Well you say here what I’m saying here in several posts: What this person claims to be Christian teachings doesn’t make it Christian teachings at all.
You can’t name this person a “Christian terrorist” at all.
How do you make of a political organisation a “demographic identity”? And how do you do this with a religion?
I wouldn’t say they aren’t Muslims, since I have no authority to tell someone if he is yes or no Muslim. Nobody has. (I would say they are definitely dreaming if they think they are, but that is an other issue.) I would start slapping Al Qur’an around their ears until they see the light and they finally start reading and understand what is written. (The same if they come up with a variety of dubious hadith.)
No, everybody knows where their ideas come from and that is to be found in rather recent history and the related political developments, leading to the introduction of the question " Is Islam the solution". Which caused a variety of reactions in a variety of countries on a variety of scales, leading to a variety of implementations and/or results.
As for your remark on the crusades: that is an other issue since it had nothing to do with terrorism. These events were as much economical and political inspired as Christianity was used to get (and keep) things going.
You have every right to be sceptical, since you don’t know that many Arabs can trace their ancestry - or part of it - down by the means I refer to.
I’m no specialist in the genealogy of the English Royal family. But I have great trouble to picture it going back as far as mine. And I doubt if the Queen of England can provide as much personal detailed information as the Arab sources provide.
The word “Jihad” is that much abused that people automatically came to associate it with armed conflict.
This is of course partially due to Islamic history. There were a lot of wars where the word Jihad came forward as a command to wage war in the name of Islam, without being provoked. Which was (and is) a very wrong interpretation.
It most certainly does not.
The teachings are very clear: “let there be no compulsion in religion”. And even more clearer when we read “God chooses who He wants” meaning: It is God’s decision who shall be Muslim and who shall not, as it was God’s decision to create what is named" many ways" = different religions for different people.
What he calls a “strong center” of the “IsLamic movement” (a choice of words to make it deliberately sound as if it was intented to be a militant movement from the start) was only the relocation of the Muslims from Mecca to Yahtrib, later named Medina.
There were other tribes there, there were also Jewish tribes. And the fact that raids on the Meccan caravanes took place, was a combination of necessity (in order to provide food and so on for the muslims) and a strategy: undermining the economy of Mecca, a strong enemy that formed a direct threat for the survival of the young Umma.
Raids on caravans was at the time occasionally done by all tribes who came in s “need to survive” position. It wasn’t exactly something new Muhammed invented in order to swtich a peaceful religon in one based on “Active Resistance” and “Armed Conflict”
The way this person twists facts of Islamic history in order to let them fit in his agenda is amazing. (Well, I would call it in fact criminal. I hope he isn’t in a position to teach).
His “stages of Jihad” is also an incredible stretch… I wonder if he actually believes himself what he writes. I seriously doubt it. Which makes it even more criminal.
We seem to be talking at cross purposes. Many arabs think they can trace their ancestry but they can’t really. To trace your ancestry back to one particular person who lived 1400 years ago is impossible.
You might be able to do it in some vague kind of way by saying I’m an arab, my ancestors came from arabia so I’m probably related to Mohammed in some way. But you wouldn’t be able to do it in a proper, legally acceptable, way.
To do that you would need to be able to produce birth, marriage and death certificates for every single person in the chain linking you to Mohammed.
Now I doubt very much that they went in for certificates in 7th century Arabia (they probably don’t even do it now I expect). Even in the UK where we’ve been keeping records longer than anyone else, most people can’t trace their roots back more than 300 years or so before the trail goes cold.
In order to persuade me that you are related to Mohammed, you would have to show me a mountain of documentation linking every single person in the chain between Mohammed and you. Since it would be impossible for you to produce such documentation (since it doesn’t exist) then the only rational conclusion one can come to is that you are not related to Mohammed.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I understand what you are saying - that by using isnad and various other quasi-religious techniques you can show that your line goes back to Mohammed.
Fine. If you want to believe in all that mumbo jumbo then that’s up to you. But if you want to prove in a proper manner that you are without question related to Mohammed then I don’t think that’s possible.
How many arabs claim they are related to Mohammed? All of them I suspect.
