space policy and international relations🇶🇦
Doha/Vienna/Paris
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“A state that cannot image its own territory cannot attribute a strike, cannot contest a false claim, cannot price its own risk.” Says kelevitch
My latest article for @SpaceNews_Inc is live on shutter control, the Gulf, and a sovereignty gap most people don’t know exists.
spacenews.com/shutter-contro…
Biggest problem with the Muslims of today is that they’re fascinatingly not able to accept that the usul al fiqh they drew rulings from do not apply to this world anymore
Critics calling Muslim nation states “slaves” to America rest on a fiqh built for a world that no longer exists, and that’s the actual problem
Classical jihad doctrine assumed one caliphal authority commanding a single Muslim army, and a world split into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, with treaties as the mechanism for peace between the two. That architecture hasn’t existed for over a century. We live under a Westphalian system of fifty-some sovereign Muslim-majority states, many with conflicting policies, some actively fighting each other. Taking a ruling built for a unified caliphate and applying it directly onto a nation-state’s foreign policy is discarding the precondition the ruling depended on and keeping only the conclusion.
Test it practically. Say Saudi Arabia invaded Israel tomorrow to “help Palestine.” Where would unified Muslim solidarity actually materialize to support that? It wouldn’t. It would trigger the same international system these critics otherwise accept, the UN Charter, international law, likely condemnation from other Muslim states worried about the precedent and an international coalition. There’s no Dar al-Islam left to absorb that action as one body, because the legal subject the old fiqh assumed is gone.
The Quran itself draws this exact distinction. Allah tells the Prophet ﷺ that believers who didn’t emigrate to Medina, who stayed behind in Mecca under active persecution, were owed no obligation of support, unless they specifically asked for help against religious persecution, and even then, not if it violated an existing treaty.
But those who believed and did not emigrate, for you there is no wilāyah (alliance or obligation of support) toward them until they emigrate. And if they seek your help in religion, then you must help them, except against a people between whom and you is a treaty. And Allah is Seeing of what you do.”
8:72
Shared faith alone, without a shared polity and bond of authority, never generated automatic military obligation, even for the founding generation of the ummah itself.
So when modern commentators invoke a transnational Muslim unity that collapsed with the caliphate, then condemn nation-states for failing to act on it, they’re being delusional and ignoring its own premises. A state acting on its citizens’ interests first isn’t betraying Islam, it’s just acting like every state on earth, Muslim or not.
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People talking about the Gulf as if it’s held hostage by Washington don’t actually understand the Gulf.
Saudi Arabia expelled Canada’s ambassador, froze trade, and pulled thousands of students out of Canadian universities in 2018, over a tweet about human rights.
In 2016, the UN blacklisted the Saudi-led coalition for killing children in Yemen. Within 72 hours, KSA called US president. threatened to pull funding, half a billion dollars, and threatened to pull other Arab states out of the UN entirely. The Secretary-General & US President caved and removed them from the list himself, called it one of the most painful decisions of his career.
In Oct 2022 Riyadh pushed a two-million-barrel OPEC cut through weeks before theAmerican midterms, with Biden lobbying personally and then promising consequences. Nothing happened. They kept Russia inside OPEC+, took the BRICS invitation, and normalised with Tehran in Beijing, deliberately,with the Americans informed afterwards.
Qatar was blockaded for 4 years and Trump was calling it a terrorist state, it got handed thirteen demands including shutting Al Jazeera and the Turkish base. It refused all thirteen, went on hosting Hamas political office, and outlasted the blockade..
None of that is what a hostage looks like. The reserves sit in dollar assets because the dollar is the deepest market on earth.. The security relationship exists because these monarchies calculated, for decades, that buying deterrence was cheaper than building a real independent military, one that could also turn around and remove them from power. That’s a trade they chose, and they’ve had the leverage to walk away from it this whole time.
