On Radical Islam, Jihadism and Londonistan

This is a “lazy” post – essentially a compilation of excerpts from articles related to radical Islam, “Islamism” and “Jihadism”. They make for worrying reading. Comments and thoughts welcome (emphasis mine, throughout).

First, excerpts from Radical Islam: An Introductory Primer by Barry Rubin (emphas.

…A young American named Ramy Zamzam, arrested in Pakistan for trying to fight alongside the Taliban, responded in an interview with the Associated Press: “We are not terrorists. We are jihadists, and jihad is not terrorism.”

What he says is well worth bearing in mind in order to understand the great conflict of our era. First and foremost, Jihadism or radical Islamism is far more than mere terrorism. It is a revolutionary movement in every sense of the word. It seeks to overthrow existing regimes and replace them with governments that will transform society into a nightmarishly repressive system.

And so one might put it this way: Revolutionary Islamism is the main strategic problem in the world today. Terrorism is the main tactical problem.

What is Islamism?

Radical Islamism is the doctrine that each Muslim majority country-politics, economy, society-should be ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship guided by the given movement’s definition of proper Islam. What Marxism was to Communism, and fascism to Nazism, Jihadism is to Islamism.

In some cases, Islamists have a wider ambition to transform the entire world, starting with Europe. While this may seem ridiculous to most Westerners, it does not seem so to the Islamists who hold that view.

Only a minority of Muslims is Islamist but that sector has grown sharply over the last twenty years and seems to be on the increase still. Muslims are also among the greatest opponents of political Islamism, and often its victims.

…The fact that radical Islamism relates to a religion, Islam, is very important (see below) but should not blind observers to the fact that this is basically a political movement and not — at least in the modern Western sense — a theological one.

Of course, Islamism is rooted in Islam but a strong opposition to Islamism…is in no way an expression of bigotry against a religion. Similarly, the idea that opposition to Islamism is in some way “racist” is absurd since no “race” is involved. Just as opponents of Communism (capitalist, imperialist) and fascism (Jews, Bolsheviks) could be discredited by calling them names, the same is done with those who oppose Islamism.

…To argue that Islamism is the inevitable or “correct” interpretation of Islam is as silly as it is to argue that it is some external, heretical ideology which has “hijacked” Islam.

…To summarize in one sentence: we should be absolutely honest in showing how the most sacred texts of Islam appear to validate revolutionary Islamists but we should understand that a struggle is going on among Muslims in which different interpretations are contending. While Islamism is not the only possible interpretation of Islam, its approach is certainly shaped and justified by basic Islamic texts. Unless Muslims and especially qualified clerics reinterpret these tenets, Islamism will continue to have a strong advantage in competing with conservative traditional Islam while liberal reformism will remain a tiny, powerless viewpoint.

…As for terrorism, that is a strategy and tactic which appeals to these movements for very specific reasons. These include the following points. While the Islamists claim they are only conducting a “defensive jihad” — since there is no caliph, offensive jihad isn’t supposed to happen — they are actually conducting offensive revolution.

The article was first published in January 2010. Read it in full here.

Next, excerpts from a startling article, titled Londonistan by Christian Caryl.

…the case of the Underwear Bomber has dramatized the extent to which Britain remains a launching pad for jihad. (Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka prefers the term “cesspit” to describe London’s function as an Islamist breeding ground.)

Just in case the Brits hadn’t figured that out, the usual anonymous U.S. State Department official was happy to do it for them. Last month, an (US State Department) official told the Daily Telegraph that their country “has the greatest concentration of active al Qaeda supporters [in the West],

The same article cited a fresh and ominous finding from the director of MI5. He estimated his service was aware of some 2,000 “radicalized Muslims” who might be involved in terrorist plots. That figure, of course, doesn’t include the population of plotters who have escaped MI5 scrutiny, like Abdulmutallab.

…So why is this particular front in the war on terrorism proving such a challenge? Haras Rafiq, a British Muslim who founded a think tank to combat Islamic extremism, worries that a big share of the blame goes to his own government. For decades, he says, Britain tolerated plotting by domestic Islamic radicals as long as they targeted other countries, often ones in the Middle East.

…In the 1990s, policymakers desperate to address the concerns of the nation’s Muslims decided to foster the creation of Islamic umbrella groups. They also unwittingly fostered radical ones.

…Last fall, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a watchdog group, published a report assailing the “insufficient monitoring” of government funds disbursed to community organizations through a program to combat Islamist extremism. The report found that Britain had granted more than $60,000 to the Cordoba Foundation — which, for instance, reportedly once hosted Anwar al-Awlaki, whose radical preaching inspired Abdulmutallab and Maj. Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter.

Then, there’s the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella organization of more than 500 British Islamic groups that received $1.35 million in government funds. Among the MCB’s more notorious members is Daud Abdullah, its deputy secretary general, who last spring signed the “Istanbul Declaration.” The document essentially declares war on any country that supports Israel (known in the declaration as the “Zionist Entity”) and thus seems to legitimize jihadist attacks on British troops. Since then, the MCB has issued a string of press releases expressing support for the British armed forces and stressing the patriotism of British Muslims. It has not, however, disavowed Abdullah.

