Posted on 01/27/2005 2:18:26 AM PST by Simmy2.5
SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico (Reuters) - Islam has joined a battle for the hearts and minds of Mexico's volatile Tzotzil Indians in Chiapas state, home of Zapatista rebels and a hotbed of sectarian strife between Christians.
In an unlikely meeting of two worlds, an idealistic Muslim sect has converted some 300 Tzotzils, a Maya Indian group known for drink-fueled fiestas and religious fervor.
"It was difficult to learn the prayers in Arabic at first but now I have them in my heart," said Muhammad Emin Lopez, 46, a Tzotzil fruit merchant who boasts that his conversion to Islam in 1995 was the state's first.
He prays five times a day as required in Islam, has gone on the obligatory "haj" pilgrimage to Mecca and attends a small mosque in a cornfield on the outskirts of the hill town of San Cristobal de las Casas.
Beside the mosque, a Tzotzil woman dressed in colorful Indian garb and known by the Muslim name Karima washes clothes in a stream near ramshackle wooden houses.
The growth of Islam in such a restive area has raised the eyebrows of Mexico's intelligence agency, wary of possible terrorist activity aimed at the neighboring United States.
But the Tzotzil Muslims have little interest in holy war, having seen religious and political conflict close up.
Many are former evangelical Protestants who were thrown out of a nearby town by fellow Tzotzils who practice a mixture of Catholicism and ancient Maya Indian rites in a conflict that began in the 1970s.
Some 30,000 Protestants have been forced from their homes and more than 100 have died in sectarian violence.
"People are full of darkness in Chiapas," said Lopez. "The Catholics and Protestants have fought each other a lot and the Zapatistas only want to know about war, not Islam," he said.
Several dozen Spanish missionaries who introduced Islam to Chiapas and still live here hold radical political and economic views such as wanting to do away with currencies, taxes and the nation state, but church leaders and academics say the group has no connection to violence.
The Spaniards, members of a group of mostly Western converts known as the Murabitun, failed in a bid to ally themselves with Zapatistas 10 years ago and have been relatively quiet since.
The missionaries, also active in the United States and Europe, suffered a blow when Lopez and some 80 other Tzotzils split from them several years ago in an argument over land and jobs and began worshiping on their own.
NEVER ASSIMILATED
Now numbering some 330,000, the Tzotzils in the mountains of Chiapas have never been fully assimilated into the Catholic, Hispanic world since Spain conquered Mexico in the 1500s.
Along with other poor Maya Indians, they form the backbone of the Zapatista guerrillas, who staged an uprising in Chiapas in 1994 and have now retired to bases in the jungle.
The Catholic Church has only a tenuous hold over the Tzotzils, some of whom sacrifice chickens in church and down moonshine known as "posh" during nominally Christian rites.
The Tzotzils, like many of Mexico's 12 million indigenous people, have a hunger of the spirit.
"They are people who become attached to religion no matter where it comes from. Islam presented itself just as any other option could have come along as well," said Felipe Arizmendi, Catholic bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas.
Experts says the Maya have become adroit at adapting to different beliefs and allegiances as the outside world has encroached on their jungles and mountains.
"That's why they have survived so long. They've been able to be at the forefront of whatever proposal or political project that's been offered to them for 500 years," said anthropologist Gaspar Morquecho.
That said, surprised Zapatista rebel leaders turned down the Murabitun missionaries' invitation to convert to Islam during a meeting in Chiapas in February 1995.
"They had an initial contact with the Zapatista army and failed," said Morquecho, author of an academic paper on the Chiapas Muslims.
Since then, the Murabitun have kept a low profile in Chiapas, setting up a mosque, "madrassah" Islamic school and several small businesses.
Headscarved indigenous women bake and bearded Mexicans serve at a pizzeria in San Cristobal de las Casas owned by Murabitun members. Pepperoni pizzas are off the menu, likely due to the Islamic prohibition on eating pork.