Calling it a prison does something worse than getting the facts wrong. It erases their agency in a way that actually flatters them, makes every choice look forced instead of deliberate. The real critique is that these rulers chose a trade that protected their own thrones and kept a stability in their countries at the cost of real strategic independence
They chose this. They can leave and they donot. Dependence you select, pay for and renewevery year is a policy.
This is an incredible video. Deep down, we’ve always known this.
Qatari officials ADMITTED that America forces the Arab nations to spend their money on useless projects and lavish sports tournaments.
Arab money is held in US banks, and the Arabs have to ask permission from the Americans whenever they wish to withdraw and spend their own money. They’re like a 16-year-old kid asking their Dad for permission to use his credit card.
If an Arab ruler wanted to spend his billions on new factories, shipyards, and new strategic industrial projects, America would refuse to give him permission.
But if the Arab ruler wanted to spend his billions on new music concerts, tennis tournaments, and luxurious hotels, then America would give him permission to spend the money.
America doesn’t want you to be strategically independent of them, because they would lose their leverage and control over you. They want these small, divided, and weak Arab states to be dependent on the US forever.
America uses modern industry and comfort to hold you hostage. These golden handcuffs ensure that you will never defy the Americans. Your electrical grid, antibiotics, refrigerators, and machinery are all dependent on US supply chains. If you dare defy America, they will shut off your imports and your people will starve.
It’s not like the people in Riyadh and Doha know how to farm. They live in skyscrapers and they buy their food from local grocery stores which rely on modern equipment and global imports.
Breaking this cycle of dependence relies on breaking the very supply chains which keep millions of people fed and housed.
In a perverse way, being developed makes you more dependent. That’s why nations like Afghanistan and Yemen are more able to defy America, simply because they’re less developed and less reliant on imports.
@anasaltikriti was being interviewed by @DillyHussain88 on this issue.
People talking about the Gulf as if it’s held hostage by Washington don’t actually understand the Gulf.
Saudi Arabia expelled Canada’s ambassador, froze trade, and pulled thousands of students out of Canadian universities in 2018, over a tweet about human rights.
In 2016, the UN blacklisted the Saudi-led coalition for killing children in Yemen. Within 72 hours, KSA called US president. threatened to pull funding, half a billion dollars, and threatened to pull other Arab states out of the UN entirely. The Secretary-General & US President caved and removed them from the list himself, called it one of the most painful decisions of his career.
In Oct 2022 Riyadh pushed a two-million-barrel OPEC cut through weeks before theAmerican midterms, with Biden lobbying personally and then promising consequences. Nothing happened. They kept Russia inside OPEC+, took the BRICS invitation, and normalised with Tehran in Beijing, deliberately,with the Americans informed afterwards.
Qatar was blockaded for 4 years and Trump was calling it a terrorist state, it got handed thirteen demands including shutting Al Jazeera and the Turkish base. It refused all thirteen, went on hosting Hamas political office, and outlasted the blockade..
None of that is what a hostage looks like. The reserves sit in dollar assets because the dollar is the deepest market on earth.. The security relationship exists because these monarchies calculated, for decades, that buying deterrence was cheaper than building a real independent military, one that could also turn around and remove them from power. That’s a trade they chose, and they’ve had the leverage to walk away from it this whole time.
Calling it a prison does something worse than getting the facts wrong. It erases their agency in a way that actually flatters them, makes every choice look forced instead of deliberate. The real critique is that these rulers chose a trade that protected their own thrones and kept a stability in their countries at the cost of real strategic independence
They chose this. They can leave and they donot. Dependence you select, pay for and renewevery year is a policy.
This is an incredible video. Deep down, we’ve always known this.
Qatari officials ADMITTED that America forces the Arab nations to spend their money on useless projects and lavish sports tournaments.
Arab money is held in US banks, and the Arabs have to ask permission from the Americans whenever they wish to withdraw and spend their own money. They’re like a 16-year-old kid asking their Dad for permission to use his credit card.
If an Arab ruler wanted to spend his billions on new factories, shipyards, and new strategic industrial projects, America would refuse to give him permission.
