Islam in Europe: A Changing Faith
Young Muslims are crafting a new brand of their religion reconciling traditional practices with the realities of life in the West
BY NICHOLAS LE QUESNE
There's standing room only in a converted warehouse in the decaying industrial hinterland north of central Paris. It's mid-October, just days after the first U.S. bombs fell on Afghanistan, and the French magazine La Médina — which serves as an outlet for the country's Muslim population — has organized a public meeting on the significance for Islam of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath.
The atmosphere is electric. The men are in jeans and sportswear, while most of the women wear scarves over their heads. With few exceptions, the audience is made up of North Africans in their mid-20s. On the podium, 39-year-old Swiss university professor Tariq Ramadan — whose grandfather founded Egypt's Islamic revival movement the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 — begins to speak. "Now more than ever we need to criticize some of our brothers," he tells the packed hall. "My dignity depends on saying, 'You're unjustified if you use the Koran to justify murder.'" The French establishment — with its traditional mistrust of religion — views Ramadan with suspicion, but tonight he sounds like the voice of reason.
Then a young woman steps up to the microphone. With her black hijab she could be from almost anywhere in the Muslim world, but her accent is unmistakable — it's pure northern Parisian: "It's urgent for Muslims today to do everything they can to make the truth about their religion understood." The crowd bursts into thunderous applause.
Although most media have focused on a hard-core fringe calling for armed struggle against America, the overwhelming majority of Europe's Muslims see their religion as a moderate one. A survey carried out by the Mori agency for Eastern Eye, Britain's biggest selling Asian newspaper, shows that 87% of the Muslims polled are loyal to Britain, even though 64% oppose the U.S.-led strikes against Afghanistan.
These people and thousands of others like them are crafting a new strand of Islam, one that aims to reconcile the basic tenets of the faith — such as social justice and submission to the will of God — with the realities of contemporary European life. Though this process has been under way for some time, the events of Sept. 11 and afterward have lent it new urgency.
For many of Europe's 12.5 million Muslims, now is the time to redefine Islam in the context of their identities as believers who were born and bred in Europe. The result is a kind of Euro-Islam, the traditional Koran-based religion with its prohibitions against alcohol and interest-bearing loans now indelibly marked by the "Western" values of tolerance, democracy and civil liberties. This new vision could well end up influencing the world these young Europeans' grandparents left behind.
For this new generation, Euro-Islam is not a zero sum game: it is possible to be Muslim and European at the same time. In fact, unlike that of their Christian neighbors, the religious faith of Europe's Muslims is getting stronger. A survey published by French newspaper Le Monde in October shows that people from Muslim backgrounds are praying more, attending mosques more often and observing the Ramadan fast more assiduously than they did in 1994, when the survey was last conducted. The increased devotion is particularly marked among those who have been to university. In Britain, more women are wearing the hijab today than 10 years ago.
Euro-Islam is a bridge between two cultures, providing young believers with a way of respecting inherited traditions while living in a different world. It also gives them the confidence to practice their religion more openly, unlike their parents or grandparents who thought their sojourn in Europe was temporary and so were content to express their faith in private. Their children view Europe as their home and see no reason not to worship more publicly.
During Ramadan, the holy month of fasting that ended last week, Ahmid — a Moroccan-born imam at an Islamic cultural center in Rome — was selling Korans and cassettes of Muslim preachers at his stall outside the central mosque. A practicing Muslim back in Morocco, Ahmid has become more devout since arriving in Italy 13 years ago. "The immigrant turns to religion for support," he says. "Muslims have always gone anywhere in the world and adapted to learn to live as they must — and let others live their lives."
As Ahmid suggests, the story of Islam in Europe is a story of immigration. During the Continent's reconstruction after World War II, Britain and France turned to their former colonies in South Asia and North Africa to fill their manpower shortages, while Germany opened its doors to "guest workers" from Turkey. Most of these guests never went home again, and their children were born and grew up as Europeans. Today, the Muslim communities in these three countries are the biggest in Europe: 5 million in France, 3.2 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain. These numbers have been augmented by more recent waves of immigration to countries like Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and the Scandinavian region.
