Ideology and Religion
by Rebecca Bynum (April 2009)
Islam does all these things as a highly materialistic religion. It focuses the minds of believers so exclusively on the material world that it eventually drives a wedge between the believer and his own spiritual nature, that is, his contact with the realm of value, and he confuses material obedience to Islam with pursuit of the good. When Muslims speak of the inner or “greater jihad” they are referring to the struggle to place their duty to Islam above their own natural and personal inclinations. The greater jihad is the struggle to conform to Islam and it is only within the Islamic system, in the Islamic world-view, that this can be seen as making Muslims “better people.” An illustration of this is revealed in the attitude of would-be female suicide bombers’ families interviewed by Kevin Toolis on Britain’s Channel 4:
“’If I had known what Ayat was planning I would have told the Jews. I would have stopped her,’ said Ahmed Kmeil, her father.
‘In our religion it is forbidden for a girl’s body to be uncovered even at home. How could a girl allow her body to be smashed to pieces and then collected up by Jews? This is absolutely forbidden.’
Even Manal’s family (Manal is the woman who lured these women into becoming suicide bombers) insisted that female suicide bombing is wrong.
‘With a man it’s different. For us, a girl can’t show her leg or wear a short T-shirt. How can you then be a good Muslim woman and expose your body to the world?
What Manal was doing recruiting those girls was wrong,’ said her mother Nadia Saba’na.
But what was shocking was none of the families of the would-be female suicide bombers expressed outrage about the innocent civilians their daughters would have killed.
They did not seem to be particularly concerned about their daughter’s death. What they were worried about was pieces of their daughter’s body being exposed to strangers, or worse still, to Jews. They saw everything through this false prism of ‘honour’.”[1]
During their years in a Jordanian prison, inmates remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in his Afghan dress weeping uncontrollably in the courtyard whenever he knelt to pray.
“Abu Musab cried constantly. He was very emotional, almost like a child,” said 35-year-old Yousef Rababaa as he recalled the young militant.
Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born one-time street thug who is now the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is remembered as a gentle man obsessed with Islam’s past glory.
His intense loyalty, his former cellmates say, went hand in hand with a fanatical adherence to his religion.
He dreamed of an Islamic utopia where people would relive the puritanical lifestyle of the faith’s early founders.
“Abu Musab would be as preoccupied with writing letter after letter to his old mother as spending long hours reciting the Koran,” said Rababaa.[2]
I submit this is a portrait of a man in the process of burying his soul. He is making the decision to undertake violent jihad and to show no mercy to the enemies of Islam just as Islam requires of its true believers – not an easy thing for any human being to do. Al-Zarqawi went on to become the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, to personally behead Nicolas Berg for the video camera, to orchestrate numerous suicide bombings, oversee a few more beheadings of Western hostages and generally to do everything in his power to defend Muslim land from the infidels, including seeking to ignite a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shi’a of Iraq (whom he also saw as infidels). Zarqawi’s jihad ended when he was killed by allied forces in June of 2006.
Still, most commentators have great difficulty openly discussing the religious motivations of fanatical Muslims. Like Melanie Phillips in her Londonistan, in his new book entitled United In Hate, Jamie Glazov refers only to Islamism and like Matthias Kuntzel, ties Islam’s current antisemitism to Nazism and even to communist agitation. Like most modern analysts, he feels comfortable discussing ideology, which in the case of Communism can mimic some aspects of religion, but is not a religion itself. He calls leftist ideologues “true believers” in a fashion which implies his discomfort with religion as such.
Here is the latest (2008) Freedom House report on Iraq (7 is the lowest score):
Political Rights Score: 6
Civil Liberties Score: 6
Status: Not Free
“Iraq is plagued by pervasive corruption. The problem has seriously hampered reconstruction efforts, and it is estimated that 25 percent of donor funds are unaccounted for. A leaked U.S. State Department report in 2007 stated that anticorruption commissions had little enforcement capacity, the judiciary was extremely weak, and officials were subject to intimidation by Interior Ministry officers and extrajudicial militias. Iraq was ranked 178 out of 180 countries surveyed in Transparency International’s 2007 Corruption Perceptions Index.