But if the Arab ruler wanted to spend his billions on new music concerts, tennis tournaments, and luxurious hotels, then America would give him permission to spend the money.
America doesn’t want you to be strategically independent of them, because they would lose their leverage and control over you. They want these small, divided, and weak Arab states to be dependent on the US forever.
America uses modern industry and comfort to hold you hostage. These golden handcuffs ensure that you will never defy the Americans. Your electrical grid, antibiotics, refrigerators, and machinery are all dependent on US supply chains. If you dare defy America, they will shut off your imports and your people will starve.
It’s not like the people in Riyadh and Doha know how to farm. They live in skyscrapers and they buy their food from local grocery stores which rely on modern equipment and global imports.
Breaking this cycle of dependence relies on breaking the very supply chains which keep millions of people fed and housed.
In a perverse way, being developed makes you more dependent. That’s why nations like Afghanistan and Yemen are more able to defy America, simply because they’re less developed and less reliant on imports.
@anasaltikriti was being interviewed by @DillyHussain88 on this issue.
The critics are measuring the Gulf against a standard no state has ever met, a phantom ummah-as-political-unit that behaves with collective loyalty above its own survival. Once you drop that standard and just ask “is this a state acting like a state,” every single complaint evaporates, because of course a state protects its own reserves, its own security, its own citizens first.
Projecting a non-existent transnational Muslim political loyalty onto nation-states, then condemning them for failing to display it is manufacturing a grievance against a category of entity that was never built to carry that weight in the first place. A state has no over-national obligation it’s violating, because there’s no enforceable over-national structure it ever signed onto.. Nobody elected Riyadh or Doha to represent Muslim interests globally above their own citizens’, and no one else does it either, not Turkey, not Pakistan, not Indonesia, the largest Muslim population on earth, none of them subordinate national interest to some imagined collective duty.
Once you see the Gulf as what it actually is, a cluster of nation-states run by rulers optimizing for dynastic survival and citizen welfare, exactly like every other state on earth, the entire “slave” vocabulary collapses, because slavery requires an absence of choice, and a state choosing its own interest every time is the opposite of that.
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No Marandi, everyone is just realising what of a fraudulent state Iran and it’s resistance doctrine is
No Marandi, everyone is just realising what of a fraudulent state Iran and it’s resistance doctrine is
Sociology is the only science whose findings leak back into its own subject matter. When physicists discover something about electrons, the electrons don’t change their behavior. When sociologists publish that people choose partners within their own class, or that credentials work as social signals, readers absorb that and start acting on it, sometimes by exploiting it and sometimes by trying to dodge it. Ian Hacking called this the looping effect, and it means the field is chasing a target that moves partly because of the chase.
This explains a puzzle about the discipline’s reputation. Its biggest ideas succeed so completely that they stop sounding like findings. Self-fulfilling prophecy, stigma, social capital, the idea that categories like “teenager” were invented at a particular moment in history: all of these now pass as common sense. Once a concept is common sense, people ask what sociology ever contributed, forgetting that Durkheim, Merton, Goffman and Bourdieu supplied the vocabulary they’re using to ask it.
It also means sociological claims have a shelf life. A finding about how a class reproduces itself can weaken precisely because enough people learned about it and started working around it. Seen that way, the field’s real test is whether its descriptions stay useful after the people being described have read them.
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Saudi Arabia will walk out of this without losing more than it’s already lost, which means the floor under this outcome is already set, it can’t actually get worse for them than where they already are.. If they win, Yemen stops being the one lasting stain on the kingdom’s record, the one failure that’s hung over every Vision 2030 pitch and every claim to regional leadership.
Close that out and Saudi Arabia is intact & the dominant power left standing in the region with a defence pact already in place & with a new defence architecture as it already started movinh
Iran is the enemy & doesn’t fight directly, it fights through proxies, and one by one those proxies are gone. Hezbollah got gutted in 2024. The Iraqi militias have spent this whole year absorbing strikes they can’t answer. Assad fell, so Syria isn’t even a corridor anymore. The Houthis are the last piece of the entire network still functioning, and they’re fighting not just Saudi Arabia but their own government at the same time. A force fighting a two-front war against both an external coalition and the internationally recognized authority inside its own country doesn’t hold that position indefinitely.
