How the Plot of Israel Will Backfire

How the Plot of Israel Will Backfire

We begin by praising Allah and bearing witness that none has the right to be worshipped or unconditionally obeyed except for Him. And we bear witness that Muhammad ﷺ is his final Messenger. We ask Allah to send his peace and blessings upon him, the Prophets and Messengers that came before him, his family and companions that served alongside him, and those that follow in his blessed path until the Day of Judgment.

We ask Allah to make us amongst them. Allahuma Ameen.

Dear brothers and sisters, I just returned from Hajj literally a few hours ago, and the khutbah that I had in mind is not the one that I'm going to give to you today — because as many of you have been following the news, the Zionist regime of Israel has spread its warfare across the region.

We ask Allah to foil its plans. We ask Allah to have mercy on all of its victims. We ask Allah to allow the plots of the oppressor to backfire on the oppressor. Allahuma Ameen.

A Story from the Abbasid Era

But I'm going to start with something before getting into the news that spurred the khutbah that I intend to give — something I was reading that is actually very related.

SubhanAllah, as you're witnessing the world unfold the way that it does, you recognize that Allah inspires a different reading of some of the ayat that you used to quickly read across. And that has been the case for the last two years — different episodes of the seerah that have a different lens.

And as we said, may Allah have mercy on the victims, the believers, the Muslims, those that have been oppressed by all oppressors in fact, wherever they are. Because they certainly have to look to the Qur'an for a deeper source of inspiration than those of us who have felt the pain of witnessing what they have been going through and trying to gain our own perspective as to what we can do for them.

But I was reading through Siyar A'lam al-Nubala, the stories from Imam al-Dhahabi, and I was ironically preparing on the flight home for my next lecture — which would be about al-Husayn, may Allah be pleased with him, and his rising up against the oppressor of his day.

And one of the things that Imam al-Dhahabi, may Allah have mercy on him, does is he covers very complicated figures as he covers Islamic history. And I came across one of these complicated figures — he was from the Abbasid period, his name was Abu Ja'far al-Zayyat, and his name al-Zayyat comes from his father who was an oil merchant.

Imam al-Dhahabi, may Allah have mercy on him, covers this complicated figure that exists about 300 or so years after the Prophet ﷺ — a wazir, a minister. He says that this was a man who was a poet, an expert in literature, an inventor, someone that put forth many contributions in terms of the sciences of the day, and was widely respected for that. But just like other complicated figures, there was a harm that matched the benefit — and some would argue that outweighed it.

He applied his brilliance in the politics of the day. He was a contemporary, by the way, of Imam Ahmad, may Allah have mercy on him — one of those who held on to the false belief of the creation of the Qur'an. He used his brilliance to create torture devices.

And so he invented what was the equivalent of what I would best describe as a gas chamber today — a tannur. They called him Sahib al-Tannur, the maker of the oven — where he created a torture device where people would be burnt alive. The Prophet ﷺ of course said: do not punish with the punishment of Allah, that burning someone is never justified, it is an evil doing. But he created a torture chamber where heat and fire would be brought into it, with a whole mechanism to ensure that the person died a very slow death in that torment. And he took great pride in creating that device.

And he used to say about himself something very interesting. He said:

"I have never shown mercy to any human being in my life. Mercy is a weakness in a personality."

This is the opposite of what we learn from our Prophet ﷺ:

(Sunan Abu Dawud, Hadith 4941; Jami' al-Tirmidhi, Hadith 1924)

"The merciful — the Most Merciful shows mercy to them. Show mercy to those on earth, and the Most Merciful in the heavens will show mercy to you."

So he said rahma is a weakness, mercy is a weakness — and this is of course the logic of a tyrant, or the tool of a tyrant: that you can't let your human emotions come in the way of how you deal with human beings, because otherwise you won't be able to control them and torture them. There has to be a level of killing your own sense of humanity in order to manage human subjects in a certain way.

So he created this torture device. And to not drag the story on — as time went on, he found himself falling out of favor with the ruler of the time, and he found himself being put into the same torture chamber that he created, thrown into it by the khalifa. And as he was thrown in to be burnt alive until he would die, he ironically screamed out: Irhamuni! Irhamuni! — Show mercy to me! Show mercy to me!

And the khalifa mocked him and said: al-rahmatu khawrun fil tabi' — mercy is a weakness in your nature.

