When Will the Help of God Come?

The relentlessness of injustice

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

I have been in a fog of late. My weeks pass like this: one day, I will have optimism and energy; I will try to do what I can to help people in Britain, Gaza, and other places. But the next day, I am exhausted. Physically, I can barely move. I get chronic migraines and chronic fatigue, and I try to wash away the tiredness and walk off the exhaustion, but it never works.

It is like the effort of being positive takes too much of a toll, mentally and physically.

Because it seems as if there is no reprieve. Any glimmer of hope seems to blow out as swiftly as a candle in a hurricane, and to light it again is to take on the full force of Mother Nature herself.

The injustice we face—individually and collectively—is relentless.

I do not know if it is a British phenomenon or one shared across the English-speaking Empire, but when officials in any capacity are shown to have made grave errors and horrific mistakes, rather than admit them, they double down. We saw this with the child murderer Lucy Letby. Management decided she was not causing the deaths of babies, and when new and further evidence showed the pattern looked like she was, the same management instead threatened to ruin the careers of the doctors who brought it to them by referring them to the GMC. And so, Lucy Letby continued to kill because of this culture of doubling down.

The same happened in the Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes cases. In the former, when evidence of massive facial bruises came in, social services doubled down on their initial belief that the referrals from Star’s great-grandmother were ‘malicious’ because Star’s abuser said that the great-grandmother did not like lesbians; and she and Star’s mother were a lesbian couple. So, the photos were ignored, and later, Star was murdered.

Arthur met a similar fate. Having initially decided they liked his dad, social services refused to change their narrative when evidence came in of extensive bruising and the fact that his step-mum—whose own children had been removed from her and were in care—could be doing anything wrong. They kept saying the family looked happy together when they visited and little Arthur was laughing, and his step-mum was seen as someone with ‘insight.’ Again, family referrals were miscategorized as a nuisance and as if they had a personal issue with Arthur’s dad and his girlfriend. Arthur was poisoned by salt, forced to sleep on the floor, forced to stand in the corridor without food, and then had his head smashed on the floor until he died by his 'insightful’ step-mum. His father even wrote a text to her telling her he would ‘bury’ Arthur when he got home. But anyone in an official capacity in Britain refuses to be wrong, and they double down and double down and double down, so children get harmed, abused, and killed.

Children’s services in the UK are a joke and cause so much harm to children you would not believe. Their behaviour and biases, their complete lack of insight, and this continued doubling down is their modus operandi and they are not fit for service.

It’s not just with children though. The IPP (imprisonment for public protection) prison sentences are a travesty of humanity. These sentences, now banned - but inexplicably not retrospectively—were meant for the worst of offenders. We are talking child murderers and serial killers. The idea was that these offenders would have a minimum tariff which could be exceeded if probation did not think they were safe enough to enter society again. Instead, they were given to people like black kids who stole bikes. One kid whose tariff was 2 years for stealing a bike (and whose sentence would have been a maximum of two years if he had had a fair and normal sentence) was given an IPP and has been in prison 16 years, mentally broken.

IPP sentences are an affront to humanity and an affront to dignity. They are not there for rehabilitation or fair punishment of crime but to keep people locked in indeterminate detention at the whim of probation officers. As we have seen in just the very few examples above, officialdom has its fair share of pettiness: a little bit of ‘power’ goes to one’s head and their ability to double down and wield that power over another human life gets them crazy drunk.

IPP sentences are so sadistically cruel that their creator, David Blunkett, regrets them terribly, realizes they have been used incorrectly and ultra vires, and has spent his later life fighting for them to be banned retrospectively and for these prisoners to be freed.

There are nearly 3,000 IPP prisoners past tariff still in prisons. Covid delayed their probation hearings by years. Petty probation officers double down on stupid rhetoric in order to keep them in longer. Why? No reason. There is no reason why the majority are not out. They have served their time. They have done their punishment. Everyone deserves another chance once they have served a determined time in prison.

Doubling down when evidence shows your initial view to be wrong is a form of arrogance, sadism, and evil. It is borne from a deep misery of the outcome of one’s own life that they choose to kick down and keep on kicking nonstop, especially with more vehemence and anger towards those who they have personally wronged. I remember listening to a talk by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf: he said people are most angry with those whom they have wronged. They are so angry with them that they wrong them more. This is the nature of humans. This is why injustice—often so easy to see and so easy to correct—takes years and years and decades to get; because of this refusal to be wrong, the hatred of being wrong, and the despising of those whom one has wronged.