But Islam itself is nothing new in Europe. After advancing as far as Tours in 732, the Arabs remained in Spain until 1492, when they were driven from Granada. Over those centuries they bequeathed the Spanish their distinctive pronunciation of the letter J as well as masterpieces of Moorish architecture. The Islamic scholars Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd reintroduced Greek philosophy to the West during the Middle Ages, while Arab mathematicians revolutionized science with the invention of algebra. And when the Ottoman armies pushed west through the Balkan peninsula in the 14th century, they established Muslim communities in Central Europe that still exist today.
In Sarajevo, the imams' calls to prayer from reconstructed mosques blend with the chimes of bells from Orthodox Christian medieval churches and 19th century cathedrals. "I have more in common with Bosnian Serbs than Muslims from Pakistan and Afghanistan," says former Bosnian Interior Minister Muhamad Besic. His words offer striking testimony of the strength of Islam's historic roots on the Continent, given that not 10 years ago his city was under siege from those same Bosnian Serbs. But they also speak of an assimilation that even war could not affect. What's different now is that for the first time in their 14-century history, Muslims are living as minorities in secular societies. Traditional Islamic theology divides the world into two zones: the dar al-Islam, or house of Islam, and the dar al-harb, or house of war. This world view assumes that Muslims will never be able to practice their religion properly in non-Muslim lands and so should not settle there. But second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe quickly discovered that this was a false opposition. Fresh ideas were needed, such as the dar ash-shahada, or house of testimony: a new concept referring to any place where Muslims can make their profession of faith and live according to the precepts of their religion.
Tariq Ramadan is one of the most prominent exponents of this new thinking. "As a Muslim I can be at home anywhere I'm safe and where the rule of law protects my freedom of conscience and my freedom to worship," he says. "In this new environment, my responsibility is to bear witness to the message of my faith."
European Muslims don't necessarily differ from other Muslims when it comes to the basic tenets of that faith, but according to Dilwar Hussain, a research fellow at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, they do have "greater flexibility, greater awareness of the wider society and more liberal attitudes." Witness the growing number of Muslim girls contacting the Rutgers Women's Health Foundation in the Netherlands for abortion advice.
Hussain says that Europe's liberal attitudes are forcing the faithful to reassess their own beliefs. "The younger Muslims are going back to the text and asking: 'What my parents used to do, is that really part of my faith or is that part of their cultural tradition?' Drawing that distinction between faith and culture is very important. You may find some things in the Islamic texts, and then the cultural setting can lead to a particular interpretation. When the cultural setting changes, those interpretations will naturally change." Says Lhaj Thami Breze, president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France: "We're forging our own way of practicing Islam, and it's going to be different from the way it's done in Morocco, Algeria or Saudi Arabia. Islam needs to free itself from imported customs."
For Yakob Mahi, 36, a Moroccan imam living in Belgium, adapting Islam to new environments has been central to the development of his faith. He cites the concept of Shari'a, the way of life ordained by God for mankind, which he says many countries have turned into a code of punishment — even though less than 1% of the Koran consists of penal rules. In Europe, Mahi says, "We can see Shari'a not as law, but as a path to be understood in its context. When we transform it into daily European life, we see that Shari'a doesn't mean cutting off the hand of a thief. Rather it's a spirit present in many things we enjoy in Europe: the principles of democracy, the rule of law, the freedoms of expression and association." That innovative interpretation makes Muslim law compatible with its Western secular counterparts. So Mahi advocates a doctrine of "spiritual citizenship" in which Muslims "respect the laws [of the secular state] but try to give a spiritual impulse to everything they do."
In Europe, Muslims must also confront social questions — such as euthanasia, abortion and sexuality — that are suppressed in many Islamic countries. Nowhere is this confrontation more obvious than in the assertive roles being claimed by women. After all, the 7th century doctrines of the Prophet Muhammad considerably improved their lot, forbidding the then common practice of female infanticide and making the education of girls a sacred duty. "It's not the religion that holds back women but the culture — and the men," says Fatma Amer, head of education and interfaith relations at the London Central Mosque. "It's up to the women to organize themselves and not accept everything their communities tell them they must do."
One area in which both women and men are asserting themselves more vigorously is marriage. In Britain, increasing numbers of young women are resisting arranged marriages to cousins back in Bangladesh or Pakistan. In France, too, young people are clashing with parents who always assumed their children would marry someone from their own village in Morocco or Algeria. "We want to choose the person we marry," says Fouad Imarraine, who runs the Tawhid Cultural Center in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. "It doesn't matter what color their skin is as long as we're of the same faith."
