Islamism, A Disease Of The Muslim World

Literal interpretations of the Koran emerge when Islam finds itself in moments of crises and are at the root of extremist violence. The Imams further its’ spread. Muslims must be encouraged to reject this invasive interpretation. The second in a series of articles.

Islamism, not to be confused with Islam, is a threat to the survival of the very religion it claims to represent and to the entire world. Until thirty years ago, there was one single word in the Arab language to refer to “Muslim”, and it was Muslim. Then, starting with Egypt, a second noun came into use which quickly spread, Islamiyy, separate from Muslim, which referred to a radical or fundamentalist Muslim who aims to create an Islamic project based on sharia. This neologism has been in place since, to define this new tendency within Islam, a tendency which has become increasingly strong, dynamic, and invasive and in the end violent and intolerant.

I propose to that European languages begin to discern between these two appellatives: “Muslim” and “Islamist”, and to abandon the term “Islamic” when it refers to a “Muslim” but to use it only as an adjective.

Given the evolution in the islamic world over the last 30 years, we must clearly distinguish Islam (which I will write with a capital “I”), as a religion which first appeared in Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century (Muslim history dates to 622, when Muhammad Ibn ‘Abdallah fled from Mecca to Medina – the higra,– and created the city founded on the principles of Islam) from islamism (which I will write with a lower case “i” ) which is a recent trend within Islam.

This is the meaning of the title: islamism is a current which is disfiguring the nature of the religion, Islam. It is not just chance that many young Arabs, Iranians, Asians distance themselves from the Muslim traditions because of islamism’s terrorist violence.

How this current was born and why it was born, I will have to leave for further discussion. Either way, it has distant roots, which have always existed in the Islamic society, but which are reawaken each time the islamic world is in crises: thus islamism presents itself as a “re-awakening” of the religion, in the arab-islamic world it is referred to as “sah-wah” or “rebirth”.

Today we are living one of the most dramatic moments in the Arab and islamic history. Why? Because the drowsiness, the period of our civil and cultural decadence, which we call “asr al-inhitât”, has gone on for too long, more or less from ‘300 to ’800. At the end of the ninetieth century there was the “Renaissance”, Nahdah, which was slowed down if not totally blocked in 1928 with the birth of Hassan al-Banna’ movement “the Muslim brotherhood”, to then be fully blocked by the creation of Israel in 1948 with all the wars and conflicts that it spawned, as well as the Egyptian revolution (1952), Iraq (1954), etc. The islamist tendency was further reinforced in 1974 with the arrival of the petrol dollars of the Saudi Arabians, rather, by the wave of petrol dollars and the consequent wahhabism.

But islamism is not Islam: it is only an extremist tendency which presents itself as the true spirit of Islam. How does it succeed in attracting so many Muslims though? The military defeat, economic crises, dictatorships, political divisions of the arab-islamic world, western imperialism, cultural invasions, etc.. Fail to properly explain islamism fatal attraction for the Muslim masses. These are but a few pieces to a lager puzzle that allow us to understand why people search for derivatives; they are not the root of the problem, no, of the evil. They are all external elements to the Muslim world. The roots of the problem need to be sought within this world; otherwise we simply confuse the symptoms with the cause of this disease. Because the Arab and Muslim society is diseased. Gravely so!

The roots are part of the tree. Thus the disease is to be found within the tree, not without. The roots of the disease are to be sought within Islam itself, not outside. This root is double. The first is some of the texts of the Koran and some sayings and practices taken from the Sunnah (the muhammadiana tradition), which are the foundations of the official teachings of Islam. The second are the teachings of certain “men of religion” (rigâl ad-dîn) – an Arab – islamic term which corresponds to the western “clergy” – based on a certain determined choice made in the Koran and the Sunnah. These two roots need to be examined, if we want to identify the cause of the illness, better, if we – like good doctors – want to diagnosis the origins of the disease.

