''Say: How do you worship besides Allah something which has no power either to harm or benefit you? But it is Allah Who is the All-Hearer, All-Knower'' [Al-Ma'idah: 76]

January 2001 saw the world's biggest gathering of human beings, by the banks of the River Ganges. The rituals that the Hindus at the Kumbh Mela participated in were diverse. One man held his hand up above his head for twelve years, several people stood for years on end, and thousands bathed in the polluted waters of the Hindu's holiest of rivers. Others merely soaked up the atmosphere whilst smoking the ''weed of wisdom'', or even sipping from cow's urine. The congregation itself was also diverse. It comprised of weird and wonderful factions, or perhaps just weird factions. Take, for example, the Aghoris, a small sect who are the followers of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. They have a morbid fascination with death, many of them spend their time surrounded by corpses, and drinking from human skulls.

A couple of months after the Kumbh Mela, members of another faith participated in a different type of ritual. This mass gathering was conducted in a very twenty-first century manner. It crackled over the cable and satellite receiver networks, the World Wide Web, mobile phones and by word of mouth. The spirit of worship ran freely through acres of column inches in tabloids, broadsheets and magazines. Every faith has its equivalent of the Ganges, and for this cult it is Hollywood, the Mela here being the Oscar's ceremony. To date there are no authorised accounts on how many members of the faith exist. The members of this faith dub themselves with no official title for their group, with many even denying being members, whilst others publicise with pride their commitment to the faith. Although they have no unified body in terms of administration and structural organisation, it is estimated that there are millions of members of the cult that worships celebrity.

In a way not dissimilar to Hinduism, the rituals of this faith are extremely diverse. These involved camping out all night just to see a glimpse of an Oscar nominee, or queuing up in the rain for hours to be able to claim to be one of the first of ''the public'' to see the fourth sequel to a film whose original was released in the 1970s. Rituals also include the daily reading of the verses of the celebrity magazines. These scriptures giving detailed accounts of the celebrities daily lives, whilst the photographs they provide give something they can aspire to. The worship of celebrity is an issue that seems to dominate the flow of information to the public. This is supposedly the epoch of the information revolution. However the channels of information seem to be clogged up with information on celebrities. More, defiantly, has become to mean less in terms of information.


This insatiable desire for information on the trivial, untrue and tragic is merely a by-product of a mindset that has been instilled in the general public by the powers that be. This is the nature of capitalism. In order for the system to work the people's minds have to be disabled or disengaged. Thinking has to be discouraged. However Allah (swt) created us as humans with an enquiring mind, and the desire to seek out the truth of what life is about. The system cannot beat this trait out of humans, so as an alternative the system ensures that minds are occupied with the trivial. Western society has lost its sense of reality. When this happens societies have to seek refuge in various forms of escapism. The dispirited, confused and hopeless people of the West retreat into the inner world of subjectivism and fantasy. Materialism and self-absorption take the place of true worship, an enquiring mind and community spirit. The pathological symptoms that manifest are a retreat into fiction, a desire not to participate, but to remain as an onlooker, and to hold reality at an arm's length. It is in this atmosphere that the film industry comes into its own. This explains how films have come to play such a major role in the western way of life. Films have become a metaphor for real life. People speak, write and communicate in clichés taken from film scripts.

The mere passive occupation of the human mind is actually only half the story. There is also the active indoctrination of the human mind with corrupt thoughts and emotions. Films and the mass media industry have an important role to play in this process. The history of Hollywood movies is a history of corporate America messing with people's minds. Hollywood has epitomised the upholding of the golden rule of the American way of life, the rule being that, those who have the gold make the rules. Films have painted a picture of Blacks, Native Americans, women and just about every non-American creed, race and culture in a manner that came to define these groups in the 20th and 21st century. The Apache, Blackfoot and Xu have been portrayed to the world as being the bad guys and the cowboys were the gallant heroes of How The West Was Won. The European marauders invaded the land of North America. They farmed the land in an intense and exploitative manner, clearing out acres of natural animal habitat in order to herd cattle. They built railroads to transport livestock and other booty around the country and also to bring the wealth from the west and mid-west to the colonial capitals of the east of the Union. They had to massacre the Native Americans in these earlier times. Then, to add insult to injury, Hollywood portrayed these proud tribes that lived at peace with the environment, as bloodthirsty savages that killed at will just to obtain a scalp as a trophy. The Native Americans now live in economic deprivation in communities riddled with social problems, drug and solvent abuse, poor housing, and no prospects of competing on an equal footing with those that raped and plundered their land.

