A global conflict

[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.

[Stavros]

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.

I can ignore your suppositions about what I do for a living, because it is not relevant to this thread, as well as being inaccurate. It is a pity that you substitute history for journalism, it means that while you writhe with discomfort in the moment, you cannot see the broader picture and for that reason you run with the pack without asking where they came from and where they are going.
It would be absurd to deny that armed, militant groups are not a threat to 'us' as well as to 'them', enough -too many- people have been murdered or injured for this to be in question, but you need to ask if the project that inspired the original al-Qaeda, its subsequent franchises, and say, the al-Shabab of Somalia, is any different from the project pursued by the Provisional IRA, the Red Army Fraction and the Red Brigades.

In every case there is a precise political context, but to acknowledge the aim of Islamic militants to create/re-create the Khalifate is no more interesting than a United Ireland or a socialist revolution in Germany and Italy. What is interesting is that after moving through different phases of violence and experiments with local government, none of these radical groups ever managed to extend their support beyond a hard core and all (with a few current exceptions) have called a halt to the 'armed struggle' (as was the case with Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the early 1970s) and then co-opted with the very people they sought to destroy (eg, the PLO, the Provisional IRA) or they were smashed with extreme force -but failed to rise from the ashes -Red Army Fraction, Red Brigades. Stay tuned for a deal between the Syrian opposition (some, if not all) and the Asad government.

You know as well as I do that the first experience of Taliban rule in Afghanistan alienated a substantial amount of the population and that the only reason why they have been able to return to prominence in some parts of the country is due to local and central corruption in government and law and order officials, and because the Taliban themselves have modified their original attitude (which doesn't make them any more cuddly than they were before but marks some degree of political maturity).

You also know that the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq was such a disaster that the very people it sought to lead turned against it, and in the 'Awakening' movement joined forces with the 'hated' US occupiers to destroy something they considered far worse.

And yet again, the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts that emerged in Somalia in the mid-1990s was credited with restoring law and order to a part of the country.Mogadishu and was a broad coalition of people whose priority was law and order for the purposes of 'normal life' -trade, education, and so on, and that the Courts survived by negotiating their way through the internecine forces in both Mogadishu and southern Somalia with a mixture of brutality and compromise -before it fell victim to radicals from within who thought it was too soft, and Ethiopian (and eventually, Kenyan) intervention from without who disrupted the gradual state-building process that had been going on. But what then happened is that the al-Shabab stepped into the vaccum created (partly by themselves) when the Courts collapsed, but have since taken the same road as the other would-be revolutionaries and so alienated the local population with their insane interpretation of Islam that they too have been run out of town.

Young men and women are attracted to movements which want to change the world, and they want to be part of that change, it is more exciting than stacking shelves in Tesco but it doesn't mean the world is going to change. Change mostly happens in spite of, rather than because of provocative acts. One of the Americans who left his comfortable home in Alabama to join the revolution in Somalia -he was even known as al-Amriki (his name was Omar Hammamii), got to the point where he couldn't stomach the sickening acts of violence being committed by the al-Shabab and complained about it -so they killed him too, a perfect example of the way in which these deluded grouplets implode over ludicrous debates on doctrine -'Left-Wing communism, an infantile disorder' is what Lenin called it, and that was rich coming from him!

So at its core we are dealing with a political issue, not a religious one, because the discourse of revolutionary politics manipulates Islam in order to distinguish between those who are or for or against the revolution, and it follows that if you don't want it, it is because you are not a 'proper' Muslim -that is not an identity crisis, that is political blackmail. These crises of the state we have been dealing with in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa exist because of the difficulties of creating a state where it did not exist before, with the attempt to create a government that represents the interests of the people who live in it, it really is as simple -and as complex- as that. Issues of identity, of tolerance and obligation, of taxation and representation, of work and education, are all part of the agenda of the modern state, and until someone comes up with a better alternative to it an extreme degree of violence will characterise live in places where extremists have the freedom to delude themselves they are important.

The Arab Spring in Tunisia did not begin as part of an Islamic revolution, it began because a local bureaucrat decided to impose one of a hundred stupid rules on a young man trying to make a living selling fruit from a cart and his patience snapped. It then emerged that people who had previously been afraid to express their own frustrations with incompetent government were no longer afraid and the rest follows -you can create a timeline of the American Revolution but when did those disparate events long before July 4 1776 actually become a conscious revolution against British rule? The Russian Revolution did not begin as a Communist overthrow of the Tsar, the Iranian Revolution only became Islamic after the Shah had left and power was contested within the country, but whatever the dress code, the driving forces are political, and the evidence shows that the armed militants who stormed the Mall in Kenya with the help of Kenyan officials so corrupt they would sell their own families for money, are a fringe element with no future.

[Stavros]

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.

