Posted on 01/25/2004 11:58:00 AM PST by Clive
A few weeks after 9/11, Hamza Yusuf, an American-born Muslim and religious scholar, publicly scolded his co-religionists, "If you hate the West, emigrate to a Muslim country."
Hamza Yusuf was born Mark Hanson to a middle-class American couple. His parents were academics, and he embraced Islam at 17.
Yusuf's outrage over 9/11 is shared by a great many Muslims across North America. But few have had the courage to express their rage as Yusuf did.
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times wrote recently, "What you are witnessing is why Sept. 11 amounts to World War III - the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years."
The first two were those by the German Nazis, and the Soviet communists.
As I noted here in August, "We are unmistakably in a global war, and the sooner we realize this, the more effective we can be in defeating an enemy more insidious than any in the past."
Yusuf's understanding of what Friedman writes came from an intimate knowledge of the intense struggle raging within Muslim societies over the past several decades for the soul of Islam as a faith tradition in the modern world.
This struggle, and it has been soaked in blood, has many dimensions. It has divided Muslims while outsiders, with or without knowledge of the issues involved, have been taking sides based on their own interests.
Broadly speaking, Muslims may be divided into two unequal groups. The larger body shares a common perspective of Islam as a personal faith. Its devotion to Muslim teachings and traditions remains in harmony with its wish to assimilate the values of democracy, individual rights and science, which define the modern world.
The second group, a minority in numbers, has "nationalized" Islam as a collective identity, where faith matters little and politics, driven by rage and resentment of the modern world, becomes the measure for testing a Muslim as "loyal" in a society dominated by a politically defined religion.
The politics of "nationalized" Islam is dominant in the area between the Nile and Indus rivers (Egypt to Pakistan). Here, faith is sanctioned by those in power wearing military uniforms or clerical robes. Dissent is not allowed, and dissenters are viewed as agents of an immoral world existing beyond the borders of "official" Islam.
This perverted version of "nationalized" Islam is also totalitarian. It has been subsidized by oil money and organized by men controlling, or influencing, state power.
The reduction of faith into a political ideology by Muslim fundamentalists was a deliberate program of wrecking Islam's message of peace and coexistence, and out of that wreckage, to shape a weapon of hate and war.
Muslims uneasy about such a perversion of their faith's traditions were intimidated, silenced, or driven out of their homelands.
Muslim fundamentalists, like Leninists and Maoists before them, are most intolerant of those who question or repudiate fundamentalist ideology while maintaining Islam as their personal faith.
Consequently, having crushed Muslim dissent within their respective Middle Eastern societies, these fundamentalists set forth to intimidate and silence Muslims living in the West.
They did this in large part through a systematic program of organizing among immigrant Muslims, by funding mosques and community-based organizations and by subsidizing religious programs and charities. And all the while by claiming the full protection of the legal/democratic system of governments in the West.
The full scope of their success in this venture has been documented in recent books by Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam (2002), and Kenneth R. Timmerman's Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America (2003).
Well before 9/11, this global war was in full swing. Only then, the victims were primarily those Muslims reluctant to acquiesce in the program of Muslim fundamentalists.
However, it was only a matter of time, emboldened by success, before the fundamentalists would strike at America.
The troubling question is why so many North Americans remain in denial of the plentiful evidence of this war in progress.
Got clue! Islam has been, since its inception, a weapon of hate and war. Any notion of a "kinder, gentler" Islam is just a facade. ALL Muslims plan to conquer the world for their religion, and convert or kill everyone who disagrees with their poisonous "religion".
There is but one Islam, a singular correct view of Muhammad, his religion, and his god. It is the one found in the Qur’an and Hadith. There is no independent record of Muhammad in history from which a variant view may be drawn. The Hadith and Qur’an are the sole repository of information on this man, his times, means, and mission. The Muhammad of Islam, the god of Islam, and the religion of Islam must be as these sources present them. Prophet of Doom is dedicated to exposing Islam’s scriptures and what Muhammad had to say about himself, his ambition, religion, and god
The Evidence is written in their own book i truly don't think that most muslims understand what they are following but I've been wrong before so maybe its time for them to prove they don't believe this way !
If you boubt the words are there read it and understand that this is truly an evil religion [cult] with real one world order results !!
The continued feminiation of western males and the never ending "quest" of americans in general to wanna be loved by everyone; one and all. Thats the real reason this war is not being acknowledged as it should be and prosecuted to its fullest.
Whether your religious or not doesn't matter to this enemy, anyone not muslim is their enemy and must be destroyed. It's a religious war no matter how profoundly vulgar and distastefull that term is too "modern sophisticated americans". In fact our greatest enemy in this war is not muslim its our inability to recognise that in this case tolerance will lead to defeat.
Baloney. They want to enjoy the benefits of living in a civilization while sympathetic to those actively planning to destroy it.
The second group, a minority in numbers, has "nationalized" Islam as a collective identity, where faith matters little and politics, driven by rage and resentment of the modern world, becomes the measure for testing a Muslim as "loyal" in a society dominated by a politically defined religion.
They want to enjoy the benefits of living in a civilization while they are actively planning to destroy it
Their are two groups of Muslims who "wish to assimilate the values of democracy, individual rights and science, which define the modern world": (1) those who are completely secularized and either don't know or care what their faith teaches; and (2) those who have so completely redefined their faith that they are considered "heretics" by most of their fellow Muslims.
You could arguably refer to the Cold War as World War III. This, the literal clash of civilizations, is World War IV. What's on the line is our entire Western civilization and our battle is against ALL of our enemies - foreign AND domestic.
Precisely. I like V.S. Naipaul, take on Islam:
Islam destroyed India. There is this ill-informed idea that it was the British, in the short time that they were there, that ruined and defaced all those temples you see. The bitter fact is that the people of India were ill-equipped to face the organized military power of Islam and were destroyed by it. The intellectual life of India, the Sanskrit culture, stops at 1000AD. Islam was the greatest calamity that befell it. Now people think only the Muslims built anything but what they brought was a slave culture that lasted in some parts of India until almost the other day. To be a Muslim you have to destroy your history, to stamp on your ancestral culture. The sands of Arabia is all that matters. This abolition of the self is worse than the colonial abolition, much worse.
-- VS Naipaul (Nobel Prize, Literature, 2001)
And this is the only alternative to islamic fundamentalism?
There's always Torah and the Final Redemption, but I guess anyone who believes in them is "as bad as 'Al Qaida" in the liberal mind.
And by the way, do any conservatives who talk this way about islam (demanding it become only a "personal faith") realize how hypocritical they sound?
Islam cannot be tamed. It is a false religion and should disappear. So should the ideology of the "enlightenment."
It'll get you talked about !
;-)
Tia
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.