The violence of the founding of the US became sanitised for the white Europeans by Hollywood. The escapism of the movie theatre created a blurring between fantasy and reality. The public would leave the cinemas taking home whatever message Hollywood wanted them to take. On the way home from the theatre people could stop at a McDonalds, eat the beef of the Wild West, eat the apple pie of the wholesome mid-west, get the free toy of a Disney character, such as Pocahontas, and contemplate on how good the American dream really is. They could reflect on how the conquering of the ''Red Man'' was not pretty, but was necessary, in order to build this great American dream. Thus Hollywood would dispel any element of guilt that the conqueror may have harboured in their hardened hearts and at the same time reinforce the policy of destroying the Native American nation.

The Hollywood treatment of the Native Americans is paralleled in its treatment of Blacks. The very first moving images made by Thomas Edison portrayed stereotypes of black savages boiling people in pots ready to be eaten. This theme was carried on to the first-ever Hollywood blockbuster, the silent movie of DW Griffith, Birth Of A Nation. The first ever feature with a soundtrack, The Jazz Singer, was one where a Russian Jew (Asa Yoelson aka Al Jolson) blacks up his face and re-enacts racial stereotypes and gets paid for doing this on the stage. The first glorious ''Technicolor'' movie, Gone With the Wind, was set on the Southern plantation. The film is a stream of subtle images of Blacks in Uncle Sam's intended role for them. There weren't any Black characters central to the plot nor did any have a major role, although Blacks appear throughout the film. They are always cooking, cleaning and generally serving the every whim and desire of the white stars and starlets in the film. The other image of Blacks, apart from servant or savage, was that of entertainer. Thus Blacks were shown as having rhythm, they were shown as dancers and singers and performers to please the white audiences.

This sent home another stereotype that had more resonance in the ghetto. The message being that the only thing that the Black people are good at is moving to the rhythm of ╗black music╝. This was given the grandiose title of dancing. Later on, the people of the ghetto started to believe in this myth themselves. That is, the myth that god had given black people brains in their feet, and that they could dance their way out of a life of poverty. So many aspired to degrade themselves by playing their dancing roles for the movies, whilst those good honest white folks insisted that they had no rhythm and could not entertain. However they were good at collecting money from the punters who wanted to see the Black people performing circus tricks. This is a tradition firmly established in the early days of Hollywood, and was seen in the first version of the musical Showboat. However the blatant racism of Showboat was toned down in the later re-makes of the film. These were released at the time of the cold war, where the Soviets made an issue of the way the US exploited their own citizens. Hollywood was sensitive in that period to exposing any chinks in the armour of the ''land of the free.''

However this tradition continued with vigour through the ''Blacksploitation'' movies of the 1970s. Today this good American tradition of exploiting black-skinned bodies is kept alive on MTV. Today the music video fulfils the role of plantation slave master, African slave trader, pimp, player and hustler. Thousands of black kids all over North America and Europe practice their moves and study videos in the hope that they could one day be like their heroes of the three-minute music clips. Their only dream and aspiration in life is to gyrate their bodies in time to a programmed drum machine.

There are a substantial number of Blacks in the US. However the image of America to the outside world through Hollywood lies exclusively in white hands. So the images of Tarzan, spear throwing and cannibals that swing from trees, are the images that Hollywood provided the world with.

The other major group that has been given the Hollywood treatment is women. The misogynist, racist cartel that ran Hollywood exploited women more than any other sector of Western society. Women were used, and still are used, purely to appeal to the most base of human drives, which is the sexual instinct. The female form is exploited as part of story lines, the female form is exploited in trailers, and the female form is exploited in the hyperbolae generated by the general media in order to promote a film in more indirect advertising. The etymology of the maxim ''sex sells'' could easily be traced to Hollywood.

We have touched on a few issues to do with Hollywood's treatment of sections of American society, those being Blacks, Native Americans and women. This is the type of treatment they meted out to their own kind. One can only imagine what they had in store for foreign cultures. The red and yellow peril has become cliché in an untold number of films from the cold war period. Then there were the propaganda films of the Second World War. In this day and age the world frowns upon the propaganda machine of Goebbels in Nazi Germany. However nothing that Goebbels could churn out could compare to the blatant racism and sheer power of mind manipulation that Hollywood produced during the Second World War. The other issue that is obviously more relevant to us is the image of Muslims on the silver screen. The whole American understanding of Islam and Muslims is seen through the eyes of Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). This is one side of the coin, whilst the other is the portrayal of the Jews.