Trish, if you are interested there are some useful articles on Somalia the Courts and the al-Shebab but not recent enough to monitor the latter's decline and fall. There is also a link to the NY Times you might have seen which suggests collusion between corrupt officials in Kenya and the murderers.


http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/rdene...nceSomalia.pdf

http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/de...omalia0407.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/wo...g.html?hp&_r=0

[Prospero]

Correction - it was another poster who described himself as a former teacher. Apologies. But your pomposity is unique in this forum.

And again you lard your otherwise interesting posts with wholly unnecessary insults.

[dderek123]

Correction - it was another poster who described himself as a former teacher. Apologies. But your pomposity is unique in this forum.

And again you lard your otherwise interesting posts with wholly unnecessary insults.

[Stavros]

Correction - it was another poster who described himself as a former teacher. Apologies. But your pomposity is unique in this forum.

And again you lard your otherwise interesting posts with wholly unnecessary insults.

You just can't stand it when someone disagrees with you, Lenin. Ironic as I am about to leave for Russia where I can see the real one, even if he has been dead for 89 years.

[Prospero]

Lenin!!!!!!!.... what a complete and utter twerp you are for all your education and erudition.

[Stavros]

Lenin!!!!!!!.... what a complete and utter twerp you are for all your education and erudition.

So you lost your sense of humour too? Look, you are an intelligent and clever person, and I don't know why you have allowed yourself to become so obsessed with Islam as if there was something exceptional about the violence being perpetrated as part of some global-expansionist, revolutionary Islamic franchise. I tried to point out that these acts of sickening violence are neither unique to Islam nor other religions, but have political causes and seek political consequences, and that is where we seem to disagree. If you can prove from historical evidence that there is something exceptional about the outrages committed by violent Muslim would-be revolutionaries, that no other religion or system of belief can match them, go ahead, make my day. Given the bewildering rubbish I have read in this last week in the press from people who can't tell the difference between a Niqab and a Hijab -converts to Islam being as ignorant as their detractors- I do wonder if reason can be brought to bear on this subject.

[Prospero]

No I have not lost my humour at all nor am i obsessed with islam and nor do i see acts of political violence as unique to the faith and nor do i blame the entire faith and nor do i see a global conspiracy and nor do i see them as exceptional and not possible by other faiths (One only has to look at the violence perpetrated during the crusades or against witches or during the various inquisitions to see the hideousness that Christinaity USED to pepetrate. One can look at attacks against Muslims in Burma now. Etc). No i object to the abrasiveness in your remarks - especially when you respond to me. You debate in perfectly civil terms with anyone else in the politics strand including radical right wingers with whom we both disagree. And yet reserve you utter disdain for me - not merely here but in response to such things as my taste in music and in any other forum where you feel you want for whatever reason to respond to me. I have now come to expect your rudeness whenever you answer a posting by me. I am more than happy to discuss any subject with anyone without recourse to rudeness. But when i get the sort of remarks you made - sure my humour begins to diminish and I will answer back with rudeness.

I assure you I am not obsessed with islam but take a professional interest in it - and am indeed presently researching a film series about the political and historical roots of the present mess in the MiddleEeast. As a fellow at Cambridge university i have also made a special stdy in islam and science and I also assure you I can tell the difference between an Abaya, a Niqab, a Hijab, a Burka etc....

Being told i can brook no argument and being branded Leninist does not seem, on the face of it, full of wit. if it were a joke I missed it.

Yep. I DO see a distinction between Islamic funamentalist violence and, say, the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries of the past. In simplistic terms, one was fired by an ideological fervour to overthrow an ancient and corrupt system and replace it with something that sought to provide greater eqaulity and fairness and social and economic justice. The islamists seek to impose a version of Sharia that is backward and aqainst any notion of human rights and social justice as we understand it in the West. So when i say there is a crisis in islam it is across the Umma and particularly between the discourses that dominate most Muslims who live outside the Muslim majority countries and those who have no wish to live in harmony but insted cleave to the sort of vision inspired by Sayyed al-Qutb, the Muslim Brtherhood, the Salafist, the Wahhabi tendency and others. They are a menace. It is a global conflict and, by that I mean, fought at a low level on many different fronts. Not on a global war scale but in continual hideous bee stings (in the bigger scheme of things) like the mrderous assault this last week in Nairobi and in such attacks as 9/11, 7/7, the attack on the Madrid rail system, the bombings at moscow airport the disco bombings in Bali, the bombings in pakistan, the rise of Jihadism in the Syria civi war etc. Not part of a coherent global consiracy but surely connected - and fired by many factors including, but not exclusively, the notion of Global Jihad. Sure there is a huge political dimension here. I am not in any way trying to suggest it is all holy war. Hizbollah for instance have clear political motivations. As do Hamas. But there is also an underpinning religious vision as well.

Finally I'd like us to please be civil to one another.

[thx1138]

Blowback is a bitch: http://www.economist.com/node/21534828 Many Americans are outraged and feel threatened at what they see as a foreign invasion of an alien culture (Mexico). While the invaders are not soldiers some of them are armed and commit crimes Americans.