So, just to be clear then - you are saying that Jihad does not, in fact, have 9 stages culminating in an armed struggle?
How many stages do you think it has?
As regards the “no compulsion in religion” line, isn’t it true that this only applies to non-muslims? When dealing with muslims compulsion is allowed because then sharia takes precedence.
This is why you see religious police in many muslim countries.
The guy in the link I gave above says that Islam has four pillars and that Iman (faith) has two pillars. One of these two pillars is Jihad.
Since Jihad is one of the two pillars of faith doesn’t it take precedence over the “no compulsion” line. The “no compulsion” line could be interpreted as meaning:
“There should be no compulsion until we reach the final stage of Jihad when compulsion is allowed”
Not really. Genealogy has always been of keen interest in the Muslim world, since the family of Muhammed, especially in the Shi’a ( but also in the Sunni ) tradition, has some import. But only some Muslims claim descent from Muhammed. For example the term sayyid refers to a descendant of Muhammed through Fatima and Ali and of course the Abbasids claimed descent through Muhammed’s uncle, Abbas. Among Shi’a communities, sayyids often form a semi-distinct and semi-elite caste/class and often dominate, or at least are very prominent in, the religious establishment - religion being almost a hereditary occupation among Shi’a sayyids. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a sayyid as is the current leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, though you need not be a sayyid to become an Ayatollah ( an earned title, not an inherited one ).
I will make no argument as to the accuracy of these claims, but since it is fairly easy to trace Muhammed’s descent through Ali from the 7th to at least 10th century for sure and since Muslims were rather obsessive about tracing that line from the start, I won’t rule out the possibility that it may have some accuracy.
I’ve never seen this anywhere else. I suspect it is a highly idiosyncratic, personal interpretation. Which is fine, Islam is certainly open to such. But I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a mainstream view.
It refers specifically to conversion, not to following religious law within a religion.
Most speak of five. He is excluding belief in the oneness of God and Muhammed’s status as the final prophet, but rather assuming it, since it is a belief rather than a physical duty ( unless construed in the context of the shahada ) like the other four ( giving alms, prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage ).
Again, idiosyncratic. Jihad IS accorded official status as a Pillar of Islam in the Alawi tradition ( as is defense of Ali - the Alawi are a Shi’a offshoot ) and the Kharijite, but not formally in the major mainstream sects. Though many regard it as a sort of a de facto “Sixth Pillar”, it isn’t, exactly.
Nope. Jihad cannot imply conversion by force as far as I have ever read.
Nah. No such exception or overriding rule exists that I have ever heard of. Besides even if jihad were an actual “Pillar”, it wouldn’t necessarily concern itself with conversion at all, but rather the need to struggle against ones enemies, spirtual and physical. Conversion and jihad are not really linked concepts. Even on those rare occasions that forced conversion occurred, it was generally not in the context of a jihad, but rather peacetime crackdowns on long-term subject populations. A partial exception I can think of is perhaps the Safavid’s anti-Sunni campaigns in 15th/16th century Iran, though even that is debatable. Jihad in one context can be spoken of in terms of extension of Muslim rule over non-Muslims, but not in terms of converting non-Muslim populaces.
But the word jihad, as we have gone over many times, has multiple meanings depending on context, personal belief, and even the historical period in which it is used. Modern concepts of jihad aren’t always identical with medieval ones.
Hmmm…Okay, just did a little research on this Israr Ahmad fellow. He’s a fairly radical Pakistani Islamist, one of Maulana Maududi’s disciples, who was supportive of the Taliban and one of those nuts who thought that Mossad orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, rather than ObL. Not a fellow I’d recommend for a moderate view :).
QUOTE]*Originally posted by Aldebaran *
** And I doubt if the Queen of England can provide as much personal detailed information as the Arab sources provide.
**
[/QUOTE]
And, ironically, I think the Queen of England can trace her ancestory back to Muhammed. If I remember the story right, some time in the middle ages, there was a Muslim Spanish prince who was a descendent of Muhammed, whose daughter married a Catholic Spanish prince. Then that daughter’s granddaughter married the King of England, whose son became King after him…so there have been Kings of England who were descended from Muhammed.
