Wahabee Wannabees?

Back on November 7, The Guardian reported

Four days after the deaths in Clichy-sous-Bois, just as community leaders were beginning to calm the situation, the security forces reignited the fire by emptying teargas canisters inside a mosque.

Considering the reaction of Moslems to the report in Newsweek that a Koran was desecrated at Guantanamo, this kind of response would be expected.

But as The Big Pharaoh points out:

Well, take a look at the above picture. It shows a group of radical Indian hindus burning the Quran in front of a camera. So here you go, a Quran getting burned on camera for the entire world to see. Isn't that more serious than Newsweek's story?

Why didn't the Arab/Muslim world erupt in flames? Where was the outrage against hindus? Why didn't we see Indian flags getting burned? Why didn't we see pictures of hindu gods getting "desecrated"?

One might be tempted to say that the explanation is that the destruction of Korans is not an issue, except when it can be used for political ends. But then, how does one explain Moslems who blow up mosques?

Suicide bombers struck in eastern Iraq and the capital on Friday, killing at least 74 Shiite worshippers near the Iranian border and eight Iraqis at a hotel — the second attack against a compound housing Western media and contractors in less than a month.

At sunset, hours after the nearly simultaneous bombings of two mosques in the border town of Khanaqin, dozens of people were still searching for relatives and friends. Others collected shredded copies of the Muslim holy book, the Quran.

How do you explain the selective anger or even selective concern of Moslems for the desecration of mosques and Korans--and the murder of their fellow Moslems?

S. D. Goitein, in his book "Jews and Arabs" comments on what Moslems really believe. Keep in mind the book was originally written in 1955 and revised in 1964:

It is, of courese , extremely difficult , if not impossible, to assess what the Muslim religion really means today to the various diverse sections of the Arab population...There can, however, be no doubt that there is a wide gap between what is really believed and practiced by many people today and between what they profess publicly.

Dr. John Van Ess, a great American philanthropist and sincere friend of the Arabs, who lived and worked for forty yeas in Basra, begins his last article before his recent death with the following words: Only very few young man pray today in the Near East." I am unable to check the correctness of ths statement...in any case it is correct to assume that many young men in Arab countries do not pray today, but--they would fervently deny that they did not conform to orthodox Islamic practice, or did not regard Islam as the most perfect spiritiual system that has ever existed. [pp. 15-16]

Of course 50 years later things may be different--and my intent is not to cast aspersions on another religion--but while history is filled with examples of schisms within religious groups, how often do we see in this day and age where within one religion, one group destroys the other's places of worship, the holy books they both hold sacred--as well as the people who use them. When we see videos of Imams spewing hate and ignorance in the mosques--to what degree is the Islamist terror that is rampant in the world actually religious and to what degree is it something else.

In his much talked-about article, "A Year of Living Dangerously", Francis Fukuyama writes:

We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries. Protecting ourselves is a matter either of walling ourselves off, or, for the Bush administration, going "over there" and trying to fix the problem at its source by promoting democracy.

There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In addition to Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Mohamed Atta were radicalized in Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem.

There is what to say for Fukuyama's approach, but I don't think you can write off the Middle East as a source of the problem. It's about time someone takes a closer look at what else--if anything--is being taught by those Imams, besides hate and the spread of Islam through the world.

See also Dealing with the Islamist Threat

See also The Obvious Question

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