Radical Islamists Wage Muslim Civil War in Africa [Mali]

Wall Street Journal ^ | 13 July 2012 | Melik Kayan

[Lorianne]

Extremist imams and jihadists infiltrate peaceful Muslim lands, uprooting religious customs that have existed for centuries. ___

The recent spate of attacks on Muslim historic and religious sites in the ancient city of Timbuktu calls to mind the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan over a decade ago. The Taliban, of course, were obliterating the icons of a rival religion, as they saw it. The Salafist militias that have lately overrun Timbuktu and Mali are obliterating a rival tradition within their own faith.

Their actions more closely resemble intra-Islamic frictions at the end of the Yugoslav conflict in the mid-1990s that were largely overlooked by the news media. In exchange for rebuilding their war-damaged religious sites, Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims first had to acquiesce to the destruction of headstones in their ancestral cemeteries and old decorative motifs on mosque walls. This was required by their benefactors, the Mideast-based Muslim fundamentalist sources of international funds.

Such incidents have now become a global phenomenon. In effect, primitive iconoclastic strains of tribal Islam have burst out of their historical isolation on the margins of civilization and coalesced globally to attack the more cosmopolitan, syncretistic and culturally advanced centers of their faith.

To Western minds, Mali denotes the most marginal of places in the African desert. But it is home to African Islam. The city of Timbuktu, located on a timeless crossroads of trade, developed as a marketplace of ideas for centuries, open to learning from afar and reverential to saintly scholars who came on pilgrimage and stayed. Their manuscripts are housed in Timbuktu's ancient celebrated desert libraries. Their mosques and shrines are what the al Qaeda-related militia Ansar al Dine are busy trying to destroy.

[himno hero]

... and Obama wants to bring Islam to America.

One way or another....

[2banana]

Islam destroys everything it touches.

And when muslims run out of infidels - they turn on each other.

[IslamE]

Oh well, let China sort it out, they are making such humane inroads in Africa, compared with us mean, old, American, white colonists, oh and the British too, we all raped and pillaged the continent of Africa don’t you know, the Chinese are are going to make things right, just ask Obama he’s a communist!

[doc1019]

Radical Islamists Wage Muslim Civil War in Africa [Mali]

[SunkenCiv]

A map of the Sahel region showing where Al Qaeda operates (AFP/Graphic)