Posted on 01/14/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by knighthawk
THERE'S something about Islam... Half declaration, half question, that remark is heard often these days. Confronted with rampaging Muslims who burn down churches, Muslims who commit mass murder, and Muslims who insist that a woman who cries rape must produce four male eyewitnesses, the temptation is to find in their common denominator - the religion of Islam - the root cause of such senseless behaviour.
Well-meaning persons, Muslim and non-Muslim, try to assure the world that that is not so; that Islam forbids violence, that Islam means peace. Those who resort to terror are wrong; they are not good Muslims; they are betraying the true religion.
Would that things were so simple.
A new book out paints it starkly. British philosopher Roger Scruton's The West And The Rest - the title derived from Samuel Huntington's Clash Of Civilisations - contains two key points that make it clear it will require more than guns and butter to rein in Islamic militancy.
First, he reminds us that 'Islam' means not 'peace', but 'submission' - specifically, submission to the will of Allah. 'The Muslim is the one who has surrendered, submitted, and so obtained security.'
The Singapore Government's White Paper on the arrests of Jemaah Islamiah (JI) members for terrorism-related activity offers a chilling corroboration. Many JI members, it says, 'continued studying (under the radical teacher Ibrahim Maidin) not only because of the search for religious knowledge, but also the sense of Muslim fraternity and companionship'.
Searching for a 'no-fuss path to heaven', these would-be terrorists wanted to be convinced that in the JI they had found 'true Islam', and thus freed themselves 'from endless searching, as they found it stressful to be critical, evaluative and rational'.
To be sure, Islam is not the only religion providing refuge from the stresses of modernity; most religions do.
In Islam, however, today's practitioners are confronted with compelling teachings and teachers that make it hard for them to figure right from wrong, orthodox from unorthodox, mainstream from deviant.
As Prof Scruton shows, Islam's murky ideological swamp predates the Al-Qaeda or Taleban. Wahhabism, the radical sect named for an 18th century zealot, was one important precursor. Another precursor was the formation in Egypt in the late 1920s of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose avowed aim was to rid Egypt of foreign powers. The Muslim Brotherhood established a pattern of violence and insurrection that was followed elsewhere, including in Indonesia, where the Darul Islam - inspirational father to the JI - fought with the revolutionary army against Dutch colonial rule.
Then there was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, who showed that a radical, violent Islam was not only possible in the modern world but also exportable to the West.
He said in 1984: 'War is a blessing for the world and for every nation. It is Allah himself who commands men to wage war and to kill.'
Killing them, indeed, was doing them a service: 'If one allows the infidels to continue playing their role of corrupters on Earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger. Thus, if we kill the infidels in order to put a stop to their (corrupting) activities... their eventual punishment will be less.'
That logic, however perverse, continues to resonate with and inspire young men across the Islamic world.
The greatest danger, however, is in the periphery of Islam moving to the centre. As intelligent, educated Muslims sympathise with the radicals, they bring with them a level of intellectual and operational sophistication that in time to come will render Islamic militancy as potent a threat as communism was 50 years ago.
The story of Yazid Sufaat, reported in the Asian Wall Street Journal on Monday, is instructive. Son of a poor Malaysian rubber tapper, Yazid was a scholarship student sent by the Malaysian government to California in 1982 to study biochemisty. He was meant to return a progressive professional, a poster boy for Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's social engineering towards a prosperous modern society.
Instead, the 38-year-old sits today in a Kuala Lumpur prison. The middle-class militant is suspected of abetting two Sept 11 hijackers and of being involved in the Bali blasts.
Like the 'conscientisation' sessions of 1960s liberation theology, militant Islam combines religious precepts with those of social justice - or what it deems as social justice. As the JI White Paper notes, JI teachers employed 'the tactic of inserting into lectures quotations from the Quran and Hadith, discussion on jihad and the plight of suffering Muslims worldwide'.
The other chilling point from Prof Scruton is that unlike Western individualist secularism, Islam is in a very fundamental sense a totalitarian doctrine: It seeks to embrace and subordinate to its dictates the totality of life. The ulama ('those with knowledge') have their authority directly from God. The syariah, the revealed will of God, is the only sanction for law.
The point is affirmed by Iraq-born Islamic scholar Majid Khadduri, who wrote in The Islamic Conception Of Justice that Muslims took for granted that political justice was 'an expression of God's will as interpreted and put into practice by the Prophet', and, after the Prophet's death, by his legitimate successors.
Such an ideological framework is not only devoid of church or holy orders; taken to its logical conclusion, it also denies any official compact with the state and regards secular authority, by definition, as being without legitimacy.
'Like the Communist Party in its Leninist construction,' Prof Scruton says, 'Islam aims to control the state without being a subject of the state.'
What does this all mean for the war against radicalism?
The secular prescription is obvious. For the sake of peaceful and sustainable co-existence, Islam's best hope is under the same framework that binds other religions to the state, in which religious institutions are subordinated in temporal matters to temporal authorities.
