A rchive Date
[ 16-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Arab-Muslims ]
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[http://www.torontosun.com/Columnists/mansur_toronto.html
The bloody struggle for Islam's soul
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
January 16, 2004
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.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. He can be reached at smansurca@yahoo.ca Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@tor.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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