And, doing some more checking, I have details… Apparently, according to some chroniclers, at least, Alfonso VI of Castile married Zaida of Seville, who converted to Christianity and took the name Maria. Most of Europe’s royal families are descended from their children.
“And, ironically, I think the Queen of England can trace her ancestory back to Muhammed”
Everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammed. And everyone in the world is descended from Confucius and Nefertiti. These are some of the fasincating conclusions of the mathematical analysis of geneaology.
Of course only a few people can trace their ancestry step by step to such historical figures.
So, now that Aldebaran and Tamerlane have asured us, that we don’t have to fear Islam itself, let’s get back to the issue:
Terrorism: What’s your plan?
So, these guys don’t want to kill us because of their faith, but we sure give them a lot of other reasons to hate us. Wouldn’t it then be time to think a little bit about this?
Boo Boo Foo: those are ways to come up with a stable, prosperous society, as you say, but they wouldn’t end terrorism.
The U.S., domestically, is similar to the points you describe. But it still got hit.
The Western European countries are also quite similar, but they still get hit. It was in France, after all, that Islamic terrorists attempted to crash a plane into the Eiffel Tower. And of course Britain has had to deal with the IRA.
Most terrorism has nationalism at its root, and comes from the nationalist attempting to get an occupying power out of the territory he considers home. The places where this happens range from the obscure, like Corsica and Sri Lanka, to the very well known, like Palestine and NYC, where the terrorists were mostly Saudi, and their objection was to U.S. troops stationed on Saudi soil.
For a very few countries, the U.S. among them, the simple answer is the best one: mind your own business. If the problem is one that occurs on territory the nation considers to be its own, or part of its strategic interest to occupy, then you have a far more intractable situation on your hands. Northern Ireland, Palestine, Corsica, and Sri Lanka all fall in this category.
There are no simple answers. Land disputes, which all of these are, are an inevitable consequence of the nation state to some extent.
Well, the goal has of course to be: make the countries where terrorists come from more ‘similar to the points’. This way you don’t get idiots like the ETA or IRA, but the much more dangerous threat of global terrorism. What we need to get rid of is this ‘us against them’ situation (view it from which side you want) where people are told that they hate us because of cultural differences (to put it very broadly).
Now you’re getting it guys. Now that we’ve got back to the real point of the thread I feel comfortable in posting again.
Pantom? Oh no doubts, for sure you’re right there. Nationalism, tribalism, in fact, any nasty “ism” you care to mention is probably a catalyst in some manner.
Hence, I ask the question - what allows these petty “isms” to amplify themselves into open violence and destruction? My belief is that you have to have an environment where certain ingredients are being mixed about and then BAM! You’ve got say, a Fundamentalist Islamic movement like we’re seeing in Indonesia these days. Or the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. I mean, where the friggin hell did Jamaa Islamiya come from? Well, a close look below the surface shows that under the Suharto regime for all those years, it seems that there was quite an oppressive government going about it’s business, and very few efforts were made to implement those 5 Golden Ideals I outlined on the front page.
Before you knew it, you had 30 years of oppression and bitterness, and poor education, and very few jobs, and little local autonomy - well it’s just a perfect recruiting ground for disenfranchised young men really, isn’t it?
So that’s what I’m trying to get across here. When a country can safely say that it has a burgeoning middle class, with only the outer extremities of the bell curve occupying either extreme wealth or extreme poverty, then you start to find a society which conducts itself peacefully and merrily.
But if your bell curve starts to excessively fill out the extremities, you start to produce the breeding ground for emnity.
That’s why I say, the hardest step of all is education - and it should be free the whole way up to and including university. The more highly educated your society is, the greater the overall scope for advancement is, and innovation, and entrepreneurialship. The greatest gift that we, in the Western World, could give to the Third World is just plentiful, free, world class education.
I know, I know - it’s hardly a cure for what exists right here, right now - but it would nonetheless be an amazingly worthwhile investment into the future. Not the least of reasons being that “quality education” oftens innoculates the very causes of fanatical zealoutry.
