Thursday Fasting Reminder: Islam that Liberates

This is part of our twice-a-week initiative to fast every Monday and Thursday, in line with the Sunnah, in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and in our attempt to remember them, not only in our mind, but also in our bodies.

The image you are seeing above is an article from the New York Times dated 20 November 1945. We Indonesians remember this as the Battle of Surabaya, one of the bloodiest battles against colonialism in our long struggle for independence; while they, the colonisers, remember it as a disturbance incident where "Muslim Fanatics Fight in Surabaya".

For those of us who have been following, and trying to deconstructing, how the Western media has been dehumanizing Palestinians in the past more than 75 years, and even more so in the past 2 years, it is glaring how the language that is being used is eerily similar.

To quote a few from The New York Times article:

Religious Leaders in Charges Against Tanks

Frenzied attacks by Indonesian nationalists on British tanks in Surabaya, with 1,000 or more Muslim troops charging into a deadly crossfire

The Indonesian often were led into the fighting my Mohammedan religious leaders, and were charging upright into British machine guns without the thought of loss of life.

This is not poor journalism—it is imperial propaganda. It depicts us as irrational, suicidal, driven by religious intoxication. This is what Edward Said called Orientalism: the systematic production of the “irrational Muslim Other” to justify European domination. Our fight for liberation becomes a spectacle of chaos. Our martyrs are rewritten as bloodthirsty mobs. The Western archive cannot see dignity in our resistance—because it would indict itself.

But do you remember the picture of Faris Odeh, the Palestinian boy throwing stone against Israeli tank? Will they, the colonisers, understand the unbending determination to fight for dignity and independence, even when the entire system is designed to crush you, even when you are robbed of any fair chance to fight, even when the enemy is enveloped in armored tanks and all you have are rocks?

It is interesting to note that, on the same day this article was published, 20 November 1945, the West began the Nuremberg trial to prosecute Nazis. But while they condemned genocide in Europe, they were violently suppression liberation struggles across the colonised world - including ours in Indonesia. That’s not justice; that’s imperial hypocrisy.

On 17 August 1945, Indonesia declared independence. It was a Friday. Within an hour of the radio broadcast, Dr. Agus, a congregant at Masjid Kauman Semarang, climbed the pulpit and publicly announced the independence of Indonesia from Japanese occupation and Dutch colonialism. This act of defiance provoked an immediate response. The Japanese launched a search. Dr. Agus fled to Jakarta and never returned; he died in exile.

That mosque became more than a house of worship. It became a site of political rupture—a place where Islam and resistance fused. Out of six officially recognized religions in Indonesia, only one house of worship—Masjid Kauman—declared independence on the day itself. This is not incidental. Islam was not on the sidelines of revolution. It was its engine.

The colonial narrative erases this. It strips Islam of its liberatory history and flattens it into a private, apolitical practice. But we refuse to forget.

The West does not fear our beliefs—it fears our memory. It fears our refusal to assimilate. It fears that we do not accept the colonial condition of silence.

They dehumanize us in the media. They call us radicals. They frame our politics as extremism and our resistance as terror. But let us be clear: the same Islam they fear is the Islam that liberated us.

We were never the irrational ones. They were. It is irrational to believe that a people can be bombed, starved, colonized, and caged for 75+ years and not rise up. It is irrational to believe that we must apologize for existing.

I used to ask why Allah made Muslim women so visible—why we walk through the world marked so visibly in our hijab in a time of surveillance, hostility, and racial profiling.

Now, I understand.

My hijab is a refusal. It is a statement that I do not belong to the colonial order, and I will not be integrated into its false liberalism. When I enter a room, my hijab speaks before I do. It refuses to let the room forget what the empire wants to erase.

Be Muslim. Be proud.

Not the kind they find acceptable.

The kind they fear—because we remember.

They will call your resistance fanaticism.

They will call your mourning extremism.

They will call your faith backward.

They will call your Islam political—and they will be right.

It is.

And it always has been.

We fast for Gaza.

We fast for Surabaya.

We fast for ourselves.

And we do not fast quietly.

Written in preparation of Sunnah fasting on Thursday, 27 Safar 1447 Unified Global Hijri Calendar (UGHC) or 21 August 2025 AD.