Imarraine describes how the attitudes of Europe's Muslims have changed. "When we went back to North Africa on holiday, we realized we had deeper ties in France," he says, sipping coffee in a café nestled at the foot of concrete tower blocks. "Very few of my generation made it to university and Islam provided us with a refuge from failure at school and feeling shut out of society. But there's now a younger generation using Islam as a way of establishing the universal values they have in common with those around them. Defining their own identity as Muslims is a way of interacting with the rest of society."
This generation has grown up thinking of Europe as home, even if it has often seemed inhospitable. Schoolgirls have been expelled for wearing the hijab in France, while in British Islamic communities like the one in Luton, Muslims are twice as likely to be unemployed as other townsfolk. But for this new generation, being Muslim and European means their faith has become a matter of individual choice rather than social constraint.
Younger Muslims are far more individualistic in the way they interpret the Koran, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're any less devout," says Mustapha Oukbih, a 36-year-old journalist who lives and works in the Hague. The Dutch website Maghreb.nl, for example, has hosted chat rooms to discuss whether it's okay for Muslim newlyweds to have oral sex. "They want to decide for themselves how to live their lives," Oukbih says. This emphasis on personal choice is providing many Muslims with a new vision of politics, too.The atmosphere is electric. The men are in jeans and sportswear, while most of the women wear scarves over their heads. With few exceptions, the audience is made up of North Africans in their mid-20s. On the podium, 39-year-old Swiss university professor Tariq Ramadan — whose grandfather founded Egypt's Islamic revival movement the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 — begins to speak. "Now more than ever we need to criticize some of our brothers," he tells the packed hall. "My dignity depends on saying, 'You're unjustified if you use the Koran to justify murder.'" The French establishment — with its traditional mistrust of religion — views Ramadan with suspicion, but tonight he sounds like the voice of reason.
Then a young woman steps up to the microphone. With her black hijab she could be from almost anywhere in the Muslim world, but her accent is unmistakable — it's pure northern Parisian: "It's urgent for Muslims today to do everything they can to make the truth about their religion understood." The crowd bursts into thunderous applause.
Although most media have focused on a hard-core fringe calling for armed struggle against America, the overwhelming majority of Europe's Muslims see their religion as a moderate one. A survey carried out by the Mori agency for Eastern Eye, Britain's biggest selling Asian newspaper, shows that 87% of the Muslims polled are loyal to Britain, even though 64% oppose the U.S.-led strikes against Afghanistan.
These people and thousands of others like them are crafting a new strand of Islam, one that aims to reconcile the basic tenets of the faith — such as social justice and submission to the will of God — with the realities of contemporary European life. Though this process has been under way for some time, the events of Sept. 11 and afterward have lent it new urgency.
For many of Europe's 12.5 million Muslims, now is the time to redefine Islam in the context of their identities as believers who were born and bred in Europe. The result is a kind of Euro-Islam, the traditional Koran-based religion with its prohibitions against alcohol and interest-bearing loans now indelibly marked by the "Western" values of tolerance, democracy and civil liberties. This new vision could well end up influencing the world these young Europeans' grandparents left behind.
For this new generation, Euro-Islam is not a zero sum game: it is possible to be Muslim and European at the same time. In fact, unlike that of their Christian neighbors, the religious faith of Europe's Muslims is getting stronger. A survey published by French newspaper Le Monde in October shows that people from Muslim backgrounds are praying more, attending mosques more often and observing the Ramadan fast more assiduously than they did in 1994, when the survey was last conducted. The increased devotion is particularly marked among those who have been to university. In Britain, more women are wearing the hijab today than 10 years ago.
Euro-Islam is a bridge between two cultures, providing young believers with a way of respecting inherited traditions while living in a different world. It also gives them the confidence to practice their religion more openly, unlike their parents or grandparents who thought their sojourn in Europe was temporary and so were content to express their faith in private. Their children view Europe as their home and see no reason not to worship more publicly.
During Ramadan, the holy month of fasting that ended last week, Ahmid — a Moroccan-born imam at an Islamic cultural center in Rome — was selling Korans and cassettes of Muslim preachers at his stall outside the central mosque. A practicing Muslim back in Morocco, Ahmid has become more devout since arriving in Italy 13 years ago. "The immigrant turns to religion for support," he says. "Muslims have always gone anywhere in the world and adapted to learn to live as they must — and let others live their lives."
