Replies

Something I ran across

Adventure in Asmara
A Report on the Sudanese Resistance
Michael Novak
http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak091902.asp

I have just enjoyed one of the best short experiences of my life. I have just returned from a trip to Asmara, Eritrea, where in four days I gave six lectures on religious liberty to the leaders of the Sudanese Resistance. These are the leaders of the growing rebellion against the Talibanish regime in Khartoum. These leaders, some 40 of them representing many diverse and widely scattered groups, have few enough occasions to get together (Sudan is a country three times larger than Texas, with few roads or other means of easy transport). Besides, now they are in negotiations, temporarily interrupted, with the Khartoum government, concerning a peace settlement that might keep the whole country together, if at all possible. Most Sudanese really want that, they say. The Resistance pretty much controls the south, with salients (or at least pockets within them) reaching up on the east to the Red Sea and on the west almost to the Egyptian border. They are beginning to outline their future nation.

(snip)

About half the leaders of the resistance groups represented seem to be Arabic speakers and about half English speakers. A majority represents various Sudanese African tribes, and either Christianity or native religions of nature, but a large minority, represents Muslim rebels from different geographical regions, races and social classes. The Muslims are outspoken and emphatic in their disdain for the abuses of the good name of Islam perpetrated by the government in Khartoum. "Our problem is not religion," one after another insists, "but a politicalization of religion, an abuse of religion. They are not true Muslims!"

"But how do you argue," another says, a former professor who came home from a Western country to become a brigadier in the field, "when they quote a text from the Koran on amputation according to sharia law, and ask if you believe in that text? We accept the Koran. We are Muslims. But we do not accept an eleventh-century interpretation of Islam. We are twenty-first century people. We are Muslims, in a country with eleven different major tendencies among Muslims, and we are accustomed to tolerance of one another."

(snip)

One of the ideological architects of political Islam in Sudan is a man named Turabi, who quite frankly admitted that his teaching was modeled on a careful study of Stalin and the Fascists of the early 20th century. Any and every means possible should be used, he learned, in the effort to organize cadres to build up a utopian, perfect, totalistic regime.

In other words, so-called "radical Islam" or "Islamic fundamentalism" of the new political type is in fact a bastard modernization of authentic Islam, corrupting Islam by the worst of all modern impulses. As one of our professor-guerrillas put it, If they were going to modernize Islam, why didn't they choose the best features of modernity to bring into Islam, like the Universal Declaration, and democracy, and human rights? Why the worst features — Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler? He expressed the last sentence with exquisite disdain, to vigorous agreement from others.....