A global conflict

[Prospero]

The news this morning from Kenya is deeply awful. At last 50 people now murdered by ultra fundamentalist members of the Somalian group Al Shabaab. Some executed at point blank range when it was clear they were not Muslim.

As those who know me at all realise i have been study in my defence of the hundreds of millions of ordinary Muslims globally who are not Jihadists or supporters of the idea of a fundamentalist Caliphate.

But my recent travels around the Middle east talking to many people and the growing numbers of terror incidents around the world convince me even more that a global struggle is underway for the soul of islam - between those who simply wish to live quietly and practice their religion (like most christians, Jews etc) and the very large number who wish to terrorise the world to impose their faith.

This should be a matter of grave concern to all of us.

It is a threat now almost everywhere - and sometimes in unexpected places. In China for instance, it is out of sight, and the Government keeps the conflict with militant Muslims in the Uighar areas. In Russian Chechen militants and jihadists flock to fight in whatever location the latest struggle is found (many in Syria for instance). Even in Indonesia, which is overwhelmingly Muslim,a radical insurgency is underway. In Mali only the presence of the French is keeping the insurgency in check. Those who could face watching the videos of militants in Syria killing Christian priests will have been the huge and multi ethnic composition of the crowds.

In Syria indeed the uprising, welcomed by so many when it began, has now been hijacked by the Islamist groups. In the northern part of the country they are murdering Christians. Any settlement is likely to see a small and fundamentalists zone created. Which will feed Jihad in such places as Jordan.

A bombing of christians today in India. Continual conflict between Jihadists in Iraq and the Shi'ite population. And so on.

Moderate islam and the wider world really do now need to focus on the eradication of this poison. it is a real threat to us all.

[trish]

Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda, National Liberation Front of Tripura, The Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, etc. etc. What lies at the bottom of these hate groups? Is it simply political? Is Al-Shabaab’s terrorist attack on a Nairobi shopping mall simply a tit-for-tat against Kenya having troops in Somalia? That may be part of it, but it is no more explanatory than the fact that the U.S. had an invited presence in Saudi Arabia (home of Mecca) was the reason for the 9/11 attacks. Somalia is and has been for awhile an experiment in total anarchy. It is overrun by mobs, gangsters and pirates. Al-Shabaab is in Somalia not because of any allegiance to its people, but because the lawless land serves as a safe haven for terrorists and brigands that periodically raid Kenyan villages and farms across the border.

There are not just violent Islamist groups, but Christian groups, Jewish groups as well. One might think religious groups are particularly prone to intolerance, but there is environmental terrorism, racial terrorism and political assassins.

Why is fundamentalism of all kinds dividing people everywhere? Not always violently but nevertheless persistently. In the U.S. we have fundamentalists in the form of tea-baggers and libertarians obstructing Congress. Worldwide there are anti-science swindlers obfuscating climate education. In every domain of human affaires find there are holdouts and contrarians for whom worldwide conversion to their own quirky system of wild-eyed beliefs is their self-appointed mission, the one and only mission that seems to give their life meaning and provide them with personal identity. Is this a function of world being effectively smaller than ever before? Is it a function of intrusion of modernity and the spread of practical and effective knowledge? Is it because expanded communications (via the internet) has opened up new territories (i.e. more connected minds) to be persuaded and conquered?

I visited Nairobi just a few years ago. Many Kenyans there are of both African decent, Indian and Pakistani decent. A coffee shop in the mall recently shattered by gunfire was managed by Israelis. I traveled to Lake Naivasha, spent a night in Tree Tops and a week on the Maasai Mara at Kichwa Tembo. The recent shootings truly sadden me.

But I do not wish to divert this conversation toward generalities. Is there something specific to Islam, its history, geography or beliefs that makes Islamic fundamentalism a global threat?

[broncofan]

People in general who cling to any one strain of thought usually have a sick sort of desperation about them. It does seem like such people are able to find one another better these days. Easier access to information, globalization, etc.

I'm not saying that living in a more interconnected world is bad in sum, but there is a netting effect with anything. One bad feature is that disaffected people are able to share ideas and form stronger alliances. It's group think on a very broad scale.

Islamic terrorism, eco-terrorism, conspiracy theorists, 9/11 truthers, HIV deniers. There have always been cranks but the number of positive feedback loops available has increased. Now people build self-reinforcing networks where they share the same ideas, make citations to the same pieces of evidence, and deny everything else. We see that to some degree with our right wing friends who visit and make the same hackneyed arguments, cutting and pasting, usually from the same resources.