Founded by a Scotsman who turned to Islam during a stay in Morocco in the 1960s, the Murabitun are from the orthodox Sunni branch of Islam but have incorporated some mystical Sufi practices.
They are highly critical of the charging of interest rates as un-Islamic and advocate scrapping currencies, taxes and the nation state, to be replaced with Islamic emirates trading in gold coins.
"Our model is not ideological or utopian but is based on the life of our Prophet Mohammad," reads a statement on the group's Mexican web site, http://www.islammexico.org.mx.
Thank you, to Simmy for posting a very good article.
Ping
Sometimes I think Reuters writers read FR and make up articles to whip up, for lack of a better term, panic.
300 converts in a base population of 33,000 of a so-called disenfranchised is less than 1%.
That is a marketing failure.
The terms Reuters and very good are oxymoronic.
It's a start, and how long before they hook up with the Azatlanians? As long as people remain poor and illiterate right next door to the big, bad USofA, you have conditions ripe for revolution of one sort or another. They want something for nothing, easy pickings for Islamofascist conmen.
So when are they going to ban Matamoros as a city name?
Duh.... Like I've been posting, the first commandment of Islam is to copy the life of Muhammad. To emulate his life since he was the perfect man, the most worthy example for all mankind to model their life after. <sic>
I would bet a million dollars they already have.
This has been going on for some time. Also not mentioned in here is that one of the Spanish "missionaries" in question was and possibly still is head of ETA's "Mexican office." And ETA is involved with every terrorist group on the American continent.
Who are the ETA? Are they the Basque terrorists?
The Zapatistas, like the Basques, want to form an autonomous region.
"It was difficult to learn the prayers in Arabic at first but now I have them in my heart," said Muhammad Emin Lopez, 46, a Tzotzil fruit merchant who boasts that his conversion to Islam in 1995 was the state's first."
So, we need spanish as a second language here in the US, since it's not fair to make immigrants learn english, but this man can learn arabic on his on.
This doesn't alarm me as much as the attempts by al- Qaida to make inroads into some of the vicious street gangs of Mexico and Central America. I understand that Islam really doesn't compete well with other religions in a open society and has limited appeal. That is one reason they do not allow Christian missionaries in most Muslim countries. Without a large enough base they can't spread with their usual methods of intimidation and violence. I know that the Mongols converted to Islam after conquering much of Arabia, but they had no organized religion, and Islam represented civilization to them. In Albania for example they have created, over the centuries, a weird hybrid of Christian and Muslim beliefs and I am sure this frustrated the Islamic militants who tried to influence them during their conflict with the Serbs. The Sufi in Pakistan blend a wacky joyful flavor of celebration and mysticism into their form of Islam which again drives the fundamentalist extremists crazy. What these Indians create will be more disturbing to our uptight enemies then anything we can do. The al- Qaida influence on criminal gangs does have me a little worried, because these gangs are already dangerous without getting technical assistance.
It won't be long until Vincente announces he's changing his name to Atta and retakes the US.
Sometimes, I think we're surrounded by evil.
Ping.
CIA must go to there !
stepping back in time...
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3aac268f13f1.htm
"Zapatista rebel army marches into Mexico City"
Foreign Affairs Breaking News News Keywords: CHIAPAS , SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS
Source: AP
Published: March 11, 2001
Posted on 03/11/2001 17:29:51 PST by HAL9000
"Tens of thousandes of Zapatista supporters fill Mexico City's main Zocalo plaza on Sunday"
ARTICLE SNIPPET: "MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) -- Fulfilling a vow in their declaration of war seven years ago, Mexico's masked Zapatista rebels led a march into the heart of Mexico City on Sunday to press their demands for Indian rights.
Winding up a two-week tour of southern Mexico, the Zapatista leaders became the first rebel group to openly ride into the city since revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata -- the rebels' namesake -- did it in 1914."
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