The fundamental reason why the Muslim world has been unable
to industrialise and take advantage of its mineral strengths is because the
Muslims’ rulers have never had any ambition or intention to improve the
situation of the Muslim world. This lack of direction has resulted in a Muslim
world full of contradiction; Saudi Arabia should be the world’s superpower considering the sheer size of its
oil resources. However the lack of ambition and foreign interference has made
Saudi Arabia a satellite state initially for Britain and currently the US.
The Khilafah, its economy, industry and energy resources
will all be shaped by a whole host of evidences which outline a clear policy
position. The Messenger of Allah ﻭﺳــﻠﻢ
ﻋﻠﻴــﻪ ﺍﷲ ﺻــﻠﻰ said "Each one of you is a Shepard and
will be held accountable for his flock." [Bukhari]
"Alif. Lam. Ra. This is a book which we have revealed
to you, [O Muhammad], that you might bring mankind out of darkness into the
light by the permission of their Lord - to the path of the Exalted in Might,
the Praiseworthy." [Ibrahim, 14:1]
"And prepare against them what force you can and horses
tied at the frontier, to frighten thereby the enemy of Allah and your enemy and
others besides them, whom you do not know (but) Allah knows them; and whatever
thing you will spend in Allah's way, it will be paid back to you fully and you
shall not be dealt with unjustly." [Al-Anfal: 60].
Islam obliged the Ameer to take care of the affairs of the
Ummah as he would be held accountable for this. Throughout numerous ayah's of the
Qur'an Allah (swt) obliged the Ummah to propagate Islam to the wider world,
take mankind from the darkness to the
light whilst in other verses Allah (swt) characterised the Muslim Ummah as the
best Ummah due to having such
characteristics. The propagation of Islam is achieved through projecting an
image of strength globally, so that those who have designs on the Ummah should
consider the existence of its deterrent force so powerful as to render success
in an attack too doubtful to be
worthwhile. These ayah’s amongst many prove the Khilafah will need to
harness its energy resources ensuring they are available for all its
citizens.
Islam has also designated electricity as public property.
Islam lays out three types of property: state, public and private. It
designated any utility regarded as indispensable for the community, such that
its absence would require people to search far and wide for it, as public
property. It would then be publicly owned – administered by the state and the revenue
generated would be administered for the benefit of all citizens. This is
derived from the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad ﻭﺳــﻠﻢ
ﻋﻠﻴــﻪ ﺍﷲ ﺻــﻠﻰ:
“Muslims are partners in three things: in water, pastures and fire”.
Although the hadith mentioned just three things we can utilise qiyas (analogy)
to extend the evidence to cover all instances of indispensable community
utilities. Thus water sources, forests of firewood, pastures for livestock and
the like are all public utilities as well as the mosques, state schools,
hospitals, oil fields, electricity plants, motorways, rivers, seas, lakes,
public canals, gulfs, straits, dams etc.
Islam would allow ownership if it were not indispensable for the community.
The Industrial plants would come under the description of
‘fire’ in the hadeeth: “People are partners in three; Water, Pastures and
Fire,” ‘Fire’ includes all that is implied by it in term of energy, whether derived
from the burning of trees, coal or electricity. All of these would be categorised
under the public
wealth and the state, individuals or companies are not
allowed to own these sources of electricity which is used as fuel to drive
industrial plants. These resources are public properties supervised by the
state and revenues generated from these are to be disbursed to the state’s
citizens after the deduction of costs.
Energy Policy
Oil and gas are two of the most important commodities in the
world. The engines of modern life are interlinked into every aspect of how
today’s societies function. The rate of industrialisation is dependent on the
rate of available energy. Even modern farming is dependent on natural gas,
through the feedstock’s that make up fertilisers. But oil and gas are finite
resources and non-renewable. They are essential to public life, meaning that
their benefit has to be shared by the public, and cannot be privatised.
The Khilafah’s energy policy will need to be adopted with
the following realities in mind:
- As energy is essential to industrialisation, the
Khilafah’s energy policy will need to be viewed through such a lens.
- Energy is needed for numerous domestic tasks, the Khilafah
needs to build upon the current energy infrastructure present in the Muslim
world
- Oil and Gas should be allocated to essential uses such as
feed stocks, plastics, agriculture, petrochemicals as no alternatives currently
exist for these.
