The West Does Not Understand History and It Does Not See the Future
(Translated)

Al-Rayah Newspaper - Issue 568 - 08/10/2025 CE
By: Ustaadh Khalid Ali – America

When the Europeans entered America after what is called Columbus’s discovery of the land of America, they found riches and vast expanses unlike anything they had seen in Europe within the new lands, so they began looting the gold and the land’s bounty and exterminating the indigenous inhabitants.  Estimates of those they exterminated reached to several millions of people in the 15th and 16th centuries CE. To justify this brutality, philosophical theories emerged that were used to justify colonialism.

The English thinker, John Locke, stated “Of Property” in his “Second Treatise on Government,” “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men.”

The English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, a member of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's Colonization Society  and an employee of the East India Company from 1823 to 1858, said,  “On the Treatment of Barbarous Nations (1874),” “To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error… nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners. Independence and nationality, so essential to the due growth and development of a people further advanced in improvement, are generally impediments to theirs. The sacred duties which civilized nations owe to the independence and nationality of each other are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are either a certain evil, or, at best, a questionable good. The Romans were not the most clean-handed of conquerors; yet would it have been better for Gaul and Spain, Numidia and Dacia, never to have formed part of the Roman Empire?”

The proponent of “natural selection,” the English biologist, Charles Darwin wrote in “The Descent of Man (1871)” that “From the remotest times successful tribes have supplanted other tribes. … At the present day civilised nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations.”

Thus, Europe built its philosophy and view of the world, including the weak societies, that they do not own the right to possession and sovereignty, even over their own land, and that the stronger is the rightful owner because he is more capable of exploiting the land, reconstructing it, and that the issue of removing or exterminating them is naturally justified according to the law of natural selection.

As late as 1947, the US President Harry Truman and his Secretary of State George C. Marshall were among the strongest opponents of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. On July 21, 1947 Truman used his diary to vent his anger at the former treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who had sought his intervention on behalf of a ship of Jewish refugees who had been denied entry by Britain to what was then Palestine. Truman wrote, “The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment on world affairs.” In the same entry Truman goes on to say, “The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment.”

However, after Jewish gangs committed the usurpation of Palestine, displaced its people, and killed tens of thousands of them in 1948, Truman decided to recognize the Jewish state. At midnight on May 14, 1948, the Provisional Government of ‘Israel’ proclaimed a new State of ‘Israel.’ On that same date, the United States, in the person of President Truman, recognized the provisional Jewish government as de facto authority of the Jewish state (de jure recognition was extended on January 31, 1949). The U.S. delegates to the UN and top-ranking State Department officials were angered that Truman released his recognition statement to the press without notifying them first. This recognition was based on the theory of “might makes right” on which the American state itself was founded and itself applied upon the indigenous people of America, exterminating massive numbers of them.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and America’s monopoly on world leadership, it felt the euphoria of victory and global dominance. American philosopher Fukuyama wrote his famous book “The End of History” in 1992, believing that this dominance and leadership was the last stage of greatness and glory that humanity could reach. With this narrow horizon, the Westerners saw themselves as the center of the universe and the end of history.

The arrogance! In an interview on CBS 60 Minutes, in 1996, veteran journalist Lesley Stahl questioned Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, on the catastrophic effect the rigorous US sanctions imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had on the Iraqi population. “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?” “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” However, achieving America’s sovereignty over Iraq and the region meant killing half a million Iraqi children.

Then on 26 September 2025, the U.S. special envoy to Syria Thomas Barrack said to journalists, “The Middle East. There is no Middle East. You know that. There’s tribes. There’s villages.” In a wide-ranging 23-minute interview with journalist Hadley Gamble, published on 22 September, Tom Barrack said, “In that part of the world, submit, there’s no Arabic word for submit. They can’t wrap their head around submit.” He then added, “Israel [is] a different story. Israel is a valued ally. We subsidize them $4 or $5 billion a year. It has a special place in America’s heart.”

This foolish man, Tom Barrack, does not understand the nature of this region, nor does he understand the meaning of the Islamic Ummah. He decides that the solution there will only be through force, and that a Jewish prime minister was able to convince America of his ability to resolve the crisis by force of arms. Although he and his government realized that the people of this land do not know submission, he does not understand what he is saying, nor does he comprehend the nature of this Ummah, which is based on a firm belief that does not know submission except to Allah (swt).

