Reply to Be Wary of Racism and Islamophobes

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[quote=Muslima][quote=Anonymous][b]I feel that I am a realist, and fearful of Islam.

I don't know how to correlate what Muslima says about the beauty of Islam with the overwhelming number of violent attacks committed in the name of Islam.
[/b]
I think it is a coordinated ploy by Saudi Arabia to push Wahhabism on the rest of the world.  And until we recognize this and shut off the flow of money at the source, Islam will continue to be manipulated into the barbaric sharia law type system that it is today.

What you're saying is that, if we wanted to look for the causes of what's happened -- Al Qaeda and the movement worldwide -- we would have to look to the schools, to the educational system which Saudi Arabia has fostered in the Islamic world?

... In order to have terrorists, in order to have supporters for terrorists, in order to have people who are willing to interpret religion in violent ways, in order to have people who are willing to legitimate crashing yourself into a building and killing 5,000 innocent people, you need particular interpretations of Islam.

Those interpretations of Islam are being propagated out of schools that receive organizational and financial funding from Saudi Arabia. In fact, I would push it further: that these schools would not have existed without Saudi funding. They would not have proliferated across Pakistan and India and Afghanistan without Saudi funding. They would not have had the kind of prowess that they have without Saudi funding, and they would not have trained as many people without Saudi funding.

richard holbrooke
U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the Clinton administration

I think that one of the tragedies of this story is that the Saudi Arabians exported their problem by financing the schools, the madrassas, all through the Islamic world. I saw this in Uzbekistan a few years after Uzbekistan got out of the Soviet Union, became an independent state in cities like Tashkent and Samarkand, where the Saudis were funding these schools teaching Koranic studies and creating a class of people for whom education was simply the Holy Book, the Koran.

... What happened here was that the Saudi Arabian government had two wings. The mainland Saudi leadership went into financial issues, defense issues, and they controlled the elite establishment in order to purchase support. From the more fundamentalist religious groups, they gave certain other ministries, the religious ministries, education ministries, to more fundamentalist Islam leaders. And that's how the split occurred.

So the Saudi government was, to a certain extent, pursuing internally inconsistent policies throughout this period -- reaching out to the West with sophisticated, well educated, internationally minded leaders like its foreign minister, like its ambassador in Washington and others. At the same time, it was funding with this vast oil revenue a different set of efforts: education, which was narrowly based in the Koran. .[/quote]

I agree with that. As a Muslim, I myself sometimes, can not reconcile the teachings of Islam as I understand them as taught to me and other Muslims that I know with the violent attacks committed in the name of Islam! In our times, the saying, “not every Muslim is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Muslim,” has almost become a cliché.  While we Muslims know this is not true, and some Muslims go to the extent of proving so by citing examples from the KKK to Timothy McVeigh, we still owe an answer to ourselves and to others. To me, whether non-Muslims are involved in terrorist activities or not is irrelevant, and certainly does not justify Muslims being involved in terrorist activities. Religion is not purely text, but it is also how the text is interpreted and acted on. It is the job of muslims to interprete their religion properly and correct false interpretations. It follows then that it is the job of muslims to confront these problems and these mis-interpretations of the religion and make it clear that murder can not be committed in the name of Islam. There is no reason why so many Muslims should have such a poor or misguided understanding of their own religion.

But having said that,  Muslim terrorists (and all perpetuators of violence and oppression) deserve to be studied carefully. Yes, it is terrorism.   Yet, it is violence directed towards a civilian population for political motivation, with the intention of both causing real harm and creating an environment of fear.  But do they do it because they are "Muslim" or for other reasons?

[quote]The reasons why someone picks up a gun or blows themselves up are ineluctably personal, born variously of grievance and frustration; religious piety or the desire for systemic socio-economic change; irredentist conviction or commitment to revolution. And yet, though there is no universal terrorist personality, nor has a single, broadly applicable profile ever been produced, there are things we do know. Terrorists are generally motivated by a profound sense of (albeit, misguided) altruism; deep feelings of self-defense; and, if they are religiously observant or devout, an abiding, even unswerving, commitment to their faith and the conviction that their violence is not only theologically justified, but divinely commanded.[/quote]

Interesting article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/27/answers-to-why-people-become-terrorists.html

To depict them as embodying the essence of Islam (as Islamophobic forces routinely do) is precisely to grant them the very legitimacy that they crave.   They neither possess nor deserve this legitimacy.  Furthermore, we have to take seriously the reality that 1400 years of Islamic history, going back to the very example of Muhammad saw, condemns the usage of violence against non-combatants, what today we would call a civilian population.[/quote]

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