Islam does not identify itself with radical islamism. But radical islamism is not foreign or separate to Islam: it is one of the possible readings of Islam (that is the Koran and the Sunnah); in short the worst possible reading. Yet this interpretation is openly promoted by the imam, who are convinced it is the most authentic, because it is the reading they themselves received, and because it is the most literal. It does not require an intellectual interpretation to reflect on the sayings and practices of the founders of Islam.

This is why it is not only essential that Islam and islamism are not confused, but that Muslims are encouraged to reject islamism as an unnatural alteration of authentic Islam, and to combat this invasive tendency. Western society must also take action to defend Muslims from islamism. Giving in even minimally to the slightest islamist request, means regressing beyond hope of recovery.

“What are your sources for your “non-violent” translations, and are they accepted as accurate by mainstream Islamic authorities? That’s the key. The translations I’ve posted are taken from the Muslim Students Association, and can be presumed to be considered authoritative by Muslims in America”

The Muslim Students Association is anything but in the mainstream of Islamic thought they are own lock stock and barrel by the Saudis and pust their Wahhabist line.

Islamism’s Campus Club: The Muslim Students’ Association
by Jonathan Dowd-Gailey
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2004
http://www.meforum.org/article/603

(snip)

A Saudi Creation
On its website, the MSA describes its emergence as spontaneous and disavows any link to foreign governments.[5] In fact, the creation of the MSA resulted from Saudi-backed efforts to found Islamic bodies internationally in the 1960s. Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy states,

The Saudis over the years set up a number of large front organizations, such as the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the Al Haramain Foundation, and a great number of Islamic “charities.” While invariably claiming that they were private, all of these groups were tightly controlled and financed by the Saudi government and the Wahhabi clergy.[6]

In the United States, two leading Saudi-backed organizations were the MSA and the Islamic Society of North America (the MSA’s adult counterpart), both of which received major funding, direction, and influence from Riyadh.

Personnel, money, and institutional linkages bound these organizations together from their inception, and all roads led eventually to Riyadh. Ahmad Totonji, an MSA co-founder, later served as vice-president for the notorious Saudi SAAR Foundation (a network of charities named after Saudi benefactor Sulayman ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ar-Rajhi), which closed down in 2001 after federal agents discovered links to terrorist groups.[7] Another MSA co-founder, Ahmad Sakr, served on a number of Saudi-affiliated organizations, such as the World Council of Mosques. The MSA is very much a result of Saudi “petro-Islam” diplomacy.

Current estimates suggest that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spends $4 billion annually on international aid, with two-thirds of that sum devoted to strictly Islamic development. Much of this largesse has ended up at Islamist organizations like MSA. Funded through private donations or through foundations and charities (only some of which the MSA officially reports),[8] MSA offers its Saudi benefactors a powerful tool. However, until the MSA’s tax records are made public (on January 14, 2004, the Senate Finance Committee publicized a list of Islamic organizations whose financial records are sought, including the MSA),[9] the exact extent of foreign funding for the organization cannot be known.

But even without the tax records, there is plenty of evidence for the MSA’s strident advocacy of the Saudi-style Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In “Wahhabism: A Critical Essay,” Hamid Algar of the University of California-Berkeley writes,

Some Muslim student organizations have functioned at times as Saudi-supported channels for the propagation of Wahhabism abroad, especially in the United States … Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, no criticism of Saudi Arabia would be tolerated at the annual conventions of the MSA. The organization has, in fact, consistently advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaati Islam.[10]

The MSA has played a major role in spreading Wahhabism. “Its numerous local chapters,” Algar explains, “would make available at every Friday prayer large stacks of the [Mecca-based] World Muslim League’s publications, in both English and Arabic. Although the MSA progressively diversified its connections with Arab states, official approval of Wahhabism remained strong.”[11]

Stephen Schwartz goes further, stating in his June 2003 testimony to the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security,

Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and an unofficial figure of 4-6,000 are under Wahhabi control … Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational and charitable solicitation … The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).[12]

The MSA reflects a prime characteristic of militant Islamic groups: a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of secular society and personal spirituality. The MSA’s Starters Guide contains an open call to Islamicize campus politics:

It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university … the politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more “In-your-face” association.[13]

All of this, the guide explains, results from the MSA’s duty “to bring morality back into the campus” and to convince students to practice Islam “as a complete way of life.”