Is there any case/country we can try to learn from? One thing that comes to my mind is Turkey. They have taken some remarkable steps lately in becoming more democratic and more just. It’s still pretty far from being ideal (from a western point of view) but they have come some way.
Interestingly the driving force didn’t come from within but from the desire of the country to join the European Union. Only when the EU said ‘no way we accept you the way you are’, did things start to change. (The EU being not happy about turkish politics didn’t keep some states from selling them tanks to attack the kurds of course, but that’s a different story.)
But then Turkey is a stable state with a stable society. Most of the states that come to mind when talking about terrorism are not. You can probably do diplomacy til you drop dead with some of the ‘heads of state’ and never influence what’s going on on the street.
I note with pleasure that all the ideologues have abandoned this thread. Boo Boo Foo, what I’m about to say here is the unvarnished truth as I see it. I’m warning you now that it’s not going to be pretty. It will be as close to the truth as my limited mind can take me.
A long time ago I read a book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, by a former New Yorker, now (to the best of my knowledge) resident in Toronto, named Jane Jacobs. It was the last of a trilogy of books on cities, what makes them tick, and their central role in the economy of nations and of the world. The reason why I liked her theories is that they have what all good theories have: the ability to explain the past and to predict, based on actual data, what will happen in the future. It helps that they were based on actual data gathered from both the high level - studies and experiments and all that - and the low level, on the order of anthropological recording and observation.
On a very high level she broke the world’s economies down to what she classified as three types of economies:
1 - Import replacing, or innovative economies.
2 - Supply regions, places that supplied economies classified as #1.
3 - Bypassed places.
What you are getting at in your posts is the impossible goal of turning all of the world’s economies into import replacing, or innovative economies. If you think about it for a moment, the terrorists with whom we are principally concerned come from supply regions.
Getting specific, Saudi Arabia, where most of the terrorists of 9/11 came from, is a classic supply region. Its principal export is oil. Its the only reason why the rest of the world even cares that it exists.
The place where they found refuge, Afghanistan, is another supply region, supplying to the rest of the world the raw material of opium, out of which the advanced, innovative economies make morphine and heroin.
It is the nature of supply regions to be classic Marxist societies, in the sense that Marx described the last stage of capitalism as: places where a very few control most of the resources, while the rest of the population serves them without any opportunity to better themselves. Warlord dominated Afghanistan and Saud dominated Arabia are exactly described by this.
These places are where the terrorists come from. Immigrants arrive in innovative societies from both #2 and #3 type economies, but the conflicts, to the extent that they exist, of #3 type economies aren’t exported because people who live in these places barely know that there is an outside world. But residents of supply regions are acutely aware of the rest of the world, and resent deeply the riches of innovative economies. So they lash out. Its only human that they do, and its only human of the innovative economies to strike back at them, and attempt to suppress the few who are aware enough and wily enough to get at the innovative places and hit them.
It’s the way it’s always been, and unfortunately the way it will doubtless always be, for as long as human beings exist.
If you remember, I quoted George Washington’s Farewell Address in a different context, but it applies even here, because the only answer for the world’s advanced economies is to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the backwaters that supply them with the raw materials that make their rich lifestyles possible. Buy their raw materials for whatever the market says they’re worth, but otherwise stay out of their business. If the supply regions are lucky, they’ll transform themselves into innovative economies on their own terms. If not, they’ll just fall back into bypassed places that no one cares about once their raw material, whatever it might be, is exhausted.
Attempting to proactively turn them into innovative economies, which is what Bush is attempting with Iraq, is just asking for trouble. Above all, if two supply regions, like Kuwait & Iraq, go to war with each other, let the neighbors of the countries in question take care of it. There’s no reason for an advanced place to get involved in squabbling over who’s drilling where for oil. Nothing could be stupider.
A specific example of a place that was threatening to go from innovative to bypassed is Turkey. As T Mehr describes it in the post just above this one, Turkey was forced into reform by a desire to stay with the innovative economies. Or at least that’s my interpretation.
