Murabitun

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This article is about the modern movement - the medieval al-Murabitun dynasty in Morocco and Spain is found at Almoravides.

The Murabitun Movement was founded in the 1980s by Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi (see Shaykh abdalqadir and Shaykh of Sufism) a Scot formerly known as Ian Dallas^[1] who converted to Islam at the hands of the Imam of the Qayrawiyyin mosque in Fez in 1963. The Murabitun was originally largely comprised of Western converts to Islam of European and American origin but now comprises Muslims from almost every conceivable ethnic background with communities in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, England, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey and Mexico. The Murabitun are members of the Darqawi order founded in Morocco at the end of the 18th century. The name Murabitun alludes to the Almoravid movement which ruled the Maghrib and Spain in the 11th century and which restored an Islam based on the practice of the People of Madinah as transmitted by Imam Malik. Murabitun propose a return to the Gold-Dinar and Silver-Dirham, and members of this movement have been leaders in establishing the e-dinar method of trading electronically with gold, and working for the abolition of paper currency and return to commodity-based transactions, for example with gold and silver.^[2] They call for the Muslim community to restore the fallen third pillar of Islam, the zakat.^[3]

1 Claim of Anti-Semitism
2 Wired magazine article on the Murabitun
3 The Murabitun in Latin America
4 Notes
5 External links

[edit] Claim of Anti-Semitism

Shaykh Abdalqadir's stance towards Hitler, which is one of belittlement rather than adulation, is summed up in his 2000 book '‘Technique of the Coup de Banque’' (quoted below, and available at http://66.49.205.6/books/Coupdebanque.pdf). Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi has been attacked from some sides for his refusal to categorise Hitler's undenied genocide as qualitatively different from other genocides, or that he was a “metaphysical embodiment of Evil”; and for his placing the Nazi genocide alongside other genocidal activities, all of which have their original model in the French Revolution.

"Hitler. Not for a moment the operatic embodiment of Evil, but rather, as Ernst Jünger defined him to me, ‘Er war nur ein kleiner Mann!’ His genocidal adventures, without diminishing them, are but part and parcel of a pattern we have traced from La Vendée to Siberia. The astonishing thing is that he was a kind of Biedermeier dictator. Look at him. His Alsatian dog, his waitress-mistress, his middle-class vegetarianism. And the undeniable Gemütlichkeit of his taste for afternoon tea and scrumptious cream-cakes. He liked Léhar, Dietrich and cowboy novels. This was the man who was going to build a state that was to last a thousand years!"^[4]

"The reality that we have laid bare is that the hallmark of the democratic state is not the mythic or should one say the fantasy procedure of the ballot box, but rather is that it in itself represents the State as machine. Hitler, Stalin, Thatcher, De Gaulle, Kohl, are but operative command modules within an identical system, each one of which represents a variant model of the modern State as designed by Napoleon."^[5]

"Indeed, in every place one can see the reliance of the specific government on its own past pre-democratic models. Hitler, with his persecution of the Jews in Germany had merely projected a reformed Lutheranism. His hatred of the Jews in Mein Kampf is both less terrible and less eloquent than that in Luther’s anti-Jewish diatribes. One could say that the Germans were Lutherans at the beginning of the week, Nazis in the middle of the week, and then were back in the Lutheran church the following Sunday, if we say that 1933 to 1945 is the middle of the week."^[6]

"Indeed, if one does not believe that Hitler somehow embodied a metaphysical power of evil, but rather was himself a part of complex destructive forces in society, then another part of that tragic equation which led to the wholesale genocide of European jewry may be seen as having one of its main impulses in the devastating greed of the usury bankers, among whom the great Jewish banking families were undoubtedly dominant. In the nineteenth century, irrationally expressed fury against the bankers of Louis Phillippe’s France landed on the unfortunate individual, Captain Dreyfus. In the twentieth century, the rage of a bankrupted and ruined Europe fell not on one but on millions with horrific results."^[7]

Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi has at times been attacked as anti-Semitic. One possible explanation is that he attacks, and names, the leading personnel of banking (a practice most severely forbidden under Islamic Law) – and many banking families are jewish, although, as he is the first to point out, by no means all of them. Again, in Technique of the Coup de Banque his position is clarified. This concluding paragraph on the subject follows a rigourous critical examination of the banking activities of the jewish Camondo family, activities which were part of the process leading to the downfall of the Muslim Khalifate in Istanbul:

“Unlike the other great [banking] families, the Camondos, having few sons, soon gave up banking. In that sense, from Moïse to the end of the family line they cannot be considered or judged as part of the banking elite. Inside that fraternity they were, even among endless financial conflict, protected and untouchable. Once they left the arena of money the Camondos became simply one among many normal rich jewish families. And so it was, that inevitably in the mid-twentieth century, the terrible pent-up demonic energy of Naziism fell upon the defenceless, innocent remnants of the once great Camondo family. Beatrice, the last of the line, and her young son and daughter, both in their twenties, were swept up by the Gestapo to die with millions of others in the concentration camps of Poland."^[8]

[edit] Wired magazine article on the Murabitun

The following is from an article written on the Murabitun by Julian Dibbell in Wired Issue 10.01, Jan 2002:

"There aren't many Murabitun, they number probably in the thousands. Scattered though they are, community leaders see one another often, convening regularly in the small Scottish town of Achnagairn, home to the movement's founder and patriarch Sheikh Abdalqadir As-Sufi (Ian Dallas). In the 1960s, he worked as an actor and promoter, making the scene in London and Paris and hanging with Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles, and other hippie icons. Increasingly disillusioned with the counterculture, Dallas wound up in Morocco, where he met the Sufi spiritual leader Sheikh Muhammad ibn al-Habib and accepted Islam.

Sheikh Muhammad had a vision: The modern revival of Islam, he believed, would come from Westerners. Ian Dallas, now Abdalqadir, was anointed to take the lead. "Go to your land and see what will happen," Sheikh Muhammad told him, and he went. Back in London, Sheikh Abdalqadir slowly gathered acolytes from the drifting spiritual seekers of the day. Murabitun legend has it that pop star Cat Stevens (later Yusuf Islam) got his first exposure to Islam from Sheikh Abdalqadir, when both of them used to hang out at T. Rex singer Marc Bolan's house. Others became hardcore followers, donning djellabas and turbans and helping the sheikh shape Murabitun belief into a curiously worldly mysticism - a radical Islam tinged with elements of classic European anarchism, moderate feminism, refined anti-Semitism, and dense Heideggerian phenomenology."^[9]

[edit] The Murabitun in Latin America

The Spanish Murabitun, based in Granada, Spain has established a large community in San Cristobal de Las Casas,Chiapas, Mexico, where a significant number of the indigenous people embraced Islam. Headed by emir Muhammad Nafia (originally Aurelino Perez). The Murabitun’s programme in Mexico^[10] prospered in spite of their having no relationship whatsoever with the movement of Subcommandante Marcos and his Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), before, during or following the group’s armed rebellion in Chiapas in 1994. There are also reports that Islam is finding adherents among indigenous peoples in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America.^[11]