Among the many repugnant ideas
promulgated of late by Islamist apologists is the notion that the world's
Muslim population has been victimized by the western world and that the unending
catalog of sociopathic acts of terror committed in the name of
Islam are a legitimate response to this perceived injustice. Perhaps the
most egregious example of this among some American Muslims is the recent attempt
to link the modern Islamist movement with the struggle for civil rights by
American Blacks. The connection is historically, culturally and ethically
absurd. In the course of history, Muslims have been the oppressors more
often than the oppressed, slavers more often than the enslaved, perpetrators
more often than victims. Islam's fundamental discomfort with non-Muslims is
inherently racist and the discrimination against non-Muslims has been a
historical feature of every society dominated by Islam. Worse yet, this spurious
logic is intended to beguile moderate Muslims into embarking on the path to
radicalization, and to create a common cause among the western cultural liberals
who have a autonomic sympathy with class struggles of any kind.
Moderate Muslims who have been ostracized and intimidated physically and
politically by the Islamists have a legitimate claim to victimization. The
majority of Muslims living in the west enjoy the benefits of a pluralistic
society and are raising their children within the spiritual and devotional
guidelines of Islam. In the last several decades, this quiet majority has
been under attack from radical Islamists promoting Wahhabist, Salafist, &
Qutbist ideologies who are forcefully attempting to wrest control of Islam for
political and ideological purposes. This phenomenon has been amply
documented by Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji who have suffered death threats
and worse for challenging Islamist ideas. A moderate Muslim who opposes
the Islamist agenda becomes its target.
Many in the West have wondered about the relative
paucity of opposition among moderate Muslims at the hijacking of their religion
by radical Islamists. The answer to this is that devotional Muslims who
oppose the radicals are intimidated and, afraid. Unlike the extremists,
they practice a spiritual and apolitical devotion to their faith and lack an
understanding of the penetration and control that Islamism has gained over the Ummah
or world Islamic community.
Akbar S. Ahmed was
formerly the Pakistani high commissioner to Britain and has been on the
faculties of Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge. He is currently the chair
of Islamic Studies at American University. He is a great example of what
most non-Muslims would consider an Islamic moderate. His
recent book, Journey into Islam, chronicles
his travels throughout the modern Islamic world, with three of his students, in
search of trends in modern Islamic thought. What he finds is profoundly
disheartening. Mr. Ahmet explains
in his book the Ummah can be roughly divided into three major categories of
Islamic culture: Aligarth,
Ajmer and Deoband. Ajmer represents
the peaceful Sufi mysticism that many westerners have historically associated
with all of Islam. Aligarth, represented by Ahmed himself, is the desire
to modernize Islam without corrupting it, and Deoband, a product of the 14th
century when Islam was under attack by Mongol invaders, represents a rejection
of the open acceptance of non-Muslims, the core beliefs of modern Islamists.
In short, he reports that the mystical and progressive forms of Islam,
Aligarth and Ajmer
are on the wane and the Islamist radicalism represented by Deoband is
aggressively on the rise.
In Mr. Ahmed's words:
"The progressive and active Aligarth
model had become enfeebled and in danger of being overtaken by the Deoband
model ... I felt like a warrior in the midst of the fray who knew the odds
were against him but never quite realized that his side had already lost the
war."
As the journalist Tony Blankley notes in his book, The West's Last
Chance the Islamists are resourceful and determined. They have adroitly
co-opted the rhetoric and ideological tactics of the extreme left, but their
agenda is more fascist than socialist. Their goals have been clearly and
repeatedly stated. What they seek is a world wide Islamic state embodied
in the restoration of the Caliphate which would rule under Sharia law.
The Christian Science Monitor's, James Brandon
reporting from Amman, Jordan sums it up this way:
The three middle-aged men
sitting in an Indian restaurant in Jordan's capital scarcely look like Islamic
revolutionaries. They are smartly dressed in Western-style suits and sip
thoughtfully from cans of Pepsi as they share their plan to reshape the Muslim
world. "President
Bush says that we want to enslave people and oppress their freedom of
speech," says Abu Abdullah, a senior member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party
of Liberation. "But we want to free all people from being slaves of men
and make them slaves of Allah. Hizb ut-Tahrir says that Muslims should
abolish national boundaries within the Islamic world and return to a single
Islamic state, known as "the Caliphate," that would stretch from
Indonesia to Morocco and contain more than 1.5 billion people."
