Ripples in a Pond: Are We Haunted by the Betrayals of the Past?

What are its roots and what is the remedy?

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How can we, as Muslims, understand the past so that we can deal with the present, in specific the present lack of cohesion and trust amongst Muslims today. Our community bears all the signs of a traumatized person, resulting in a deeply rooted sense of mistrust, not only of fellow Muslims but of Islām in its entirety.

And while I don’t pretend to have all the answers in this video, I do feel we have to start somewhere by asking, “What are its roots and what is the remedy?”

So here I explore the particular historical phenomenon by which this trauma came upon us and I attempt to develop a genealogy of its origins through such figures as Sir Mark Sykes, a key contributor of the Balfour Declaration and a co-conspirator of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, a 1916 secret treaty between the UK and France which led to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, an incident whose ripples still impact the lives of millions of Muslims to this day.