So this isn’t really a question about whether Saudi Arabia survives Yemen. It’s a question of what’s left of Iran’s entire regional architecture once the last proxy standing finally breaks.
Saudi Arabia will walk out of this without losing more than it’s already lost, which means the floor under this outcome is already set, it can’t actually get worse for them than where they already are.. If they win, Yemen stops being the one lasting stain on the kingdom’s record, the one failure that’s hung over every Vision 2030 pitch and every claim to regional leadership.
Close that out and Saudi Arabia is intact & the dominant power left standing in the region with a defence pact already in place & with a new defence architecture as it already started movinh
Iran is the enemy & doesn’t fight directly, it fights through proxies, and one by one those proxies are gone. Hezbollah got gutted in 2024. The Iraqi militias have spent this whole year absorbing strikes they can’t answer. Assad fell, so Syria isn’t even a corridor anymore. The Houthis are the last piece of the entire network still functioning, and they’re fighting not just Saudi Arabia but their own government at the same time. A force fighting a two-front war against both an external coalition and the internationally recognized authority inside its own country doesn’t hold that position indefinitely.
So this isn’t really a question about whether Saudi Arabia survives Yemen. It’s a question of what’s left of Iran’s entire regional architecture once the last proxy standing finally breaks.
"A customer who pre-funds almost the entire build cost of the satellites it intends to lease capacity from is not behaving like a customer. It is buying an asset and leaving the operating risk with the operator. That is a structure, and structures tell you more about intent than press releases do.
• • •
Qatar and Turkey building shared capacity is a redundancy decision as much as a cost one. It creates a path that does not run through any single Western supplier relationship, without either party building an independent industrial base."
Kelevitch
Space policy and satellite programmes analyst satellitetoday.com/opinion/2…
Saudi Arabia's victory over the UAE in January produced the Houthi breakthrough inSeptember
On 3 September the senior commanders of Yemen’s west coast forces were flown to AbuDhabi, out of an Emirati base on the Somali shore of Bab al-Mandeb. Within days the Houthis took six districts and four islands,Mayyun among them.
Work backwards from that.
On 30 December Saudi jets bombed two Emiratis ships off Mukalla. Yemen tore up its defence agreement with the UAE and gave Abu Dhabi twenty-four hours to get out. Riyadh took Mukalla on 2 January, entered Aden on the 9th,declared the south secured by the 12th. The STCwas dissolved, several of its figures ended up under house arrest in Riyadh, and Zubaidi fled to Abu Dhabi with a treason charge behind him.
Saudi Arabia won that war completely.
The difficulty is what it won against.
TareqSaleh's National Resistance and the GiantsBrigades were Emirati creations, and they were the only ground forces that had ever beaten the Houthis in open country. Abu Dhabi cut their salaries in January. By early September Riyadh was stripping Tareq of his powers.
The UAE had built an airstrip on Mayyun. In March an Emirati military aircraft was blocked from landing on it. By September the island belonged to the Houthis .
Yemeni officials are briefing that Abu Dhabi left the road open on purpose.
The structural version is worse anyway. Riyadh defunded the only army that worked because it answered to somebody else, and has spent October trying to buy it back
Araghchi's mediation offer is Riyadh's least humiliating exit, which is why it's dangerous for them to take and hard to refuse. Tehran delivering the Houthis is the only settlement that doesn't look like defeat and it makes Iran the broker the Americans declined to be.
Interesting times
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Allah says in Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:33:
“Indeed, the recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth to cause corruption is that they be killed…”
This is the verse concerning hirabah and corruption in the land. The Saudi Ministry of Interior cited Qur’anic verses concerning فساد في الأرض in its statement on the execution of the two Bangladeshis. So the claim that Saudi Arabia simply invented a death sentence without citing any Islamic legal basis is false.
