In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful
The Land of Freedom (The City of Peace)
Author: Abdul Basir Sohaib Siddiqi
Translation by : Tahleel Team
Date of Publication: 25.11.2025
In the Land of Freedom there stands a city with lofty towers and strong walls, known as the City of Peace. The condition for citizenship and residence in this city is freedom of spirit. Upon its gate, written in golden script, is the word “Peace”—meaning that just as the lives of its inhabitants and citizens are guaranteed and protected, so too are their property, honor, dignity, and chastity safeguarded from any violation.
In this ideal city, chains are not forged from iron. There is no prison, and if a place resembling a prison has been constructed, it is in reality a center of moral reformation, occupying only a very brief period of time. When, within that short span, an acknowledgment of wrongdoing is made, there is no jailer in this city wielding a whip to strike the heads of free people.
The crown of honor in this city is human dignity, and the circulating currency is honesty and truthfulness. In the marketplace of ethical coexistence, the goods exchanged are friendship and love.
The inhabitants and citizens of the City of Peace are one unified body; their pains and joys are shared. The beautiful verse,
“The children of Adam are members of one another,
Created from a single essence.
If one member is afflicted with pain,
The other members cannot remain at ease,”
is the gentle and melodious refrain of every individual heart.
Charity is one of the means by which people are connected to one another, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or color, and it is also among the ethical paths in the struggle against poverty.
In this ideal city, ethics sits upon the throne of governance. It is the moral spirit that rules, and upon the seal and signet of its sovereignty is inscribed justice. Upon its tongue flows the blessed verse:
“And cooperate with one another in righteousness and piety, and do not cooperate in sin and aggression.”
In historical reality, we find the efforts and sacrifices of free people devoted to the construction of this secure and peaceful city. Every decision and effort of the free, in the totality of history, appears at specific moments as particular acts inseparably linked to the historical whole. Yet, sorrowfully and painfully, the movement toward building the City of Peace in the Land of Freedom has always been bloodstained, accompanied and escorted by suffering and hardship. For in the arena of confrontation, the selfishness of ruling tyrants (taghut) sits upon the throne of power, issuing, from their criminal puppet theaters, commands for the killing of the free.
Jailers who institutionalize widespread captivity wield whips to strike the heads of free people so that the voice of freedom may be silenced. With bloated bellies of greed and avarice, and with gaudy yet shameful banners in the name of the homeland, they devour the nation’s economy like a mad suckling child, giving rise to vast poverty proportionate to their greed. They establish force and violence as the norm of life’s relations upon the ruins of the lofty palace of human dignity, and in the marketplace of exchange and economic relations they mint the prevailing currency under the name of force and brutality.
Alongside the bloody struggle of free people throughout history, pain and suffering—manifested as tears—are lived experiences of human societies. Within these experiences lie devastation born of destructive wars, mass graves, and the blood-soaked pages of human history.
In the City of Peace, freedom itself is an ethical category, grounded in moral imperatives. These moral imperatives are intelligible within the framework of monotheistic belief; without reference to this framework, ethics loses its transhistorical definition and becomes trapped in the whirlpool of relativism, seeking—without justification and with inherent contradiction—to establish conceptual unity and objective realization.
In other words, ethics finds its true meaning within the framework of monotheistic belief and manifests justice, which itself stands in direct relation to the security and well-being of society. It thus becomes clear and evident that under a deviant interpretation of religion, the security and well-being of society are effectively sentenced to death—an interpretation grounded in base desires, interests, and ignorance, desires and interests that wield swords in the arena of the struggle for survival and parade upon the throats of the weak.
When ethics is severed from monotheistic belief and religion (Islam) is interpreted in a deviant manner, the possibility arises for the emergence of pseudo-freedom or false freedom. This means that false freedom becomes the minstrel of greed and avarice, appearing within relations of force and violence in the arena of the struggle for survival.
Pain and suffering do not prevent the free from striving to realize their ideals in building the City of Peace. The covenant of the free is proclaimed by historical moments, across diverse geographies, as lessons of history.
The path toward the City of Peace, though difficult and bloodstained, is worth traversing. Life in the City of Peace is among humanity’s highest moral aims, and it is worthy of all these sacrifices—sacrifices that must be accepted, or even lives that must be given—so that in this city the crown of human dignity may be placed upon the human head. On the blessed path toward this noble goal, this chant is softly recited:
“My mother, on her knees, taught me the lesson of sacrifice—
I have known the faith of Abraham, the Friend of Allah, from long ago.”
In the City of Peace, there is no hoarding, no bribery, no treachery. False promises and deception have no place there, and the despotism of deviant religious interpretations finds no foothold.
In this ideal city of peace and serenity, aggressors and violators of rights and freedoms bear upon their foreheads the mark of eternal condemnation.
So, O free people, continue your journey fearlessly toward the ideal City of Peace, and do not pause even for a moment.