This is not terrorism of course, but it leads to deep distortions of reality.

I want to second Trish's point. Just because someone points to the transgressions of their enemy as the cause of their actions does not mean they actually are. And even if these transgressions are a necessary condition, there may be dozens of other pre-disposing factors such as ideology that better explain the "response".

[broncofan]

But I don't mean to ignore the event that inspired the original post. It is horrible. The truth is in direct response to it I don't even know what to say.

[Prospero]

Sayed Qutb's philosophy is at root of much of contemporary Jihadism.

Sayyid Qutb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A great primer (And hugely readable)to the roots of al-Queda and this philosophy is the The looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. It details the development of this thought up to - but not including- the attack on the twin towers.

Interestingly in the 1950s and 1960s, the US covertly funded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the Nasser period because they saw it as a bulwark against Communism. Just as they funded the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan to combat Soviet occupation.

[Stavros]

But my recent travels around the Middle east talking to many people and the growing numbers of terror incidents around the world convince me even more that a global struggle is underway for the soul of islam -

I disagree, because there is no 'global struggle' just as there is no such thing as 'the soul of Islam'. Like it or not there is no central authority in Islam, neither the scholars of Al-Azhar nor Qom, nor the Grand Mufti of Mecca can lay claim to such a role, however respected their opinions might be -just as the Pope is no longer an authority on Christianity -if he ever was-, and the Dalai Lama does not speak for all Buddhists.

Trish asks 'is it simply political' -yes is the answer, and to elaborate on that would mean an historical exegesis of the primary forces that have shaped the Middle East since Napoleon landed in Egypt on the 1st of July 1798 -too much for this thread, but a few thoughts follow.

For some historians -for example Malcolm Yapp- 1798 marks the arrival of 'modernity' in the region; it marks the beginning of a crisis for the Ottoman Empire from which it never recovered, and it sparks a new set of discourses in Islam which attempt to make sense of what Islam is in this new modern world, and whether or not it can fuse with it, co-exist with minimum fuss, or must reject it entirely. Mohammed Abduh, Jamal al-din al-Afghani, Mohamed ibn Abd-al-Wahab -and others, are primarily concerned with politics, and its expression in this other new thing that emerged in the wake of Napoleon and his defeat: nationalism and the state. In the event, all three strands have been submerged in the creation of a modern system of states in the region after 1918 -and also had to contend with the impact of Empire, the attraction of secular politics, and the fact that for most of the period since 1918 the ordinary man and woman in the street has not had an opportunity to shape their own agendas, for dictatorship was quick to replace messy experiments with democracy with the certainty of brutal, centralised rule and the obliteration of civil society.

That there has not been one dominant discourse in Islam is part of the complex layer of political activity that has characterised the vicissitudes of the modern state in a region where, as in Europe, people have manipulated religion for political purposes, it has suited a variety of leaders and would-be leaders to make bombastic claims about their fidelity to this or that belief in order to win converts.

Where a particular strand of Islam has dominated, the consequences have been as grim as the consequences of modernity in Europe where, until only recently (1989 if you must have a date) more than half the continent was ruled by one-party states or military dictatorships, but where, in one small corner called Northern Ireland, nobody couched the conflict in terms of a 'crisis of Christianity'.

Why not? At the same time as the 'Troubles' when Churches in northern Ireland were being attacked (mostly by extreme Protestant groups), Christians were leading the slaughter of Muslims in Lebanon as they had done so since the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the Tel al-Zaatar camp in 1976, and continued right up the ghastly massacres in the Chabra and Shatila camps in 1982 -was this 'simply political' or a 'Crisis of Christianity'? What proportion of the military leaders of South American governments, and their soldiers, were rounding up and killing 'godless Communists' in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Colombia to preserve the Christian state?

And how different are these groups and their radical ideology from the guerilla movements of the 1960s who took their cue from the Russian and the Cuban Revolutions and the (erroneous) belief that even a small ragged bunch of militants can overthrow a government and create a new one -? The motto was simple enough: If you don't hit it, it won't fall. The campaign strategy of the Salafist groups in the Middle East comes straight out of the handbook of the Leninist party and the fact that for a variety of reasons the Bolsheviks manoeuvred themselves into a position in Russia in 1917 from which they could mount a bid for power, their opponents being as incoherent and divided as the Syrian opposition is today.

