...With the end of the cold war and the emergence of global networks in which goods, ideas and people circulate outside the language of citizenship, the fundamentalist fight for ideological states has lost influence... Muslim radicalism, by contrast, has moved beyond the language of citizenship to assume a global countenance, joining movements as different as environmentalism and pacifism in its pursuit of justice on a worldwide scale. Such movements are ethical rather than political in nature: they can neither predict nor control the global consequences of their actions...
Spectral brothers: al-Qaida’s world wide web Snapshots of Faisal Devji's Landscapes of the Jihad are to be seen within
posted by y2karl
on Dec 8, 2005 -
17 comments
...The presumption that there are 'good' Muslims readily available to be split off from 'bad' Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America’s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America’s embrace of the highly ideological politics of 'good' against 'evil.' Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the 'moral equivalents' of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism... Here is an excerpt of
Chapter 1 of
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, and with
one review,
two review,
three reviews hereafter. And here is author
Mahmood Mandmani interviewed by
AsiaSource.
posted by y2karl
on Apr 11, 2005 -
38 comments
The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why -
An unlikely group of onetime religious jihadists have recently stepped into the midst of the debate on Saudi Arabia's future. They belong to a larger circle of liberals, intellectuals, professors, former Wahhabi scholars, judges and even women who are discussing subjects in the media that were taboo before 9/11 -- questions about terrorism, about Wahhabi discrimination toward Muslims of the Shiite and Sufi sects (whom they consider apostates), about alcohol, about AIDS, about the rights of women to drive and work. The ex-jihadists are fluent in Islam and, more important, in the lingo of the underground terrorists, and they've surfaced from the extremist subculture with a message for the Wahhabi official clerics, the royal family and even their complicit American allies: Wake up. It's you who created us. We are not an aberration. From
The Agonist--where the editorial comment
this is an absolutely excellent article and a must read is quite indisputable. From entering
Salafiyya in Google comes the fascinating polemic
The Salafi Cult. better known as the Khawarij.
posted by y2karl
on Mar 7, 2004 -
19 comments
The "merger" of the Egyptian Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad and the Saudi Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda in 2001, based on the foundation of Qutb's book "Milestones", provide outlet for those who have no other way of expressing their objections to the authoritarian regimes of the countries they live in, and the reach of American power in the Middle East.
posted by semmi
on Sep 17, 2002 -
19 comments
From the essay by Ziauddin Sardar: Scroll 2/3 of the way down--it's from
I.S.I.S. The Institute For Islamic Secularization
A Call for Caution and Prudence
* We need free inquiry of the religious premises of the growing conflagration.
* We need rational debate of the questionable premises of a "holy war" or jihad.
* We need a rational debate of the biblical call for retribution.
* We call upon the United States not to act unilaterally and to petition the United Nations to establish a peace-keeping force.
* All terrorists when apprehended should be brought to the World Court at the Hague and put on trial.
* The basic constitutional civil liberties of America should not be abrogated.
--Perhaps we're all best off with the godless making the rules?
posted by y2karl
on Sep 30, 2001 -
8 comments
