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The battle for the soul of Islam
If there remain any doubts about what 9/11 means on this, its third anniversary, they should be quelled by the horror perpetrated in Beslan. Here children, the most vulnerable in society, totally innocent of any responsibility for history's wrongs, were slaughtered by killers in the service of an ideology, Islamism, that has perverted a noble faith into a cult of death. The meaning of 9/11 in its Chechen variation was spelled out by the killers of Beslan's children. Here is how the Washington Post described that motivation on Sept. 7, quoting from an apperance on Russian state television by one of the captured Chechen terrorists: "'We gathered in the forest and the Colonel -- it's his nickname -- and they said we must seize the school in Beslan,' said the man, who had short, dark hair and no beard. He said the orders came from (Shamil) Basayev and another Chechen commander, Aslan Maskhadov, and that his group included Arabs and Uzbeks as well as Chechens and people of other nationalities. When we asked the Colonel why we must do it, he said, 'Because we need to start war in the entire territory of the North Caucasus.'"The children of Beslan -- like the victims of 9/11 in New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and casualties in other cities (Bali, Jakarta, Karachi, Istanbul, Casablanca, Madrid, Jerusalem, Moscow) -- were merely quarry in a larger design of Islamists, according to their ideology, to precipitate a war between dar al-Islam (abode of Muslims) and dar al-harb (abode of infidels). Islamists are brazen about their goals. They seek power irrespective of cost, like their totalitarian counterparts of the previous century, to transform existing Muslim countries into Islamist societies. How would such an Islamist society appear in our time? The Taliban regime in Afghanistan provided the world with a glimpse of an Islamist utopia. The Islamist agenda, now a global monstrosity, cannot be traced to some root cause located in poverty or some wrongs done in history; nor can Islamists be appeased through negotiation. Islamist terrorism is a calculated means to achieve absolutist ends. What is least understood and hotly denied by many Muslims, is that Islamism was embedded in Muslim history from its beginning. While Muslim civilization flourished and remained healthy, Islamism, as an absolutist politics of violence, was contained. Once decadence extinguished the creative dynamism of Muslim societies and internal rot laid waste to them, Islamism in its various guises -- Wahhabi sectarianism in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and beyond, Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan, Khomeinism in Iran, Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia -- became the most visible face of Islam. In contemporary times, during a past half-century financed in large part by rising oil revenues, Islamists steered the politics of the Muslim world and of many Muslims immigrating to the West. Osama bin Laden and his followers are merely Islamists in a bloody-minded hurry relative to Wahhabi ideologues, impatiently pummelling history to move in the direction of their desired goal. This explains why the West does not often hear from so-called "moderate" Muslims contending with Islamists for the soul of Islam. There is no organized body of moderate Muslims. Islamists have intimidated, coerced and silenced Muslims who might otherwise have organized opposition to Islamism. Many individual Muslims occasionally break through this silence, often risking their personal safety and security, and bravely contend with the Islamists to expose their hate-filled politics. But individual Muslims operating without any organized public support in their own communities, despised for breaking the tribal code of honour-shame and frequently ostracized by fellow Muslims, cannot be a substitute for a political party or movement, which is required to isolate Islamists, reclaim Islam and revive the comatose civilizational impulse that flows throughout Muslim history. Such a turnaround might still be possible. It will only happen, however, when Muslims in sufficiently large numbers repudiate Islamism for what it is -- an ideology of killers. The first task, along with making the world safe for children everywhere, is eliminating Islamists by winning the war on terror. Posted by: Fred 2004-09-11 |
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