Faris, peaceful jihad Abdullah al-Hamid, got off

Unfortunately, I never had the privilege of meeting him personally; rather, I knew about him by chance about two decades ago, and then I followed his thought and his activity since then. The first thing I knew about it was from a friend of Saudi students at the American University of Texas.

There is a distant alienation in which Arab poetry has a special fragrance; I heard from that student a poem by Abdullah Al-Hamid that is part of the fun political criticism, and I have commented on my mind, including two strange words, which are the words of Al-Hamid criticizing the policy of silencing and wailing in Saudi Arabia:
memorization of the Qur’an ** and woe to the one who interpreted
And slurring and concealment ** Woe to who showed

I realized from the start that the poem's owner has a sweet tongue, a broad human horizon, and that he is a political critic who possesses a sense of humor, a verbal spirit, and an Islamic background, revealed by his use of the terms of the science of readings in the poem (insertion, concealment, and display) with clear literary grace.

Then I found - later on - that this kind literary touch is present in Al-Hamid's political speech, interspersed with clever literary references of profound political significance. An example of this is that - may God have mercy on him - when he once wanted to alert the Saudi authority of the dangers of standing in the face of the Arab Spring revolutions, he concluded his lecture with the famous Bahri house in describing the spring season: The
spring of divorce came to you, laughing laughter ** from Al-Hassan until he almost talked and
was alerted by Nayrouz in Twilight of Duja ** The first rose was slept yesterday

God gave him a strong tongue, a warm heart, a pure spirit, great courage and iron determination. He did not improve puns and metaphors, despite his poetic talent and literary specialization, but integrity and frankness overcame him, so he called things by their names, and he said to the unjust "O unjust!" And to the flatterer: "O hypocrite!"

Abdullah Al-Hamid was the only fabric in a society torn apart by two opposing forces: the forces of tyranny, religious and political algebra, and the forces of exaggeration, penance, and detonation. So he charted for himself - with a few of the free and righteous in his country - a third way, which he called "peaceful jihad". This is a wonderful term, which Al-Hamid derives from the texts of Islamic revelation, and in his book entitled: “The Word is Stronger than Lead” - which he found with concerted evidence from the Qur’an and Sunnah, including:

1- The noble verse: “Do not obey the disbelievers and fight against them with great effort.” [Surat Al-Furqan, verse 52], that is, strive for them in the Qur’an. The context of the verse indicates that "jihad here is a jihad of words, not jihad of Hussam", as Al-Hamid says.

2- The noble verse: “O Prophet, strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites and exaggerate them” [Surat Al Tawbah, 73]. Al-Hamid commented here, saying: "It has been proven that the Messenger, may God bless him and grant him peace, did not fight the hypocrites and did not kill them. It turned out that this jihad is a peaceful civil jihad, with patience and peaceful fighting."

3- Several hadiths of the Prophet, the most authentic of which is the hadeeth: “The master of martyrs, Hamzah ibn Abd al-Muttalib, and a man who rose to an unjust imam and commanded and forbade him and killed him;” [Al-Hakim narrated and authenticated by Albani] Al-Hamid says: "Then the Messenger made the word of jihad at the peak, and the word is a kind of civil work."

Abdullah Al-Hamid - may God have mercy on him - was fully aware of the price of peaceful jihad, which he called in words and deeds, so he explained in the same book that "this jihad is consistent with the command of virtue and forbidding what is evil in that each of them is a well-known and forbidden thing, but jihad is related to the emergence of an element Risk-taking, "and this realization did not prevent him from riding danger.

He was an idealist as soon as that was the secret of his strength and the source of his unyielding determination for three decades. His awareness of time was profound, so he realized that political change was coming undoubtedly, and that the Arab-Islamic region is no exception to the movement of history, and that the message of the people of wisdom and consideration is to facilitate the movement of change in the shortest way, and the cheapest price of blood and money.

He was - with his insight - before his time, so he called for what we called in another article, "preventive reform", and it was a precedent to that even before the emergence of the wave of the Arab Spring, and what it carried from the omens did not understand the fools and fools whose historical significance to this day.

The method of reform adopted by Al-Hamid and his companions - in the “Society for Civil and Political Rights” (decisive) in Saudi Arabia - is to advocate for preventive reform that serves everyone, whereby rulers and ruled converge in the middle of the road, and Saudi Arabia gradually turns into a constitutional monarchy, in which the ruling family maintains It suffices from glory and wealth, and the people obtain their freedom and dignity, and their affairs are managed through elected bodies, subject to popular accountability and control.

This reform includes the independence of the judiciary, the cessation of repression and imprisonment without right, and the guarantee of individual and collective freedoms, within the legal limits established by Islam. It can be said that Al-Hamid is the first to present an integrated constitutional reform vision for the Saudi state, with courage and integrity, away from the exaggeration of the takfiris and the glorification of the adept.

Al-Hamid realized early on that only political reform would dry the fountains of takfiri ideology, and curb ferocious violent groups, and he explained in more than one context that these groups are nothing other than the monarch of the prevailing dualism in Saudi Arabia: the duality of princes and jurists, sheikhs and sheikhs, who serve to keep the people under their political control And their religious guardianship, and what they call it "Saudi twin oppression".

He concluded that the ruling of the people and the jurisdiction of the nation on itself are the alternative to this Catholic marriage between the princes of Saudi Arabia and the jurists traveling in their passengers, who allowed the authority to nationalize Islam, and convert mosques into "monastic silos or pharaoh trumpets", as he put it.

