generalspeaking

Islam Aflame

Restive young men seeking excitement, adventure, a release of social and hormonal tensions, and just incidentally hoping to store up good karma for their paradisaical futures look to where the action is. Pakistan seems to be the place to go to. Why, even the national army, its secret policing agency, and its government have invested themselves in the burgeoning business of covert militias and jihad-training.

As long as that monster doesn't turn against them. As long as they're able to control that Frankenstein they succeeded in creating. No, they did not do this themselves, entirely on their own. After all, those madrassas all needed funding and that funding came from Wahhabist sources in Saudi Arabia. A country whose vast oil wealth has enabled them to fund community and teaching centres all over the world, in fact.

But it has been in Pakistan in particular that these ultra-fanatic-religion-incendiary courses in supreme Muslim aspirations have taken the entire Muslim world of fantasy-violence-prone young men by storm. It was just serendipitous that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan giving a kick-start to the hordes of jihadist groups that would follow the inspirational Taliban and al-Qaeda.

"What more can a Muslim want than being a claimant to the faith, a fighter in its cause prepared to offer all sacrifices. And the most important thing is having a heart enlightened with the yearning for martyrdom."

What indeed. Doesn't that go right to the heart of the matter? Pakistan started with its vicious war with/against India for that White Elephant, Kashmir, and things just got nicely going from there. Kashmir is still there, in India's possession, of course; two nuclear-armed neighbours - but there is an entire world to conquer out there, why stop with Kashmir?

The bitterness of the conflict in Kashmir is, of course, reflected in the fact that Kashmir is India's Jerusalem. As Jerusalem is to Jews its indivisible jewelled city of light, so is it to the Arab and Islamic world a figment of entitlement, as a symbol of the unstinting hostility that Islam has toward the outside un-Islamic world, and specifically Judaism and Christianity, represented by Israel and the United States.

Pakistan has been a nursery whose purpose has been to turn glory-seeking young Muslims into feckless human bombs, the while assuring the West that it is an ally against insurgent fanaticism. The country has come lately to struggling against its own success, a clay Golem that it successfully turned into a monstrous movement it can no longer contain, one that threatens the country's existence. And, just incidentally, its nuclear armaments.

This is where the Afghan Taliban rest between forays, and where the Pakistan Taliban are newly discovered to have their own intractable grievances with the government which has ventured into tribal areas previously off bounds through an unspoken agreement. It is where al-Qaeda confers at a distance with its widely-dispersed fledgling groups throughout the Maghreb and surreptitiously, in the West.

With the final achievement of completely Islamicized Pakistan through sharia, spreading from there to Afghanistan, a triumvirate including Iran can reach out to Turkey in the throes of abandoning its remove from official Islamism, and the Arab world can watch, fascinated, as Syria and Lebanon follow suit - and then what?

Labels: Middle East, Political Realities, Religion, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, May 06, 2010