Marwa Yousuf K

Time does not walk forward; it swings. Not evenly, not gently, but with the burden of consequence – back and forth between oppression and revolt, wealth and ruin, power and its collapse. It is not progress that drives history but pressure, rupture, and recoil. History, when told by the empire, is made to look like ascent. But when you examine the bones beneath – the enslaved, the looted, the scorched, you begin to see the rhythm for what it is: not a line but a pendulum.

More than poetic, this metaphor is analytical. It reveals that what we call the “present” is often a rebranded past, that what is framed as stability is usually the calm between two swings. Domination re-emerges in new forms; resistance inherits old lessons. The pendulum may shift its costume, but not its choreography. Anti-imperialist thinkers – across continents and centuries have argued that empire never truly leaves, it evolves; from the lash to the loan, from missionary zeal to development aid, from maps to markets.

To think geopolitics through this metaphor is to disarm the lie of linearity. It is to understand that what the West sells as progress is often only repetition – a cycle in which the coloniser returns, wearing democracy’s smile and carrying data rather than whips.

Mapping the Metaphor: From Machiavelli to Ibn Khaldūn Niccolò Machiavelli recognised that political systems are inherently unstable. In discourses on Livy, he argued that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are not permanent structures but temporary phases – each carrying within it the conditions that lead to its own breakdown. For him, history was neither static nor stable; it was motion shaped by excess, where:

Order becomes corruption —> liberty becomes licence —> strength becomes tyranny. Then comes the purge, and the cycle restarts.

But long before Florence’s thinker picked up his pen, Ibn Khaldūn, the North African father of Sociology, had already diagnosed the rise and fall of empires with almost surgical clarity. In his Muqaddimah, he outlined what can only be called a theory of civilisational pendulum: empires begin with strength rooted in ‘aṣabiyyah – the tribal solidarity and moral fibre that binds people together. According to his theory, empires go through stages across generations: the first generation fights and builds; subsequent generations maintain, consume, and then forget the cause, leading to decay. Luxury, complacency, and distance from justice corrupt the ruler and society internally, weakening the empire and leading to its fall. This cyclically invites a new, often previously oppressed, group with fresh ‘aṣabiyyah to rise and take control.

No theory better explains the cycles of empire than Khaldūn’s, as it’s both descriptive and moralistic. Empires rarely fall from external pressure alone; they collapse when distance from justice becomes structural, when accountability is replaced by self‑worship, and power no longer recognises any authority beyond itself.

Centuries later, Marx would reframe this in materialist terms: class struggle as the engine of history. Power does not recede out of mercy – it is challenged, broken, seized. Polanyi extended this logic with his theory of the “Double Movement”: liberal markets push, society pulls back. Globalisation tears open traditional ways of life; social forces demand protection. Capitalism produces its own backlash – the cycle of expansion and resistance is not accidental but structural. Thinkers across traditions understood that concentrated power eventually ossifies, faces resistance, and unravels. Collapse then isn’t an interruption; it’s a recurring outcome. But unlike Western secular frameworks, the Islāmic tradition embeds this cycle in theology. The Qur’ān repeatedly reminds us that nations perish when they transgress bounds, that strength invites accountability, and that time is not self-correcting but divinely governed.

“Do they not travel through the earth and see what was the end of those before them? They were more numerous than them and stronger in power…”

(Sūrah Ar-Rūm 30:9)

This verse isn’t just a rhetorical question but a dismantling of arrogance and directly confronts the myth of exceptionalism – the idea that might ensures survival. The verse lists the material strength of past civilisations not to admire it, but to nullify its permanence: more numerous, stronger, more entrenched. And yet? Gone. This verse destabilises Western imperial self-confidence. It says: strength does not equal immunity, and numbers do not equate to longevity. Technological advantage, infrastructure, and global influence – all of it can vanish and has, repeatedly.

The West is, therefore, not an exception. It is simply next.

