But Why Would The US Want To Become An Islamic State?

'We are going to address ­corruption in the Senate, corrupt foreign ­policy, the mayhem around the ­Muslim world...
Muslim Cleric Anjem Choudary

Mayhem around the world? Choudary isn't kidding. He has said that he sees his rally in Washington, DC as

a call for the Muslims to rise up and ­establish the Islamic state in America.

But why would Americans want an Islamic state? Just look at the history of Islam: from its beginnings, Muslim rulers resorted to force, notes Efraim Karsh:

making violence a key element of Islamic political culture. No sooner had the prophet Muhammad died than his successor, Abu Bakr, had to suppress a widespread revolt among the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years later, the head of the umma, Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was murdered by disgruntled rebels; his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for most of his reign with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor of Syria, Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went on to establish the Umayyad dynasty after Ali’s assassination.

Mu’awiya’s successors managed to hang onto power mainly by relying on physical force to prevent or quell revolts in the diverse corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids during the long centuries of their sovereignty.

The Ottoman empire used force on its subjects as well, for reasons reminiscent of the current wave of protests in the Middle East:

In the century or so between Napoleon’s conquests in the Middle East and World War I, the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects.

...The Ottoman army or its surrogates brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in Mesopotamia and the Levant in the early 19th century, against civil strife in Lebanon in the 1840s and against a string of Kurdish rebellions. In response to the national awakening of the Armenians in the 1890s, Istanbul killed tens of thousands – a taste of the horrors that awaited the Armenians during World War I.

More recently there was the Syrian massacre of 20,000 Muslims in Hama during the 1980's and the Sudanese genocide in Darfur.

And that brings us to events in Libya.

The question now is whether these protests--and the price the protesters are paying in blood--will lead to a real change in the Middle East.

One thing is clear: these protests should serve as a message to Choudary and his friends that they are protesting in the wrong corner of the world.

Technorati Tag: Choudary and Islam.