AL-DAULA AL-ISLAMIYAH, the Islamic State, is a "fundamentalist" movement. The fundament is the Islamic state founded 1,400 years ago by the Prophet Muhammad in Medina and Mecca. This backward-looking stance is a propaganda ploy. How can anyone resurrect something that existed so many centuries ago?
In reality, IS is an extremely modern movement, a movement of today and probably of tomorrow. It uses the most up-to-date instruments, like the internet. It is a revolutionary movement, probably the most revolutionary in today's world.
In its rise to power, it uses barbaric methods from bygone times to achieve very modern aims. It creates terror. Not the propaganda term "terrorism" used nowadays by all governments to stigmatize their enemies. But actual atrocities, abominable deeds, chopping off heads, destroying invaluable antiquities -- all to strike debilitating fear into the hearts of its enemies.
The IS movement does not really care about Europe, the US and Israel. Not for now. It uses them as propaganda fuel to achieve its real immediate aim: to take hold of the entire Islamic world.
If it succeeds in this, one can imagine the next step. After the Crusaders conquered Palestine and the surrounding areas, a Kurdish adventurer called Salah-a-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin to European ears) set out to unite the Arab world under his leadership. Only after succeeding in this, did he turn on the Crusaders and wipe them out.
Saladin, of course, was no IS-style merchant of atrocities. He was a profoundly humane ruler, and as such he was feted in European literature (see: Walter Scott). But his strategy is familiar to every Muslim, including the leaders of today's Islamic "Caliphate": first unite the Arabs, only then turn on the infidels.
FOR THE last two hundred years, the Arab world has been humiliated and oppressed. The humiliation, even more than the oppression, has been seared into the soul of every Arab boy and girl. Once the whole world admired Arab civilization and Arab science. During the European Dark Ages, barbaric Westerners were dazzled by Islamic culture.
No young Arab can abstain from comparing the splendor of the past Caliphate to the squalor of contemporary Arab reality -- the poverty, the backwardness, the political impotence. Formerly backward countries like Japan and China have risen again and become world powers, beating the West at its own game, but the Arab giant remains impotent, attracting the world's contempt. Even a tiny band of Jews (Jews of all people!) beat the Arab countries.
A huge reservoir of resentment has been building up in the Arab world, unseen and unnoticed by the Western powers that be.
In such a situation, there are two ways out. One is the arduous path: to divorce the past and build a modern state. That was the way of Mustapha Kemal, the Turkish general who banned tradition and created a new Turkish nation. It was a profound revolution, perhaps the most effective of the 20th century, and it earned him the title of Ataturk, Father of the Turks.
In the Arab world, there was an attempt to create a pan-Arab nationalism, a feeble imitation of the Western original. Gamal Abd-al-Nasser tried and was easily put down by Israel.
The other way is to idealize the past and claim to revive it. That is the way of IS, and it is hugely successful. With little effort it has taken hold of large parts of Syria and Iraq, wiping out the official borders created by Western imperialists. Imitators have set up proxies all over the Muslim world and attracted many thousands of potential fighters from the Muslim ghettos in the West and the East.
Now the Islamic State is starting on its march to victory. There seems to be no one to stop it.
FIRST OF all, because nobody seems to realize the danger. To fight an idea? To hell with ideas. Ideas are for intellectuals and such. Real statesmen look at facts. How many divisions has IS?
Second, there are other dangers around. The Iranian bomb. The Syrian chaos. The breakup of Libya. The oil prizes. And now the avalanche of refugees, mainly from the Muslim world.
Like a giant toddler, the USA is helpless. It supports an imaginary secular Syrian opposition, which exists only in American universities. It fights against the main enemy of IS, the Assad regime. It supports the Turkish leader who fights against the Kurds who fight against IS. It bombs IS from the air, risking nothing and achieving nothing. No boots on the ground, God forbid.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