This Western mentality, whose doctrine is based on the capitalist principle that the victor is the one who has the right, and the strong can do whatever they want, does not understand the facts of history and will never understand them, no matter how circumstances and conditions change. The examples we have cited in the enslavement of peoples and the plundering of their wealth, are nothing but evidence of the pattern of thinking in the West. This stereotypical mentality cannot comprehend the divine truths and laws in the universe, that people are equal like the teeth of a comb, that they were created free, not slaves, that the right to rule the earth is one and indivisible and does not change with the change of powers, that the people of Truth are the bearers of the divine Risaalah message, and that Allah (swt) alone is the One who gives to whomever He wills and decides what He wills. Allah (swt) said,

[وَلَقَدْ كَتَبْنَا فِي الزَّبُورِ مِن بَعدِ الذِّكرِ أَنَّ الأَرضَ يَرِثُها عِبادِيَ الصّالِحُونَ]

“And We have already written in the Zabur (Psalms) after the previous mention that the land is inherited by My righteous servants” [TMQ Surah Al-Anbiyya: 105]. So Allah, Al-Maalik (swt), Who is Al-Haqq, glory be to Him, is the One who gave the inheritance of this land to the righteous.

The West will not understand the Laws of Allah (swt) in this universe unless they embrace the ideology of Islam. Those are the laws which decree that the dominance of falsehood is perishable even if after some time. Allah (swt) said,

[وَكَأَيِّن مِّن قَرْيَةٍ عَتَتْ عَنْ أَمْرِ رَبِّهَا وَرُسُلِهِ فَحَاسَبْنَاهَا حِسَاباً شَدِيداً وَعَذَّبْنَاهَا عَذَاباً نُّكْراً]

“And how many a city was insolent toward the command of its Lord and His messengers, so We took it to severe account and punished it with a terrible punishment” [TMQ Surah At-Talaq: 8].

The West will not understand that the people of truth are the ones who will be victorious, without a doubt, and falsehood is weak, no matter how high and mighty it is. The powers of the Ummah that believe in their Lord (swt) are higher, stronger, and more powerful than all the forces of falsehood, no matter how high and elevated their status.

These Laws of Allah (swt) are witnessed by both the believer and the non‑believer. However, the believers see them with the vision and guidance from Allah (swt) which He sent down through Messengers and Prophets (as). Their reality corresponds to those divine truths so their Imaan within them becomes a firm certainty that will not be shaken no matter how calamities surround them, and darkness of falsehood overwhelm them.

Before Allah (swt) sent Musa (as) to his people, He (swt) told us the divine truth that he was victorious from the moment of birth. When Allah (swt) sent revelation to Musa (as), He (swt) informed us of the truth of victory before it happened, by saying,

[وَنُرِيدُ أَن نَّمُنَّ عَلَى الَّذِينَ اسْتُضْعِفُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ وَنَجْعَلَهُمْ أَئِمَّةً وَنَجْعَلَهُمُ الْوَارِثِينَ]

“And We desire to show favour to those who were oppressed in the land, and to make them leaders, and to make them the inheritors” [TMQ Surah Al-Qasas: 5]. Musa (as) had no doubt that victory was inevitable, and that he and his people would be victorious over Pharaoh and his soldiers.

As for the kafir (disbeliever), he also sees these created truths before his eyes, just as the believer does. He sees the destruction of the darkness, the tyrants and the mighty, but his obstinacy, kufr (disbelief), and pride in himself blind him from seeing the divine Law of Allah (swt) in the reality of events, so he interprets them materially, believing that the right is in the hands of the conqueror, the strong makes the law for the weak, the right is for the “civilized,” the strongest is master and the weak a slave and a servant to him, and power does not vanish as long as its material means are in his hand.

Therefore, it is not surprising what the Jewish state today is doing of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, with absolute support from America, and behind it the countries of the West. It is not surprising that there is a continuation in genocide, so long as there is no true deterrent force to it. It is not surprising that there is the boast of the Jewish Prime Minister in his saying from 2019, “Our enemies received the message. We can reach everyone. We can reach everyone, even in their bed. I hope that this lesson will be learned.” It is not surprising that America sees the continuation of war in the region to achieve its goal, and its purposes in redrawing the geopolitical map as it wishes, so long as it has the capability to do so.

This blind mentality that sees nothing but the hand of strength and material deterrence, cannot be stopped except by the power of a true state that makes it see the truth and submit to it not by argument and persuasion, but by real force. He who is blind to seeing the truth with his heart will see it with his own eyes. May Allah (swt) hasten the establishment of that noble state, capable of deterring tyrants and putting an end to their injustice and corruption.