The issue of the Jews in Hollywood is an epic in its own right. Jews built the very foundations of the studios, hence it would come as no surprise that their output of films were often to serve the Zionist cause. The blatant examples of the direct link between Hollywood and Israel can be seen in the 1960 film starring Paul Newman, Exodus, which traced the events of 1947 (in Hollywood style of course), and later Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). These two films were overtly pro-Jewish. Exodus had more effect on US public opinion for supporting Israel than decades of lobbying politicians had ever had. However, for every one, in-your-face, Zionist propaganda film there are ten that give a more subtle hint of pro Israeli support.

DW Griffith has already been mentioned, and is mentioned here again as being one of the key forgers of the den of iniquity called Hollywood. His biographic film, The Birth of a Nation (1915) helped to formulate and stabilise Hollywood's oft-recycled narrative style. This film became the template for almost every film ever made by Hollywood in term of its structure and presentation. Griffith's Birth of a Nation was an adaptation of The Clansman, a novel about the Civil War and reconstruction by the South. Griffith was a Kentuckian whose father had served as a Confederate officer. Griffith was deeply sympathetic to the material, and to the Ku Klux Klan. The blatant bigoted content of The Birth of a Nation prompted riots in northern states. Certain states even banned the film outright. However this did not prevent DW Griffith's so-called classic from becoming the single most popular film in history to date; in the year of its release nearly 3,000,000 people saw it. Griffith, a man famous for courting controversy, was totally unrepentant about the uproar his film had caused. He later issued a pamphlet about the film and the issue of free speech. Griffith was a significant figure in that he had been called the ''the Shakespeare of the screen'', and he has been widely accepted as being ''the man who invented Hollywood.'' Hollywood was created by the likes of DW Griffith. Should we be surprised as to what DW Griffith's fledgling town, Hollywood grew into?

It was in 1915 that the collaboration in corruption began to take a strong foothold. The main studios then were Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (later Paramount Pictures, 1927) and Universal Pictures, founded by Carl Laemmle in 1912. Later on small independents started to merge; Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn, Metro Picture Corporation and Louis B Mayer Pictures merged to form MGM in 1924. In the same year Columbia Pictures, Inc. became incorporated by Harry and Jack Cohn. Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., was a year earlier founded by Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack Warner. These organisations became the backbone of the Hollywood studio system, and the men who controlled them shared one common trait: they were all first, or second-generation Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, most of them with little formal education, while 90 percent of the audience they served was Protestant or Catholic. By the 1920s, when movies became a mass medium, this Jewish cabbala started to influence every American citizen. Hollywood went on to become the chief purveyor of American culture to the world.

Over eight decades later this same cartel of carpet-baggers are in charge of delivering the cheap and nasty all-American culture, the main cash export from the US, to the world. Only now they have many more tools at their disposal. The companies such as Fox, Warner, and United Artists also control TV networks and the mainstream music record labels, hence the magicians of these companies can adopt a multi-pronged approach. The United States has many tools at its disposal for dominating the globe, economically, politically and militarily. However the drive in these fields is supplemented by the US's striving for World cultural domination. There is no one single industry that augments the cause of subjugating the world in terms of hearts and minds to American cultural Imperialism, than the film industry. So worshipping at the altar of celebrity may seem pernicious enough. However it is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the sinister monstrosity that looms below the surface of the film industry.

It is unfortunate that the world, that had previously seen the justice of Islam, has become dominated by the capitalist nations such as Britain, the United States and France, looking to secure as many interests for themselves as they could. Islam, and only Islam, will liberate the world from the ills of the capitalist dominated world, by solving the problems that it has caused and establishing a system of justice for all peoples, and only the Islamic Khilafah will establish Islam in the affairs of life. This chaotic situation, which is witnessed throughout the world, is a direct result of the capitalist way of life that is characterised by the poisonous ideas of freedom, democracy and pluralism. It is also the consequence of the absence of the Islamic Khilafah, which is the method that Allah (swt) ordained to practically establish his deen on the earth.

We ask Allah (swt) to help this Ummah to rise to her greatest duty, which is for her to choose an Amir, sincere to her deen of truth, so that he may lead her with it, returning the Islamic Khilafah as the number one state in the world, and on that day the believers will be happy with the victory of Allah (swt); and all praise is to Allah (swt), the Lord of the worlds.

''Know that the life of this world is only play and amusement, pomp and mutual boasting among you, and rivalry in respect of wealth and children. (It is) as the likeness of vegetation after rain, thereof the growth is pleasing to the tiller; afterwards it dries up and you see it turning yellow; then it becomes straw. But in the Hereafter (there is) a severe torment (for the disbelievers) and Forgiveness from Allah and (His) Good Pleasure (for the believers). And the life of this world is only a deceiving enjoyment'' [Al-Hadid: 20]

Salim Fredericks