Category: Religion

Islam’s Imperial Dreams

Islam’s Imperial Dreams

Mr. Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and his new book, “Islamic Imperialism: A History,” on which this article is based, is about to be published by Yale.

Within twelve years of Muhammad’s death, a Middle Eastern empire, stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had come into being under the banner of Islam. By the early 8th century, the Muslims had hugely extended their grip to Central Asia and much of the Indian subcontinent, had laid siege to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, and had overrun North Africa and Spain. Had they not been contained in 732 at the famous battle of Poitiers in west central France, they might well have swept deep into northern Europe.
Like the leaders of al Qaeda, many Muslims and Arabs unabashedly pine for the reconquest of Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the country a grave historical injustice waiting to be undone. In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of regaining, in Zawahiri’s words, the “lost glory” of the caliphate. Some analysts now see a new “axis of Islam” arising in the Middle East, uniting Hizballah, Hamas, Iran, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of Iraq’s Shiites, and others in an anti-American, anti-Israel alliance backed by Russia.
For the Islamists, the stakes are very high indeed, for if the political elites of the Middle East and elsewhere were ever to reconcile themselves to the reality that there is no Arab or Islamic “nation,” but only modern Muslim states with destinies and domestic responsibilities of their own, the imperialist dream would die. (Click on the title to read the whole article)

Head of Arab League Pushes Nuke Programs

Head of Arab League Pushes Nuke Programs – Yahoo! News
KHARTOUM, Sudan – The head of the Arab League called on Arab states Tuesday to work toward “entering the nuclear club” by developing atomic energy

BERLIN (AFP) – Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear programme, with help from Pakistani experts, a German magazine reports in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.

This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new–medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects–but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends….If nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation.

Henry Kissinger said yesterday “ “We live in a period in which most of what we know from history is inapplicable or applicable in limited ways.”

Then he says, Asia today is like 19th C. Europe and the Middle East is like the 17th C. Then there’s globalization which both integrates economically and fragments politically. And somehow we need to synthesize this all in a way the public can understand.

NEW DELHI – Village elders ordered a Muslim man in eastern India to leave his wife after he accidentally divorced her in his sleep, a news report said Tuesday.

In the wake of the cartoon jihad and mosque-on-mosque violence in Iraq, most Americans now think Islam has more violent believers than any other faith. Yet many still view it as a “peaceful religion.”

Psychologists might call this cognitive dissonance — a state of mind where rational people essentially lie to themselves. But in this case, it’s understandable. In our politically correct culture, criticizing any religion, even one that plots our destruction, is still taboo. And no one wants to suggest the terrorists are driven by their holy text. Is Islam the only religion with a doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates warfare against unbelievers?

Chanting “God is Greatest” after the 71-to-36 vote, Hamas lawmakers hugged and kissed Ismail Haniyeh, their teary-eyed prime minister-designate who vowed to not to abandon the fight against Israel.

“The Koran is our constitution, Jihad is our way, and death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration,” Hamas lawmaker Hamed Bitawi said.”

To bolster its campaign, the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter internet content of any country in the world — second only to China, Hopkins said.

It also is one of a growing number of Middle Eastern countries that rely on U.S. commercial software to do the filtering, according to a 2004 study by a group called the OpenNet Initiative

MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism

Indland Jyllands-Posten

Salman Rushdie should soon have some more compatriots with his Fatwah death threat; after he and 11 leading secular Muslims published this manifesto in a Danish paper. Click on the link above to read the full original. Here is an excerpt:

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

Hamas on a mission from God

Hamas, the Islamic radical party now ruling the Palestinians, announced that they don’t really care about financial aid from Europe or the U.S. This is because Hamas believes that soon the world will be largely Islamic, and the Christian nations will amount to little, or nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Hamas believes they are on a mission from God, and that their success is preordained. This creates some difficulties when trying to negotiate with Hamas.

Cathy Young: Modernity’s threat –

Cathy Young: Modernity’s threat –

Freedom from religion

In a New York Times column (IHT, Feb. 10), David Brooks wrote that the West, with its “legacy of Socrates and the agora” and its “progressive and rational” mindset, is open to a multiplicity of arguments, perspectives, and “unpleasant facts,” while radical Muslims cling to “pre-Enlightenment” dogmatism and shrink from the “chaos of our conversation.”

Yet Brooks overlooks the fact that a large segment of the population in the West, and especially in the United States, rejects the progressive, rational mindset and embraces pre-Enlightenment values as well. Fundamentalist Christians, traditionalist Catholics and ultra-Orthodox Jews do not, with very few exceptions, call for violence in response to heresy. But they too often equate criticism (let alone mockery) of their beliefs with “religious bigotry” or “hate speech.” And they, too, often seek not simply to protest but to shut down offensive speech.

The truth is that modernity, with its “chaos of conversation,” its chaos of lifestyles, its attitude that there is nothing more sacred than freedom of expression, is profoundly threatening to many religious traditionalists of different faiths. (Last year, quite a few American conservatives applauded Pope Benedict XVI’s assault on “the dictatorship of relativism.”)

At present, for a variety of historical and cultural reasons, radical fundamentalism holds a particular sway in the Muslim world, where it is wedded to political violence in ways that have no parallel in other religions. To ignore this difference and this danger would be foolish. But it is also unwise to ignore the religious backlash against modernity in the West, and its own tensions with individual freedom.

Los Angeles Times: Drawn into a religious conflict

Los Angeles Times: Drawn into a religious conflict

“Back in the High Middle Ages,” writes Tim Rutten, “the three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — reached one of those fundamental forks in the historical road.” Rutten says Judaism (largely thanks to Moses Maimonides) and Christianity (largely thanks to Thomas Aquinas) chose to believe that reason and faith led to the same truth. Ironically, Islam, whose early scholars had preserved the works of reason’s first apostle, Aristotle, “held that there were two truths — that of revelation and that of the natural world. There was no need to reconcile them because they were separate and distinct. It was a form of intellectual suicide and cut off much of the Islamic world from the centuries of scientific and political progress that followed.” Well done, Mr. Rutten!