Of diversity in Islam
[ by Charles Cameron — against either / or thinking — a graphic reminder? ]
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Islam is “a mosaic, not a monolith”.
Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, offered us a 177-page exposition of that theme in a book of that title published by the Brookings Institution (2003), expanding on an earlier and shorter essay of the same title. Of the book-length version, he writes:
Presenting such a wide-angle view in a relatively small space requires the free use of generalizations, summaries, and categorizations that must leave out many nuances of history.
1.
There’s no doubt that some currents within Islam preach a continuing war against “Crusaders and Zionists” — and make no mistake about it, this is a religious movement, claiming its sanction in scripture and its path as submission to the will of God, as indicated by David Martin Jones and MLR Smith in Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency [see Zen’s comments here]:
The process of radicalisation is obviously a complex one. Certainly, the passage to the act of terrorism cannot be reduced solely to religion. Nevertheless, it is somewhat naive, if not perverse, to dismiss it completely. The bombings of the Madrid and London transport systems in March 2004 and July 2005 respectively, and even the 9/11 assaults, are, whatever else, Islamist acts in a Western setting. The view that religion is at best a secondary motive defies the evidence. All the groups that have undertaken high-profile terrorist acts dating from 9/11 and stretching from Bali to Madrid, London and Mumbai have acted in the name of a militant understanding of Islam. Such a pattern of worldwide attacks, exhibiting a profound devotion to a politically religious cause intimates, if nothing else, a religious dimension to jihadism. In fact, to reduce jihadism to individual social pathology attempts to explain away political religion as a social fact. Rather worryingly, it assumes that when a highly motivated jihadist claims to undertake an operation to advance a doctrine, he does not really mean it.
This might seem so obvious as to require no comment — yet Jones and Smith follow this paragraph with a question:
we need to resolve this paradox: why do counterinsurgency theorists exhibit this reluctance to confront the ideological or politically religious dimension of modern insurgency?
— and there are no doubt other segments of the media, intelligence and policy communities of which the same question might be asked.
One aspect of the answer, I believe, lies in the general tendency of post-enlightenment thinkers to “push religion into the background of their story” (Richard Landes‘ words, which I quoted here in a different context a week ago).
2.
The young man pointing a gun at the viewer on a Facebook page (h/t Internet Hagganah) is the avatar of a net-salafi in Germany whose sequence of avatars looks like this:
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