Annie
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Since 9/11, actually more like the past year, I've come to the conclusion that orthodox Islam is violent. The following post does a pretty good illustration of why. Those that take a 'reformed' pov, do not go radical, those that do, do. Links at site:
http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/008367.php
http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/008367.php
Every Way to Paradise
by Joe Katzman at March 31, 2006 02:40 PM
From "The Sufi Soul" by William Dalrymple:
"The Tablighis are now probably the largest Muslim missionary movement in the world, and advocate a return to the basic fundamentals of the Koran. They greatly dislike Sufism, the mystical face of Islam, and believe that Sufi shrines like that of Nizamuddin encourage such un-Koranic practice as idolatry, music, dancing and the veneration of dead saints. With his dark skin, wispy beard and narrow eyes, Amin did not look like a Delhi-wallah. He was an aircraft maintenance engineer from Dacca [JK: Bangladesh] who had come to Delhi [JK: India] to learn more of the teachings of the Tablighis, and to help preach what he considered to be the proper ways of Islam....
So, I asked, what do you think of the Sufi idea that God can also be found in the human heart?
Paradise within us? said Amin, raising his eyebrows. No, no: this is emotional talk - a dream only. Is there evidence for this in the Koran? Real Islam is more disciplined than that: there are rules and regulations that must be followed: how to eat, how to wash, even how to clip your moustache. There is nothing in the Koran about paradise within the body. It is outside. To get there you must follow the commands of the Almighty. Then when you die, inshallah, that will be where your journey ends.
Here, it seemed to me lay some sort of crux - a small but vitally important clash of civilisations, not between East and West, but within Islam itself. Between the strictly regulated ways of the orthodox Tablighis and the customs of the heterodox Sufis lay not just two different understandings of Islam, but two entirely different conceptions of how to live, how to die, and how to make the final and most important, and difficult, journey of all - to paradise."
If you want to understand the Sufis a little bit better, Winds' "Sufi Wisdom" category offers a bit of a window. But now it's time to shift from India to places beyond, and to focus on the Salafists, Hojjatieh, and their ilk rather than the Sufis. For that, however, what we need isn't an expat but a shrink. Several, in fact, as we look at Islam's einsatzgruppen, the psycho-mechanics of death cults, and how G-d is drawn....
We'll start with The Anchoress, whose post "Abdul Rahman Vanishes - Deathfans and Fascists afoot" has some interesting thoughts and links. Including this one:
"Yeah, yeah, Death to Christians, Death to Jews, Death to cartoonists, Death to gays, Death to unveiled or dishonorable women, Death to the West. Death to all who dont agree with us! Death, Death, Death - thats all these people know. Maybe its because they know so little about loving life?"Well, yeah. I mean, they've told us that more than once. "Spengler" adds this important point:
"Sacrifice is the universal means by which religions enable the faithful to come to grips with death.... All religion submerges the ego, in anticipation of the day when death will destroy the ego for all time. Sacrifice, namely giving up something of one's self, is the universal vehicle for reducing the ego. Sacrifice becomes terribly dangerous when the ego cannot re-emerge under the sun and sky of the real world. There is a distinction between a spiritual identification with Jesus' suffering, and nailing a live volunteer to a cross, as do some Catholics in the Philippines."
Aye, there's the rub. Over to Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, with a story for you from Britain:
"I noticed one day that his mood had greatly improved; he was communicative and almost jovial, which he had never been before. I asked him what had changed in his life for the better. He had made his decision, he said. Everything was resolved. He was not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he had previously intended. Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could.
Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies - enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it - and hence were legitimate targets."
An orientation that is not by any means confined to Islamists, and underlies much of the modern Left's thinking as well. But let's stick to our focus. Sigmund, Carl & Alfred's "Really, Really, Succinct" stitches together a series of posts from The Anchoress, Dr. Sanity and Shrinkwrapped. The key line? In speaking of Islam's killers and suicide bombers it quotes the simple question:
"I wonder if in his religious ecstasy experience there is room for a consideration of the possible pain of his victims?"
The short answer is obvious, the longer one revealing. Over to Shrinkwrapped's key post. Ecstatic Terror was born after reading a Times of London on-line article called "Are you ready? Tomorrow you will be in Paradise...", discussing ~250 interviews of people who had been trained as suicide bombers and failed in their missions. This was also the study that had inspired Dr. Sanity. Shrinkwrapped writes, correctly:
"Her work is chilling. Her subjects describe an entire industry devoted to creating suicide bombers. A key part of the preparation of the "martyrs" is their psychological preparation....Over to Friedman:
The suicide bombers have made it perfectly clear that they deny the humanity of all non-believers. This is a signal distinction from every other religion. Evangelicals may believe you cannot be saved if you do not agree with their beliefs. They may work hard to "save you", though typically are respectful of those of us who do not desire saving at the moment. The Islamist agrees that you are bereft of Allah's love and offers "submission" to Allah via conversion, or "submission" via dhimmitude, at the point of a sword.
Inadvertently, Tom Friedman, of all people, agrees with my thesis..."
"The secret of this story is in that conversion - and so is the crisis in Islam. The people and ideas that brought about that sudden conversion of Hasib Hussain and his pals - if not stopped by other Muslims - will end up converting every Muslim into a suspect and one of the world's great religions into a cult of death."Ultimately, it's about the way one constructs one's god - but the twist is dark, because the vision of the Islamists denies the very humanity of non-believers. Ultimately, what they create is a deity in their own image - and that deity, no less than the terrifying Aztec gods of murder and sacrifice, is a bloody-jawed monster. Back to Sigmund, Carl & Alfred's "Really, Really, Succinct":
"In other words- if we are reading Dr Sanity clearly, the suicide bomber not only has to accept the notion of a venegeful Allah, he must also create that god for himself and embrace the call that created god extends him.
