After a year, the Flood continues to rise

A year has passed as of today since the Al-Aqsa Flood. Of course, under Israel's cruel bombardment this has been a year that felt far longer to the people of Gaza, who have not seen the light of day. But it has also been a year that we cannot say passed easily for the genocidal criminal Israel and its minions. It was a year in which all the stories they had been telling humanity for two hundred years were exposed, their masks fell, and the blood, the murders, the racism and the exploitation beneath their humanist, advanced, modern, democratic orders were laid bare. But more importantly, the frustration of being unable to subdue a handful of Gaza while having taken the whole world captive made every second of that year feel like a longer time than what the Gazans lived.

Whatever the numerical data about the war (the death toll, the amount of bombs dropped, equal to 3 Hiroshimas), the fact that it is actually being seen and lived that these have no importance is in itself a great blow for Israel and its friends. A demoralizing blow, destructive of the narrative, magnifying their troubles into mountains. By contrast, whatever the numbers say, there is a victory at the heart of this Flood for the Gazan who defies them with his faith, his bare body and his belief.

We said that at the end of a year Israel is still very far from both of the goals it declared at the outset of its massacres in Gaza. By contrast, within a year the Gazans managed to make their cause, which had almost been on the verge of being forgotten, the most important issue of the whole world. At the end of a year, unprecedented demonstrations all over the world, above all in Türkiye, are claiming and voicing the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian cause has long since gone beyond belonging to the Palestinians. This cause has deciphered the fact that all humanity is captive to this racist, separatist, occupying, Zionist world order, and has driven all people to demand their own freedom through freedom for Palestine.

The Palestinian cause has set in motion a powerful critical reason pointing out that the entire world is mentally under occupation within a different order of occupation, whether by political, economic or media means. The tragic and somewhat comic side of the matter is that it has come to light that the minds of philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Sheila Ben Habib, who have built their whole philosophical-intellectual careers on critique and have set themselves up as teachers of so-called critical thinking to the world, are not exempt from this occupation by power. The Al-Aqsa Flood, if it did nothing else, has enlightened humanity against the late Enlightenment thinkers who put forward excuses against all criticism on the grounds that their projects are not yet finished.

Of course it did much more as well. It showed that heroism, which is often said to have been left behind because of the advanced products and stages of defense technologies, has not died. To the people of our age, who have surrendered to a people and a mentality that acts with the claim and arrogance of being God's chosen servants and lords it over other people, yet that have severed their bond with God and trust only in technology and their power, it showed how one can be strong and assertive by trusting in God alone.

The self-confidence that, even when he himself or all his relatives have been killed, defies with "we have won" when he is pulled out from the rubble covered in dust and soil with a victory sign has come to the people of our age like a message never heard before. The revolutionary realism contained in the words "God is sufficient for us, and He is the best of guardians" reaches its place as a lesson of a seriousness that the smug flippancy of fatalism critiques against it cannot cope with.

We cannot know how many of those smug people this voice can reach, but the killing of death raining down on the people of Gaza in every part of the world, and their defiance of it with gratitude, with praise, with enchantment with God's verses, have become verses themselves and opened, and continue to open, people's eyes.

Of course it opened above all the eyes of the Muslim peoples. Palestine, Jerusalem, resistance, struggle, jihad, even the reckonings of the Hereafter, which had almost lost value in the eyes of Muslims before October 7, have been revived and taken their place in people's imaginations, in their lives, and in their perceptions of friend and enemy.

Gaza, martyrdom, and, when the occasion arises, honorable losses are all part of the Islamic struggle. The believer never loses so long as he is upon uprightness and so long as he is upon faith. Even if he dies he does not lose, even if he is defeated he does not lose. Losing is only a calamity that befalls you when you come to resemble your enemy. After the Arab Spring, attempts were made to halt the Islamic movements through coups. The familiar refrain about the end and failure of Islamism came into play. Yet it was not the Islamists who failed; it was the system itself that gave up all its own claims, went bankrupt and could not tolerate Muslims. It was its resort to political or actual massacres, at the cost of abolishing itself, locking its own system and undermining it, in response to the challenge of Muslims.

Today, against the pushing back of Islamists in the face of this tyranny, there is no project that has won and been able to offer the world a new vision, value and ideal. Neither in the Islamic world nor in the whole world. By contrast, it is certain that in a world that has raised victory cries because Islam was killed again, what Islam represents has been disregarded. Islam has never claimed to offer more than the gains that Western civilization represents and claims. After this point, too, it makes no claim of offering people a better worldly life, but it has the cause of making people aware of, and liberating them from, the darkness and oppression of servitude to creatures, which has become unnoticeable because eyes have grown so accustomed to it. Those who live in those darknesses have no means of measuring and evaluating the successes or failures of this cause.

Gaza showed that the struggle against material domination, against a world order in which racist arrogance is expressed in a spoiled manner through technological superiority, has a different mathematics. The whole world saw, from within a people kept for 17 years under siege, as if held in a concentration camp, that if they believe, the will to freedom cannot be torn away. Moreover, that people also told the whole world the ways of resistance and liberation. Simply with their stance, their martyrdoms, their resistance and their gratitude, the people of Gaza showed people that a different kind of life, a different kind of existence, is possible.

With this stance the brave men of Gaza invited people to awaken to the Flood they are in and to board the ship of salvation. Arrogant, spoiled, racist Israel and its entourage imagined they could suffocate this rebellion within a few days. Because it had always been so before. The Zionists have never lived through a war that lasted a year until now. Yet at the end of a year they feel they are still being dragged toward an uncertain adventure. For those who, over a year, realized this flood and took a stand against the rulers of the world order, the Flood kept rising and flowing. On the first anniversary we saw people in all the cities of the world running to become a drop within this Flood.