Redefining Victory: Gaza 3 Years On

For three years now, Gaza has defined our daily mood, how we wake up, how we manage our days, and how we sleep. That fateful day did something to us. It drew some of us together, challenged some friendships for many, and for the fortunate few, it became a catalyst for positive change. For me, it signals the start of a blossoming friendship with people we did not have in our lives before that weekend, whilst reminding me of the worst possible pain and suffering at the hands of a merciless regime.

During these three years, there are times I have felt helpless, at times guilty, often heartbroken, and sometimes even worried for myself, for what so much watching has done to my heart and for what I will say when Allah asks me about these years. We prayed, we wept, we gave and we marched, and the people of Gaza are still finding their dead under rubble, still burying their children and still passing winters in tents.

It goes without saying that the brutal killing of children is not a blessing, and that none of us sitting safe in our warm homes has the right to tell the bereaved that their pain is beautiful. This piece will, however, try to unpick the silver linings we can find in these deep dark clouds.

An age-old question

Take even a cursory glance at the Deen and you will find that grief has always had a space as a human response. Prophet Ya’qub alayhis salam wept for his son until he lost his sight, whilst simultaneously advising his family never to despair of Allah’s mercy, which tells me that a broken heart and an unbroken hope can live in one chest.

Once we deep the scale of the destruction over the past three years, it was only human of us to ask where and when the victory is. I take some comfort from finding our question in the Quran, where it is asked by a messenger and the believers around him. Allah offers us some context:

أَمْ حَسِبْتُمْ أَن تَدْخُلُوا الْجَنَّةَ وَلَمَّا يَأْتِكُم مَّثَلُ الَّذِينَ خَلَوْا مِن قَبْلِكُم ۖ مَّسَّتْهُمُ الْبَأْسَاءُ وَالضَّرَّاءُ وَزُلْزِلُوا حَتَّىٰ يَقُولَ الرَّسُولُ وَالَّذِينَ آمَنُوا مَعَهُ مَتَىٰ نَصْرُ اللهِ ۗ أَلَا إِنَّ نَصْرَ اللهِ قَرِيبٌ

“Or do you think that you will enter Paradise while such [trial] has not yet come to you as came to those who passed on before you? They were touched by poverty and hardship and were shaken until [even their] messenger and those who believed with him said, 'When is the help of Allah?' Unquestionably, the help of Allah is near.” (al-Baqara, 2:214)

Allah records the question without rebuke and answers it with reassurance, so it appears asking about victory is not the issue. The issue is that we took our idea of victory from the news: whoever breathes the longest, who loses the fewest soldiers, who takes the land, and anything else we are convinced are ingredients of victory. The Quran uses the word differently, and the more I read its accounts of victory the less they resemble ours.

“You are a people in haste”

The sirah has its own three-year siege. The Quraysh of Makkah drove the Prophet ﷺ and his clan into a narrow valley and sealed it with a pact that forbade trade, food and marriage, until the people inside were forced to eat leaves and the crying of hungry children reached beyond the valley walls. In those same Makkan years, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt radhi-Allahu anhu - whose back bore the scars of burning coals - came to the Prophet ﷺ and asked him to pray for relief. The Prophet ﷺ promised him that Allah would complete this matter, and then added:

«وَلَكِنَّكُمْ تَسْتَعْجِلُونَ»

“But you are a people in haste.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, 3612)

If that was said to Khabbab, who had been tortured for his faith, I wonder what would be said to us, who refresh a screen and expect the world to have changed. Sabr, as I have come to understand it from these years, asks for more than just waiting. Sabr asks that the calamity leave us the same people before Allah, praying despite our pain, fair while we are angry, generous while we are afraid, and still serving long after the headlines have moved on. We have watched the people of Gaza teach Quran in tents and share bread baked among the rubble, and I know of no better commentary on the word.

Sabr also leaves the facts as they are. When Musa alayhis salam stood with the sea before him and an army behind, his people said they were sure to be overtaken, and on the evidence available in that moment, they were right. But he was a prophet of Allah. Data was not enough. What he could clearly see with his own eyes had to be falsified. He instead answered:

كَلَّا ۖ إِنَّ مَعِيَ رَبِّي سَيَهْدِينِ

“No. My Lord is with me, and He will guide me.” (al-Shu’ara, 26:62)

He accepted the sea and the army as they were, but disputed with the conclusion his people drew from them. Why? Because he knew that only Allah decides who returns the victors and the losers.

