01
(Essay)
Look Who Owns the World
The men holding the world right now, read from the record, and why a believer keeps the dunya in his hand and out of his heart.
By Mike Rashid King • Allah's Humble Servant
Look who owns the world
Read the record of the men holding the world right now and tell me this is the prize.
The President of the United States is a convicted felon. On May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury found him guilty on thirty four counts of falsifying business records. He was sentenced on January 10, 2025 to an unconditional discharge, which means the conviction stands and no penalty attaches to it, and on August 28, 2026 a federal judge refused for the third time to erase it. Before that, in May 2023, a federal jury found him liable for sexually abusing a woman in a department store dressing room and then defaming her, and the judge wrote in July 2023 that the verdict did not mean she had failed to prove that he raped her as many people commonly understand the word. In June 2026 the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal of that verdict, and in August 2026 it refused again. It is final. None of that stopped him from taking the oath. That is the record, from the courts, and I am adding nothing to it.
PBS NewsHour, January 10, 2025 · PBS NewsHour, August 28, 2026 · PBS NewsHour, July 19, 2023 · Al Jazeera, August 17, 2026
The Prime Minister of Israel has been under an International Criminal Court arrest warrant since November 21, 2024 for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. In October 2026 the court's deputy prosecutor said the case is still proceeding. At home he has been on trial since 2020 for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and in November 2025 he asked his president for a pardon, two weeks after the American president wrote a letter asking for one. He still holds the office. That is the record.
Lawfare on the ICC warrants, November 2024 · Middle East Eye via Peace and Justice Post, October 16, 2026 · Reuters via Khaleej Times, December 1, 2025
And under both of them sits the Epstein class. A convicted sex offender who pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a seventeen year old, was arrested in July 2019 for trafficking girls, and died in federal custody before trial. In January 2026 the Department of Justice released more than three million pages from his files. The names in those pages run through finance, politics, royalty, academia, law, media, arts and sport. Being named is not a charge, and I charge no one. I am pointing at the address book. That is where the world's upper floor kept its friends.
Britannica, The Epstein Files: A Timeline · Epstein files, public record summary
Allah will judge these men, and He will judge me, and I have enough to answer for. But the record is public, and a man is allowed to read it and say what it says about the men who made it. I will do that in a minute. First, why I am naming them at all. A lot of men my age spent their twenties and thirties grinding toward the top floor of this building. Now the floor is lit up and we can see who lives there. That is not a reason to despair. It is a reason to look up.
The dunya (this world, the life of this world as opposed to the hereafter) was never the prize. Allah said so plainly, the Prophet ﷺ said so plainly, and now the newspapers say so too, which is the only new part.
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What the record says about the men
Now the part I said I would do. This is my judgment, and I will own every word of it. The facts are above. The reading is mine.
The first man lied, on paper, thirty four times, and a jury of his own citizens said so. A jury of his own citizens also found that he forced himself on a woman and then called her a liar in public for saying so, and he kept calling her a liar until a second jury put an eighty three million dollar price on it, a verdict he is still fighting. He has never once said he was sorry for any of it. He wears it. That is the trait, and it has a name in our tradition. The Prophet ﷺ passed down a sentence from the prophets before him: if you have no shame, then do as you wish. Haya (shame, the modesty that stops a man before he acts) is the brake. Take the brake out and the car goes wherever the appetite points it. What you are watching in that man is a car with no brake, and the whole country is in the back seat.
The second man stands accused by a court of using hunger as a weapon on a penned population, and his answer, with that warrant still standing, was to ask for a pardon for his own corruption. I do not need the court to finish its work to read that. Allah described the type fourteen hundred years ago and gave it a name. Indeed, Pharaoh exalted himself in the land and made its people into factions, oppressing a sector among them (Surah Al-Qasas 28:4). Exalted himself. Made factions. Crushed one of them. The pattern is older than Israel and Allah said it would keep coming back, and every time it comes back it believes it is new.
