The first letter to the National Post, dated July 25, 2005, and the response, dated July 26, 2005 make some excellent points about Jihad and the West. It is not about oil. It is not about Israel. It is certainly not about George W. Bush.
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The first letter to the National Post, dated July 25, 2005, and the response, dated July 26, 2005 make some excellent points about Jihad and the West. It is not about oil. It is not about Israel. It is certainly not about George W. Bush.
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George Jonas
National Post
July 25, 2005
Many people regard the Middle East as the main battleground between militant Islam and the non-Islamic world. There's even a view that the central conflict is between Israel and the Palestinians. If that conflict could be resolved, the problems of radical Islam, terrorism and so on, would go away.
I don't think so.
The struggle between the Islamic and non-Islamic world has been going on for some 1,400 years. In the words of the eminent Princeton scholar Professor Bernard Lewis, it began "with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present day."
For the first thousand years, Islam had been triumphant. Then the crescent moon started waning. "For the past three hundred years," Professor Lewis writes, "since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, Islam has been on the defensive."
There have been lulls in the contest. The latest one lasted from 1918 to 1979. This 60-year gap -- between the collapses of the Ottoman Empire and the Peacock Throne of Iran -- wasn't so much in the struggle itself as in its perception. A low-grade war was going on between the Islamic world and its neighbours even during these 60 years, especially on the Indian subcontinent and in the Middle East. Still, when Islam's jihad picked up speed again after 1979, it caught most Westerners by surprise.
"Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbours," wrote Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in his much-quoted book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Conflicts were alternately smouldering and raging again at Islam's borders all over the globe. Some flash points, such as Kashmir and Kosovo, were well-covered by the media. Others were hardly noted.
People were aware of the conflict between Pakistan and India over Kashmir -- not surprisingly, since the clash threatened to erupt in a nuclear exchange. Muslim ambitions in the Balkans were also reported, though only in terms of autonomy, not dominance. Islam's aspirations in south-eastern Europe were supported by the West. NATO ended up going to war, first to secure Muslim Bosnia's desire for independence from Yugoslavia, then Muslim Kosovo's desire for secession or union with Muslim Albania.
Far less has been written about Dagestan, or Xinjiang, or Indonesia's North Maluku and Central Sulawesi regions. Yet there would have been much to write about. In Indonesia, scores of Christians were murdered by Laskar Jihad, an Indonesian Islamist movement, in 2001. In the village of Lata-Lata, 1,300 Christians were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Though Lata-Lata's Christians were rescued after 18 months of captivity, many others were not so lucky.
Geographic Islam spans the globe. The continuum ends at Xinjiang in northern China. From there Islam's spheres of influence trace back northwest into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and eventually the North Caucasus to regions such as Dagestan and Chechnya, and southwest into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and ultimately the Middle East. In the last 20 years, there have been clashes at every point along this immense frontier.
The bombs aren't going off in Madrid, London or Sharm el-Sheikh alone. The Muslim population of Xinjiang is about 35 million, of whom some five million are Uighurs (also known as Taranchis or Kashgarliks). Some Uighurs have come under the sway of militant Islam. According to China, Uighur separatists have been responsible for more than 200 violent incidents in the past 14 years.
Dagestan, a poor region of the Russian Federation, is at the other end of the Islamic continuum. It neighbours Chechnya. Its population of about two million people, mainly Muslims, belong to more than 30 different indigenous ethnic groups (Chechens, Laks, Avars, Dargins, etc.) speaking 27 different languages. Dagestan's backwardness and tribal diversity are troubled waters, ideal for Islamist militants to fish in. Recurring terrorist incidents related to Chechnya and Dagestan culminated in a horrible mass murder of Beslan schoolchildren in 2004.
A clash of civilizations may not be inevitable, but far more needs to be resolved than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to avoid it. Arab-Jewish hostility isn't the root cause of the tension between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo, Xinjiang and North Maluku are very distant from the conflicts of the Middle East. Iranian theocracy, Saudi Wahhabism or Pakistani-Afghan talibanism have nothing to do with the creation of the Jewish state.
In 2001, Robert Fulford wrote:
"Of all the smug and foolish delusions that were part of conventional wisdom when I was young in the middle of the 20th century, two stand out in memory. One was the idea that nationalism was a 19th-century concept, on its last legs. The other was that religion, as a force in worldly affairs, was slowly but inevitably fading away. At times I was stupid enough to believe both of these preposterous fallacies; but then, so was nearly everyone else."
This world of illusion ended when we re-entered the age of religious wars in Tehran 26 years ago. We heard no bang at the time. There was barely a whimper.
© National Post 2005
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National Post
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Re: The Many Faces Of Jihad, George Jonas, July 25.
Mr. Jonas makes some good points.
However, there are countries that are majority Muslim and are not exporting terrorism, yet still have some cleaning up to do.
They were silent when the Soviet Union rolled into Afghanistan. They were silent when Beijing was, and likely still is, waging an undeclared war against Muslims in Sinkiang. But it is still held against the U.S. that it came to the aid of Muslims in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania.
Unless Islam purges itself of its Arab Aryanism, dealings between the Muslim world and the world that embraces other faiths and traditions will be as if we are walking on egg shells. Which is hardly a worthwhile way to live.
David W. Lincoln, Edmonton.
© National Post 2005