So turn then to a world that pours injustice like a waterfall on an ant. The relentless onslaught of it. It never stops. And when the ant calls out and points out the wrongs, the injustice becomes heavier, more urgent, until the ant can do nothing but brace itself or drown.

Palestinians have felt this relentless onslaught for decades. The smears, the lies, the torture, the kidnapping, the infanticide, the murder. What is so surreal and yet describes Shaykh Hamza’s words so precisely, is that the hatred of those they have wronged is seen with such keenness in the IOF. We saw it when they killed Shireen Abu Akleh. It wasn’t enough that they killed her; they had to destroy her funeral. The wrong they committed was so great they were compelled to commit more.

This behaviour is only seen when someone KNOWS they are wrong and have done wrong and have caused injustice.

We see it in Gaza. The IOF kill children and their parents. Then they throw them in mass graves. Then they COME BACK to the graves to desecrate the bodies more, steal the organs, urinate on them, etc. They defile dead bodies because they feel compelled to do even more injustice, even more wrong to the ones they have wronged.

It is why judges refuse to listen to appeals—creating torturous mental acrobatics to deny an individual justice. When someone is wrong, it takes courage and goodness to address it, but the low rate of appeals being heard shows that careerist judges are not chosen for moral aptitude nor do they—in the majority—possess it.

I do not know why people do this. Maybe it is an unconscious knowledge emanating from their souls, that the person they have wronged has taken from them some of their humanity and their respect in the eyes of God. Maybe on this level, they feel ashamed and frustrated, angry and furious; but instead of laying the blame on themselves, where it lies, they attack the one who they say caused them to fall into error—the one whom they wronged. It’s classic DARVO—a narcissistic trick, where the are the forever victim of the evil they have wrought on others.

We have seen the state of Israel doing this en masse, continuously and perpetually since inception. And the more they state their DAVRO victimhood, the more their rage continues; the more we see it consume them from the inside; the more they go back to dead bodies and try to defile them till there is nothing. Nethayahu looks angry and devil-like because he is the personification of all we have been told Lucifer is: arrogant, dishonest, evil and sadistic.

I say to people the most powerful word is sorry. Sorry, I was wrong. Sorry, my initial view was incorrect. I am often wrong about people, not maliciously, but because I am human. My perspective is always skewed because it is subjective; as are all of ours. When more facts come and objectivity can take root, then I reassess. I always reassess. I never, ever continue with my initial thoughts unless evidence shows them to be correct.

That’s how humans should act. That’s how we do not.

Under this relentless injustice, I do not know how to live. Is it only in the English-speaking world? If I venture outside, will I find people with more balanced judgments; more thoughtful ways of living?

Or are we trapped in a world that has committed itself to injustice as its very foundation, with all notions of justice systematically dismantled? Have we embraced the darkness as a species, with our systems of justice fully complicit in obstructing it?

I ask my friends all the time. “Please, habibitee, are we in hell? Are we there? Is this what hell is? Waching depravity and cruelty and not being able to do anything? Being taunted with it? Knowing injustice and the doubling down of it; that every fight against it makes it worse? This mental torture we live in; tell me, is this hell? Are we there? Are we living in it?”

There is a verse in the Qur’an. It says:

“Do you think you will be admitted into Paradise without being tested like those before you? They were afflicted with suffering and adversity and were so shaken that ˹the Messenger and the believers with him cried out, “When will Allah’s help come?””

The answer comes straight after:

“Indeed, Allah’s help is near.”

I am exhausted at the relentlessness of the injustice we are facing. I am exhausted at the relentlessness of the injustice the Palestinians and Sudanese, Congolese, Somalis, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemeni, and Afghanis - so many of the global majority, are facing. I am exhausted at the relentlessness of the injustice I am personally facing (which I will share soon). I am exhausted and I am exhausted.

Every day, my heart beats widely in despair and my eyes fill with tears and everything in my sight swims, and my mind falls into the depths of darkness where light can’t reach.

And so I turn to the sky and ask God, “Mata nasru Allah?” When will the Help of Allah come?

And in my mind I hear, “Inna nasra Allahi qareeban”

Indeed, Allah’s help is near.

I hope beyond hope it is near. But the near feels so far under this drowning flood of evil.