“Legislation passed in 2006 criminalized the ridicule of public officials, and a number of Iraqi journalists have been charged with the offense.
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One is forced to ask the question, if we remove a dictatorship from people who are not free, either mentally or spiritually, because they are held in thrall to Islam, can this be described as liberation? Can head-counting ballots be described as democracy? And cannot these well-meaning people who promote democracy-for-all be exploited even as democracy itself is exploited, by Islamic groups for the purpose of seizing power?
Madeleine Albright is another example of such a mind-set. Like Natan Sharansky, she also spoke at Vanderbilt University and employed the usual business-speak that has become a staple in modern politics and diplomacy. She seems accept an idea pervasive, among politicians and diplomats, that we have total control over the dynamics of Muslim countries and that their reactions are always the result of something we do, which is something within our control.
In her statement before the U.S. Committee on Foreign Relations Feb 26, 2009, Albright repeated a common talking point put forward by Islamic organizations that Muslim terrorists are betraying the “true Islam”:
Western media are full of references to Islamic terrorism. But what does that mean? We do not portray the Oklahoma City bombing as Christian terrorism, even though Timothy MacVeigh (sic) thought of himself as a Christian. MacVeigh was guilty of mass murder – and there was nothing Christian about it. The same principle applies with Islam. When Muslims commit terrorist acts, they are not practicing their faith; they are betraying it.
A playbook for the [Muslim Brotherhood] can be found in a publication issued last Fall by the U.S.-Muslim Engagement Project that is being aggressively promoted to the Obama administration and Congress by a number of its non-Muslim participants. Notably, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently effusively presented the Project’s book entitled Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Former Congressman Vin Weber did the same at Grover Norquist’s weekly meeting of conservative activists last week.
Underwritten largely by George Soros’ and other left-wing foundations, Changing Course seems to reflect predominantly the recommendations of groups the government has established are Muslim Brotherhood fronts, such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Both are represented in the Engagement Project’s “Leadership Group.” Accordingly, its book calls for:
“engagement with groups that have clearly demonstrated a commitment to nonviolent participation in politics” (read: the Brotherhood);
“not equat[ing] reform with secularism, nor…assum[ing] that reformers who advocate some form of Shariah as the basis for the rule of law will inevitably abuse human rights or adopt anti-American policies”;
“not supply[ing] additional ammunition to extremists by linking the term ‘Islam’ or key tenets of the religion of Islam with the actions of extremist or terrorist groups”;
Launching “an education program comparable in scale” to “the more than $7 billion” invested in the “post-Sputnik U.S. commitment to math and science education” to “education on Islam and Muslims, sustained over a decade or more, focused on teacher training and curriculum in middle and high schools, and colleges.”
The assumption by Albright, Sharansky and many others that we in the West can guide, direct, instruct and control Islam through the method of “engagement” is a dangerous one. The assumption by Muslim groups like the Brotherhood is that they can guide, direct and control Western power through the infiltration of its institutions and the willing partnership by people who know effectively nothing about what they are dealing with, but assume that the good Islam, the religious Islam can somehow be separated from the bad, political Islam. All Muslim Brotherhood related organizations are actively upholding and promoting this false assumption. This is easily achieved because no one wants to criticize Islam as a religion.
In the struggle so far, the Brotherhood is winning hands down.
[1] Toolis, Kevin “Face to face with the women suicide bombers” The Daily Mail Feb. 7, 2009
[2] Reuters, April 7, 2005 retrieved from Jihad Watch
[3] World Public Opinion.org, “Public Opinion in the Islamic World on Terrorism, al Qaeda and U.S. Policies,” February 25, 2008
[4] The Freedom House Iraq Report, 2008. These excerpts from the report were taken from View From The Right.
[5] Gaffney, Frank “Shariah’s Brotherhood” Center for Security Policy, March 16, 2009
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