Receiving the Wound
One thousand days after the flood
A Shaheed, martyr in Arabic, is someone who bears witness. It is someone who demonstrates what is possible, and through the bearing of this witness, enlightens those with hearts to see.
I once heard it said that October 7 made a martyr of Gaza, and this might be true, but not in the cynical way it was intended. Gaza has borne witness. It has shown us what liberation looks like. The cost of it, and more importantly, that it is possible.
Over the past two or three years, it has become clear that Gazans do not see the world the way the rest of us do. Our mortal worldview is narrow and foggy. It baulks at sacrifice, it debases courage and it abhors community. It leaves one unmoved by word or deed, choosing instead to scrutinise discourse, or wallow in resentment.
The Gazans choose to cradle a flickering light. Those grieving parents, the orphans stoically recounting what can only be scenes from a horror film, the prisoners describing the depravity they endured; their words, whether spoken, sung or written, constantly reference a path that leads to liberation, their sentences are pregnant with signifiers within a coherent value system, complete with a roadmap for praxis.
For most of us the introduction was in Abu Obeida’s speeches. These eloquent communiques to ‘the free people of the world’ stand upon a great body of literature, one that has been obscured and interrupted. We all have access to it, but it is the Gazans and the Southern Lebanese who revere it, live by it, and add to it. The attentive listener was jolted into reality when Abu Obeida recited:
يا عابدَ الحَرَمينِ لوْ أبصرْتَنا لَعلمْتَ أنّك في العبادةِ تَلْعبُ
1مَنْ كان يَخْضِبُ خدَّهُ بدموعِهِ فَنُحُورُنا بِدِمَائِنا تَتَخَضَّبُ
Quoting from an epistle sent by Abdullah Bin Mubarak in the year 197 Hijri (812BC) from the battle front in Aleppo to Al Fadeel Bin Ayyad, who abandoned the frontline to dedicate himself to worship in Mecca and Madinah.
An overview of this literature is a task far too ambitious for this occasion. However, one notable addition I want to highlight is a book written in the tunnels underneath Gaza by father, scholar, educator and Deputy Company Commander of Al Qassam Brigades Mohammad Zaki Hamad.
Mohammad Zaki Hamad started writing his book deep in the tunnels under Beit Hannoun, in northern Gaza, about a month and a half into the war. It would be his second full length book, after publishing his Master’s degree dissertation, The Informative Values of the Holy Quran, alongside numerous pamphlets and sermons. Four days before his martyrdom, he sent the final chapters to his brother. He was martyred on June 12, 2025.
Alongside a will directed to his wife and children, Hamad left explicit instructions to his brother to publish the book anonymously. Like most posthumous publications, at least some of the author’s instructions were ignored. Anonymity is essential for security, however, Hamad requested anonymity even though the book was only to be published in the case of his martyrdom.
In an interview with Hamad’s elder brother Abdul Rahman on the invaluable Jisr podcast, he explains the reasoning behind the author’s request to publish the book anonymously. Abdul Rahman Zaki, a scholar and educator himself, explains that Hamad’s inclination towards anonymity with this book comes from same ethos that makes fighters hide their faces, and are always covered up or blurred.
It is because these men do what they do for God. They do it for a cause and an ideal, and they see fame and glory as distractions that murk the purity of their struggle. They insist on covering their faces and hide their names to make sure that Al Riya’, doing good for show, does not creep into their hearts. Hamad’s brother refers to this as the culture of the Litham. The veil.
The book is titled Under the Banner of The Toufan, after the name of the battle that took place on October 7th, Touffan Al Aqsa. The subtitle, Khabbab’s Trench, references Khabbab ibn al-Aratt, one of the earliest converts to Islam - the sixth, in fact - and the first to declare it in the face of Qurayshi elites who viciously persecuted the early Muslims.
Khabbab was a slave, and so particularly vulnerable to the abuse of his master, Umm al-Anmar.
Umm al-Anmar used to torture him severely: She would have him wrapped in a palm-fibre mat and placed on the fire, and nothing would extinguish the fire beneath him except the melting fat of his back. When his suffering was mentioned before the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him), he would say: “O Allah, help Khabbab.”
Demoralised from all the abuse, Khabbab came to the prophet seeking to inquire about divine help and its nature, about trial and its duration, and about falsehood and its ferocity. What is it? Until when? How would these hardships end?