Although Al-Hamid was ideally dreamy - and that was the secret of his attractiveness and influence - it was also very realistic and practical. His vision of constitutional reform in Saudi Arabia came with specific milestones, with clear goals, not based on a grudge against anyone, but rather widens everyone. His vision was not based on the urgency of the fruit, or jumping on social facts and political obstacles.

Therefore, he called for starting to implement what resembles the Moroccan political model in Saudi Arabia, i.e. moving from absolute monarchy without supervision, to mixed monarchy in which the king and those elected by the people participate in managing the affairs of the country, according to clear constitutional limits. Al-Hamid did not find any harm in the mixed property being a preliminary stage for the transition to full constitutional monarchy, as he was concerned with opening a gap in the impasse, and a light shining at the end of the dark tunnel.

One can imagine where Saudi Arabia would be today - as well as the entire Arab region - if the Saudi leaders appreciated seeing al-Hamid and his companions the right amount, and they adopted this form of preventive reform in the seals of the nineties, or early last decade, or even after the explosion of the Arab Spring. Certainly, Saudi Arabia would have today been reconcilable with itself, pioneering in the Arab countries, leading the world and the Islamic world, instead of the state of material exhaustion, moral exhaustion, and strategic wandering that it is experiencing today.

This preventive reform that al-Hamid and his companions called for in Saudi Arabia - if he had found attentive hearts and conscious hearts - would not have gone without a good effect throughout the Arab world and the Islamic world, and less so that Saudi Arabia would have turned into a good example in the field of peaceful political transition, not a source of revolution Countermeasures, and a source of igniting strife and fires throughout the Arab countries, in order to keep the Arab peoples in the yoke of slavery.

But what happened is the opposite of what Abdullah Al-Hamid and his free friends wished for: Dr. Mohammed Al-Qahtani, and Dr. Abdul Karim Al-Khader, and Dr. Walid Abu Al-Khair, and others. The Saudi authority - and behind it (or before it) the Emirati authority - gave its hand in the oppression of the Arab peoples revolting against tyranny and corruption, and spent the treasures of its people in financing bloody coups, and turning the Arab revolutions into civil wars of nihilism, the fire of which devoured the Arab peoples and their homelands.

The martyr Abdullah Al-Hamid went to his Lord, and he is a resident of the dark and calculated Saber prison, adhering to the method of peaceful jihad, and left behind a wide intellectual and poetic heritage, inspirational principled positions, and two prisoners imprisoned in the same way as he was imprisoned in support of truth and justice, and a group of prison companions Out of prison.

Al-Hamid sowed the seed of reform and went ahead, like his friend and son of the martyr Jamal Khashoggi who said his word and walked. It does not seem that Al-Hamid never doubted faith in the message of enlightenment and liberation upon which his life was stopped, even if its fruits are late, for it is a message of truth, justice and good in the end. The idealism of al-Hamid, and his deep belief that the seeds of good are not lost, remind me of the symbolic chant with which Malik bin Nabi published his book “Conditions of Revival”:

"My friend!

The time has come for the pale dawn ray to flow between the stars of the East.

Everyone who would wake up began to move and rise up in the sleep numbness and his tattered clothes.

The ideal sun will shine on your struggle that you have resumed there on the plain, where the city that has slept since yesterday is still drugged.

Your new morning radiation will carry your blessed shadow in the plain where you sow, far from your steps.

The breeze - which is now passing - will carry the seeds that your hands sprinkle out of your shadow.

Seed, my dear brother, for the sake of your seeds to go away from your field, in the lines draining you deep into the future.

Here are some voices chanting, the voices your steps in the city have awakened as you turn to your morning struggle.

Those who wake up in turn will be reunited with you after a while.

Sing, my sower brother! In order to guide with your voice these steps that came in the dark of the dawn towards the step that comes from far away.

Let your joyful singing sound as it was heard by the prophets singing at another dawn, in the hours that civilizations were born.

Let your riches fill the hearts of the world with the heaviest and strongest of these tumultuous choirs.

Here they are now set up at the door of the city that awakens the market and its cabarets, so that they tend to tilt those who came after you, distracting them from your call.

And here they have set up theaters and platforms for clowns and acrobats, in order to cover the uproar with the tone of your voice.

And here they have lit the false lamps in order to block the daylight, and to obscure the darkness, your ghost in the plain that you are going to.

And here they have beautified idols to infuse the idea.

But the ideal sun will continue its course without retreating, and will soon announce the victory of the idea and the collapse of idols, as happened on the day the Hubble crashed in the Kaaba "((Malik bin Nabi, conditions of the Renaissance)).

The martyr Abdullah Al-Hamid was among those idealistic dreamers who did not sleep on the injustice, do not reside on humiliation, and see the brightness of tomorrow's brightness behind the dark night's veil. What was frequently said was that "the dream is the beginning of the road", that "everyone who walked the path arrived," and that "the river digs its course".

In some unfavorable circumstances, heroes must resist "not for survival, but for the sake of eternity," as Malik bin Nabi says in Conditions of Revival. Abdullah Al-Hamid was one of those heroes betting on eternity, staring at the horizon of eternity. Perhaps it was on the doctrine of Imam Al-Hadrami, the judge of the Almoravid dynasty, who wrote at the end of his book “The Signal in the Management of the Principality” this wisdom, which does not bother its owner with victory or refraction, as long as the truth is the guide of his path: Of mostly falsehood. "