As Ahmid suggests, the story of Islam in Europe is a story of immigration. During the Continent's reconstruction after World War II, Britain and France turned to their former colonies in South Asia and North Africa to fill their manpower shortages, while Germany opened its doors to "guest workers" from Turkey. Most of these guests never went home again, and their children were born and grew up as Europeans. Today, the Muslim communities in these three countries are the biggest in Europe: 5 million in France, 3.2 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain. These numbers have been augmented by more recent waves of immigration to countries like Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and the Scandinavian region.
But Islam itself is nothing new in Europe. After advancing as far as Tours in 732, the Arabs remained in Spain until 1492, when they were driven from Granada. Over those centuries they bequeathed the Spanish their distinctive pronunciation of the letter J as well as masterpieces of Moorish architecture. The Islamic scholars Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd reintroduced Greek philosophy to the West during the Middle Ages, while Arab mathematicians revolutionized science with the invention of algebra. And when the Ottoman armies pushed west through the Balkan peninsula in the 14th century, they established Muslim communities in Central Europe that still exist today.
In Sarajevo, the imams' calls to prayer from reconstructed mosques blend with the chimes of bells from Orthodox Christian medieval churches and 19th century cathedrals. "I have more in common with Bosnian Serbs than Muslims from Pakistan and Afghanistan," says former Bosnian Interior Minister Muhamad Besic. His words offer striking testimony of the strength of Islam's historic roots on the Continent, given that not 10 years ago his city was under siege from those same Bosnian Serbs. But they also speak of an assimilation that even war could not affect. What's different now is that for the first time in their 14-century history, Muslims are living as minorities in secular societies. Traditional Islamic theology divides the world into two zones: the dar al-Islam, or house of Islam, and the dar al-harb, or house of war. This world view assumes that Muslims will never be able to practice their religion properly in non-Muslim lands and so should not settle there. But second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe quickly discovered that this was a false opposition. Fresh ideas were needed, such as the dar ash-shahada, or house of testimony: a new concept referring to any place where Muslims can make their profession of faith and live according to the precepts of their religion.
Tariq Ramadan is one of the most prominent exponents of this new thinking. "As a Muslim I can be at home anywhere I'm safe and where the rule of law protects my freedom of conscience and my freedom to worship," he says. "In this new environment, my responsibility is to bear witness to the message of my faith."
European Muslims don't necessarily differ from other Muslims when it comes to the basic tenets of that faith, but according to Dilwar Hussain, a research fellow at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, they do have "greater flexibility, greater awareness of the wider society and more liberal attitudes." Witness the growing number of Muslim girls contacting the Rutgers Women's Health Foundation in the Netherlands for abortion advice.
Hussain says that Europe's liberal attitudes are forcing the faithful to reassess their own beliefs. "The younger Muslims are going back to the text and asking: 'What my parents used to do, is that really part of my faith or is that part of their cultural tradition?' Drawing that distinction between faith and culture is very important. You may find some things in the Islamic texts, and then the cultural setting can lead to a particular interpretation. When the cultural setting changes, those interpretations will naturally change." Says Lhaj Thami Breze, president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France: "We're forging our own way of practicing Islam, and it's going to be different from the way it's done in Morocco, Algeria or Saudi Arabia. Islam needs to free itself from imported customs."
For Yakob Mahi, 36, a Moroccan imam living in Belgium, adapting Islam to new environments has been central to the development of his faith. He cites the concept of Shari'a, the way of life ordained by God for mankind, which he says many countries have turned into a code of punishment — even though less than 1% of the Koran consists of penal rules. In Europe, Mahi says, "We can see Shari'a not as law, but as a path to be understood in its context. When we transform it into daily European life, we see that Shari'a doesn't mean cutting off the hand of a thief. Rather it's a spirit present in many things we enjoy in Europe: the principles of democracy, the rule of law, the freedoms of expression and association." That innovative interpretation makes Muslim law compatible with its Western secular counterparts. So Mahi advocates a doctrine of "spiritual citizenship" in which Muslims "respect the laws [of the secular state] but try to give a spiritual impulse to everything they do."
