Alas for Gaza, the Ruin of Moral Authority

In the eighth century, one Muslim man, one Muslim moral authority, singlehandedly barred an army of Abbasid soldiers from committing ethnic cleansing and collective punishment against the protected Christian population of Lebanon. His name was Imām al-Awzāʿī, and he was one of the most renowned scholar-sages of his time; indeed, the founder of a madhhab or school of legal thought that dominated the Levant and Andalus for a century.

A single man: not an international institution, a criminal court of justice, or a conference of ‘united’ nations. Yet in 2023, in 2024, and then in 2025, namely thirteen hundred years later, all of the organizations, courts, and apparatuses of a nominal ‘international community’, showed themselves incapable of halting one of its minor member states from carrying out a relentless series of the most unspeakably savage and bloodthirsty atrocities seen since the Second World War, primarily against helpless children. Not a single man; hundreds of individuals in positions of great apparent influence and authority as defined by a ‘rules-based’ international system. But their words, and their measures, were without effect. More than that: the worst atrocities, the worst images of the War, and the brazen insistence on the assault on Rafah, and subsequently on Gaza City, came after the International Court of Criminal Justice found Israel to be culpable in plausible genocide.

Now what of Imām al-Awzāʿī’s powerful moral intervention? In 759, a Christian insurgent named Theodore had led the Christian population of Mount Lebanon in an uprising against the Abbasid authorities, a rebellion ostensibly engendered by crippling taxation. The mutiny was violent, and indiscriminate, not merely pursuing the authorities but moreover leading to the senseless killing of local Muslim villagers, and this prompted the Abbasid provincial governor Ṣāliḥ Ibn ʿAlī, to dispatch an army to quash the rebellion. Yet the governor soon wished to go further than that: he sought to exploit this unrest as an opportunity to expel the Christian population of Mount Lebanon altogether.

And it was at this point that the great imām of the Levant intervened. ‘How can the generality be punished for crimes that are particular,’ Imām al-Awzāʿī asked, in a famous letter to Ibn ʿAlī, ‘even, indeed, to the point where they are driven out of their homes and despoiled of their wealth?’ He then cited the Qur’anic verse, {No soul shall bear the sin of another}, and a celebrated teaching of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ concerning excellence in treatment of non-Muslim minorities: ‘Whomsoever oppresses the one with whom a covenant has been made, and burdens him beyond his capacity, I shall be his adversary.’

This moving conveyance of the Divine judgement, delivered by an imām of supreme moral authority, was sufficient to cause the Abbasids to altogether abandon their plans for ethnic cleansing and collective punishment. For that was a time in which moral authority and moral certainties would straightforwardly trump ‘realist’ politics in any direct confrontation. Our contemporary world, conversely, is locked in a war between natural law and the basest forms of Machiavellianism — typically modified by arbitrarist Will-to-Powerism — a war which is now in its final stages, because the decisive triumph of that neo-Machiavellianism is nigh. Now, the post-WWII settlement had indeed attempted a resurrection — in charters of human rights, the UN, and international law — of a natural law which despite attempts at Medieval principial synthesis was impaired from its very advent by its naturalistic, immanentist origins and circular structure of justification.

The most eminent relics of pre-modernity, led by the renowned Thomist Jacques Maritain no less, were resuscitated for the sake of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one last attempt to stem the tide of the post-moral techno-barbarism that had been unleashed in the two world wars. Therein, in order to make the attempt to command truly universal acceptability even under conditions of modernity, Maritain invoked jus gentium, an isthmus of commonly agreed principles intermediate between natural and positive law, in aid of placating those unable to make the sundry metaphysical commitments implied by traditions of natural law.

But too late, at least in the historical scheme of things in the Western world, and to no lasting avail. We now live in an age in which even the most evident of moral certainties is ever-ripe to be interpreted as an arbitrary choice, permanently subject to the dismal cost-benefit and risk calculations of selfish prudentialism. And while by the dictates of the natural moral hypocrisy of the unpurified soul, most would like to be seen to align with natural law and the moral high ground, in the domain of action, neo-Machiavellianism will always win. For the extramental instantiation of morality demands as its prerequisite moral certitude; and in its absence, morality will never be able truly to determine action.

Yet signs of hope amass on the horizon. In a signal that the illusion of liberalist justice and morality may soon be shattered once and for all, the contemporary liberal internationalist establishment seems to have suddenly lost the ability even to pretend to moral high-mindedness. In what the Portuguese thinker Bruno Maçães has recently called the ‘end of hypocrisy’, the US and its allies now largely prefer to profess and invoke simple might-is-rightism, over their previous genuflections to moral piety and the perpetuation of a common good for the world. Perhaps in this new clarity there is hope for the opening of new moral routes and possibilities.

In the foregoing I did not, of course, intend to compare the Christian rebels and the Abbasids to the Palestinians and Israel; for one thing, the Abbasid treatment of minorities under their jurisdiction was almost infinitely superior to the barbarism that has been shown to the Palestinians over the course of what Rashid Khalidi has called ‘the hundred years war on Palestine.’ Rather, the event of Imām al-Awzāʿī’s decisive, and even more importantly, efficacious intervention, goes to show just how much we have lost under conditions of philosophical modernity and postmodernity, in the denial of the subordination of the political domain to the ethical.

True peace is and always has been the harvest of true morality, and true morality that of knowledge of reality and the timeless good. Regardless of our times and places, therefore, let us always embrace the risks of moral courage.