Empire as Repetition: the West’s Cyclical Amnesia

Modern Western imperialism – clothed in the language of human rights and global governance- is not a break from history but a reactivation of it. The United States, Britain, France, and their allies have not invented new tactics, but rebranded old ones. What was once “mission civilisatrice” is now “democracy promotion”; what used to be armed conquest is now “humanitarian intervention”; where they once imposed governors, they now install debt traps.

The U.S. Occupation of Iraq (2003–2011) echoed the British Mandate for Mesopotamia (1917–1932) in both arrogance and aftermath. The narrative was almost identical: “bring civilisation,” “liberate the people,” “build institutions.” What followed was predictable: oil theft, puppet regimes, sectarian fractures, and then the slow, costly withdrawal – leaving behind devastation disguised as reform.

Libya is another swing of the same pendulum, where Gaddafi’s ouster was sold as a necessary intervention to prevent atrocity. The result? A fractured state, open slave markets, warlordism – the very chaos imperial powers claimed they were preventing. History didn’t just repeat; it came full circle with a vengeance.

Venezuela, too, is a textbook case. The Monroe Doctrine, declared in 1823, asserted U.S. authority over Latin America – a region to be kept free from European influence, but not from American exploitation. Today, that same doctrine lives on in economic warfare: sanctions, trade embargoes, currency sabotage, and open talk of regime change. Washington denies it’s imperialism – but its targets always seem to be brown, poor, and resource-rich.

What ties these examples together is not just power, but pattern. The West swings between open aggression and strategic restraint. When soft power fails, it returns to hard, and when hard power becomes unpopular, it cloaks itself in NGOs and “development partnerships.”

The Global South does not face new oppression. It faces recurring algorithms of control: extractive debt, tech surveillance, energy capture, and outsourced warfare, where the pendulum’s face changes but its force remains the same. And yet, what’s most revealing is not how often the empire returns but how easily it forgets. Historical amnesia is built into Western exceptionalism. To acknowledge the pendulum would be to admit that their power is neither moral nor permanent. So they reset the narrative every time and then act surprised when the ground begins to shake.

Islāmic Memory and the Fall of Powers

If we read history the way Allāh tells us to – with sight sharpened by humility, not pride, we’ll begin to notice that every powerful civilisation eventually behaves like it’s invincible and every single one falls.

“Have they not travelled through the earth and seen how was the end of those before them? They were greater than them in strength, and they ploughed the earth and built upon it more than they have built…”

(Sūrah Al-Ghāfir 40:82)

This verse manifests as sunna – a divine pattern, not in the theological sense of ritual, but in the historical understanding of precedent. Sunan al-awwalīn – the ways of those who came before, is a qur’ānic category that invites reflection, not nostalgia. It says: look at the

empires that rose, corrupted, collapsed… not just to mourn or marvel, but to learn, to take heed, and most importantly, to stop thinking yours is the exception.

Within the Islāmic intellectual tradition, empire is not inherently evil, but it is intrinsically accountable. Its legitimacy comes from justice (ʿadl), not expansion. From upholding ḥuqūq al-‘ibād, not accumulating ghalaba. Once that balance is broken – once the rulers forget God and fear only rebellion, the arc begins to bend toward collapse.

We see it in The Banū Umayyah: expanding with missionary zeal, but collapsing under dynastic arrogance and tribal favouritism.

The ‘Abbāsids: built on revolution, decaying into courtly indulgence and theological rigidity.

Andalus: a golden age dimmed not by foreign conquest alone, but by internal fragmentation, sectarianism, and the abandonment of prophetic unity.

And most devastatingly, we see it in the late Ottoman state, where Islāmic legitimacy was co-opted by bureaucratic centralisation, European debt entanglements, and a fatal delay in recognising that the world had changed – that the ummah’s body could no longer be held together by nostalgia alone.

What these collapses reveal is that the fall of an empire is not always violent. Sometimes it comes dressed as reform, and sometimes it is the slow, quiet erosion of purpose – when power loses meaning and becomes inertia, when empires become machines that no longer know why they began, only how to keep moving.