The Evil Plot Returns to Its Maker

Why do I start with this story? The verse that comes to mind:

Allah says: verily the evil plot only comes back to engulf the one who made it. The evil plot will only harm the one who created the plot. It is in Surah Fatir — Allah mentions the arrogance of those who plotted against the Prophet ﷺ, and the evil plans they cooked up to try to hurt him ﷺ. But verily, an evil plan only harms the one who makes that plan in the first place.

I want to stop with this verse for a bit, and let's take the personal lesson first. If you are someone who seeks to harm someone else, and you find yourself in a situation where you can come up with a plot and a plan to make yourself immune to any consequences — or so you think — and you put your brother or your sister in a terrible situation, know that Allah will cause you to suffer in the exact same way that you caused your brother or your sister to suffer. And it may be that the infrastructure, the plot that you are putting together, will actually come back to engulf you.

If you are a victim of someone else who plots against you — after many days and nights, perhaps weeks or months or years of suffering at the hands of someone who puts forth a miserable plot to make your life miserable — know that Allah will cause that person to be ensnared, engulfed by that very same plot at some point. It is a promise of Allah:

They plot and Allah plots, and Allah is the best of plotters. It is a promise.

And makr has the element of surprise to it. There is an element of taking someone when they are not paying attention, when they have left that front vulnerable, and being caught into it. And so there is a very personal lesson to take from this.

The Promise of Allah Regarding the Oppressors

But now you come to the issue of the day. I want you to pay attention to what Allah is saying to us. There is a promise that Allah's victory is near:

There is a promise:

That Allah will defend those who believe. We've talked about that promise in great detail. There is a promise:

That they plan and I plan. They plot and Allah plots, and Allah's plot is always greater, and Allah is the greatest plotter against them.

All of these are promises. But when Allah says:

— pay very close attention to what Allah is saying to us. That when a tyrant feels invincible, when a tyrant feels like they have the devices and the tools to be able to penetrate and to be able to create harm in multiple ways, and does not see a pathway to accountability — Allah is telling you that they will ensnare themselves in the same way that al-Zayyat ensnared himself. That they will actually be creating the infrastructure, the plan, and the plot that will lead to their own ruin and destruction. And that is as much a promise of Allah as anything else He has already promised.

And SubhanAllah, as you're watching the Polish terrorist Benjamin Netanyahu speak with such pride — and that snickery and that joy and that glee, "we figured something out, the Mossad is able to build an entire secret drone base in another country without anyone paying attention" — as you watch that sense of invincibility, wallahi this ayah just kept coming to my head. Because how much is Allah sowing within what they are building of their plot that is beyond their own sight? Of His makr over their makr, of His plot over their plot. How much is being devised on the inside of what they are devising — that they cannot see in a divine sense — that will eventually come to haunt them, that will eventually cause them to be engulfed by their own tyranny.

Historical Lessons: The Crusaders and the Mongols

And the scholars talk about this from a historical sense. That Allah does not let a tyrant ever ride their plot high for more than a qarn — for more than a century. Some of the scholars mention sixty, seventy, or a hundred years. And you think about it — the plot always comes back to backfire.

The two greatest tyrants that the Muslim world knew were the Crusaders and the Mongols.

The Crusaders pillaged Jerusalem with the goal of eliminating the light of Islam once and for all so that it would never be there again. And I want to say that it is important for you, O Muslims, as you attend Jumu'ah, to feel every bit of the weight and the pain of the fact that Masjid al-Aqsa is closed. May Allah liberate it. Masjid al-Aqsa has been shut down. May Allah liberate it. Allahuma Ameen.

I want that weight to be felt by each and every single one of us. That there is not a single musalli being allowed in the first qibla that the Prophet ﷺ ever faced for salah — at this moment. And the arrogance of your oppressor.

The Crusaders thought that by pillaging and by destroying and by uprooting every semblance they could of Islam in Jerusalem, they would ensure that it never came back. In the process of that, the darkness that they put forth and the historic footprint of that darkness actually backfired — because Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi did not just reconquer Jerusalem, but the light that Salah al-Din brought back to Jerusalem, the standards that he upheld, the way that he carried himself, the way that he refused to be tainted by their darkness and become dark in the standards that they put forth like them — the way that Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi entered into Jerusalem not only ensured the return of Islam to Jerusalem, but it ensured that we're still talking about it almost a thousand years later.

