is greater than the benefit expected from defensive jihad, then the deciding word belongs to the ruler of the Muslims. In our own age—when the once-unified Islamic state has been carved up into smaller nations, each with its own laws, policies, systems, and borders—it is a serious error to take the words of those two scholars, or of any other scholar, and apply them wholesale to our current reality by saying that this is an individual obligation on every Muslim who lives outside the occupied land.

Indeed, aiding them with both wealth and life is obligatory; yet if our ruler, who governs according to the purified Sacred Law, deems it necessary to forbid some or all of that aid because he sees a greater benefit for Islam and the Muslims or wishes to avert a definite harm, it is impermissible to oppose him—especially when the harm is as glaring as the midday sun.

How many times have we seen and heard in these days of some of our youth—once upon pure monotheism and the Sunnah—returning from lands overrun by the forces of unbelief, bearing alien ideas and corrupt doctrines, and declaring