In Europe, Muslims must also confront social questions — such as euthanasia, abortion and sexuality — that are suppressed in many Islamic countries. Nowhere is this confrontation more obvious than in the assertive roles being claimed by women. After all, the 7th century doctrines of the Prophet Muhammad considerably improved their lot, forbidding the then common practice of female infanticide and making the education of girls a sacred duty. "It's not the religion that holds back women but the culture — and the men," says Fatma Amer, head of education and interfaith relations at the London Central Mosque. "It's up to the women to organize themselves and not accept everything their communities tell them they must do."
One area in which both women and men are asserting themselves more vigorously is marriage. In Britain, increasing numbers of young women are resisting arranged marriages to cousins back in Bangladesh or Pakistan. In France, too, young people are clashing with parents who always assumed their children would marry someone from their own village in Morocco or Algeria. "We want to choose the person we marry," says Fouad Imarraine, who runs the Tawhid Cultural Center in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. "It doesn't matter what color their skin is as long as we're of the same faith."
Imarraine describes how the attitudes of Europe's Muslims have changed. "When we went back to North Africa on holiday, we realized we had deeper ties in France," he says, sipping coffee in a café nestled at the foot of concrete tower blocks. "Very few of my generation made it to university and Islam provided us with a refuge from failure at school and feeling shut out of society. But there's now a younger generation using Islam as a way of establishing the universal values they have in common with those around them. Defining their own identity as Muslims is a way of interacting with the rest of society."
This generation has grown up thinking of Europe as home, even if it has often seemed inhospitable. Schoolgirls have been expelled for wearing the hijab in France, while in British Islamic communities like the one in Luton, Muslims are twice as likely to be unemployed as other townsfolk. But for this new generation, being Muslim and European means their faith has become a matter of individual choice rather than social constraint.
"Strictly religious problems are becoming more marginal," says Hakim El Ghissassi, editor of France's La Médina, referring to the widespread availability of mosques and religious instruction. "Young people today are more concerned with resolving the social issues facing Muslims: employment, equality in the labor market, political representation and the way that history is taught in schools. Muslims are going to make their voices heard more and more on these issues. They're going to want to take part in government at the local, national and European level."
For the moment, though, Muslim political representation is small. With a Muslim population of 800,000, the Netherlands has seven Muslim M.P.s. Britain has only two, and France none. Yet people like Bassam Tibi, a professor of international relations at the University of Göttingen who coined the term Euro-Islam, insist that the integration of Europe's Muslims depends on the adoption of a form of Islam that embraces Western political values, such as pluralism, tolerance, the separation of church and state, democratic civil society and individual human rights. "The options for Muslims are unequivocal," says Tibi. "There is no middle way between Euro-Islam and a ghettoization of Muslim minorities."
In Britain, that view is shared by the writer and critic Ziauddin Sardar, who came to the country with his Pakistani parents as a child in the 1960s. "If there is a sociological change there will be a theological change as well," he says. "In Islam, law and ethics are the same thing. If you change the ethics, you change the law. There will be a new interpretation of Islam."
This new interpretation is taking shape in different places at different speeds. Although non-Muslims often view Islam as a monolithic bloc, the religion is characterized by its diversity. With over a billion believers scattered across every continent, as well as separate Shi'ite and Sunni traditions, the Muslim community (or ummah) has long been a philosophical construct rather than a demographic reality. That's true in Europe, where Muslims are divided by country of residence as much as by country of origin. "The problems Muslims are facing here are deeply influenced by the institutions of the countries where they live," says Farhad Khosrokhavar, a professor at Paris' School of Post-Graduate Studies in Social Science. "But the influence of democracy and religious tolerance is bringing about a meeting of minds."
And that influence could well spread to the Muslim world as a whole. For Zaki Badawi, chairman of the Imams and Mosques Council of Britain, Muslims in the West are helping to answer the question that has haunted Islam for the past century: how to reconcile tradition and modernity. "Islam, like any other society, finds modernity challenging," Badawi says. Although that challenge is felt more acutely in the developing world, intellectuals in those countries don't have the freedom to analyze the problem and find effective solutions. "The tension between Islam and modernity will be answered by thinkers in the West," Badawi says, "and transferred back to our native countries."
