generalspeaking

Explicating Islam?

"Right now what we are seeing is a redrawing of the map of the Middle East and the failure of the Arab states to basically be able to create a common narrative of tolerance within Islam and moderation in Islam to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham. And we're seeing a huge crisis in the Middle East. In fact, we're seeing the disintegration of the Middle East."
"Unfortunately, the war against extremism is not going well because, like elsewhere in the Muslim world, there is no common narrative against the extremist groups. The army and the government [Pakistan] are at odds with one another so they are not prone to adopt a common narrative against the extremists. And so about one-third of Pakistan is no longer controlled by the authorities. We have huge areas which are controlled by various insurgencies ... this obviously leads to very dangerous conclusions: money laundering, drug running, not to speak of the training of extremists and being able to export them to other countries like Syria and Iraq."
"ISIS  has adopted a lot of the military tactics and political tactics used by the Taliban. ...but basically ISIS is much more extreme. It wants to eliminate all the minorities from the Middle East. It wants to redraw the map of not one country but multiple countries, right across the Middle East. And the methods it's using are methods that not even the Taliban used -- the mass slaughter of opposing soldiers or aid workers and journalists. And of course their grasp of the media and the use of social media."
"I think these extremists have been able to construct an ideology and a set of beliefs that do resonate among disenfranchised Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, and possibly it could as well in Jordan and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and other countries."
"Finally, let me just say that this whole battle that ISIS is fighting, this is a war within Islam. This is not a war against the West. What ISIS wants is the elimination of Shias, the elimination of minorities. It wants to extend its interpretation of Islam to the whole Islamic world, which is why it it has formed the caliphate. It's not an al-Qaeda rehash. This is something completely different -- al-Qaeda was obsessed with hitting the far enemy, which was America. ISIS is obsessed with hitting the near enemy, which is the Arab regimes."
Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani journalist, author

With all due respects, Ahmed Rashid -- who so brilliantly explicated the sly methodology of the government of Pakistan in assuring the American administration that it could be relied upon as a partner in the 'war against terror', while extracting billions in funding for the Pakistan military even as it was conspiring with the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda to advance their agenda -- seems to have missed a few points here in his little exposition.

He, of course, is the expert on the situation as it pertains to east Asian affairs, but there is nothing particularly new about one-third of Pakistan being outside the authority of the government; it always has been independent of central government within the mountainous tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was where, primarily both the Afghanistan and Pakistan Taliban and their special guest, al-Qaeda, found refuge when they were being hunted by U.S. and allied NATO forces.

That is, before Osama bin Laden took up more permanent residence in Abbottabad, at a stone's throw from an elite military officer-training installation. And where a doctor, friendly to the belief that his country was an ally against terror with the U.S., as a neighbour to the bin Laden compound, helped the CIA in its identification of the residents so a raid could be conducted in the confidence that in all likelihood it was an bin Laden family compound. For his naivete he remains imprisoned as a traitor to Pakistan.

As for holding the current leading Arab leaders responsible for the rise of Islamism, it should also be acknowledged that most of those leaders have been represented by the authority of Saudi Arabia with its Wahhabist school of Islam, training impressionable young Muslims all over the world in Saudi-funded madrassas yet bin-Laden targeted the Saudis in particular as a corrupt influence, selling out to the hated Americans. Al-Qaeda's focus was interior and exterior, both.

And if any Arab leader gave inspiration to the modus operandi of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, it would be Syria's Bashar al-Assad whose atrocities and mendacity have seen few equals among Arab leaders with the exception of another Baathist leader, Iraq's late Saddam Hussein; Bashar Assad has outdone his own father in his killing exploits targeting Sunni Syrians protesting their unequal status to Syrian Shiite Alawites.

What the world now sees more clearly than ever is the extent to which in some Arab countries the military governs the government, not the other way around. This was so as well with Turkey until the advent of Islamist president/prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The quagmire that is the Arab and Muslim world, with the deadly animosities between Iran's Shiite imperialism and the majority Sunni nations is reflected in what is now occurring in the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Iraq axis and the Sunni majority Arab League and the Islamic State.

If ISIS is focusing on the Middle East to establish its credentials as an overarching dominion representing a caliphate under which all other Muslim nations must huddle, that is merely the stepping stone to full achievement of enacting a far wider reach embracing the non-Islamic world, offering it the opportunity to surrender to Islam, pay the appropriate protection money for their survival under Islam known as jizya, or be exterminated for their denial.This is the goal of jihad.

Of course, for a religion and the exponents of that religion, insisting on pure Islam, the sacrilege of the existence of other religions in competition with Islam, and the devotion to the one and only true religion of an almighty presence which exemplifies the purest of human behaviours in obeisance to god, it is strange that among the Islamists corruption is rife, theft and violence commonplace, drug and gun-running a sought-after source of income.

For indices of overall dysfunction no part of the world is more rife with tribal hatreds, sectarian violence and threats toward non-Muslims and ordinary Muslims alike

Labels: Afghanistan, Islamic State, Jihad, Middle East, Pakistan

posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 08, 2014