The very definition of war has changed over the course of history. Today, many wars are unmanned with no foreign element on your soil. There is an intense digital component to today’s warfare—the speedy spread of information, the even faster propagation of misinformation, the real keyboard warriors versus the bots. People of past wars would never believe the catastrophes possible without every setting foot on foreign land.

Beyond the digital battlefield, the physical one has transformed just as dramatically. Compounded by the possibility to fire long-range missiles and to harass the enemy with unmanned drones, it is likely to protect one’s own people to obliterate another. The click of a button is all it requires to exterminate innocent children in a school millions of miles away in “enemy” territory.

The notion that international law exists or that it ever mattered has crumbled. The world’s population can now see through the facade of “rules of war”, of hoax fall-back organizations like the ICC, ICJ, UN, WHO, all put in place to create an illusion of safety nets that never actually existed. The list of these deceptive entities is tediously long. The ruling class lives by their own rules and creates a semblance of order for everyone else though any random arrangement of alphabets.

No matter what the latest declared reason for war, some elements of war will always remain unchanged—the palpable fear, the uncontrollable heart beats, and the making of hasty life-long and life-altering decisions. These are on the part of the misinformed unfortunate masses. A rumor spreads and people are forced to leave the homes they spent decades building. The braver ones, or the ones in denial, choose to stay and witness unimaginable horrors. Families get separated by borders and death. The norm is a base-level anxiety that never leaves one’s chest. What is the right decision to make?

What also never changes is the root causes for a war to begin from the perspective of the state. Annexation of land, greed for greater control of the world’s resources, and a false sense of nationalism indoctrinated in the masses that are mere sacrificial lambs to the authorities when the right opportunity presents itself. These are, of course, the visible causes.

The visible causes, however, are merely symptoms. The rot runs deeper than borders and resources, it reaches into something embedded in the human condition itself. The more subtle ones are deeper-rooted traits in humanity—the ones humans have been deemed unfit to hold from the beginning of time. Allah has many names and attributes, some of which He wants us to “share”. Of them are mercy, kindness, gentleness, friendliness, and forgiveness. But there are ones that He has rightfully reserved for Himself. Chief among them: تكبر and كبرياء — words that don’t map neatly onto the English “arrogance” or “pride”, because they describe something beyond human register entirely. They are a manifestation of His sovereignty, a right requiring neither permission nor justification. To claim that greatness for oneself is not merely pride, it is a declaration of rivalry with the Divine.

He created us equal in His eyes despite the wide spectrum of skin shades and societal status—the only defining feature He encouraged us to compete in, is our تقوى , our God-consciousness. So claiming greatness above other humans is in turn equivalent to posting as competitors to a Supreme Being that our faculties are unable to fully fathom. One tiny glimpse of His تجلي rendered the great prophet Musa unconscious.

Everything humans have ever created has been inspired by some He created first. Every colour on the most comprehensive palette is based on a sea creature he painted with first. Every sound we allocated to our technology from ambulances to ring tones is based on a birdsong He conceived. Every character we “invented” in our stories has a precedence in His Divine construct. We have never actually created anything. We have merely used the elements this minecraft world is equipped with in experimental combinations and quantities. Then we build it further, bigger, better, forgetting the source of the elements we used and the inspiration we borrowed to build our fragile world.

He reminds us over and over in the Quran that to Him belongs all that is in the Heavens and the earth. If He simply chose to “click” one raw material away, our world would collapse. Yet the illusion that we are in control is a fast-spreading virus that has taken over our innate pure nature. We have tainted it to assume control, to assume we plan, to assume to fate of others is in our hands and worst of all, to assume originality of creation. The truest and most undeniable citation in all our work, regardless of citation format, is that of the خالق that is رحيم، حكيم and لطيف but is also القوي. We will never possess even a fraction of these qualities at once, let alone in the right measure to execute them flawlessly.

Every war begins with someone convinced they are the exception, that their cause, their nation, their hand on the trigger is the one the rules were never meant to restrain. That delusion is older than any weapon we have built to carry it. The lesson we need to inculcate within ourselves and to pass on to our generations to come is to stop trying to compete with His attributes. Rather, we need to embody the ones He encouraged us to and to fully internalize that our purpose, even before worship was, is, and will remain submitting to His Majesty.