Preconfiguring the Revolution: An Anarchist Manifesto on Palestine and the Global Muslim Community

There has never been, in the modern West, a radical political movement by orthodox Muslims designed to build our communities from the ground up. There have been movements focussed on electoral politics, lobbying, and even dreams of re-establishing the caliphate. There have been some local community initiatives, but never a movement centred on radical community building. Radical community organisation has not been a political tactic embraced, or discussed with much seriousness, by the vast majority of Western Muslim communities. This has been to our extreme detriment. Our inability to organise around the systemic change we want has disempowered us, severely impacting our ability to resist the systems which allow the rise of fascism and the far-right, as well as global issues facing Muslims: the genocides in East Turkestan, Sudan, against the Rohingya, and of course, Palestine.

This is especially surprising given Islam’s history and its emphasis on centering community through zakat, sadaqah, and worship, all organised around a masjid. One would think it completely germane, second nature, even, to build self-reliant, empowered communities. Historically, Sufi orders have operated their own communities outside of the state. The Chishtiyya, for example, ran free kitchens offering food to all, known as langar; distributed water from fountains known as sabeels; and maintained communal lodges known as khanqahs, all while refusing any royal patronage. These institutions were critical for the impoverished and needy, who could rely on Chishti khanqahs at a time when state institutions were failing.

Several centuries later, in what is now Northern Nigeria, the Yan Taru (“associates”) network was set up by Nana Asma’u as a decentralised system for education, spreading Islamic knowledge to the furthest parts of the Sokoto Caliphate. Asma’u, a scholar, a poet, and a polyglot, did this by creating a network of teachers who went out into rural areas and taught women through didactic poems. Her poetry featured topics such as aqeedah, piety, and jihad against oppressors. These poems were memorised and recited, creating a mobile, oral archive of resistance. When the British colonised the Sokoto Caliphate, these women formed an important part of the resistance. Through reproducing the teachings of Nana Asma’u, they were able to hold on to their Islamic heritage and continue to spread it. Both the Chishti order and Muslims in Northern Nigeria are still around.

Yet our major malaise, a ghost we summon at every tragedy, is that we do not have effective leadership and therefore aren’t able to mobilise with any real force. Our efforts then get channelled into political movements that only tangentially represent our interests—whether those movements are led by the state or NGOs. Many of these movements claim grassroots status, or claim to be “for the people,” yet channel our emotions and labour into establishment politics. The most vocal voices on Palestine today still appeal to Euro-American systems of justice that move slower than molasses. From almost the very beginning of the genocide, various international bodies have called Israel, Netanyahu, and the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) criminal and genocidal, with absolutely no impact. Almost certainly, one day these rulings will help sanitise the West once again; they will be used to claim the West was on the right side of history. For the time being, though, they do nothing. More critically, they will not prevent the next genocide, for the system will prevail. In fact, the sanitisation will be used to argue that the system worked all along.

The only real impact we’ve seen has come through precisely the organisation I am arguing for: trade unions stopping shipments of weapons; self-directed autonomous zones pressuring institutions to cut ties with Israel; and community-led direct action shutting down factories manufacturing weapons for the IOF. Without the right type of grassroots development, our representation and leadership will always default to the status quo, which is exactly what we must resist.

Let us be clear on another thing: we are not leaving the West. Read that as you like: either as a statement of defiance against the growing calls from the Right for Muslims to “go back where you came from,” or as a resigned sigh that we will live out the rest of our days away from the homeland. In any case, millions of Muslims are not going to make hijrah. Moreover, for the increasing number of converts, the West is their home. Yet we are totally rootless, existing betwixt our reality and dreams of what might be, leaving us politically silenced, socially marginalised, and spiritually adrift.

Our rootlessness explains our paralysis. Communities that do not feel at home cannot build homes for others. Without rooted institutions, awaqaf, masjids that serve the people, networks that endure, we are left with fragments: protests that flare up and vanish, petitions that go nowhere, leaders who chase status in systems that despise us. To be rootless is to be unmoored, and unmoored communities cannot organise with force. They can only drift. We must begin to build institutions that anchor us to where we are, eschewing foreign money (both from abroad and from state-approved institutions) in favour of community co-ops.