The authorities described the offence as an indecent act inside a mosque in Makkah. Consider the circumstances. Makkah is the holiest city in Islam, and its sanctity is established in the Qur’an. Allah says in Surah Al-Hajj 22:25:
“Whoever intends therein wrongdoing, We will make him taste a painful punishment.”
The sanctity of the Haram is so great that fighting is subject to special restrictions there. Allah says in Surah Al-Baqarah 2:191:
“And do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight you there.”
If even fighting is restricted in the Haram, why would anyone pretend that the sanctity of the place is irrelevant when discussing other offences committed there?
And consider the time. The two Bangladeshis were reportedly detained on 1 and 2 August 2023, corresponding to 14 and 15 Muharram 1445. Muharram is one of the four sacred months mentioned in Surah At-Tawbah 9:36.
So Zina in a Muslim land? Sarcred land, Makkah, in a mosque, a sacred mosque and in muharram and people are acting schocked?
Islamic law recognises taʿzir, and its jurisprudence addresses punishment, deterrence and the protection of public interests. The Saudi authorities cited the gravity of the offence and the sanctity of the time and place. The discussion must therefore address the legal classification and the grounds actually invoked, not an invented story about two people being executed merely for kissing.
People circulated a beheading video from 2015, falsely associated an unrelated photograph with the defendants, and spread a story about a married couple on honeymoon. The man’s father reportedly said that the family did not even know the woman. Yet people built their entire argument around this misinformation.
And this is the part I find most revealing.
Saudi Arabia carries out executions every year for serious crimes. Yet this particular case has become another opportunity to attack Sharia itself. Many of the loudest voices are Muslims who claim to respect Islam, praise its heritage and speak about its beauty, but recoil when Islamic legislation becomes a real question rather than an abstract ideal.
There is a difference between examining a court’s judgment and treating Allah’s legislation as something shameful. When Muslims automatically adopt the same arguments used to discredit Sharia, without even examining the Arabic statement or the legal classification, we should ask what exactly they are defending.
Do they want Islamic law to exist only as a symbol, something to celebrate during Ramadan but reject whenever it has legal consequences?
Allah’s legislation does not become acceptable only when it agrees with contemporary secular sensibilities.
If you want to criticise the ruling, address the ruling. Read the Arabic. Examine the Qur’anic verses cited. Discuss the classification of the offence and the principles of taʿzir.
But stop using misinformation as a weapon against Sharia.
Allah says in Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:33:
“Indeed, the recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth to cause corruption is that they be killed…”
This is the verse concerning hirabah and corruption in the land. The Saudi Ministry of Interior cited Qur’anic verses concerning فساد في الأرض in its statement on the execution of the two Bangladeshis. So the claim that Saudi Arabia simply invented a death sentence without citing any Islamic legal basis is false.
The authorities described the offence as an indecent act inside a mosque in Makkah. Consider the circumstances. Makkah is the holiest city in Islam, and its sanctity is established in the Qur’an. Allah says in Surah Al-Hajj 22:25:
“Whoever intends therein wrongdoing, We will make him taste a painful punishment.”
The sanctity of the Haram is so great that fighting is subject to special restrictions there. Allah says in Surah Al-Baqarah 2:191:
“And do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight you there.”
If even fighting is restricted in the Haram, why would anyone pretend that the sanctity of the place is irrelevant when discussing other offences committed there?
And consider the time. The two Bangladeshis were reportedly detained on 1 and 2 August 2023, corresponding to 14 and 15 Muharram 1445. Muharram is one of the four sacred months mentioned in Surah At-Tawbah 9:36.
So Zina in a Muslim land? Sarcred land, Makkah, in a mosque, a sacred mosque and in muharram and people are acting schocked?
Islamic law recognises taʿzir, and its jurisprudence addresses punishment, deterrence and the protection of public interests. The Saudi authorities cited the gravity of the offence and the sanctity of the time and place. The discussion must therefore address the legal classification and the grounds actually invoked, not an invented story about two people being executed merely for kissing.