Ibn Taymiyyah, writing during the Mongol invasions, stated plainly: “Allāh upholds a just state, even if it is disbelieving; and does not uphold an unjust state, even if it is muslim.” He wasn’t presenting a theological paradox but a political principle. Justice is not a symbol of legitimacy; it is the precondition for survival, and once abandoned, it will always lead to collapse.

Today, most Muslim-majority governments fall into two categories:

Either they are direct participants in the architecture of imperial power – facilitating U.S. militarism and Israeli normalisation, securing extractive infrastructure, and suppressing dissent on behalf of their backers; or they are under siege by that same system – sanctioned, fragmented, invaded, or strategically destabilised.

And for those who believe this configuration is fixed, the Islāmic worldview is clear: it will not last. No system built on injustice is permanent, and no regime is immune to decline. What persists is not governance or borders, but Allāh swt’s justice – and it does not negotiate with power. Everything else – statecraft, currency, surveillance, weaponry is provisional. Dust waiting to be scattered.

Patterns in the Present: Echoes Across the Map

If you listen closely, you’ll notice the sound of empire repeating itself – not in the headlines, but in the infrastructure of violence. The modern coloniser doesn’t operate through flags or formal annexation. It functions through extractive flows: oil, data, debt, and drones. Territorial control has been replaced by infrastructural domination, but the logic of empire remains unchanged. The pendulum still moves – only the instruments have evolved.

Palestine is not just a site of zionist occupation, it is the world’s clearest mirror of settler-colonial rhythm: Dispossession, erasure, resistance—surveillance, bombing, rebuilding. Repeat. The West pretends this is an intractable conflict. It is not. It is the repetition of the empire’s core logic: replace the native, weaponise guilt, monetise suffering. The settler, paper state of Israel, is not the exception – it is the Western norm, concentrated. In fact, “Israel” functions as a Laboratory State – testing technologies of control later exported globally. Facial recognition software used in Hebron appears in Western airports, surveillance towers in Gaza mirror those on the U.S.-Mexico border, weaponry used to kill Palestinians is then shipped to Occupied Kashmir – the occupation industrial complex is profitable and portable.

In Africa, the pendulum has turned again – this time through coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. What Western media calls “instability” is, in truth, the end of patience. A generation born under IMF austerity, French military presence, and U.N. hypocrisy is refusing the script. Their flags may not yet align, but the rhythm is unmistakable: a rejection of colonial residue masquerading as development. The “Sahel swing” is not a flash in the pan. It is the beginning of a recalibration. The question is not whether France will lose influence – it already has. The question is: who replaces it, and will that replacement escape the same patterns?

Kashmir, too, remains suspended in time – not just because of occupation, but because the international order has chosen to treat military lockdown, demographic engineering, and digital erasure as internal matters. The abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 was not just a legal manoeuvre – it was a signal: that settler logic would be normalised, not challenged.

And beneath that silence lies a civilisational forgetting – the pendulum here is not only political but ontological. When an entire people are denied narrative sovereignty, when the world forgets that resistance is a right, the imperial cycle tightens. In Sudan, we watch the pendulum swing violently – warlordism born from decades of structural adjustment, foreign arms flows, and elite fragmentation. The current catastrophe is not a local feud. It

is the fallout of decades of imperial engineering: weaken the state, arm the proxies, extract the gold.

Even Europe is not immune. The rise of far-right parties in France, Germany, Italy – all speak to the pendulum’s other truth: that empire abroad breeds fascism at home. The colonial return is not only external; it is also internal. European states now mimic the borders they once imposed on others: surveillance, deportation, demographic panic. The pendulum comes home. Globally, too, the rise of BRICS and the decline of the U.S. hegemony are signs of a multipolar recalibration. But this swing is not clean. Russia and China may challenge Western dominance, and while they do not yet offer a perfect anti-imperialist model, they do provide a counter-imperial one.