The third is not a man but a class, and the class is the worst of the three, because it has no face to hold accountable. Men of finance, politics, royalty and the academy who knew what their host was and kept his company anyway. Allah told you exactly how a civilization dies, and He said the rot starts in that room:
وَإِذَآ أَرَدْنَآ أَن نُّهْلِكَ قَرْيَةً أَمَرْنَا مُتْرَفِيهَا فَفَسَقُواُ فِيهَا
Wa idha aradna an nuhlika qaryatan amarna mutrafiha fafasaqu fiha
And when We intend to destroy a city, We command its affluent but they defiantly disobey therein; so the word comes into effect upon it, and We destroy it with complete destruction. (Surah Al-Isra 17:16)
The mutrafin. The ones who have been given ease. Allah does not say a city falls when its poor sin. He says it falls when the people on the top floor stop obeying, and the Epstein files are a three million page photograph of the top floor not obeying. Nobody in those pages was hungry. Nobody was desperate. They had everything the dunya sells and they wanted the one thing it forbids, and they wanted it in private, with the lights off, which tells you they knew.
So here is the character of the top floor in three words, and I stand on all three. Shameless. Pharaonic. Rotten from ease. That is not slander. Slander is saying what a man did not do. This is reading the file.
And here is why it matters to you. Allah shows the followers and the followed standing together on the Day, and the followed cutting the followers loose. When those who have been followed disassociate themselves from those who followed them, and they all see the punishment (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:166). Then the followers say, if only we had one more turn, so we could cut them loose the way they cut us loose (2:167). Every man who tied his hopes to the top floor, who voted for it, cheered for it, defended it on the timeline, wanted a seat at its table, is in that ayah. The men up there will not know your name on that Day. Do not give them your heart on this one.
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What Allah says the dunya is
Allah gave the dunya its definition in one ayah (verse), and He gave it in the form of a list.
ٱعْلَمُوٓاُ أَنَّمَا ٱلْحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنْيَا لَعِبٌۭ وَلَهْوٌۭ وَزِينَةٌۭ وَتَفَاخُرٌۢ بَيْنَكُمْ وَتَكَاثُرٌۭ فِى ٱلْأَمْوَٰلِ وَٱلْأَوْلَٰدِ
I'lamu annama al-hayatu ad-dunya la'ibun wa lahwun wa zinatun wa tafakhurun baynakum wa takathurun fi al-amwali wal-awlad
Know that the life of this world is but amusement and diversion and adornment and boasting to one another and competition in increase of wealth and children. (Surah Al-Hadid 57:20)
Five words. Play. Distraction. Decoration. Bragging. Stacking. Read them again with the record from the first section in front of you and tell me which one is missing. The ayah goes on. It is like rain that brings up a crop the farmers love, then it dries, then it yellows, then it is debris. And it ends: what is the worldly life except the enjoyment of delusion. Mata' al-ghurur. The furniture of a con.
Allah repeats that exact phrase when He tells you that you will die:
كُلُّ نَفْسِھ ذَآئِقَةُ ٱلْمَوْتِ ۗ وَإِنَّمَا تُوَفَّوْنَ أُجُورَكُمْ يَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَٰمَةِ
Kullu nafsin dha'iqatu al-mawt, wa innama tuwaffawna ujurakum yawma al-qiyamah
Every soul will taste death, and you will only be given your full compensation on the Day of Resurrection. (Surah Aal Imran 3:185)
The payout is not here. The men on the top floor are collecting an advance on a check that will be settled somewhere else. So are you. The only question is which ledger you are working for.
Then the ayah that explains the record better than any newspaper:
قُلِ ٱللَّهُمَّ مَٰلِكَ ٱلْمُلْكِ تُؤْتِى ٱلْمُلْكَ مَن تَشَآءُ وَتَنزِعُ ٱلْمُلْكَ مِمَّن تَشَآءُ
Qul Allahumma malika al-mulki tu'ti al-mulka man tasha'u wa tanzi'u al-mulka mimman tasha'
Say, O Allah, Owner of Sovereignty, You give sovereignty to whom You will and You take sovereignty away from whom You will. (Surah Aal Imran 3:26)
Allah gives the mulk (dominion, rule, sovereignty) to whom He wills. He did not say to the best. He did not say to the clean. Kingship in this world is a test He hands out, not a grade He hands back. A man who reads the headlines and concludes that Allah is absent has the ayah backwards. The headlines are the ayah.