…You might well argue that both of these issues are so fundamental to our notions of democracy, freedom and decency that nobody should be afforded credit for supporting them. But this is to ignore (as the government does consistently, pretending not to notice) the enormous, profound ideological differences between Islam and the west.

Read in full here.

There is more. Below, excerpts from Tavleen Singh‘s article on why we must not tolerate radical Islam:

As a huge fan of Barack Obama and a dedicated enemy of radical Islam it worried me to hear the American President talk of ‘moderate’ Taliban. I found myself wondering how they would be graded. Would those who burned girls’ schools but did not participate in the global jihad be considered moderate? What about those who believe in stoning women to death and marrying nine-year-old girls but not in suicide bombing—would they be considered moderate? By this measure the men who blew the Bamian Buddhas to smithereens would be considered mere pranksters trying to amuse Allah with a spectacular display of idol smashing.

After the American President made his comment about moderate Taliban he got a response from the Taliban themselves. There is no such thing as moderate Taliban, a Taliban spokesman retorted angrily, unless the President meant the lazy old Muslims who sit idly at home instead of joining the jihad against Jews, Hindus and Americans.

…Radical Islam is an ugly, dangerous ideology. There is nothing in it that would help solve the world’s problems or lighten its shadows. Its fundamental principle is that everything we need to know about life, laws and faith is revealed in the Koran and that we must abide by the interpretation given us by semi-literate, fanatical mullahs. If not we will be punished horribly by bearded mujahideen. Radical Islamists believe they have the right to impose their diktat well beyond faith to politics, culture and every aspect of life. This is where the problem begins.

For us in India it is an especially serious problem. Not only do we have more Muslims than almost any other country but we are also the ultimate idol-worshipping country, bursting at the seams with heathens who indulge happily in such pagan festivals as Holi.

…The religions of India are in their essence atheistic and the opposite in almost every way to the theistic religions that came to us from the neighbourhood in which Islam was revealed to the Prophet. For centuries we have lived peacefully with Islam because of our fundamental belief that everyone has a right to their own faith. But, with the visible radicalisation of Muslims across India under the malevolent influence of radical Islamists, tensions between the communities have grown in recent years.

…Even by the standards of radical Islam the Taliban are unspeakable monsters as can be seen from a casual examination of what they did when they ruled Afghanistan and what they are now doing to Swat and Bajaur. In Swat more than 200 girls’ schools have been burned in recent months, schoolgirls have been attacked for daring to go to school, journalists have been beheaded for telling the truth and Sufi Mohammad has given interviews saying that democracy is an infidel idea. To accept any of these things as acceptable because Islam has a different set of values to ours would amount to tolerating intolerance.

Read it in full here

There is a silver lining though..From Sadanand Dhume’s “India’s Groupthink on Islam” here is the final excerpt:

If you’re looking for a defining image from the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival, which ended Monday…none was as arresting as the unannounced (for security reasons) appearance of the controversial Dutch-Somali writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Speaking to a packed hall, with her burly bodyguard unobtrusively off-stage, Ms. Hirsi Ali spoke about Islam—and its problems with individualism, women’s rights and sexuality—with a frankness unfamiliar to most Indians. She described the faith she was born into as “a dangerous, totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion.” She argued against the moral relativism that has prevented Western intellectuals from scrutinizing Islam as they do Christianity and Judaism. She asked why it seemed impossible to have a sober discussion about the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad without riling Muslim sentiment...

…But her very presence in Jaipur speaks of the ways in which India, home to 150 million Muslims, is slowly starting to grapple with the faith.

...The Indian debate about Islam has remained frozen in a time warp. The mainstream intellectuals who dominate the country’s editorial pages and television channels tend to trace the Muslim world’s problems almost exclusively to the alleged misdeeds of Israel and the United States. The Hindu right doesn’t make this mistake, but its tendency to group all Muslims together, its inability to distinguish between Islam as a religion and Islamism as an ideology, and its championing of causes important to the most orthodox Hindu believers shades into bigotry and religious chauvinism.

In Jaipur, Ms. Hirsi Ali challenged the assumptions of both groups. She was flatly unapologetic about her views on Islamic theology, but at the same time she urged the audience to think of Muslims as “individuals who are capable of changing their mind.”

…Jaipur marked a small step toward the slow but inexorable knitting of India into the mainstream of global discourse on a sensitive subject. A clutch of books by Indian authors that take a critical look at Islam and Islamism are also contributing to this trend. It’s easier to start using a cell phone than to change a mindset, but over time Indian audiences are likely to begin demanding the same sophistication from their intellectuals that they do from their phone service providers.

Read it in full here.

Comments and thoughts welcome, as always. Pl remember: No personal abuse, no sweeping generalisations.

Image Courtesy: BBC