And so on -it is politics and the modern state; modernity and issues of gender and identity which are at the cause of the contemporary Middle East, and there but for a few yards of cloth and contentious rituals, go we all.

[Prospero]

It seems you do not understand metaphor Stavros - (my use of the word soul) and patronise me in suggesting i do no realise there is no central authority in islam.

[dderek123]

As a former teacher, I believe education and awareness should be the tools used to treat the deep wounds of fundamentalism. There's a strong correlation between fundamentalism and lack of education. Furthermore, it makes sense to think that an uneducated person would be more susceptible to indoctrination.

The Punic Wars were my favourite global conflict to learn about in history class. Hannibal was a beast.

http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.ph...roducts_id=149

http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.ph...roducts_id=148

http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.ph...roducts_id=147

[Stavros]

It seems you do not understand metaphor Stavros - (my use of the word soul) and patronise me in suggesting i do no realise there is no central authority in islam.

A metaphor for what? You could try and discuss political Islam in the context in which it has become important rather than invent your own crisis and then express surprise that not everyone recognises it as such.

[Prospero]

Stavros - I have not invented this crisis. It is very real. What I wrote yesterday was a rapid and gut response to the horrific events still unfolding in Kenya.

But was not inspired by some fantasy.

I wonder how many Jihadists you have spoken to? How many British Muslim radicals you have met? How many former inmates of Guantanamo Bay? How many Imams across the Arab world? How many ordinary Muslims in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or Dubai or elsewhere?

So why such a patronising and arrogant dismissal by you of something for which is a considerable evidence . A paper published this summer by the Royal African Society for instance discusses the formal affiliations between al-Shabaab and the Al-Queda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM) with the "central" al-Queda leadership.

(I seriously wonder if your students found you as pompous and patronising in the classroom as you come across on here on almost any topic on which you feel someone else is wrong.)

I used the word soul loosely. I might have said heart, or mind or some other such word. Allow me, if you will, a little journalistic licence in coming up with a phrase to suggest the scope of the crisis facing the various forms of Islam globally. Yes it is to do with modernism and how to reframe Islam in the modern world. And in the aftermath of the rule of people such as Nasser and Saddam.

What I was saying is that the various forms of mainstream islam are undergoing an identity crisis and facing an aggressive challenge from a very fundamentalist vision of the faith - one that seeks to impose its own very rigorous version of Sharia law as espoused, for instance, by the Taliban when it ruled Afghanistan and which is now shared by various movements globally. It is one that in many cases also publicly espouses the notion of the creation of a global Khalifate. Or if its aims are more limited a khalifate that displaces other rules and governments in Muslim majority countries. There are many contradictions here... for instance the influence of Wahabism promoted by Saudi Arabia when in some of its forms, the radical islamist would love to overturn the rule of the Saud royal family.

And no while it is convenient for some commentators to see al-Queda as a global conspiracy (I avoided that word) it is a tendency which many younger radicalised young Muslim men (and some women) see as fitting their needs. And it does threaten the normalcy of Islam in the West (read the various accounts of those who have been radicalised in the UK via contact with still active radicalizing groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir.

As to supreme leadership in the Islamic world? There was, as you know, under the Ottoman Empire such a leadership. Today it is thoroughly splintered. (And was centuries ago when the binary divide over the succession to the prophet occurred). But the Shia tend to look to the supreme spiritual leadership in Iran and the university of Al-Azhar in Cairo is also seen as a religious authority of great repute. But no in the end I agree and know full well that there are no popes or Archbishop of Canterbury or dalai lama. I guess I had assumed most people knew this already. Did I suggest anything otherwise?

You draw a comparison with Northern Ireland as if to demolish my assertion of a crisis within Islam. No this was not seen as a crisis in Christianity – but it certainly was on one level a sectarian divide as well as a complex political one.

And the horrible massacres in refugee camps in Lebanon Now again these were not religious killings as much as Israeli inspired killings by Phalangists of opponents in the civil war –and of Palestinians. Political.

Is the public beheadings of Christian priests in Northern Syria simply political? Was the questioning of people in the shopping mall in Nairobi – and their summary execution if they were found not to be Muslim – simply political? I don’t think so.

These ignorant young people are the victims of a religious AND political ideology that IS a threat to the various forms of mainstream Islam and they also represent a wider threat.