And the measure of what lasts:
ٱلْمَالُ وَٱلْبَنُونَ زِينَةُ ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنْيَا ۖ وَٱلْبَٰقِيَٰتُ ٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتُ خَيْرٌ عِندَ رَبِّكَ ثَوَابًۭا
Al-malu wal-banuna zinatu al-hayati ad-dunya, wal-baqiyatu as-salihatu khayrun inda rabbika thawaba
Wealth and children are but adornment of the worldly life. But the enduring good deeds are better to your Lord for reward. (Surah Al-Kahf 18:46)
Al-baqiyat as-salihat. The deeds that stay. Everything on the top floor is zinah, decoration. Everything on your prayer mat is baqiyat, what remains. Allah closed the argument in two lines in Surah Al-A'la: but you prefer the worldly life, while the Hereafter is better and more enduring (87:16 to 17). He did not say the dunya is nothing. He said it loses on both counts. Better, and longer.
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What the Prophet ﷺ said
He gave the instruction with his hand on a young man's shoulder. He ﷺ took hold of Ibn Umar and told him to be in this world as if he were a stranger or a traveler passing through. Ibn Umar carried it the rest of his life and added his own rule: when evening comes, do not count on the morning, and when morning comes, do not count on the evening. Take from your health for your sickness and from your life for your death.
A traveler does not fight over the hotel furniture. He does not pick a side in the lobby politics. He keeps his bag packed and his eyes on the road, and he is polite to everyone because he is leaving. That is the posture. Not bitterness. Not withdrawal. Luggage by the door.
He ﷺ told you how much the thing is worth. If this world were worth the wing of a mosquito to Allah, He would not give a disbeliever a drink of water from it. Read that against the record in the first section. Allah hands out the whole top floor to whoever He wills, and the price tag on the whole building is below a mosquito's wing. The men up there are not being rewarded. They are being given water.
Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2320, graded sahih by at-Tirmidhi
He ﷺ gave the ratio. This world next to the Hereafter is what comes back on your finger when you dip it in the sea. Not the sea. The wet on one finger.
He ﷺ told you how it would feel. The world is a prison for the believer and a paradise for the disbeliever. If the dunya feels tight on you, if you look at what the top floor gets away with and something in you refuses to want it, that is not a defect in your faith. That is your faith working. A prison is supposed to feel like one. The man who feels at home in it is the one in trouble.
And he ﷺ lived it, with the whole Arabian peninsula at his command. Umar walked into his room and found him on a woven mat that had left its marks in his side. In the storeroom, a handful of barley, some leaves, a hanging waterskin. Umar wept. He said Caesar and Chosroes sit in gardens and rivers and you are the Messenger of Allah and this is your room. The Prophet ﷺ asked him whether he was not content that they have the dunya and we have the Hereafter.
Umar was not weak. Umar was the hardest man in Madinah, and he cried at the sight of that mat. That is the right reaction to the gap between what the world's rulers have and what the best man who ever lived chose. Then you dry your eyes and you take the deal he offered. They get this. We get that.
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Why the state of the world is the proof
If the dunya paid out on righteousness, it would be the Hereafter.
That is the whole argument, and I want you to sit with it instead of rushing past it. A world where the clean man always wins and the corrupt man always falls is not a test. It is a vending machine. Allah did not build a vending machine. He built a test, and a test only works when the wrong answer can look like it is winning. So the convicted man takes the oath, and the man under warrant asks for a pardon, and the address book of the top floor reads like a who's who, and none of it is a glitch in the system. It is the system doing what Allah said it would do. He gives the mulk to whom He wills, and He watches what each man does with his portion.
