How can an Ummah of nearly two billion—stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, overflowing in resources, history, and faith—watch with hands tied as a genocide unfolds in front of its eyes? How can it fail to act, fail to halt, fail to resist the butchering of its children, the destruction of its cities, the humiliation of its dignity and the desecration of its holy land? What happened to us? What illness has hollowed out our resolve? We are not weak, yet we act as if we are. We are not helpless, yet we behave as if we are handcuffed and shackled.
This paralysis is not a result of physical limitation. It is psychological, spiritual, and ideological—a form of collective trauma and paralysis inflicted over decades. To understand our condition, one must look beyond military might and economic statistics. One must peer into the shattered mirror of our collective identity and see the devastation that is hidden behind our silence.
If you want to understand the soul of this Ummah in chains, don’t count its mosques or its flags—look into the hollowed eyes of a woman who’s forgotten she can leave.
I want to draw a parallel here—as a mirror for the Ummah, not just as a metaphor but as a lens to view our condition. This is what psychologists call the ‘battered woman syndrome’: a condition of psychological captivity where the victim not only endures her abuse but begins to believe she cannot live without it. She starts to think she deserves it. That she is too weak to leave. That resistance is futile, and escape would only make things worse.
This syndrome doesn’t just describe individual trauma—it eerily echoes the collective condition of our Ummah today. We too have been systematically broken—through invasions, colonization, ideological indoctrination, propaganda, and betrayal. We’ve absorbed the voice of our oppressors until it became our own. We question our own strength. We doubt our right to freedom. We live in fear of stepping outside their system, even when it is the very source of our suffering. We are the battered woman—on a global scale.
I’ve met women like this. Watched them fold into themselves, breath by breath. She’s the woman whose sense of self has been so thoroughly dismantled, so eroded by constant blows—emotional, physical, psychological—that even her inner voice no longer belongs to her. Her thoughts echo her abuser’s words. Her will is indistinguishable from his control.
He abuses her. He isolates her. He tells her she’s nothing without him. And then, once the damage is done, he buys her forgiveness with flowers. Whispers sweetness into the wounds he himself opened. She believes—desperately—that this time he means it. That this time he’s changed. She tells her friends about the horror, the humiliation, the bruises… but she won’t leave. She can’t. She’s trapped in the psychological vice of learned helplessness, the belief that even when the door is open, escape is impossible. Instead of using what little strength she has left to break free, she exhausts herself pleading for him to see her pain—clinging to the delusion that if he just understood her suffering, he might grow a heart.
Keeping her trapped gives him strength and power. He lives off of her resources, her sincerity, care and love, while giving her crumbs—just enough attention, praise, and admiration to keep her going. When she expresses any real disagreement with him, he rains abuse on her, breaking her down with physical or emotional brutality, dismantling her sense of self. He fears the day she manifests her true and full strength, because her awakening would cause his fragile ego to collapse. His power is parasitic. He must siphon her brilliance, her compassion, her capacity for life, and wear it like a mask to hide his own hollowness.
The Muslim Ummah today is that woman. The West is the abuser—an empire that could not survive without siphoning from our strength, extracting our wealth, exploiting our divisions. This is how it keeps the Ummah subdued—through hard and soft power, through violence and illusion.
Hard power in the form of military invasions, drone strikes, genocide, and the imposition of brutal regimes that serve foreign interests. Secular liberal ‘democratic’ systems are installed in countries through puppet tyrants like viruses—disguised as modernity, designed for obedience and compliance.
Soft power is more insidious. It comes dressed as friendship, as aid, as “shared values.” It rewrites our story through media, education, and culture. It infiltrates our universities with think tanks and foundations, reshaping our intellectual class into echo chambers of Western thought. It co-opts our artists, our influencers, our reformers—turning them into mouthpieces for agendas not our own. Through film and television, it sells us self-hate wrapped in slick visuals. Through development grants and NGO partnerships, it funds the fragmentation of our social fabric. It teaches our children to admire the hands that bomb us, and to scorn their own faith as backward. It deconstructs the Muslim mind—not by force, but by seduction.
International organizations enforce asymmetrical rules—rules that never benefit us. The United Nations, the ICC, the ICJ, the World Bank, the IMF—these are not halls of justice. They are tools of containment that enslave nations in the quicksand of debt and slavery.
