An Ummah Uncolonized: With Struggle Comes Liberation

Rescue workers surround a corpse amidst the rubble in Iran at a site strewn with bodies, each one belonging to someone’s daughter who was alive in the morning before Israel and the United States decided to bomb a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing over one hundred and fifty little girls on February 28, 2026 (Abbas Zakeri for Mehr News Agency via the AP).

Sunni or Shia, Muslim or Not, We Are One Against Zionist Imperialism

By Yussra

Forward

I’m sorry for the graphic image, but I wonder about the ethics of shielding our eyes from atrocities sponsored by our own taxes. We’re also often wisely advised to stay out of comment sections, but I like being able to access people’s honest reactions to world news in ways they might not share anywhere outside of a screen. I’ve been reading lots of comments from Muslims lately on current events, so this essay will primarily address Muslims, but even if you’re not Muslim, a peek into our distinct yet overlapping Sunni and Shia perspectives might be helpful to understand, and I hope the core message can encompass any human who cares about justice and peace. To anyone who strives against oppression, I consider you my family. Thank you for your fight.

Two Troubling Takes

I’ve been seeing more unity among Muslims this week than I have in a long time, but also some disturbing division, a consequence of the colonizer retraining our very psyche. As Allah continues to expose the oppressors and reveal more of His plan with each passing day of Ramadan, today I wanted to shed light on two drastically clashing perspectives I’ve noticed in the Ummah, because it’s been catching my attention how differently we perceive the same events based on our experiences and allegiances. There are many other viewpoints out there, but for our purposes, I’ll briefly cover two troubling stances I’ve noticed from Muslims in response to recent news. The wider context to this conversation includes America and Israel’s attacks against Iran, and Iran’s counterattacks against Israel as well as US military bases across the Middle East, especially in the Gulf countries. In the interest of fairness, I’m about to call out both Sunni and Shia Muslims, but I do so with love. 

1. Among Shia Muslims, there are those who perceive Shia leaders like the Iranian government to be sacrificial heroes, the only ones willing to take on the Western Zionist colonizer in a world where Sunni leaders are themselves colonized…

• However, I’m not sure how they reconcile this belief with the fact that the Palestinian resistance is Sunni, not to mention the fact that Iran has consistently behaved out of self-interest, meaning they only fight Israel when Israel attacks them, while Israel has been overwhelmingly left unimpeded by the entire international community in its genocidal campaign against Palestine.

2. Among Sunni Muslims, there are those in places like Syria and Iraq who have been oppressed by Iran’s current regime, so they perceive Iran as another occupier they have to deal with on top of the Western empire…

• However, some of them allow their frustration with one aggressor to make them actively root for the other in an appalling display of the “lesser evil” fallacy, a reactionary mentality that someone perceived to be merely less evil than someone else is therefore morally acceptable to support… and in what universe could Israel be considered a lesser evil compared to any other entity?

The Scope of the Moment

I’m a Sunni Muslim from Iraq myself, so I’m not going to sanitize Iran’s record against their neighbors, but we have to distinguish between people and their leaders, between regional disputes and external domination, and between one’s complaints against his brother’s abuses and the mutual threat they both face from the serial killer who lives down the street. When I said that humanity has failed Palestine, I meant it. With the notable exception of Yemen, no force on Earth, not even Iran, has tried to stop Israel and the Western world from carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to completion. And now that failure is boiling over, with hundreds of our precious Iranian siblings slaughtered by the US and Israel in the space of days. Even the wealthiest Gulf countries are finally feeling the burn and tasting the consequences of their support for the Zionists who have been massacring our brothers and sisters in Palestine and Yemen and Sudan and far beyond this entire time.

The news these days might have people finally asking some very important questions. Questions like: wait, why are there so many US bases in the Middle East? And questions like: how can Zionist Persians and Zionist Arabs celebrate as the West massacres their own people? Or questions like: why is the Zionists’ so-called “Board of Peace” made up of leaders of Muslim nations from every corner of the Earth under the guidance of the very war criminals who have carried out genocide in Gaza?

I love it when people start asking questions. I love hearing that Americans are starting to wonder why exactly they should be expected to kill and die for Israel. I love seeing Muslims turning against their colonized leaders and toward each other, rejecting the tribalistic nationalism of tyrannical puppets and seeing with new eyes what we once were and insha’Allah can again become: a global community of Muslims united, an Ummah uncolonized. While many of us have been blessed to live in peace as we focus on growing closer to the Most Merciful and making our way through the Qur’an during this precious month, how many Muslims have been murdered this Ramadan?

In the past several days alone, we have escalation of genocide in Sudan through the support of the United Arab Emirates, we have Pakistan striking Afghanistan, we have Pakistanis getting murdered while protesting America and Israel’s killing of Shia spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, we have debris from Iran’s rockets falling on Bengali workers in the Middle East, we have American bases making targets out of every Arab land, we have Israel bombing Iran and Lebanon and forcing the populations of countless cities to scatter, and through it all, we still have Palestinian children dying of starvation, even today.

I want you to pause this reading and open up a tab with a world map; take a second to look at the size of Israel’s stolen land, and compare it to the scope of destruction across Asia and Africa that the Western world and its vassals have carried out on Israel’s behalf.

What have we been doing? Ya mu’mineen, this current moment we are witnessing is a special chance that Allah has opened for us. Let’s stop taking the colonizer’s bait. Let’s stop seeing the world through the eyes of our nationality or race or sect alone. Of course our identity will inform our worldview, but our experiences should only enrich our empathy and our solidarity. If your people have lived through oppression, then you should be all the more able to recognize it in others. Let your concern for others envelop the Ummah and beyond, because in our limited time through this life, we owe it to everyone, Muslim and otherwise, to stand with them against injustice.

That’s why we’re here, remember?