Rubber-Stamp Religion: The Manufacturing of Religious Legitimacy

News:

Donald Trump appoints Shaykh Hamza Yusuf as religious advisor. (5pillarsuk)

Comment:

The Trump administration has appointed Muslim figures to serve on its Religious Liberty Commission. However, this is not a triumph for Islam, but rather a calculated co-option of Muslim scholarship to sanitize and sustain the status quo of secular liberal hegemony.

Let us be absolutely clear: this commission is a bureaucratic organ of a state that enshrines secular capitalism as sacred, wages war on Muslim lands, and props up apartheid regimes like the Zionist entity in Palestine. For any so-called “scholar” to accept such a role is a betrayal of the Ummah’s political aspirations and intellectual integrity.

The very framework of “religious liberty” as articulated by this commission equates Islam with Christianity and Judaism, reducing Islam to merely a personal faith. But Islam is not a religion confined to prayer and morals; it is a comprehensive way of life— a complete political, economic, social, and judicial system. By participating in this commission, these Muslim figures accept the marginalization of Islam, confining it to the private sphere and detaching it from its ideological and systemic nature.

It is shameful to see that Muslim engagement in the West has often centered on appeasing the establishment or advising on how to best implement kufr, rather than protecting the Muslim community and identity or contributing to the global effort to reestablish Islam as a deen that governs every aspect of life and challenges kufr ideas and systems.

Muslims in the West must recognize that these appointments are not victories. They are integrationist strategies. By elevating such Muslim figures, the regime ensures that Muslims serve its system rather than rise to challenge it. It encourages them to detach from the global Ummah and accept the confines of a national, American-Islamic identity tailored to the needs of the establishment.

We call upon Muslims— particularly sincere scholars— to reject these roles of complicity and instead return to the project of Islamic revival: not within the framework of Western secularism, but as a clear ideological alternative to it. Only by supporting the global effort to reestablish Islam as a comprehensive system of governance through the Khilafah (Caliphate) can we truly safeguard the identity, dignity, unity, and future of our Ummah and see that this Deen prevails as commanded by Allah (swt).

[هُوَ الَّذِي أَرْسَلَ رَسُولَهُ بِالْهُدَى وَدِينِ الْحَقِّ لِيُظْهِرَهُ عَلَى الدِّينِ كُلِّهِ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ الْمُشْرِكُونَ]

“He is the One Who has sent His Messenger with ˹true˺ guidance and the religion of truth, making it prevail over all others, even to the dismay of the polytheists.” [61:9]

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Haitham Ibn Thbait
Media Representative of Hizb ut Tahrir in America