- Oil and Gas should also be utilised for transport and
energy generation as current technologies are primarily run on them, but
alternatives need to be sought. This will help to create a more sustainable use
of the Khilafah’s resources, allowing flexibility in the sale of oil for
revenue generation, and as aid to assist nations in bringing them closer to the
fold of Islam
The Khilafah on its emergence will from day one be faced
with three key challenges that will need to be overcome and will define the
Khilafah’s energy policy:
1. The Khilafah in all likelihood will be a rapidly
industrialising state that will be on a permanent war footing, this makes
energy utilisation critical
2. A military strike by the US
3. As the rate of industrialisation is dependent on the
energy available the current energy and electricity infrastructure is poorly
designed in many of the current Muslim lands to cope with base load (minimum
energy need) demands of heavy
industries. Furthermore the centralised nature of both local and national grids
in many of the Muslim lands would leave many without electricity if a number of
power stations sustained an attack.
The first challenge can only be overcome by the Khilafah
securing its own supply of oil and natural gas and other energy sources. If the
Khilafah is to emerge anywhere other than the Middle East then it will begin to
face difficulties in securing supplies beyond the end of the decade. As an
example, the current natural gas reserves of Bangladesh would supplement the
nation for the next 40 years based on its current demand but if export
agreements with India are concluded, this would drop to 12 years. Existing reserves
will deplete faster than the current status quo. Both Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
and Vladimir Putin of Russia pursued such a policy of nationalising their
energy resources so they could be used for domestic development rather than
being siphoned off to the West.
From the outset, the use of oil should be preserved for the
armed forces, petrochemicals industries, and freight, flight transport and
fertilizers. Considering that 90% of all transport is currently oil dependent, transport
that can run on alternatives means should be developed. This would imply the
use of compressed natural gas (CNG) for public transport and personal
automobiles. Pakistan has an estimated 25.1 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of proven
gas reserves. This has led to Pakistan having the highest number of compressed
natural gas (CNG)-run vehicles in the world leaving Brazil and Argentina behind
in the race as largest user of natural gas vehicles. This would mean saving gas
reserves for the transport and not the power sectors. Thus power generation
would rely on coal, nuclear and renewables. The Khilafah will need to use
nuclear energy for its huge industrialisation programme as it has the capacity
for massive power generation which the Khilafah’s new industries will
need.
Such a policy would make the other challenges facing the
Khilafah much more manageable. There is
the very real possibility of a strike by the US as the Persian Gulf Oil and Gas
– the largest in the world are threatened for the first time as US strategic
assets. It should be remembered that the US has the capability to carry out a
sustained attack using an array of missiles. Whilst there is no short answer to
this dilemma, the Khilafah will need to mitigate the possibilities of such an
attack occurring, this can be achieved by annexing and expanding very quickly,
so the US will then be dealing with a much larger area. As Afghanistan and Iraq
has shown, the longer the supply lines have to travel the weaker the front
lines. It should also be borne in mind that the US makes use of a number of
military bases that have been provided to them by the Muslims’ rulers, cutting
such supply lines will severely hinder US capabilities.
The Khilafah from her inception needs to build a
decentralised energy infrastructure. A decentralised infrastructure is where
local power generation is the priority, through numerous small scale owerplants,
as opposed to a centralised grid where the nation is dependent on power
production through larger but fewer power-plants.
There are a number of advantages a decentralised energy
infrastructure over a centralised nfrastructure will bring to the Khilafah:
- The Khilafah will be an expanding state; expanding grid
networks will be more difficult, expensive and inefficient if expanded from
power stations positioned long distances from demand.
- The Khilafah will in all likelihood face a foreign attack;
local power generation through a decentralised grid re-enforces regional and
local grids – facilitating continuation of power in one region if another was
to lose power.
- In most Muslim lands, populations are distributed with a
larger percentage resident in rural areas rather than urban areas, a
decentralised energy infrastructure will help prevent the formation of
‘mega-cities’ and large urban conurbations seen throughout the world.
- Local grids will be a key element in providing power for
existing areas that do not have power.
- Without the need for power to be sent over long distances,
the larger power-plants would be used to ensure a secure supply for the heavy
industrial complexes and sensitive installations.