They lost the plot. They became a historical blueprint of evil. And Salah al-Din became the manifest blueprint of good. It was right within a hundred years, within a qarn, that Allah foiled those plans of theirs. And if you were to say to the Crusaders fifty, sixty, seventy, or seventy-seven years into their oppression that there was even the slightest chance that that would happen, they would mock you. They'd call you a lunatic. But Allah was carefully plotting as they were plotting, and they would be taken by the same infrastructure that they created.

In the same way with the Mongols — it didn't even take a hundred years for someone from the offspring, a grandson of Genghis Khan, to actually embrace Islam. Which is unheard of. The colonizer embracing the religion of the colonized. And suddenly these people became students of the same structures that they destroyed.

The Mongol Empire, after wreaking havoc on the Muslim world — it wasn't a hundred years. Within that same qarn, within that same one hundred years, Allah turned it all around. And if you were to say to someone within thirty or forty years that that makr, that plot, that plan would result in this — no one would have believed you. In fact, even a Muslim would have looked at you and said: the Mongols embracing Islam? They just finished stacking the skulls of the Muslims and destroying another thousand sets of books and masajid. The Mongols embracing Islam? Are you serious? How does that happen? How does it all turn around?

That an evil plan always comes back to haunt only those who initiated it. That in the process of that plot, Allah plots something from within that the plotter cannot see, but the plotter will one day feel.

The Hadith: Beware of Evil Plotting

And one of the narrations in Hafidh Ibn Kathir's tafsir of this verse in Surah Fatir is an athar that the Prophet ﷺ said:

(Cited in Tafsir Ibn Kathir, commentary on Surah Fatir, 35:43)

Beware of plotting evil. And that is indeed first and foremost a warning at a personal level for each and every single one of us — beware of plotting evil. Because the Prophet ﷺ says verily an evil plan will only come back to backfire against the one who plots it in the first place. But then he says in this athar: and they have from Allah a pursuer — wa lahum min Allahi talib — that Allah will send someone to pursue them, or that Allah Himself will pursue them in the process.

Renewing Our Trust and Our Efforts

What does this mean, dear brothers and sisters? First and foremost, we do not operate within the confines of this dunya. Allah mentions:

That verily those who burn the believers — they will have the punishment of being burned as well. Whether that is in this life or the next, that is beyond us.

But what that also means is that when you see an evil plot extending itself, and when you start to see the pathways of overcoming that plot close, that is where you renew your trust in Allah. Your trust is not in the military of any country. Your trust is not in the defense of any country. Your trust is not in the mechanics or the tools or the supports of anything else. Your trust is in Allah, who is the maker of all means and the reason for all reasons. Your trust is in Allah, the controller of all outcomes. You renew that trust in Allah.

But — and there is a big but here — there is no reason for you in any way to feel better about yourself when renewing your trust in Allah. These promises and these ayat are not meant to instill complacency in us. These promises and these ayat are not meant to say to us to take a back seat and say let Allah do what He does.

It is first and foremost that you renew your yaqeen, you renew your certainty. That certainty and the promise of Allah was in 2021, it was in 2023, it's in 2025, it was in 1948, it was in 1967, it'll still be around. That they will create — or be the authors of — their own destruction in the divine decree of Allah, and we believe that.

But you come back to yourself, dear brothers and sisters, and you renew your own efforts, you renew your own movements, you renew everything that you said that you would do when it all first started. I don't want to hear anyone talking about Gaza fatigue. It's pathetic.

I can tell you — in Hajj, you could hear the people making their du'a in tawaf, and you could hear them making du'a over the microphones in Arafah. And when anyone would get to the word Gaza, their voices would break and their tears would flow. There is no such thing as Gaza fatigue. If our brothers and sisters are living it, then we have to keep at it. It's as simple as that.

But I just want you to couch yourself in this ayah for a moment. That makr — that plot that is being extended — has holes in it that we cannot see, nor can they.

And even if history doesn't catch up to them, Allah will catch up to them. And even if it's not in this dunya, then it will be in the akhira. And even if it's not in our lifetimes, then it will happen. And that trust has to be renewed in Allah.

But don't you dare take a backseat right now. This is a time to increase, not a time to fall into despair. This is a time to renew our intentions, to renew our trust, to renew our efforts. Not a time to take a backseat.

Du'a

May Allah bless us all.