Fasciating. It does make one wonder if we could somehow get out of the
way and let all the radicals kill each other off. :-/
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 23, 2009, at 14:50, [email protected] wrote:
In a message dated 8/19/2009 8:42:36 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
BILROJ writes:
Terra Incognita: A new type of Islamic militancy
Aug. 17, 2009
Seth Frantzman , THE JERUSALEM POST
The sudden and bloody fighting that broke out at a mosque in the
Gaza Strip on Friday is emblematic of a new phenomenon within the
Islamist movement. From Gaza to northern Nigeria and Pakistan, and
throughout the Islamic world, a new type of militancy has grown, one
that involves extremist preachers, their followers begging for
martyrdom, and self-destructive battles that result in their deaths,
usually at the hands of fellow Muslims.
THE PHENOMENON of extremist religious movements surrounding inspired
preachers is surely not new nor confined to Islam. Revivalist
Christian sects such as the Branch Davidians and their leader David
Koresh clashed with US police in 1993 with tragic results, and in
India the Sikh leader Bhindranwale led a militant independence
movement that resulted in thousands of deaths. The Ghost Dance which
swept up Native American communities in 1890 was led by the Paiute
prophet known as Wovoka and resulted in the Wounded Knee massacre
where over 300 people died. The practitioners believed their special
religious garments would repel bullets. A similar phenomenon
occurred in China in 1900 when a religious society known as the
Boxers produced a wave of anti-Western militancy led by men who
believed their devotion could protect them from bullets. Their
movement was destroyed by the intervention of European armies.
A minority branch of the Islamic faith known as the Isma'ilis
produced a radical sect known as the Assassins who spent the 11th
and 12th centuries harassing and murdering Muslim and Christian
leaders in the Middle East before being exterminated by the Mongols
in 1256. In Israel's War of Independence in 1948, an extremist
Muslim Brotherhood unit wearing supposedly protective garments
stormed Jewish Kfar Darom in Gaza resulting in the deaths of most of
its members who had travelled from North Africa. (Kfar Darom fell to
the Egyptian army soon after.) Indonesia has been stricken by
Islamist revival movements since the 19th century, partly sparked by
the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 where thousands of people died after a
volcano eruption nearly destroyed the island, which today manifest
themselves in the groups like Darul Islam and Jemaah Islamiyah.
Islamism it seems is beginning to produce more and more radical
fringe movements that, far from being part of a unifying umbrella as
al-Qaida intended, are "linked to al-Qaida" but succeed mostly in
fighting Muslim governments and destroying themselves as well as
civilians located near their mosques. The July 2007 Siege of the Red
Mosque in Pakistan was one such example. It was led by brothers
Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, sons of a radical
preacher named Maulana Qari Abdullah who founded the mosque in 1965.
A series of escalating incidents led to an eight-day siege of the
mosque in which 11 Pakistani special forces, 84 mosque members and
14 civilians were killed.
On July 31, following days of fighting, Muhammad Yusuf of the Boko
Haram sect was killed in northern Nigeria. His sect had launched a
series of attacks on police stations, churches and government
offices in several northern Nigerian states. More than 200 people
died before the army launched an assault on the organization's
mosque, capturing Yusuf who later died in custody.
But the most famous example of an extremist Islamist uprising is the
siege of Mecca, so well documented in a recent book, The Siege of
Mecca, by Yasoslav Trofimov. On November 20, 1979 some 500 armed
followers of Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al-Utaibi, a member of a
leading Saudi family, layed siege to the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The
standoff lasted 14 days during which 250 militants and 130 Saudi
national guardsmen were killed. The leader of the group was later
beheaded, along with 67 of his followers.
IN THE afternoon hours of August 14, word came out of Gaza of a gun
battle between radical Islamists who had proclaimed a caliphate and
members of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Some 100 members of
Jund Ansar Allah led by Abdel-Latif Moussa, a radical preacher at
the Ibn Taymiyah mosque, were confronted by Hamas security forces
that surrounded the mosque and a shootout ensued. Initial reports
claim up to 24 people died, including six Hamas police officers and
one civilian. The leader of the group reportedly blew himself up.
All of these examples point to a new trend in Islamism. It was once
thought that Islamists primarily viewed themselves at war with
secular Muslim regimes. That later morphed into al-Qaida, which
viewed itself as being at war with the entire non-Muslim world,
inspiring such movements across the world.
Now Islamists are turning on each other. The BBC described the
situation, in a tongue in cheek manner, as one group "accusing the
Islamist group of not being Islamist enough."
The one thing that unites all of these events is disappointment with
unfulfilled Islamist government, guns, mosques and preachers who
seek to revive an Islamic past, whether the mahdi, as in Saudi
Arabia's siege, or the caliphate, as in Gaza. A secondary problem is
that it makes pernicious tyrannical governments such as Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia and Gaza's Hamas seem more benign because they are
"fighting terrorism" or "they too are threatened by extremists." In
fact their support, or in the case of Nigeria, the appeasement, of
Islamism helps breed further radicalism.
The writer is a PhD student in geography at The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem and runs the Terra Incognita Journal blog
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/
Satellite?cid=1249418630004&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
[ Back to the Article ]
Copyright 1995- 2009 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/
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