and put in prison. Many other members of the Nahda movement were arrested together with him. The elected President Kais Saied, with the soft coup he implemented step by step shortly after being elected, behaved toward Tunisia, the cradle of the Arab Revolutions, almost like the collector of a penalty that had been imposed.

Ghannouchi has been in prison since that day. The fabricated charges against him show not his guilt, but only the guilt of those who level them. Nahda, which he leads, is the name of the possibility of compatibility between Islam and democracy in the Islamic world, and this possibility is precisely the nightmare of the counter-revolutionary axis.

That Ghannouchi, known throughout his life for his distance from every kind of violent movement and for his very strong intellectual personality, is subjected to this treatment in fact exposes the hollowness of all the conceptions about Islam and the Islamic world held both by Westerners and by the Islamic countries that side with them. In Gaza, to be sure, these hollownesses have been exposed far more openly. Those who deem this cruelty fit for Gaza, what would they not deem fit for Ghannouchi?

Yet in 2012-13, the path recommended to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was to behave moderately and accommodatingly, like Ghannouchi. In truth, the Egyptian Brotherhood too was subjected to a coup although there was no excess on their part, no autocratic practice whatsoever. How far they could tolerate even Ghannouchi, whom they had recommended to them, was thus seen as well.

With his intellectual depth, his horizon, his political and spiritual personality and his leadership, Ghannouchi is a great blessing not only for Tunisia but in essence for the whole Islamic world. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his style of politics, and the way he fills it in intellectually and juristically, constitutes a path of ijtihad in terms of the science of Islamic politics.

That such a great value (and likewise other Muslim scholars held in the dungeons of other Muslim countries) is forced to defend himself, in an extremely shallow and foolish political debating environment, at a level that is in no way commensurate with him, is a great disgrace not only for Tunisia but for the whole Islamic world.

We have left yet another Ramazan behind with these agendas. Ramazan came and went, as it does every year. Of course, in leaving it did not abandon us. It left behind as a trust the Qur'an, which was revealed in the night better than a thousand months, on a night of Ramazan. But every year, in its own time, it comes again and loads that trust onto our hearts anew, and offers it to our lives anew. May our Lord make us among those who hear that blessed offer of Ramazan, and among those who benefit in the best way from its school.