Some scholars, including Muslim ones, have noted that Islam is today at the point that Christianity was when the Reformation took place. They postulate that the throes the religion is undergoing are not dissimilar to those that Christianity went through before the separation of church and state became accepted within Christianity.
As Islam awaits its equivalent of Martin Luther, however, national governments have only one option: tough, strong and secular leadership that heads off exclusivist tendencies before they take deeper root.
Even the Malaysian government is coming round to that: Defence Minister Najib Tun Razak warned yesterday that growing intolerance towards non- Muslims and an Islamic religious school system that preaches extremism and hatred threatened the Malaysian way of life. Singapore is no exception.
Islam-list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
All Muslims believe that the Signs of Qiyamah, prophesied in the Hadith, will manifest when mankind nears Judgment Day.
Of those, some Muslims believe that those signs are being fulfilled at the present time.
Of those, some Muslims are willing to take an active part in the War between the Mahdi and the Dajjal.
The Mahdi will be the purest Muslim since Mohammed. The Dajjal will be the greatest evil since the serpent in Eden.
The Dajjal will try to take over the world, conquering either through force of arms or seductive persuasion. The Mahdi will rise up to fight him; his army will begin the jihad in Afghanistan.
I'sa (the "prophet Jesus") will descend and fight at the side of the Mahdi. He will also chastize his followers for believing in the Trinity, will break all the crucifixes and crosses, will level all the churches and chapels, and destroy all the pigs.
The Dajjal will be unable to capture Mecca and Medina. He will finally be killed by the Mahdi (some say by I'sa) outside of Jerusalem.
Then the Mahdi will spread Islam throughout the globe, and there will be many years of peace and harmony under shar'ia before the Last Day.
For centuries, imams taught this in the traditional manner. But around 1980, many imams discovered the allegorical interpretation of scripture, and began to preach that the Dajjal did not have to be one individual -- he could be a nation or a cultural system.
So, you see, folks: We are the Dajjal.
And they used many of the Signs of Qiyamah as proof that these are the End Times: e.g., a brother in the East will be able to speak to a brother in the West (telephone, radio, email); men will jump through the sky, touching the clouds (airplanes); lewd musical and dancing girls will be everywhere (radio, MTV); women will rip the children from their wombs (abortion); homosexuality will increase ("gay" rights movement); etc.
The imams preach that these are things which the Dajjal -- Western Culture -- are spreading throughout the world -- in effect, "conquering" the world, as the Hadith predicted.
All that's left, they tell their followers, is to join the Mahdi's jihad and become terrorists to fight the Dajjal.
And they are confident of victory, because that is foretold in the Hadith.
Now do you understand what we are up against?
For whatever reasons, Bush and Rumsfeld and the newspapers and networks are withholding this information from us at the moment. But there it is.
If you have any doubts, do a web search for Qiyama or Qiyamah or Qiyamat, Dajjal or Dajjaal, and Mahdi -- and sooner or later you will arrive at websites of Muslim "End Time" preachers.
Also, look for the writings of Prof. David Cook on Muslim millennialism.
I know from Prof. David Cook's essays that the books make the bestsellers' lists and are all over the bazaars, so I would guess that, yes, it probably is discussed now and then even in the most "secular" of papers, just as Christian millennialism is discussed now and then in the New York Times or Washington Post.
And given that a lot of their newspapers, radio stations, and television programs are not secular, the topic of how "the signs of qiyamah are coming to pass" as Amerika tries to impose its evil will on pious Muslims is probably a good audience-getter, and a common theme of editorials and letters to the editor.
It's pretty simple, too. All you have to say is something like "Men constructing tall buildings that touch the sky is foretold in the Hadith as one of the signs Judgment Day is nigh!" and people will nod their heads and say, "That's true."
I wish I could give you a first-hand description, but I imagine it must be something like how the Black Muslim street preachers try to stir up the crowds, multiplied a thousandfold in every city, town, and village.
IMHO, Islam today makes a closer analogy to a criminal about to be apprehended and sentenced to eternal damnation with respect to a second coming and Great Tribulation. It'll take more than a Martin Luther King to get out of that one.
BUMP
Not every Islamic terrorist has to be a millennialist. I'm sure there are plenty who are motivated by political (e.g. Palestine) or economic (e.g., IMF) motives or just generic anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-Israeli hatred.
And not every Muslim who believes that the Signs of Qiyamah are unfolding takes the extra steps to enlist in the "Mahdi's army." (What small percentage of Christian millennialists become survivalists waiting to do battle with UN black helicopters?)
But David Cook explains (and Google searches confirm) that Islamic millennial expectations have become common currency since the 1980s. The books make the bestseller lists (not unlike the Hal Lindsay or Tim LaHaye books here), and tracts and pamphets are everywhere.
And when you mix the perception that the United States (with Israel, NATO, the UN, the IMF, etc.) is the Dajjal and that the Earth has only a few years left of existence in with those other motives, you create a powerful cocktail for not only recruiting soldiers, but soldiers who believe the world is coming to an end anyway, so why not go out in a blaze of glory.
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