It is narrated by Khabbab, who said: “We came to the Messenger of Allah while he was reclining, leaning on his cloak in the shade of the Kaaba. We complained to him, saying: ‘Will you not seek help for us? Will you not supplicate to Allah for us?’ So he sat up, his face reddened.”
The Prophet answered thus:
“Before your time a man would have a pit dug for him in the earth and be put in it, then a saw would be brought and placed above his head which would be split in two, but that would not turn him away from his religion. He would be combed with iron combs below his flesh in bone and sinew, but that would not turn him away from his religion. I swear by God that this matter will reach perfection, so that a rider will go from Sanaa to Hadramaut fearing nothing but God, or a wolf which may attack his sheep; but you are in a hurry.”2
I sense the psychological state of our master Khabbab, that companion of the Prophet who gained profound understanding through Allah’s established ways (sunan) and whose connection to Islam was forged through suffering and sacrifice. For our master Khabbab underwent a practical experience that shook the foundations of the old, ignorant mindset (Jāhiliyya) and established an Islamic mindset that coexists with wounds and grows accustomed to them.
The great act of worship in which our master Khabbab truly excelled was not the night prayers, nor memorising texts, nor charitable works and voluntary projects, rather, it was ‘receiving the wound’. This is the distinctive worship of our master Khabbab. This is the arena in which your relationship with Allah will not mature until you stand firm within it.
So writes Mohammad Zaki Hamad in the preface to his book.
The prophet’s answer to Khabab’s pleas is jarring. It defies our sensibilities. Hasn’t he suffered enough, you want to protest.
A quieter soul would ponder the prophet’s words, would try to think why the famously kind Muhammad peace be upon him, would retort in such a manner. If we let the prophet’s words in, a truth might slowly dawn:
We want the world we live in today, as it is, but with a free Palestine.
What the people of Gaza and southern Lebanon taught us is that for Palestine to be liberated, the world must change. And that change requires sacrifice.
In an interview with the children and widow of Qassam Brigades Commander-in-Chief Mohammad al-Deif, we learn how his children were brought up on one principle, one goal: the liberation of al-Aqsa. They go to school to liberate al-Aqsa, they get a job to liberate al-Aqsa, they get married to liberate al-Aqsa, they’re kind to their neighbours because they want to liberate al-Aqsa, they start families to liberate al-Aqsa, and if they don’t, their children will liberate al-Aqsa, and if not them, their children’s children will liberate al-Aqsa. It is inevitable, as is their sacrifice. This is a materially different reality from demanding a free Palestine without being willing to endure even discomfort. From wanting the same world we live in now, but with a free Palestine.
This is not vague deferment or an ambiguous end times doctrine. It is doable in the here and now. It is already happening. Gaza has shown us. The change has already been set in motion.
The author situates himself alongside Khabbab during the Battle of the Trench 5 Hijri (627 AD), when several regional powers united to wipe out the small band of Muslim believers. After a Persian convert teaches the muslims how to dig trenches, a yet unfamiliar technique in that backwards land, they go on to endure a 27-day siege, and then win this minor battle in a marginal territory between two empires, the Roman and the Persian.
It is unthinkable that within a few years, those same people who barely survived the Battle of The Trench will go on to fight empires. The rational, reasonable, pragmatic, realistic, scientific view, whatever you want to call it, would have compellingly argued that these people have no business fighting not one but two great empires at once. Yet within a decade, that same generation managed to upend the world, inflicting terrible losses on the Romans and total defeat on the Persians.
Moral victory paved the way for triumph in battle. Terrible injustices were prevalent during the Jāhiliyya, in Quraysh and elsewhere: slavery, licentiousness, debauchery, murder of children, selling of children. The parallels with the world we live in today are clear: starting with Epstein and ending with the average weekend in London or Dubai.
Gaza’s moral victory is clear. It defies left and right, liberal and conservative. This horizontal spectrum proved to be redundant because it offers nothing of difference. The left is the right, the liberal is the conservative. Underneath the divergent discourse, both agree that the world is strictly material.
Gaza gives us a vertical spectrum. Not left and right, but up and down. Not liberal and conservative, but sacred and profane; material and transcendent; good and evil. We have always been told to aspire to humanity, and we forgot that in fact we start from humanity. We ought to look up, aspire to what is nobler.