The Movement of the Ummah

Islām never told us the world would orbit in our favour. It told us to recognise sunan al-awwalīn, the cycles of those who came before. To build for accountability, rather than permanence. Because collapse is inevitable, and when it comes, only those anchored to Allāh will remain upright.

“And such are the days We alternate among the people…”

(Sūrah āl ‘Imrān 3:140)

This verse is a theological mapping of the pendulum I keep referring to in this piece. Days of dominance do not last, and days of defeat are not death. Power alternates – not arbitrarily, but to test us. Liyamīza allāhu al-khabītha mina al-ṭayyib (So that Allāh may separate the filthy from the pure.)

The ummah, in this metaphor, is not just a passive subject of empire but a test case of memory. We have seen pre-modern global rule (khilāfah), colonial fracture, modern nation-state dismemberment, and now surveillance-age fragmentation. The question is not “when will we rise again?”

The question is “when will we stop forgetting?”

Because the longer we think our collapse is just bad luck – instead of bad faith, bad leadership, and insufficient memory – the longer we will keep swinging between imported ideologies and borrowed solutions. We chant revolution but fund our tyrants. We memorise Sūrat Yāsīn but ignore Sūrat al-‘Ādiyāt. We romanticise the past while despising the rigour that built it. To reclaim rhythm, we must return to revelation as methodology. The Prophetصلى الله عليه وسلمdidn’t fight the empire with slogans but with clarity, structure, sabr, and ḥuqūq.

Toward a Revolt of Rhythm: Breaking the Pendulum? Can the pendulum be broken?

The honest answer: not entirely. The architecture of empire is not just physical, it’s epistemic, metabolic. It shapes how we dream, how we desire, how we define “winning.” To truly break it would require unlearning not just systems, but selves. But disruption? Yes. Disruption is possible. Realignment is possible. Counter-rhythm is possible.

History is full of moments where the pendulum paused – not because power relented, but because truth ruptured through the surface: the Haitian revolution, the Algerian resistance, the first Intifada. Moments where the oppressed seized rhythm, where the empire stumbled, and for a moment, the air was clean.

But every time the pendulum disrupts, three things happen:

1. Empire retools: it learns from its failures faster than the oppressed consolidate their gains.

2. The revolution forgets: it gets seduced by reform, comfort, or foreign validation.

3. The people split: ideologically, tribally, personally. unity falters.

To disrupt the pendulum, then, we need more than resistance. We need institutional memory, moral scaffolding, and spiritual grounding.

The Prophetصلى الله عليه وسلمsaid: “A believer is not bitten from the same hole twice.” yet muslim political movements have been bitten from the same hole for decades – co-option, foreign funding, egotism, naïve trust in Western courts and media.

What the Pendulum Teaches

The pendulum reveals that an empire is not sustained by strength alone, but by repetition of violence, denial, and historical amnesia. It does not collapse when it becomes weak, but when its contradictions can no longer be contained. The West, despite its rhetoric of progress, is repeating the structural errors of every empire before it: overextension, moral detachment, and the assumption that power justifies permanence.

Collapse is inevitable – but that’s not the point. The point is that without preparation, it means nothing. Those who wait for rupture without building alternatives will be buried in the fallout, and those who posture resistance without structure will be folded back into the same cycle they thought they were breaking. For Muslims, in particular, this is a matter of theological alignment. Allāh does not delay collapse because He’s absent – He delays it because every test demands witnesses, and this ummah has been given more evidence than most.

What the pendulum teaches is not just hope – it teaches consequence and consequence requires clarity: about history, about power, and about what must be done when the next arc begins.

The time to analyse has passed, and the time to organise is already narrowing. The next swing will not be kind to those still trying to negotiate their position within a collapsing structure. It will only favour those who had the foresight to build beyond it.

Marwa Yousuf K. is a writer exploring how politics and faith shape life in Occupied Kashmir and beyond, with contributions to local publications and community platforms.

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