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UNDERSTANDING
THE PRESENT CRISIS |
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Letters Please
write to us at upc@dsl.pipex.com |
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The Islamic movement and the
West I am Nagah Ismail, a
first-year DPhil student in sociology. As a student I would like to thank you
so much for this effort, it is useful and needed. As a Muslim Arab person
(from Egypt), I would like to make the point that it is very difficult to
achieve an understand of the current crisis if we keep locking ourselves into
the term 'terrorism', and keep only seeing 'a' person called Bin Laden! Please know that leading your readers into
that corner adds to the current obscured and confused stance by the world
towards such serious and dangerous developments, which is in itself a severe
'crisis'. Understanding the Islamic
movement only from the perspective of 9/11 makes it look as if the world
caught a severe fever on 9/11 from which it has not yet recovered. But the
reason it has not recovered is that since 9/11 the world has been taking the
wrong medication, which reduces the pain but does not, and will never, cure
it. Bin Laden for me is a one drop in
the sea of an Islamic movement that is full of anger at despotic states and
global injustice. Dealing with the phenomenon of Bin Laden without
understanding the overall history and struggle of the Islamic movement, and
without addressing the roots of its anger, will only serve some individual
persons who have decided to engage in war: Bin Laden, Bush, and Blair. I use the term 'Islamic
movement' as an umbrella term. The Islamic movement, as I define it, is a
frame of mind and a related course of action that unites different Islamic
groups with different Islamic political ideologies who all share a common
goal. Their common goal is not to seize power but to establish,
under whoever is willing to rule, an Islamic state replacing the despotic,
corrupt, and co-opted secular state. The means that the different groups
believe in to achieve this objective are varied: some adopt non-violent
strategic planning, while others believe more in warfare. It is unfortunate though
that, although it has a relatively recent history, al-Qaeda enjoys the most
popularity all over the world of any group in the Islamic movement. I say it
is unfortunate because of course it is literally the use of violence,
associated with the engagement of US and UK counterviolence, which has gained
al-Qaeda its popularity. Every honest
person in the world should ask himself why and how this has happened, with
the result that the whole movement is ignored and everyone concentrates on
al-Qaeda as the object of knowledge and understating. The next question is
where this 'mistake' has been leading and will lead. You have started to partly
answer these questions in your site by addressing the Palestine-Israeli
conflict, and the US and Britain's international politics. What is missing,
though, is material on (1) the history and the formation of the Islamic movements;
(2) the definition of the never-defined associated terms: terrorism,
fanaticism, extremism, etc.; (3) the conflict between Islam and modernity;
(4) the stance of global civil society towards the Islamic movement. This
last is for me the most fundamental issue. Are the people who demonstrate
against the war on terror different in their understanding of the Islamic
movement from Blair and Bush? Do they recognise that Blair and Bush are not
at all different from Bin Laden: both Bin Laden and Bush-Blair kill
civilians, legitimize illegitimate war, abuse religion in their war, and
violate international law! In my view, those people
demonstrate against the war because they are fundamentally human and love
peace, but yet they haven't been liberated enough to address the root causes
of terror: they are constricted by the lack of a thoughtful and unprejudiced
understanding of the Islamic movement. Instead they have fallen into the trap
of the discourse of 'terrorism' and 'fanaticism'. That discourse was first
initiated by the undemocratic Islamic regimes in Egypt, Pakistan, Algeria and
elsewhere. Later, the discourse was and still being more developed and
manipulated by the US and Britain to support their foreign policy. For me, it is unfortunate to
note that the lovers of peace, who protest against the war and ask for the
application of the international law, have been ignoring the violation of
international law for a long time: tons of Security Council resolutions on
Palestine were ignored under the eyes of activists and peace movements. So I
can see that the protestors act out of fear rather than acting out of
justice: they feared the United
States when international law was violated by its baby Israel, and now they fear
Bin Laden because he has announced no limit! I wish to witness the day when
the peace lovers get stronger than Bin Laden: when they take initiatives
before him instead of reacting to his devastating initiatives. Before ending, please know
that Palestine is the most important evidence among many other evidences of
global injustice and biases against Muslims’ concerns. All these evidences
have to be addressed seaparately in order to understand the current
crisis. In the light of this
understanding, I would be more than happy to be of any help to your thankful
effort. Yours sincerely Nagah Ismail |
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