My horizontal language, shaped by years of reading materialist philosophy and literature made it difficult for me to translate the preface quoted above. It was a predicament I had not anticipated. I realised my literary faculties have always been captured in landscape mode. Hamad’s book addresses us using language rooted in divine revelation, and with that comes a rationality that defies defeat, and a vocabulary that insists on liberation, complete and without compromise. This language that warns of the “loss of the heart’s life”, does not allow for accords of the Oslo variety. Life without dignity and justice is a fate much worse than death.
Those of us who wrote stories or composed songs have found ourselves in a dilemma after al-Aqsa Flood, and all that came after it. Our work subscribed to a worldview that was suddenly untenable. The values informing a lot of music, literature, and film had long been a pendulum swinging between nihilism and hedonism. There was an unspoken consensus that nothing mattered, nothing had meaning beyond pleasure.
Gaza showed us that all it takes to render nihilism obsolete is one act of sacrifice. And we have seen endless sacrifice in Gaza. Meaning comes from a simple act, an act that all faith stands upon, and it is this: to decide to believe, and by that act, to inscribe meaning. If there is meaning, then some things do actually matter. What follows is the question: What is it that matters?
One way to describe the aforementioned moral vacuum comes from Marxist turned Catholic philosopher Alasdair McIntyre in his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. In it, he paints a picture of the moral landscape prevalent today: Imagine the world long after an apocalyptic event. The few who survived have lost all connection to our civilisation, they roam the earth and see artefacts from our time: an engine here, a blowdryer there, a remote control, a scanner, a crane, strewn around without context. They have no idea what these things are for, how they work or how they were made, so they develop their own ways of using them, almost always far from their intended purposes.
For McIntyre, this is the state of morals in the world today. We know the words bravery, honesty, chastity, loyalty, but not what they mean or where they come from, why they’re important, or what system of belief created and sustained them. They have become empty shells.
In Gaza, these words are full and round and weighty. They are hot, juicy, nourishing, like a perfectly cooked dim-sum. They have an actionable aftertaste. In resistance literature, one finds a coherent value system, and a roadmap for praxis that is thoughtful and pliable.
In a translation of ʿAbd Allāh Yūsuf al-Laddāwī, “The Seeds of Hamas: A Report on Promoting the Values and Morals of Islam in Palestinian Society” (2025), by Mujamma Harakat, the nom de guerre of an excellent translator and publisher of resistance literature, appears this passage: Our beloved Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid, in his epistle, Hamas Symbolism, writes that: “Hamas, in all its steps, balances and manages, tightens then loosens; these are the laws of politics and practicing jihad. The image of the leaders of Hamas is that of the sailors who navigate their ship, leading it by the wind by tugging the sail. They pull the ropes of the sail in order to maintain balance, lest it capsize.”
Mohammad Zaki Hamad was on the frontlines from Day One. Deep in the trenches, less than a kilometer from the Israeli Army’s assembly, he writes of conditions that are ‘unbearable.’ 150 x 180cm on average, often dug with hand tools, the tunnels ‘are not hotels, not even homes. They are graves.’ Many lives and limbs were lost digging them. Men were buried alive in them long before October 7th.
He describes the first thirty days of bombardment of unprecedented intensity, and in particular ten days when he and his brethren were completely cut off after some of the tunnels collapsed and poisonous gas was pumped into them. No contact, no food and very little water. They were presumed martyred. Absentee funeral prayers were held for them.
They survived by rationing their water to the measure of the bottle cap. Each taking a sip and handing over the cap to the man next to him.
The ‘thirty day school’ was soon over and the fighters emerged, famished and with various illnesses. Many were martyred. They were all killed by aerial bombardment, none in direct combat. No one shall know their names but God, Hamad tells us, and that is more than enough.
After his 30-day ordeal, Hamad soon recovered, and went on to ‘forget its pain, but not its lessons.’ Us too, we ought to not forget, or miss entirely, the lessons learnt since October of 2023. A powerful beam of light shoots out of that small strip called Gaza, connecting it to the heavens. This light guides and reveals.
Turn away at your own peril.
O pious worshipper of the two sanctuaries
had you seen us you would know your’s is but play
He who dyes their cheek with his tears
Our throats with our blood are dyed
Transmitted by Al Bukhari.