>>Unfortunately Islam has more of them [extremists], and they are killing people much more energetically.
You know better than that. It is all too easy to classify all Muslims around the world as some sort of pyromaniac cavemen with a psychotic twist and an aversion to skyscrapers, but this is just not true.
Zonder, I never said all Muslims were extremists. I said that Islam has more extremists, doing more killing, than any other religion. This is a statement of fact. I'm sure you must have seen the list that circulated around the Net recently, of 31 current "hot" conflicts, which noted that 28 of those conflicts have Muslims on one side or both.
Jihadists have worked their way into most of these conflicts, whether it was their war from the start (Al Qaeda/US, Algeria, Abu Sayyef in the Phillipines), a nationalist struggle that they gladly "lent a hand to" (Israel/Pal, Chechnya), or a where they are being used as a deniable tool of statecraft by a government (Kashmir, also Israel/Pal).
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism over the past decade or so is due at large to the conditions Muslims around the world are living in - they are deliberately kept undereducated and in line through religion so they will not rise against their autocratic regimes. Besides, they see other Muslims around the world living in similar conditions of oppression. Unfortunately, the total aggregate of these conditions plays too well into the hands of religious fundamentalists.
This is a vast oversimplification. Most of the governments that have tried to keep the population "in line" with religion have achieved an anti-Islamist population, as in Iran. What is happening in most of the Arab world is different; all political dissent is being channeled through the mosque where it takes on Islamist coloring and is pointed at the US and Israel. The governments acquiesce in an uneasy coexistence. Egypt, for instance, certainly does not support the Islamists, and has cracked down on them brutally more than once.
You have also omitted the great influence of Saudi-funded propaganda. Wahabbi/Salafi madrassahs all over the ummah are turning out little brainwashed jihadists, in places like Indonesia whose Islamic traditions have been easy-going until now, and whose government is not particularly oppressive. But if the only free school is the madrassah, poor parents will send their boys there. In such schools, the boys will indeed be taught to see their co-religionists living "in similar conditions of oppression", whether they exist or not.
As for what Islam, should do, it should have an Enlightenment, as Europe did in the eighteenth century, and join the modern world. David Warren has some good thoughts on the subject:
davidwarrenonline.com |