When an impressionable and idealistic young Muslim voices something like
the following, "If I were to talk freely I would say that I want an
Islamic state, that I hope one day to see Britain or the US be a Muslim
country," he no doubt imagines an earthly paradise where
spirituality reigns and the corruption and excesses of modern Western society
are absent. Unfortunately, the harsh reality of life in every Islamic
state throughout the course of history has been one of grotesque inequality,
brutal repression and almost unimaginably barbaric despotism. The
following quote from a recent article in USA Today hammers home the reality of
Sharia Law.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — The Saudi judiciary
on Tuesday defended a court verdict that sentenced a 19-year-old victim of a
gang rape to six months in jail and 200 lashes because she was with an
unrelated male when they were attacked. The Shiite Muslim woman had
initially been sentenced to 90 lashes after being convicted of violating
Saudi Arabia's rigid Islamic law requiring segregation of the sexes. But in considering her appeal of the verdict, the
Saudi General Court increased the punishment. It also roughly doubled prison
sentences for the seven men convicted of raping the woman, Saudi news media
said last week. The reports triggered an
international outcry over the Saudis punishing the victim of a terrible
crime. But the Ministry of Justice
stood by the verdict Tuesday, saying that "charges were proven"
against the woman for having been in a car with a man who was not her
relative.
Another, more recent example of Islamist barbarity:
Mentally Disabled Women Used in Bombings
By STEVEN R. HURST
Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD (AP) -- Two women described as mentally disabled and strapped with remote-control explosives - and possibly used as unwitting suicide bombers - brought carnage Friday to two pet bazaars, killing at least 91 people in the deadliest day since Washington flooded the capital with extra troops last spring.
Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, Iraq's chief military spokesman in Baghdad, said the women had Down syndrome and may not have known they were on suicide missions, but gave no further details on how authorities pieced together the evidence. He also said the bombs were detonated by remote control.
So, what's the answer to this dilemma?
Clearly there's no one answer, but
M. Zuhdi
Jasser, a former U.S. Navy lieutenant
commander and the president and founder of the
American
Islamic Forum for Democracy, offers the following wise words as a recipe for
turning the Ummah in a more productive direction:
I was raised to appreciate American freedom which
guaranteed my right to life, liberty, and the practice of my personal faith of
Islam, like in no so-called Muslim country. My grandfather used to talk about
how the devastation of Syria brought by the military coups and the Baathists,
and ultimately by Hafez Assad, was allowed to happen because moderate
freedom-loving Syrians abandoned the military to the thugs, who ultimately
repeatedly savaged the country, before entrenching the Assad family despots for
generations.
I have always been a devout practicing Muslim maintaining a central personal
spiritual relationship with God in my life. I have also held true to the
importance of spiritual practices in my life including fasting, daily prayer,
scriptural recitation, charity, community worship, and personal integrity. As a
result, I have often been asked by the local communities in which I have lived,
to speak about Islam, its role in my life, and my understanding of its history.
Well, before 9/11, in the 1980s, as I found myself frustrated by the
politicization of many but not all of the Muslim communities in which I
participated, I began to focus on the main problem I experienced — the harmful
impact of political Islam upon the practice of Islam in America.
A moral, pluralistic, spiritual Islam is the only way to defeat Islamofascism. We saw with the London plots this summer, perpetrated by Muslim
physicians, that this ideology utilizes terror as a tactic to achieve fascistic
political ends blind to the professional training or level of education of
the individual foot soldiers. The ends which these militants seek, is a warped, utopian
dream of a caliphate or some form of so-called Islamic state, which imposes
their despotic theocratic interpretation of Islamic law upon citizens. The Nazis
had physicians and professionals of all walks of life helping them to commit
genocide against the Jews through a supremacist dehumanization of their enemies
— true fascism. So too do militant Islamists dehumanize their enemies (anti-Islamists)
and exact their barbaric punishments upon innocents in an evil torn right out of
the pages of every fascist regime in history.
Our only task is to live free....of religious
extremism
Relevant Links
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-11-20-saudi-rape_N.htm?csp=34
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0510/p01s04-wome.html
http://www.aifdemocracy.org/