For these reasons, and many others, embracing anarchist tactics for community building is the only real way forward for Muslims globally, but especially in the West. To clarify, I am not arguing for an anarchism that removes Allah from our lives, nor the institutions that bring us to Him. The proposal is instead to be empowered in our faith while living within the milieu of capitalism. In fact, the vision is to strengthen the Islamic faith—its scholarship, adherents, and purity—by disconnecting from capitalism as far as possible and re-centering faith. This can happen because the ontological differences (underpinned by late-stage capitalism) between the political and spiritual begin to collapse as we step away from reliance on the “state” as a moral authority.

Tactics are wide-ranging, but it’s important to note that, rather than the chaos and lawlessness many people envision when they think of anarchism, it in fact builds community resilience. Some may be surprised to learn that many tactics already embraced by those at the forefront of resisting the Gaza genocide are anarchist in origin. Direct action and creating autonomous zones are two clear examples of this. Mutual aid, too, has entered Muslim discourse, with scholars now calling for awqaf revival and local zakat distribution. Anarchist tactics don’t just stop there, though: parallel and counter-institution building is a key part. This includes everything from free schools, physical and mental health clinics, community-owned land and gardens, community-owned housing, worker-owned businesses, credit unions, free libraries, and independent presses, to more radical institutions like squats, cop-watches, and community defence organisations.

This approach is inclusive and flexible, but its major strength is that it is autopoietic: discrete movements that come about spontaneously and manage themselves. And because they are autopoietic, if one gets shut down, it doesn’t matter. Other community organisations will come to fill the gap. Moreover, every individual act is amplified through the collective. Here, contributions are not smothered by bureaucracy; they strike directly, making individual impact greater than it may seem. Leadership is horizontal and rooted in the community, not vertical and dependent on the system for permission. Here, decisions do not stall at the top; they flow swiftly to those in the community who carry the wisdom to act. Imams and religious scholars can take their rightful and integral place as the spiritual and Islamic heart of our community, ensuring that we stay connected to our tradition and place Allah above all else. Activists can lead their projects as experts in their area. Our labour and our emotions remain our own, invested wholly in the mission. We can be as radical as we want, knowing full well that our community will have our back.

Our roots must also connect with others to create networks. Local initiatives are essential, but no single community can carry the burden alone. To endure, prevail, and resist effectively, our communities must federate, linking together as equals, not under a central authority, but through bonds of solidarity and shared purpose. Again, this is not alien to Islam or Muslims. A pilgrim could travel from Cairo to Mecca and, on their route, find lodgings, sabeels, masjids, and zawiyas all funded by awqaf. In some places, even roads and bridges were maintained by local waqf. These resources created a network of reliable support for travellers. In the same way, a clinic that serves one neighbourhood becomes a healthcare network when federated. A school becomes an education system. A single masjid may be vulnerable, but a federation of masjids can withstand repression and defend its people. Federation is our strength: not centralisation, not hierarchy, but many communities moving as one body. This is how we move from islands of survival to a continent of resistance.

Federating locally is one thing, but federating globally helps us bypass the systems of oppression that cause so much suffering—and break the grip of empire. Buying coffee directly from a co-op in Indonesia owned by workers strengthens their community (and ours) far more than buying fair-trade goods where profits are diluted through corporate machines. Changing our buying and consumption habits on a wide enough scale intensifies movements like BDS: it not only puts pressure on multinational cartels, but actively undermines them. Direct solidarity with Palestine, Sudan, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, and even indigenous non-Muslim communities allows us to address their needs directly. In fact, it allows communities themselves to decide, demand, and define what justice looks like. It also returns control of resources back to the people. But this isn’t a paternalistic relationship. It’s reciprocal. We take as much as we give.

This is how we preconfigure the revolution—that is, we begin to live the lives and create the world we want in spite of the global systems of oppression. German anarchist Gustav Landauer is reported to have said, “The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.”¹ I’m not pessimistic about a revolution; I remain ever hopeful. There is a point, though, where we must begin to live out our principles in anticipation of the revolution. To Landauer’s core point, our relationship with our ummah, whether locally or globally, should not be mediated through the state. Our actions should not only be those the state deems acceptable. We should not only include those the state deems worthy, nor give only through channels it approves. We should build our own networks of care, solidarity, and resistance. We should become ungovernable. This is how we preconfigure the revolution: by living as though it has already begun, without permission.

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1. Ward, C.; Anarchism as a Theory of Organisation; Patterns of Anarchy; Krimmerman, L.I & Perry, L. (eds.), 1996. [↩]