The terrorism of other places, like the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, the Corsicans, and the Palestinians, are really nationalist resistance movements in which the weaker nationality strikes at the dominant one through terrorism. This is more amenable to a transformation into a more peaceful sort of resistance along the lines of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, given a courageous leader willing to sacrifice for the common good. But such leaders are rare, unfortunately. In any event, they have to emerge from the ranks of the oppressed nationality, and the dominant nationality has to deal with them in the appropriate way. Outsiders just muck up the works.
Very interesting post, pantom! But I think, there is one issue you omited: cultural differences.
Compare let’s say Iraq and Norway. Both countries are rich in oil, their economy lives off it. But then the one place becomes a much admired, roll model democracy, the otherone a dictatorship. Keeping in mind, that they call Iraq the cradle of civilization due two the ancient cultures there, what made it what it was in recent years?
Or let’s look to the former east block. Those countries, that were freedfrom communism and it’s hardships try now to turn to the west to participate in it’s prosperity. They’re not bringing bombs with them…
What I’m trying to say is: There is more to it than just economical reasons, although it’s a major point.
Norway was a democracy long before it ever got its hands on oil. It’ll be interesting to see what happens there when the oil runs out.
The Eastern bloc never qualified as a bypassed place, IMO, which appears to be the implication of your contention above. They were conquered countries that eventually got to overthrow their chains. Most of them appear to be innovative economies from over here, to the extent of trying different things to get themselves going again after all those years of repression. And they got to throw those chains off with outside help, but not with the outsiders moving in with troops as in Iraq. Actually, the troops left, as in this case it was the Red Army that withdrew. That helps immensely, because it means that they were allowed to deal with their internal conflicts on their own.
The U.S. did help out with some of the conflicts going on in the former Yugoslavia. Interestingly, that worked out a lot better than the current intervention in Iraq is working out so far.
The more I think about it, the more interesting that is. Not sure what conclusions to draw, though.
One path is for you to go seek out the enemies arrayed against you and either eliminate them or have them negotiate a peace.
The other path (and this has been the tone of this thread) is to build for yourself an “impenetratible” fortress protected from any attempts by your enemies to attack you. Both paths have their snares and pitfalls but the path of building an impenetratible fortress is at its core a failure waiting to happen.
No matter how much security you put up there will ALWAYS be a way to get you. You can spend billions trying to protect your interests and take a non-aggresive posture in everything you do, but to do this invites your enemies to see you as weak and plyable to their demands. If you are a student of history you should know that no matter how great a fortress you construct and how many guards you put in place the enemy will find and exploit a weakness in your defense.
Before we had “Terrorism” it was called WAR. Terrorism IS war conducted on a lower level. Wars are not won by sitting back and playing defense. They never were and they never will be. To succeed at the terrorism war you have to take the war to your enemies and have them fight on their ground using their resources, keeping them off balance and robbing them of any initiative.
If you do not do this you invite disaster like we witnessed 2 years ago. The US has done this with the Barbary Pirates, Quadhafi and Libya, Spain and even jolly old England. England BTW was the only country besides Mexico to invade the US in force. They even managed to march on the capital and burn it.
But we forget lessons of history. This current war has been ongoing for many years before we even called it “The War on Terrorism” its just now when a president with a spine has said enough is enough and decided to actually procecute the war that we (and everyone else for that matter) have begun to notice.
There is a lot to this classification of economies/countries. But I still think it’s not the whole story.
World economy has been working like this for ages. But Terrorists attacking places where people are not even aware of being targets or of being at war if like - now this seems to be something fairly new. And I don’t belive that residents of supply regions resent deeply the riches of innovative economies as you write. They most probably hate the people of these countries but they envy the riches.
So the question must be, what has started the attacks? It’s not so much that rich countries turn to supply countries for resources but more how they go about it. After all a poor country sure would like to sell something. But it sure doesn’t want the buyer to mess with it’s internal affairs.
Let’s look at the two countries you mention in your post: Norway was a democracy befor the found oil. But they are now a supply country - or call it a country living on exports of their resources. In your post you don’t mention the type of government so called rouge states have. They are not only supply countries but they are also no democracies!
The war in Yugoslavia was a purely internal and also a religious war. No terrorists came from there and US interference was based on moral grounds not as a part of the war on terror.
So the points we have to look at are economy, democracy and culture!