The Prophet ﷺ said the world is sweet and green, and Allah has made you successors in it to see how you act. To see how you act. That is the purpose of the top floor and the purpose of your apartment. Both are exam rooms. The man with more has a harder exam, not a better grade.
Systems Thinking gives you the second half. Every empire runs on one lever, and the lever is attachment. The system can only move a man who wants something it controls. Fear of losing the job. Fear of losing the platform. Fear of losing the house, the status, the invitation. Pull the lever and the man bends. Look at who bends in Washington, in Tel Aviv, in every boardroom and every newsroom, and you will find the lever every time. Now look at the man whose heart is not in the building. There is no lever on him. He can be killed, and Allah's people have been killed, but he cannot be moved. That man is the most dangerous thing in any system, and the Quran spent twenty three years building him.
Dialectical Thinking demands the objection, and it is a serious one. So should a Muslim withdraw? Sell the business, delete the accounts, go sit in a cave? If the dunya is a prison, why build anything in it?
Because the Prophet ﷺ ran a state. He signed treaties, commanded armies, settled disputes, and arranged the markets of Madinah, and he slept on the mat. Abu Bakr spent a merchant's fortune buying men like Bilal out of slavery, and Umar called him our master for it. Uthman gave the Muslims the well of Rumah and equipped the army of hardship, and reminded the men besieging his house of both. Abdur-Rahman ibn Awf arrived in Madinah with nothing, turned down half of his brother's wealth, asked only to be shown the market, and built his fortune from butter and dried yogurt. Not one of them withdrew. What they did is the thing this essay is about. They held the dunya in the hand and kept it out of the heart.
Sahih al-Bukhari 3754 · Sahih al-Bukhari 2778 · Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3701, hasan · Sahih al-Bukhari 2048
That is zuhd (detachment from the world, wanting little of it). Zuhd is a condition of the heart, never a size of the bank account. A poor man can be drowning in the dunya because it is all he thinks about. A rich man can be a stranger in it because he knows exactly what it is worth and would hand it back tomorrow. The test is simple. If it were taken from you tonight, what would you do at Fajr? The man who would still stand is unattached. The man who would not get up has told you where his heart lives.
So build. Build hard. Build halal. And never once confuse the building with the prize.
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What steadfastness buys
A man asked the Prophet ﷺ for one instruction so complete that he would never need to ask anyone else. He ﷺ gave him two sentences. Say I believe in Allah, then be steadfast.
Istiqamah (steadfastness, staying straight on the road after you have taken it) is the whole program. Not a peak. Not a phase. A direction held for years while the world does what the world does. Here is what it pays, in both currencies.
The practical gains first, because men want to know what this costs and what it returns.
An unattached man cannot be bought. The lever every system pulls is the fear of losing something, and the man whose heart is in the Hereafter has already priced the loss. He can walk out of the meeting. He can say no to the money. He can post the thing that costs him followers. I have watched men with ten times my resources fold in rooms because they wanted something in that room more than they wanted their own name. Zuhd is the only negotiating position that cannot be beaten, because the other side has nothing you need.
An unattached man sleeps. The Prophet ﷺ said wealth is not a lot of possessions, wealth is the richness of the self. The richest man I know by that definition drives a ten year old truck. The poorest I know has a jet and cannot sit still for ten minutes. The man who has decided that the Hereafter is the payout stops auditing his life against other men's lives. That is where the anxiety lives, and it leaves with the attachment.
An unattached man decides clean. Every bad decision I have made in business came from wanting something too much. Fear and greed are the same disease, and the cure for both is the finger dipped in the sea. When the whole deal is worth a drop, you can look at it straight, take it or leave it, and move on without the deal taking a piece of you.
An unattached man can watch the news. He sees the record from the first section and it does not shake him, because he never expected the dunya to be just. He expected it to be a test. He grieves for Gaza and he gives, and he does not lose his faith over the fact that the men responsible are in office. Allah told him they would be. Allah told him why.
Now the spiritual gains, which are the real ones.
إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ قَالُواُ رَبُّنَا ٱللَّهُ ثُمَّ ٱسْتَقَٰمُواُ تَتَنَزَّلُ عَلَيْهِمُ ٱلْمَلَٰٓئِكَةُ أَلَّا تَخَافُواُ وَلَا تَحْزَنُواُ
Inna alladhina qalu rabbuna Allahu thumma istaqamu tatanazzalu alayhimu al-mala'ikatu alla takhafu wa la tahzanu
Indeed, those who have said, Our Lord is Allah, and then remained on a right course, the angels will descend upon them, saying, do not fear and do not grieve, but receive good tidings of Paradise, which you were promised. (Surah Fussilat 41:30)
Read the order. They said it. Then they stayed on the road. Then the angels came down. The reward for istiqamah is named twice in that ayah and both are things the top floor cannot buy at any price. No fear. No grief. The two things every rich man on earth is paying to get rid of are handed to the steadfast man as a gift, and then Paradise on top.
The Hereafter is assigned, in Allah's own words, to those who do not desire exaltedness upon the earth or corruption, and the outcome is for the righteous (Surah Al-Qasas 28:83). Not wanting to be high on the earth. That is the entry requirement. The men in the first section wanted the top floor more than anything, and they got it, and the ayah says what that choice cost them. The man who stays low here is being measured for something else.
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The practice
The rule is the Prophet's ﷺ: a stranger, or a traveler. The drills are mine.
- Keep the five. The five daily prayers are the anchor chain. Every one of them pulls your head out of the dunya and puts your face on the floor five times a day, on schedule, whatever the news says. A man who holds the five on time has istiqamah before he knows the word. A man who lets them slide is drifting, no matter what else he is doing.
- Read the record, then read the ayah. When a headline shakes you, open Surah Aal Imran 3:26 and read it out loud. Allah gives the mulk to whom He wills. Then close the phone. You just converted a provocation into a lesson, which is what the headline was for.
- Give until it costs you. Sadaqah (voluntary charity) is the drill that proves the heart is not in the money. Give to Gaza. Give to the masjid. Give to the brother who cannot pay you back. Pick an amount that you feel, and give it anyway. That feeling is the attachment leaving your hand. Let it go.
- Visit the graves. The Prophet ﷺ stood at his mother's grave and wept, then told the companions to visit graves because they make you mindful of death (Sahih Muslim 976). Go once a month. Stand there with your phone in your pocket and look at the names. Every one of them had a top floor they were trying to reach.
- Run the audit. Once a week, ask one question and answer it without flinching. What would I sell my deen for? Name the number, the offer, the woman, the room. If you find one, that is where the lever is, and that is the attachment you work on next. If you find none, say Alhamdulillah (all praise is due to Allah) and check again next week, because the dunya does not stop recruiting.
- Hold the dunya in the hand. Build the business. Train the body. Raise the children. Buy the house. Do all of it with the bag packed by the door. The test of whether a thing is in your hand or in your heart is what happens when it is threatened. If you would break a rule of Allah to keep it, it is in your heart. Move it.
- Say the dua the Prophet ﷺ taught, every day. Wa la taj'al ad-dunya akbara hammina wa la mablagha 'ilmina. And do not make this world our greatest concern, nor the limit of our knowledge (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3502, graded sahih). Say it after Fajr and mean it. A man gets what he asks for at that hour.
Sahih Muslim 976 · Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3502, sahih
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The quiet work
The top floor is lit now. Everyone can see who lives there and how they got the keys. Let them have it. Allah gave it to them to see what they would do, and the record shows what they did.
Your work is in a different building, and nobody is filming it. The prayer on time. The money given quietly. The deal you walked away from. The night you stood when the house was asleep. None of that makes the news, and all of it is being written down by the two who write, for a ledger that settles on a day when the top floor is debris and the barley in the storeroom is worth more than the kingdom of Caesar.
Be a stranger here. Keep the bag by the door. And when the world shows you its rulers, do not lose heart. Look up.
Be in this world as if you were a stranger, or a traveler passing through.
By Mike Rashid King • Allah's Humble Servant