May your feast be in paradise!

Let us revive the rest of our year, the rest of our life, by reading the Qur'an that He entrusted to us, in the month of Ramadan in which the Qur'an was revealed. Our life after Ramadan is a feast of beginning, a revival and a cycle of life: eid, iade (restoration).

We are passing through such days that we are being warned and invited from every side to make this restoration, to restore our lives anew under the guidance of the Qur'an. Unparalleled messages rain down on whoever wishes to lend an ear, and dazzling verses become manifest to whoever wishes to see. These verses are sometimes carried into our lives, thrust before our eyes, by the enemies of humanity, and therefore by the enemies of God.

The barbaric genocide in Gaza, which has entered its 7th month, has lined up all the civilized powers behind it, rank upon rank. Their true faces and values beneath the mask of contemporary civilization become manifest every day with all their fraudulence and ugliness. The savagery they display without regard for women and children, for human beings, wounded, journalists, doctors, civilians, scientists and so on, has no place even in their own books, though of course we are not speaking of the books they have distorted and bent to their raging whims and desires, nor of the philosophies of satanic whispering that they have embellished and adorned and made attractive by dazzling people's eyes.

The savagery displayed in Gaza for more than 6 months is not written only to Israel's account; it is written to the account of the whole of Western civilization. Whatever the philosophical or scientific roots of that civilization may be, it is indistinguishable from its morality and its religion. When you scratch beneath all its secular, laic appearance, bigoted religiosity and racism come out. Now you do not even need to scratch it; it has spilled out with all its recklessness.

For more than 6 months it has known neither Friday, nor night, nor day, nor Ramadan; it has gone on attacking, raining death in its own way. But there was one thing it did not know: while thinking it was raining death, it was in fact raining life upon the valiant sons of Gaza and, through them, upon the whole ummah. Now that it has entered its 7th month, it has tried every savagery that could be called inhuman. It has tried everything to make the free and valiant men of Gaza bow. It has even bought the reactions of Muslim country leaders, and under their silence, under US and European support, it has continued all the massacres. Despite using the most disproportionate force, in its 7th month of massacres it still has not reached the goals it announced at the outset, and has been disgraced.

In the massacres it continued in the month of Ramadan without slowing down and without regard for any human value, it raised the bar yet another notch on the first day. It assassinated the car carrying 3 sons and 4 grandchildren of Ismail Haniyeh, Head of Hamas's Political Bureau, martyring them all. This of course was not its first attack on Hamas leaders and their families. But to carry it out on the first day of the holiday and to target so many of his children together is without doubt a further level of savagery and baseness. To target a family that was in transit for family holiday greetings with their children, in a manner that even the most savage terrorists could not do. To think thereby that it could make Hamas bow can only be a display not of strength but of weakness and wretchedness.

That Ismail Haniyeh has already lost 60 members of his family at various degrees of kinship since the beginning of the war. And is it only him? The family members of all the other Hamas leaders are in Gaza, and all of them are at the primary targets of Zionist attacks, and they take hits just like all the people of Gaza.

On the contrary, this display of impotence-driven aggression by Israel becomes an occasion for the Hamas leaders to display to the whole world an incredibly unparalleled fortitude, heroism and loyalty to the cause. Indeed, Ismail Haniyeh received the news of the martyrdom of his three sons and 4 grandchildren in a hospital where he was visiting wounded Gazans, as if receiving an utterly ordinary piece of news. His first reaction was "We are all from God and to Him we shall return. Praise be to God," and, in response to the voice on the phone that gave the news while weeping, saying let us get on with our work, he continued the hospital visit as if nothing had happened.

This is truly an incredible example of attitude, fortitude and patience. At the same time it is a magnificent exemplar that complements the extraordinary epic of humanity we have been seeing in Gaza for more than 6 months. It almost makes one say that it does not belong to this world, but in fact it is a verse-like manifestation of a personality that has taken its inspiration, education and philosophy precisely from the Qur'an. It is impossible for people floundering at the levels of contemporary civilization to understand this. Indeed, in the statement he made afterward: "If the Zionists think they will make us bow with this, they wait in vain. Our own lives, the lives of our children, are sacrificed for the cause of liberating Jerusalem. The blood of my children is no more valuable than that of those who have been martyred in Gaza for six months."

Israel's attacks have for more than six months been making the valiant men of Gaza give all humanity lesson upon lesson. The inhuman baseness in every attack that is carried out at the same time causes an epic of heroism, an epic of humanity, to rise in front of it.

For the people of Gaza, death is in any case the inevitable end of us all, like every living being. What matters is not living more or less, but living with honor and dying with honor. To reach this end by killing death, for freedom, in the refusal of servitude to any servant, is a philosophy of life. To think that one can frighten people who have set martyrdom as the noblest, loftiest goal of their lives, by assassinating them, and deter them from their path, is the greatest ignorance of both Israel and those who lend it their shoulder.

Meanwhile, let everyone listen carefully to the words that the wife of Hazem, one of Haniyeh's sons, who laid him in the grave together with his three children, said as she bade him farewell. Doesn't this magnificent point of view still strike you now as a magnificent embodiment of a personality, of a heart, kneaded with the Qur'an?

"Give my greetings to the Messenger of God, give my greetings to all the martyrs! By God's leave we are of those who are patient. By God's leave I have presented you to God. O my Lord, reward me in my affliction and replace what I have lost with something better. They are entrusted to You, take good care of them. O keeper of the Book of God, O imam. May you be a sacrifice for the Messenger. Those who killed him have lost, they have certainly lost! Hazem is not dead, he is alive. "Do not think of those who are killed in the way of God as dead; rather, they are alive with their Lord, being provided for." By God's leave you have gone to your eternal dwelling, to your garden of bliss. Now I have become the mother of a martyred boy, the mother of martyred girls, and the wife of a martyr. Let no one call out to the Arabs, they need us, we do not need them. It is they who are dead, we who are alive! It is you who are living, by God, they are the dead! May God's mercy be upon you, O Abu Amr! My eid is in paradise, my dearest. May your eid be in paradise."

May God make their abodes paradise and their stations exalted. May He send down patience upon the hearts of those who remain, make their steps firm, and grant them victory over the oppressors.