One Hand Clapping articulates something about Al Queda that I’ve believed for some time. What we’re seeing is not so much a war between radical Islam and the west, as a civil war within the Islamic world. In other words, it resembles the thirty years war in Europe, and the two sides represent the same opposing values, the middle ages vs. the modern world.
But how can Muslims make war on other Muslims when it is prohibited in the Quran? The same way that Christians in Europe killed one another over religion during the religious internecine wars of Europe that occurred regularly from the 16th to 17th centuries. If you see yourself as the defenders of the true faith, then you exclude from the faith the other side.
What the blasts yesterday in Istanbul and the other attacks going back years that killed Muslims show is that al Qaeda excludes most of the world’s Muslims from the umbrella of protection afforded by the Quran. Either al Qaeda considers them apostate or heretical Muslims, thus not truly Muslims, thus permissible to kill, or al Qaeda considers collateral deaths permissible in the furtherance of its aims. Or both, in some way.
Al Qaeda’s war is not only against the West; in fact, I say that they are not even principally fighting against the West. Their primary war is against other Muslims. What is at stake are lives, human freedom and the very definition of Islam itself.
As I pointed out in August 2002, the Muslim world is faced with defining what Islam really is. If al Qaeda is not in fact the keeper of the true faith, then the rest of the Muslims must unite to destroy al Qaeda just to ensure the survival of Islam itself. They need to understand that the present crisis is not primarily that of Islamists against the West, it is the Islamists against everybody who does not toe their line.
If this is really true, then the justification for Bush’s invasion of Iraq is looking weaker and weaker, and all it’s achieved is to increase support for the bad guys.