The condition we skip

The promise of help is certain, though it comes with a condition that I find uncomfortable to read.

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِن تَنصُرُوا اللَّهَ يَنصُرْكُمْ وَيُثَبِّتْ أَقْدَامَكُمْ

“You who believe, if you help Allah, He will help you and make your feet firm.” (Muhammad, 47:7)

We ask when Allah will help us, and the ayah asks in return what we have done for His cause. Allah turns the tables on us. What have we done to earn that help? That question falls far more heavily on the two billion of us who watch rather than on a people under bombardment. At Uhud, the archers left their hill for a moment and the whole army paid for it, and I suspect each of us knows which hill we were given to guard, whether a prayer, a trust, a family or a principle, and how long ago we walked down from it.

Victory in the hour of defeat

Nothing has changed my thinking on this more than the events in Hudaybiya. The Muslims came in ihram from Madina having travelled for days, yet the Quraysh turned them back from Hudaybiya without offering them the comfort of performing the Umrah. The terms of the subsequent treaty looked so much like humiliation that some of the Companions struggled to accept them at the first instance. On the road home, with no umrah performed and no battle won, Allah revealed:

إِنَّا فَتَحْنَا لَكَ فَتْحًا مُّبِينًا

“Truly We have granted you a clear victory.” (al-Fat’h, 48:1)

Where was the victory in the signing of a truce that appeared on the surface to be a defeat? We learn from history that the truce allowed the Arabs to meet Muslims and hear Islam for themselves, and where fourteen hundred had stood at Hudaybiya, ten thousand entered Makkah two years later. When Allah later described that victory in Sura al-Nasr, He spoke only of people entering His religion in crowds, before closing on His name al-Tawwab, the One who receives those who return (110:1–3). Victory there was counted in how many souls found a route back to their Creator.

By that count something has already begun. People with no tie to Islam opened the Quran to understand the faith they saw among the ruins, and Muslims who had drifted for years returned to their prayer mats. We lost sleep over children whose names we did not know, and learned from it that this ummah is one living body, since feeling returns to a numbed limb as pain. We also saw ourselves more clearly than we probably wanted to, in our division, our dependence, our love of comfort, and how little hundreds of millions of Muslims weigh without institutions.

I should be more careful here, because none of this makes the price they have paid acceptable. Yet the Quran itself goes further than I would dare. In Surat al-Buruj, a believing community is thrown into trenches of fire, no army comes for them, and by every worldly measure the men who lit the fire have won. Allah says of the believers:

ذَٰلِكَ الْفَوْزُ الْكَبِيرُ

“That is the great triumph.” (al-Buruj, 85:11)

A trimuph for them, yes. But we remain. So we must still seek justice in this world with everything we have, and we must strive to end the killing, and work tirelessly to have the homes rebuilt, and we pray for an outcome that ends with a people living in freedom and dignity. What Surat al-Buruj does teach us however, is the prematurity of the assumption that victory requires outliving our enemy.

The minbar — beyond what we see

The people of Gaza paid for these lessons with their children and we received these lessons for nothing, which makes each one an amana. If these years returned us to the Quran, we owe it to them to stay with it, and to live by whatever it teaches us.

I recently read a story which looks exactly like this in practice. Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099 and remained with them until 1187, so whole generations were born and buried without seeing Masjid al-Aqsa returned. In those years Nur al-Din Zengi rahimahu-Allah commissioned a minbar to be made for a masjid he did not control, but he died before he could see it placed there. Salah al-Din rahimahu-Allah installed it after the city opened.

Most of what is asked of us is of that kind. We build the school, give in charity, raise our children, fund our scholars and do so much more of what we can control, for a victory we may never live to see, trusting that Allah writes the reward all the same.

Three years on, I think we stand somewhere between sabr and fat’h, patience and victory, without knowing when Allah will open the next door, and what remains for us is the work in front of us, done for longer than our attention would like. If we leave with anything, it should be the sense of obligation that our sabr, our perseverance, our discipline and our relentlessness needs to be greater than the enemy’s. They will not stop, so how can we?

وَاللَّهُ غَالِبٌ عَلَىٰ أَمْرِهِ وَلَٰكِنَّ أَكْثَرَ النَّاسِ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ

“Allah prevails in His purpose, though most people do not know.” (Yusuf, 12:21)