بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

O believers afflicted by calamity! The capitalist ideology has killed an entire generation: will you still persist with it?!

On the eve of Saturday 10/09/2011 CE, the Zanzibar Isles were afflicted with an unparalleled historic calamity that spread grief, tears and pain into every house, with the capsizing of the MV Spice Islander in the Nungwi area. This is the worst and most severe accident to have afflicted Muslims of these islands, as the passengers are estimated to have reached 3,000 yet, those saved do not reach even a quarter of that number. Thus, this calamity reduced a large portion of Muslims, despite their relatively small number in these islands, a calamity that managed to wipe out entire families, from grandparents to grandchildren, whilst leaving other families without actively working men, child-bearing women and children, who are the hope of the future. No doubt, this calamity afflicted virtually every family in these islands. Hizb ut Tahrir East Africa, despite its activists being themselves victims of this calamity, also extends its hand of condolence and support to other victims. May Allah increase our reward and forgive all our deceased. Amin!

After standing with you in this grief and advising all to show patience since this is Qadhaa wherein the command lies with Allah Ta’ala Alone, we are also obliged to carefully scrutinise human action in this calamity. We state that it is a great sin to merely advise people to be patient and to avoid accounting human beings! It should be clear that human actions in the sphere that man controls belong to the human being, and these actions have a specific guidance whether to perform or abstain according to the Islamic Shari’ah. Thus man is accountable for his actions if he becomes negligent in this sphere through punishment in this life and the Hereafter. We are not questioning the Qadhaa of Allah; rather we are questioning human actions in the sphere that man controls with the criterion for such action being halal or haram not Qadhaa.

With respect to the capsizing of the MV Spice Islander there appears, clear as day, human negligence, open government contempt, disdain for passengers etc. As a start, travel between Zanzibar and Pemba Islands has been fraught with difficulty for many years, such that passengers are forced to compete with each other for any vessel, since there are no alternatives. It is nearly 40 years since the government bought passenger vessels, before they disappeared. After the deterioration following the disappearance of government vessels, virtually all other passenger vessels between Zanzibar and Pemba, leaving aside speedboats and such like, have been old vessels offering poor and irregular service offering passengers zoo-like transport. These vessels are obviously over-loaded before the very eyes of relevant government agencies, yet no official questions them, rather such officials corruptly take the opportunity to add their own illicit passengers. Safety is never a consideration, and people are gathered together like charcoal gunny bags. No lessons were taken from previous capsizing such as those of MV Kabul at the end of the 1990s and MV Fathi with respect to improving the comfort and safety of the majority downtrodden using these vessels. Rather business as usual continued: Greedy vessel owners and corrupt government officials, who both chase after wealth illicitly ‘by any means necessary’ at the risk of mass calamity! Secondly, after all the above negligence and contempt, the government completely failed to mobilise quickly upon news of the accident, at midnight but rather negligently failed to appear for many hours. The government was outdone by the poor villagers of the nearby area, particularly those of Nungwi who, driven by their faith and humanitarian instinct, quickly and bravely moved to mount relief and life-saving operations to the best of their ability, despite poor equipment and difficuly living conditions, until the government belatedly and shamelessly announced it had taken over relief operations many hours after the incident had occurred! May Allah richly reward all those who assisted. Amin!

The villagers did all that, whilst the government slept soundly… Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un! Not satisfied with that, the government then added salt to open wound, by organising a collective prayer for all victims that shamelessly included Christian prayers, despite everyone knowing full well that virtually all the victims are Muslims and that Zanzibar is a Muslim country! Furthermore the government continues to deliberately hide the true numbers of the dead to hide its guilt, despite their relatives knowing full well that their loved ones were on the doomed ferry, down to each soul and each name. Is the government not openly insulting the bereaved relatives and treating them as if they are lunatics crying over persons who never died?! In truth, there is much more to say than can be included in this leaflet, and our grief is greater than can be stated, even if our tears turned into ink!

O beloved Muslims of the Zanzibar Isles! The true leader never evades his people thus Hizb ut Tahrir East Africa again reminds you, and we will never tire of reminding you, that the source of all our troubles is the corrupt capitalist ideology that gives birth to democratic governments. This ideology cares only for benefit/interest; it deliberately ignores halal and haram, the Hereafter, innate human dignity and even human life. So what can we expect from a government borne of this corrupt ideology except evils and troubles?! Who does not know about how such governments across the world are harming their citizens through poverty, disease, ignorance, even killing their own citizens due to self-interest and looting emergency funds collected for victims of calamity as is expected here? Let us not be fooled by changing one face for another, since the basis of evil is the entire ideology and superficial reform cannot help. How many times have you changed one face for another and one commission for another vainly hoping for progress? Has your fundamental condition changed at all apart from the increase of even more severe calamities such that you are suffering in this world even before losing in the Hereafter if you do not change this situation?!

Hizb ut Tahrir East Africa calls you to the noble Islamic ideology, whose justice is known to all such that Khalifah Umar (RA) was so concerned about his citizens’ welfare that he feared that his Lord would account him for an animal stumbling if he did not fix the roads. Or how he quickly and justly dealt with the famine that afflicted Madinah in 18^th year of the Hijra by ordering his governor in Egypt to quickly despatch caravans of food, and his governor Amr bin Al-Ass replied: “I’m sending so many caravans of food that when the first animal reaches Madinah then the last one will be leaving Egypt!” How different from our woeful lives today under the capitalist ideology! O Allah: Forgive our deceased and awaken our living so that we establish Islam to liberate us. Amin!