Originally Posted by
trish
This morning I listened the story of one boy who was shot in the head at West Gate Mall (and is now in the hospital). Pleading their lives his mother and sister were asked by the gunman to recite a passage from the Koran. After they did they were shot and killed. A fellow gunman asked, “Why did you do that?” The reply was, “They weren’t wearing the Habeeb.”
According to the NPR radio report I was listening to Al-Shabaab is closely affiliated with Al-Qaeda, which has been trying to get a foothold in Somalia for more than a decade. But Al-Shabaab was a minor player there until the U.S. invasion cleared its political competition.
I find it difficult to believe the West Gate Mall shooting is simply or purely or merely political. Yet it’s doubtful one can understand it without the political background, the history, the geography, the balance of power (or lack of a balance in Somalia). Politics and religion. Which is the powder keg and which the fuse? Which the chicken and which the egg? Does it make any sense even to ask?
It is reported that some of the Mall shooters are young Somali men who were orphaned refugees given shelter within the U.S. and accepted into American families and schools only to years later be recruited by terrorists and sent back to Somalia. Is it religion that drew them back? Is it political rage? Nostalgia for their parents and their home soil? Whatever chords were struck, these poor young men were transformed into agents of terror.
As Prospero says, these recruiters are everywhere. I suspect most are honest in their beliefs about Islam. That believers are becoming too Westernized and their religious practices are becoming too lax, their faith too thin. But Westernization is a political process and the reaction to it is political: recruit men, send them to war, establish the Caliphate (albeit it’s based in religious legend).
I admit I’m pretty stupid when it comes Islamic issues, but it currently seems to me that in Islam politics and religion are inextricably intertwined as might be the case for any religion which has as a primary goal (early Mormonism for example) the establishment of a holy government.