People circulated a beheading video from 2015, falsely associated an unrelated photograph with the defendants, and spread a story about a married couple on honeymoon. The man’s father reportedly said that the family did not even know the woman. Yet people built their entire argument around this misinformation.
And this is the part I find most revealing.
Saudi Arabia carries out executions every year for serious crimes. Yet this particular case has become another opportunity to attack Sharia itself. Many of the loudest voices are Muslims who claim to respect Islam, praise its heritage and speak about its beauty, but recoil when Islamic legislation becomes a real question rather than an abstract ideal.
There is a difference between examining a court’s judgment and treating Allah’s legislation as something shameful. When Muslims automatically adopt the same arguments used to discredit Sharia, without even examining the Arabic statement or the legal classification, we should ask what exactly they are defending.
Do they want Islamic law to exist only as a symbol, something to celebrate during Ramadan but reject whenever it has legal consequences?
Allah’s legislation does not become acceptable only when it agrees with contemporary secular sensibilities.
If you want to criticise the ruling, address the ruling. Read the Arabic. Examine the Qur’anic verses cited. Discuss the classification of the offence and the principles of taʿzir.
But stop using misinformation as a weapon against Sharia.
Also it’s funny how netayanhu is showing in that map that UAE is doing Israel’s work in Somali, Sudan, Lybia etc
This is the clearest public confirmation yet that the Mecca Pact is being read by Israel as a genuine rival power bloc worth mapping and naming instead of a hollow symbolic gesture, while simultaneously, Israel’s own stated strategy leans on secessionist and paramilitary partners (RSF, Yemeni and Libyan separatists, Somaliland) across exactly the fractured, low-asabiyyah states we spent weeks mapping as arbitrage ground. Netanyahu is doing, openly and on a slide, precisely what we traced Iran, UAE, and others doing more quietly: treating hollow states as a chessboard of proxies and alignments rather than respecting them as sovereign actors.
ًً retweeted
This is the clearest public confirmation yet that the Mecca Pact is being read by Israel as a genuine rival power bloc worth mapping and naming instead of a hollow symbolic gesture, while simultaneously, Israel’s own stated strategy leans on secessionist and paramilitary partners (RSF, Yemeni and Libyan separatists, Somaliland) across exactly the fractured, low-asabiyyah states we spent weeks mapping as arbitrage ground. Netanyahu is doing, openly and on a slide, precisely what we traced Iran, UAE, and others doing more quietly: treating hollow states as a chessboard of proxies and alignments rather than respecting them as sovereign actors.
This is the clearest public confirmation yet that the Mecca Pact is being read by Israel as a genuine rival power bloc worth mapping and naming instead of a hollow symbolic gesture, while simultaneously, Israel’s own stated strategy leans on secessionist and paramilitary partners (RSF, Yemeni and Libyan separatists, Somaliland) across exactly the fractured, low-asabiyyah states we spent weeks mapping as arbitrage ground. Netanyahu is doing, openly and on a slide, precisely what we traced Iran, UAE, and others doing more quietly: treating hollow states as a chessboard of proxies and alignments rather than respecting them as sovereign actors.
The five daily prayers are the most sophisticated anti-elite mechanism ever designed.
Every system of knowledge in human history has been gatekept. You want philosophy learn Greek. You want law go to the academy. You want spirituality find the monastery, pay the priest, climb the hierarchy.
Knowledge as power has always flowed through institutions that could be captured, corrupted, or bought.
Islam said : five times a day, every Muslim on earth stands in the exact same posture, says the exact same words, faces the exact same direction, with zero intermediary. The shepherd in Mali and the caliph in Baghdad are doing the identical act. No priest can sell you access. No institution can revoke your membership. No scholar
can stand between you and the prayer.
The ulema exist, the imams exist but the core transaction between the believer and Allah requires nothing they can provide and nothing they can withhold.
1400 years later every other spiritual tradition is struggling with institutional collapse, abuse scandals, gatekeeping accusations. Islam built the decentralization solution into the architecture from day one.