It would be symbolically and historically fitting if the next great reform of Islam came from the diaspora in the West. After all, the starting point of the Muslim calendar is not the year of Muhammad's birth but the day 1,379 years ago when the Prophet led his followers from his birthplace in Mecca to found a new community in Medina. "The very foundation of Islamic civilization was built on diaspora, on the move from Mecca to Medina," says British Muslim writer Sardar. "This is where the diaspora is very important: in creating a truly moderate tradition for the future." The new diaspora of Muslims in Europe already has that task in hand.
With reporting by JEFF CHU/Birmingham, ABI DARUVALLA/Amsterdam, HELEN GIBSON/London, JAMES GRAFF/Brussels, JEFF ISRAELY/Rome, ANDREW PURVIS/Sarajevo and URSULA SAUTTER/Bonn
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Permanent ruse for an indefinite war
Abid Ullah Jan, MMN
Sunday 22 May 2005
Are there some peace-loving people still waiting for the US withdrawal and the end of wars and occupations? If there are, let it be known to everyone that their desire will remain a dream for as long as the most corrupt and tyrannical system of governance survives in the US and allied states.
Now that the lies about weapons of mass destruction have been officially admitted, and the situation in Afghanistan is far worse than it ever was under the Taliban, the single most important motivator that led the US into these adventures is being publicly acknowledged.
Before discussing the real motivators, let us look at the war lords' liberal mouth pices and see how they are trying to give us a different ruse for permanent war.
In its January 13, 2005 editorial, "Bulletin: No W.M.D. Found," the New York Times writes: "The 1,200 military men and women who were assigned to his search team are now fighting Iraqi insurgents. We hope they succeed. If they do not, large swaths of Iraq could become a no man's land, where terrorists will be free to work on W.M.D. projects and United Nations weapons inspectors cannot go to thwart them."
The question is where were the terrorists and insurgents before the US invasion? In the final analysis we will see how the New York Times ruse for the war leads to addressing the same objective as the chief terrorists have set for themselves.
The war lord, Thomas Friedman, also repeated the same mantra the same day in the New York Times under the title: "Ballots and Boycotts." He concluded: "we have a much greater chance of producing a decent outcome in Iraq by appealing to the self-interest of the Kurds and the Shiites to be magnanimous in victory, than we do of getting the fascist insurgents to be magnanimous in defeat."
So the task is now reduced to defeating "fascist insurgents." But are they just insurgents? Where were they before the US invaded Iraq on the basis of lies?
The day after the lies were officially admitted, the Washington Post was totally silent. Washington Time (Jan 13) was silent as well but to promote the permanent ruse, it published an article, "Stay the Course," by Congressman George Allen, who promoted the same ruse in these words:
"These attacks are being carried out by vicious terrorists who detest freedom and aim to push back not just the election, but to keep democratic elections from ever taking place in Iraq. Their ultimate goal and victory would be to return Iraq to a repressive state or an intolerant theocracy."
Los Angeles Times was also silent on January 13. However there was an article, The Truth Shall se you back," by Margaret Carlson which on the one hand admitted that "in the Bush administration, you lose your job not for lying but for telling the truth," but on the other habd favored the Iraq invasion and demanded more troops: "Bush gives those medals to people who keep their mouths shut, like L. Paul Bremer III, who got one for not saying until he retired that Bush hadn't sent enough troops to Iraq."
The real objective for the totalitarian nihilists' going to war was openly discussed by General Abizaid a few weeks before the US public acknowledgement of lies. Gen. John Abizaid, whom the Washington Post Editor, David Ignatius, could not pump any more than he did in his December 26, 2004 column, is like any of the doomed commanders in history – busy dreaming conquering the world and achieving the impossible for their masters.
For each Abizaid of the past there were many Ignatius to keep them reminding that they command "the most potent military force in history." However, all those potent forces melted like wax in their respective ages when they undertook "Long War" that Abizaid is keenly looking forward to keep fighting for decades.
Ignatius's description of Abizaid's field of action clearly shows the real motive and the target area for the 21st century crusades. Besides the title: "Achieving Real Victory Could Take Decades," the language used for such descriptions further smells of a new, indefinite crusade.
After spending some time in Abizaid's company, Ignatius describes the battlefield as "the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan" in a world where "if there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general.
No one denies that. The question, however, is about the real motives and the real enemy. David Ignatius asks: "For all of America's military might, the Long War that has begun in the Middle East poses some tough strategic questions. What is the nature of the enemy?" In the very next question he identifies the enemy: "What will victory look like, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world?"