In the process, the MSA preaches a creed of “special treatment” and “self-segregation” that sounds reminiscent of, and may actually borrow from, Afro-centric campus politics of the 1990s. Demanding that universities be more “Muslim-friendly,” the MSA’s newly established National Religious Accommodations Task Force (RATF) directs local MSA chapters to insist that universities provide separate housing and meals for Muslims only.[14]

The politics of segregation practiced by the MSA have included blanket marginalization of its own female members. Shabana Mir, writing for the American Muslim, summarizes the plight of Muslim women on campus:

It is particularly important to know what is happening with Muslim women pursuing higher education. Many Muslim women in MSAs are working toward the justice and the equality that Islam ordains for humankind. A survey of sisters’ participation in MSAs conducted in 1994 shows that women’s activism in MSAs is at an abysmally low level due in large part to “brother domination.” A related problem is “there is a common attitude that strict segregation should exist between the genders and that sisters should not appear in public!” On an MSA mailing list, a popular article gives a long list of conditions that women must fulfill to gain access to the mosque. These include obtaining permission from her male guardian, wearing hijab [veil], not wearing “fancy clothes” or perfume, not mixing with men, leaving immediately after the prayer, and so on![15]

(snip)

ScubieNuc writes:
Fair enough. But if you had to answer the question today "Does America have the will to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq until they are secure and self-governing, even it it takes 40 years?" Would you answer "yes?"

My answer?

Yes, of course. And we must be prepared to do the same with EVERY OTHER currently-Islamic nation on Earth. That is, go in, overpower the government, vanquish the mullahs, outlaw Islam, and "de-Islamicize" those nations, with the will to remain for as long as the struggle takes.

Yes, of course. It's the only way we will ever WIN this struggle. Anything more is merely buying time or treading water before the inevitable.

The reason we have reached the point we're at in Iraq is because we failed to understand just WHO or WHAT "the enemy" really is. Yes, Saddam was part of it and he had to be deposed. But he is not - repeat, NOT - the primary opponent in this worldwide struggle.

Our REAL enemy has been dead for 1400 years, but one who continues to fight on through the people entrapped within the ideology he created.

So long as he - or to put it more correctly, his "religion" - lives within people, we will grapple with his threat to our civilization.

Bear in mind, however, that when I answered your question above, it was strictly MY answer.

Will _America_ reach the point where she answers affirmatively, as well? Frankly, I'm not optimistic; I hope I'm proved wrong. I fear that it will take an unspeakable calamity on our soil before America wakes up, and, by that time, the damage to the fabric of our nation and culture may be so devastating that representative government itself may have to be set aside for a while. We will see.

- John

Germany frequently exploited ethnic antagonism between groups for class resentment and to create religious isolation. That is how they divided and and destroyed communities.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/656675/posts
The Arab/Muslim Nazi Connection

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/816232/posts
Nazi Roots of Modern Radical Islam

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1089006/posts
Al Qaeda`s Neo-Nazi Connections

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1320747/posts
After World War II, Genoud served as the financial advisor to the Grand Mufti. In 1958, the Swiss Nazi set up the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva to manage the war chest of the Algerian National Liberation Front, whose partisans were fighting to free their country from French colonial rule. Several Third Reich veterans, including Maj. Gen. Otto Ernst Remer, who had served as Hitler’s bodyguard, smuggled weapons to the Algerian rebels, while other German advisors provided military instruction. Under the guise of supporting the Arabs’ struggle against French colonialism, Genoud and his Nazi cohorts were following the same geopolitical strategy that Hitler had pursued in the Middle East.

As for Duncan Hunter, you can just do an FR keyword search:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=duncanhunter

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