Fixing Islam -- You can't get there from here

Submitted by Chris Chrisman (United States), Apr 21, 2004 at 10:57

Commenter Cheryl Bernard is right that only a modernist or secular government in an Islamic country will be able to sustain democratic values, but the problem is "you can't get there from here."

Islam is both religion and government. Governments that do not follow Islamic law are considered apostate. Apostates from Islam must be killed. The problem is that implementing shari'a (Islamic) law is impossible in modern times because it is so draconian. Hence, there isn't a single government in the Muslim world that is "legitimate" in the eyes of fundamentalists. (Iran comes close, but Sunni Muslims consider Shi'ite Muslims to be idol worshippers because they revere gravesites --- e.g., the grave of Imam Hussein -- Mohammed's grandson -- in Kerbala).

Governments in many Islamic countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, to name a few) actually employ the religious elite to interpret the Koran and Hadith so that the government is seen as legitimate in the eyes of the citizens. More and more Moslems are coming to doubt the integrity of the established religious leadership. Islamic terrorism isn't a phenomenon of the downtrodden underclass. Most of the leaders of terrorist activities are business men and educated professionals (e.g., Osama bin Laden, Sayyid Qutb, and Abdulaziz Rantisi) and they are reading the Koran and the writings of past theologians themselves and coming to their fundamentalist views quite independently of the religious leaders.

A telling and chilling anecdote comes from the Egyptian trial of "the Blind Sheikh" Omar Ahmad Abdel Rahman who was later convicted of terrorism in the first attack on the World Trade Center. At his Egyptian trial for conspiracy to assassinate secular president Anwar Sadat in 1981, he told the judges that rulers who deliberately forsake the shari'a and reject their obligation to make it the law of the land deserve to die.He quoted the Koran that says, " They who do not judge by that which Allah has revealed are the unbelievers." Most of the charges against him were ultimately dismissed because, in the view of the judges, he was merely teaching what the Koran said. What this says is that the connection between terrorism and the Islamic basis for terrorist violence (i.e., jihad) is well established and legally unassailable in the eyes of Moslems.

As long as Moslem nations are backward and impoverished there will be Islamist voices saying that their salvation will only come by returning to the fundamentals of Islam and by overcoming the Infidels -- Christians and Jews. If there is hope for a solution to terrorism or fundamentalist Islam in our lifetime, I sure haven't found it.

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