This July in Empire: On Wars, Sanctions & Blockades That Keep the Ummah Dependent
For this Ummah, times continue to be historic and events momentous. Wars, sanctions and blockades all echo old patterns of imperial control over Muslim resources.
Iran is still under fire, and the West Bank is being violently occupied by settlers. Meanwhile, Lebanon mourns a loss, and Gaza lies in ruins. All the while, the US won’t stop its harassment for the sake of capital, bullying the world into obedience through never-ending tariffs.
Needless to say, politics driven by moneyed interests is as old as empire itself. In the modern era, the British secured near complete control over Gulf oil — as local rulers ceded the region’s wealth in return for military protection — yet again ensuring resources were put to imperial rather than native use.
Then as Pax Britannica came to naught, it was the US that inherited and modernised this model of external control. Its punitive potential was demonstrated most definitively in the brutal 1990–2003 sanctions on Iraq, siege warfare which “killed an entire country” erasing two million people.
That template — using trade and finance as tools of coercion to discipline a state — was refined further against Iran over the past many decades, via sanctions on oil exports, SWIFT exclusion and dollar-clearing restrictions. The global financial system has in effect become weaponised.
The same logic permeates today the actions of imperial clients like Saudi Arabia whose stranglehold on essential supplies has turned Yemen into yet another failed state and a humanitarian disaster.
Be it through oil concessions, naval and air blockades, or financial warfare, the mechanism of controlling the lifelines of a poor but proud nation has remained remarkably consistent across a century.
Tayyib investor takeaway: Contrary to what conventional analysts might suggest, sanctions, energy blockades and chokepoints are not to be seen as “market opportunities” but rather red flags. It means corporate profits accruing from such malignancies will inevitably be the result of strangling whole societies, as in Iraq, Iran, Cuba and Palestine over decades. So do your tayyib audit: avoid arms‑linked shippers, fossil majors that cash in on crises, GCC state entities; instead prioritise stocks that feed, treat and connect people — among names I have previously covered, food producers like Indofood, healthcare players like IHH, neutral logistics like Mitratel, and Asian renewables like Solarvest.
Digital transmutation of colonialism
There is also another, digital dimension to the economic entrapment of the Ummah. After all, the very first global communications network was an imperial enterprise, then a British monopoly. By the 19th century, the All-Red Line became a powerful tool of control for empire managers, from Suez and Aden to Penang and Hong Kong.
Today the buildout of the Internet follows the same colonial logic. Cable projects of tech giants like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta — such as Equiano and 2Africa — follow old trade routes through the Global South, monetising data, while local economies see little benefit other than hosting fees and construction jobs.
Because US multinationals control the infrastructure — hardware, software, networks — they set the rules, extract rent on cloud and platforms, and harvest massive amounts of data for surveillance‑based advertising and AI. The result is informational power concentrated in the hands of Big Tech corporations, instead of countries generating the data.
For as long as ownership and control over the physical backbone of the digital world — submarine cables and data centres — is foreign, in the absence of strong local protection rules, data colonialism throughout the Muslim world will persist, with poor countries supplying raw data and electricity and the Global North earning from high-margin value‑added services.
Tayyib investor takeaway: AI infrastructure plays should be screened not just for interest but for who ultimately controls (e.g., US hyperscalers) and benefits (e.g., Israel via Project Nimbus); stay away hyperscaler-heavy ETFs complicit in Nimbus-style deals in favour of genuinely sovereign or non-aligned Asian infrastructure.
Colonial finance in action
Among common tools of imperial control, debt has been the most inconspicuous of them all, and unfailingly consistent too. Debt dependence is an ultimate weapon in the arsenal of western capitalist power, one that keeps the world, including Muslim-majority nations, economically subordinate.
This ties directly to the Islamic prohibition of riba — which is not merely a personal piety rule but rather our systematic rejection of debt dependence that roots global power imbalances.
Interest-based finance historically emerged as a byproduct of colonial capitalism’s wealth extraction from the Global South. Egypt’s swift descent into a debt trap on the eve of the 20th century — and subsequently into full British control — could not be more illustrative. Once fiscal sovereignty was gone, political sovereignty dissolved. Tunisia’s own default and colonisation by France came just a decade earlier. Even the Ottoman Empire, the last of caliphates, suffered a similar fate, its customs, railways and tax systems falling into the hands of European bondholders.
So-called “development finance” that came after decolonisation in practice amounted to the same repression. Modern market gendarmes (like the IMF, World Bank, Eurobond managers, SWIFT) have been extending the old pattern of colonial extraction by preying on developing countries — the very countries that had been drained bone dry by former colonisers — and their need for capital.
The IMF and World Bank’s ruthless free market agendas shattered the economies of too many developing nations, forcing cuts in social spending, privatisation of state enterprises and opening of borders to imported goods (including arms). Instead of focusing on productive self-sufficiency and knowledge-based competition, they would be locked into narrow commodity exporting positions — mainly to service debt obligations. Pakistan, Bangladesh, a whole bunch of Arab states have all been there.
Today the global financial system performs the same disciplining function, and with great efficiency. Governments that dare resist western empire are instantly cut off by SWIFT (think Russia), their financial assets frozen and credit downgraded. Eurobonds denoted in dollars or euros make the Global South ever more susceptible to the whims and fancies of financiers sitting in New York and London. In essence, the mechanism that emptied the Ottoman treasury has simply been digitised and centralised.
Tayyib investor takeaway: Debt remains a key lever for western imperialism. The Global Majority continues to spend many times more on servicing debt than essential services like education. Hence, for Muslims avoiding riba can end up being both worship and a small act of anti-imperialist resistance. Our shifting savings into asset‑backed, profit‑sharing and local cooperative models is us escaping the toxic architecture of contemporary finance. And when investing, refusing to contribute to the capitalist machinery of destruction is the only responsible way.
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