The stability of the grid should be secured by base-load
generation through Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT) and coal, as the Khilafah
progresses nuclear energy should take over from the role of gas. But it should
be noted; although nuclear energy is the most stable base-load generation
available, its commissioning and decommissioning costs are extremely expensive.
Through industrialisation the speed of the Khilafah’s depletion will increase,
in order to deal with this eventuality the Khilafah’s should put in place a
policy of researching for alternative sources of energy.
Through a decentralised grid local power generation can be achieved through the use of
renewables. The use of renewables depends on climatic and geographical
conditions of the region for which it is to be used for. Wind is the most
mature of all the renewable technologies, while Biomass generation is the most
stable. The most ideal situation in a decentralised network is where every
building is itself a power source. This could take place via the Khilafah
adopting building standards whereby all new buildings must have a certain
percentage of its energy needs met through micro-generation i.e. through solar
and Combined Heat and Power units. Pakistan and Bangladesh have huge hydropower
potential, whilst Indonesia and Malaysia have large wind power potential, at
the same time the Middle East has huge solar potential.
Conclusions
The Muslim world possesses all the necessary ingredients to
fulfil the Ummah’s energy needs, Allah (swt) has endowed the Muslim lands with
many minerals that are more than sufficient for the Khilafah to launch an
industrial revolution. The Khilafah would in fact from some perspectives be in
a much better position on the eve of its development then many of the
industrialised nations were. Germany, Japan and China all lacked the necessary
resources, it was this challenge that led Germany and Japan to colonise
resource rich nations. The US and Britain lacked the necessary population for
industrial development, this was overcome through enslaving the people of colonised
nations. This Khilafah will not have face problems as the Ummah number over 1
billion and the Islamic lands posses more than enough mineral resources for an
industrial revolution.
The current status quo only benefits the elites in the
Muslim world who live in their air conditioned palaces whilst the Ummah starve
in the towns in sweltering heat. Attempts by the World Bank and the United
nations to take charge of the energy potential present in the Muslim lands have
been designed to allow Western companies to take control of the oil fields, gas
fields and energy infrastructure in the name of the ‘market solution’ to the
energy crisis across the Muslims lands. The Muslims’ rulers have no intention
or ambition to make the Muslim world self sufficient in energy.
The development of the necessary energy infrastructure would
in reality create million of jobs which would lift million out of poverty in
the Muslim world. In turn the development of energy would have massive knock on
effects by stimulating the wider economy through the development of heavy industry,
manufacturing complexes, military industries, refineries and mills.
Many would contend that as energy, especially oil is a key
resource for the West they would carry out military intervention if the
Khilafah took charge of its own resources. De-classified documents have shown
the US and Britain were planning military action in the wake of the oil price
hikes in 1973. Such a theory is also used as a justification by many of the
Muslims’ rulers to continue oil exports to the West whilst their own population
suffer load shedding.
Whilst this reality is a possibility in reality the only
country who is heavily dependent on oil imports and would consider such an act
in its strategic interests is the USA. However the US currently is bleeding to death
in Iraq and Afghanistan and would need to carry out a sustained attack
involving millions of troops to wrestle control over the Muslim world’s oil
reserves. Venezuela has shown that nationalising ones energy resources does not
necessarily entail a US invasion.
The only assured strategy that will almost certainly ward
off the US and at the same time turn the Khilafah into a world power is
reunification with the Muslim world. Islam obliges only one state for the whole
Ummah and this means reunification with the Muslim world is compulsory. With
most of the Muslim world living under dictators in severe poverty unification
is not a difficult task to achieve, however it does face challenges. Aside from
Western agents who will want to hold onto their positions, the challenge to a
large extent will be the ability to expand and join the nations together
through linking their governance, judiciary, administration and economies. The
Soviet Union achieved such a feat in the past by building the Communist camp.
Wherever the Khilafah is established first it will have a very powerful
motivation which will easily make different nations become part of the union
and - that is Islam itself.
And (remember) when your Lord said to the angels:
"Verily, I am going to place mankind as a caliph on earth." They
said: "Will You place therein those who will make mischief therein and shed
blood, - while we glorify You with praises and thanks and sanctify You."
He (Allâh) said: "I know that which you do not know." (Al Baqara: 30)