This is not unlike the culture that produced Nazi ideology. It was one thing to celebrate and embrace Aryan superiority- it was quite another to enforce that ideology. Nazi records are replete with memos reporting how 'front line' extermination soldiers could not always be counted on to do the job- indeed, they were often reluctant to murder innocents. There were reports of soldiers deserting and disobeying orders- clearly an intolerable situation for any army.
In fact, a special unit, The Einsatzgruppen, was established purely for the purpose of murder. Regular army troops could not be counted on to get the job done.
The suicide bombers are the modern day Einsatzgruppen. Their mission is not motivated by politics or economics, though like Hitler's Nazis, that was the excuse given."
I've heard some idiot commenters describe Naziism as "Christian" before. That is a profound ignorance given the regime's open and ideological declarations of the need to extirpate that religion and replace it with a religion of the state, one dedicated to a fusion of modern totalitarian thought with pagan gods of war and death. Which certainly sounds familiar these days.
The thing to remember, however, is that this is all a deliberate human construct. It can therefore be un-constructed by the classical human methods. Dr. Sanity's "Union With An Evil God notes:
"It is possible,though, that Allah may be getting a bum rap. In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", Jessica Rabbit--who is always responded to as a wanton sex kitten--exclaims in frustration at this depiction of her, "I'm not bad! I'm just drawn that way!"
Allah may not be so bad. Perhaps he's just drawn that way...?"
There's a lot to this. Ali Eteraz at Unwilling Self-Negation, in an interesting and deeply insightful post that concludes:
"Why, instead of being receptive to the notion of Muhammad's spiritual makeup, have we made him into some kind of austere caricature of himself? A cold, unfeeling man! As if being a man means being dispassionate. Rest assured, it is us who made Wurther into a Warrior. Before the West called him Mahound we were calling him Conqueror. We were the ones who spoke of the "conquest" of Mecca. We who talked so disparagingly of "the pagans." We who attributed stoning to him; attributed to him battle-martyrdom; we, who, even when he went to heaven, sent him upon a winged stallion, as if it takes a cavalry charge to be near God. These are descriptions the belivers posited. This is not Orientalism. This was long before Edward Said. Long before the Crusades. It was us you and I who celebrated Muhammad on the basis of his virility instead of his humility. You and I who emphasized his political leadership, without reminding ourselves that he began with shepherding a flock of sheep. If was you and I who did not allow Muhammad to remain a man. We wanted him to be able to predict the falls of Rome, Constantinople, and the coming of the anti-Christ even the occurrences (the details) in the Day of Judgment. We wanted all this because we were weak. We could not accept that we followed the suggests of a man who fought not pagans but loneliness. We could not accept when he was like us because we could not accept ourselves. So we twisted him. We gave him foresight as if he were a soothsayer; we gave him Hercules' strength; Don Juan's charisma. We gave him the all-seeing eye of God. We went so far as to say that on the Day of Judgment, Muhammad would rise to become greater than God. Don't believe me? It was you and I who said that when God condemns, Muhammad saves.
Muhammad was only a man who left a book for posterity. Yet now Muhammad is an idol. And idol that is exclusively maintained by the Muslim. In facts, as recent events demonstrate, we do not allow anyone else the permission to idolatorize him.
Ghalib warned us not to lift the covers off the Kaba lest we might find an idol? I peeked, and I found the idol was called: Muhammad."
And with the idol comes the more ancient customs of the fire-mawed gods, complete with the select of the young being urged into immolation upon an altar venerated by the community.
Commentators like Tony Blair have called aspects of Islamism "pre-feudal," and others have referred to today's Islamists as a 10th century faith. In the end, that may well be giving them altogether too much credit. But the weapons Islam's self-appointed High Priests seek, and will purchase, to build that grand sacrificial altar to their fire-mawed god will be distinctly of our centuries. An altar meant for sacrifice, death - and ritual submission before its bloody-handed priests and their devotees, given open and official license to prey on the community entire.
We would not be the first society to believe itself above and beyond a fall into a Dark Age, and find itself wrong. As Wrtchard notes in "The Return of the Ripper":
"It is not enough, as the British Army has done, to look on at this mayhem from the outside in, blinded by the illusion that these executions are just one more quaint ethnic practice that the guilt-ridden West has no right to criticize; that it is one more expression of identity that one is obliged to tolerate, whether these sanguinary events happen in British-patrolled Basra or the British city of Leeds. The wellsprings of terrorism arise from certain tendencies within Islamic society itself; and unless the weeds are pruned the flowers will never grow, until we find ourselves alone at midnight in the Garden of Evil."
And Spengler, more strongly still, from a very thought-provoking 2004 article entitled, simply, "You love life, we love death":
"Whether the human ego can stand up to this absolute power is a different question; whether Islam has a propensity to produce a necrophiliac brand of radicalism is a question that the West will continue to ask. That issue is only tangential to the matter of al-Qaeda's challenge, which simply means, "Unlike us, you are unwilling to give your lives for your cause. "Evidently that is true of the Spanish; if it becomes true of the West in general, radical Islam will win."Yet that same article also recalls the distinctly Western George Patton, who said "Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to make the other poor bastard die for his country." That is the Western way, and one of the classical human methods for "un-construction" of threats. And so it is that the ancient injunction calls to both sides of the divide:
"This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Therefore, choose life, that you and your children may live."
- Deut 30:19