Although the war lords identify "Islamic" world as the enemy, but it is actually the Islam-less Muslim world, which is the target. The motive is to hold it from becoming Islamic in the real sense.
Despite occupying two countries for the last few years and killing around 150,000 people, including Americans, the terrorist in chief, General Abizaid, "believes that the Long War is only in its early stages." Imagine the advanced stages when the objective will be achieved with "modernization of the Islamic world" and its "accommodation with the [capitalist] global economy." (the Washington Post, December 26, 2004, page B01).
It shows the enemy was not Saddam, nor were the WMD a threat. Like Galloway, many are reminding the war lords that there was no Iraq connection to 9/11; there were no WMD; Saddam was not a threat and so on. Others are pleading naively to end the occupation and bring back the troops.
Terrorist minds have a different view and different real objectives. General Abizaid has been clearly telling that his forces are out there to crush those who "try to re-create what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Muhammad."
To the 21st century crusaders, invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan are just Iraq "the early stages" of a "long war" in the "loose network of like-minded individuals who use 21st century-technology to spread their vision of a 7th-century paradise."
Is it now clear enough for those who want their kids back from Iraq? It was not a war on WMD or Saddam or a mission for democracy and freedom in the first palce. It is a war on "7th century paradise."
Abizaid's historical analogies to Bolshevik leaders or revolutionary Europe in 1848 are totally misleading. Through the distorted lens of history, contemporary problems are presented in a way to justify the never ending wars. There is enormous difference between the 19th-century anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who wanted to use revolutionary violence to purge what he viewed as a corrupt order, and those who are working to pave the way for Muslims' living by Islam today.
If the revolutionary leaders in the Muslim world are against the corrupt order and tyrants like Islam Karimov, General Musharraf and the kins and sheikhs; if there is a change process underway, why does that bother the US? What is it trying to protect or impose?
Why is the US after the revolutionaries? Why does it want to "kill or capture them"? Is the corrupt order in the Muslim world somehow sustaining the modern Imperium Americanum?
What kind of modernization is this that has taken lives of more than 120,000 Iraqis so far?
We know that none of the Iraqi's went on a suicidal mission to kill fellow Iraqis before the arrival of modern day barbarians in Iraq. What made the Iraqis do so: their desire for a "7th century paradise" or their reaction to the 21st century tyranny?
All these 120,000 Iraqis were not "salafist Jihadists" or revolutionaries. If this is the count for a couple of years, what if the indefinite crusade continues for decades as envisaged by the war lords?
The new ruses are coming from the "liberal" mouth pieces of the war lords because there is no doubt remaining on the baselessness of earlier justifications for war. No one uttered a single word about denying Muslims the right to live by Islam at the time when the air in Washington was full of lies and everyone was busy in inventing more lies to somehow make the "initial stages" of the crusade possible. We didn't see Abizaid coming out, as we do now, to declare: "No need to lie. We are heading for a long war for 'modernization' of the modern day 'Bolsheviks'?"
The reason is that the war lords in the US wanted to launch the war and they cared less if they had to brazenly lie for that. Now that their earlier lies are exposed, they are clearly saying that the threat is the Muslims desire to live by Islam. They also add that it is not wise to leave the mess behind. In their view things will be in order when there is no aspiration among Muslims left to live by Islam.
There are two pertinent questions: Is it possible? And how long would it take? The answer to the first question is: absolutely not. The answer to the second question is that the war will continue till the war lords realize that their "modern Imperium Americanum" has slipped from their hands for ever.
The question that no one among the American war lords is considering is about the cost. They believe the proportion of 1,500 to 120,000 is worth defeating what Abizaid calls "the most despicable enemy I've ever seen."
Keeping in mind the early miscalculations about wining their ideological war, one can safely predict that the worst war of human history is unfolding before our eyes. Allowing the American totalitarians to finish their job amounts to granting them a license to wipe out, at least, one quarter of the human population.
There will never be anything like what the chief terrorist, General Abizaid, promises the world: "One day you'll wake up and there will be more food, more security, more stability." We have all these things now. What is missing is the lack of will on the part of the nihilists in Washington to let others live the way the have to live. Otherwise, the future generations would consider us worse than those who supported Nazis and other fascists in similar adventures.
:: Article nr. 11957 sent on 23-may-2005 03:56 ECT
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