Nauman Sadiq
The US first nurtured the Taliban. The Taliban devastated Afghanistan over a decade. Again came the US to 'fight' Taliban and completed the devastation. That was not enough: they moved to Iraq and devastated it. Then came Libya, Yemen, Syria and so on. Landscapes were flattened; blood flowed in the streets. Even the US proxies like Saudi Arabia became bold enough to send tanks to cull the unarmed protesters at neighborhood. One with a clear vision and working ears can see and hear all this.
Or does everybody? Do our dear mainstream media outlets let the information (that matters) to flow freely? Absolutely not. The era of apparent over-information has been so abjectly the hostage of distorted information--when it concerns to these issues of prime importance--that one feels like admiring the then USSR for its poorly executed media censorship. In a sense, we are blind and deaf with working eyes and ears.
In this mess, here I received this submission of an extremely well-articulated article from Sadiq from Pakistan. Besides stating the obvious from past, he relates how the latest series of tragedy from Iraq to Libya and Syria to Yemen is the continuation of the double game of The West. You may say the things will remain the same whether we decry these evil deeds or not; but in a world replete with absurdly distorted mass communication, there are people who have managed to keep their sanity intact and looking for real and informative materials. Here goes one.
The mainspring of Islamic extremism and militancy is not the democratic political Islam, because why would people turn to violence when they can exercise their choice to vote their rulers in and also to vote them out? The mainspring of Islamic militancy is the despotic political Islam of the Gulf variety. The Western powers are fully cognizant of the reality that the mainstream Muslim sentiment is firmly against the US intervention in the Middle Eastern affairs, especially after the end of Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the US after defeating a staunch rival turned its guns against the Muslim world in order to further exploit their energy resources.
In its July 2013 report [1] the European Parliament identified the Wahabi-Salafi roots of global terrorism, but the report conveniently absolved the Western powers of their culpability and chose to overlook the Western complicity in nurturing Islamic extremism and violent Jihadism all over the Islamic world during the Cold War against the erstwhile Soviet Union; and even today, in the Libyan Jihad against the Qaddafi regime in 2011; and the Syrian Jihad against the Alawi (Shia) Assad regime. This is the principal thesis of this write-up which I will discuss in detail in the following paragraphs.
In my previous write-up: The role of Saudi Arabia, as de facto Caliphs of Islam, in sponsoring Islamic extremism and violent Jihadism [2] I stated that an exponential growth in the phenomena of petro-Islamic extremism can directly be attributed to the generous funding of the Islamic charities and madrassahs all over the Islamic world by the Gulf countries after the 1973 oil embargo when the price of oil quadrupled and the Arab Sheikhs’ contribution to the spiritual ‘well-being’ of the Muslims increased proportionally.
Peaceful or not, Islam is only a religion just like any other religion whether it’s Christianity, Buddhism or Hinduism. Instead of taking an ‘essentialist’ approach, which lays emphasis on ‘essences,’ we need to look at the evolution of social phenomena in its historical context. For instance: to assert that human beings are evil by ‘nature’ is an essentialist approach; it overlooks the role played by ‘nurture’ in grooming humans. Human beings are only ‘intelligent’ by nature, but they are neither good nor evil by nature; whatever they are, good or evil, is the outcome of their nurture or upbringing. Similarly, to pronounce that Islam is a retrogressive or violent religion is an ‘essentialist’ approach; it overlooks how Islam and the Quranic verses are interpreted by its followers depending on the subject's cultural context. The Western expat Muslim would interpret a Quranic verse in a liberal fashion; and urban-Pakistani Muslim would interpret the same verse differently; and a rural-tribal Muslim would find meaning in it which could be extreme. It is all about culture rather than religion or scriptures per se.
Moreover, I said that Islam is only a religion ‘just like any other religion.’ But certain reductive neo-liberals blame the religion, as an institution and ideology, for all that is wrong with the world. I have not read much history, I am only a humble student of international politics; that’s why I don’t know what the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition were all about? Although, I have a gut feeling that those were also political conflicts which are presented to us in a religious guise. However, I am certain that all the conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries were either nationalist (tribal) conflicts; or they had economics and power as their goals. Examples: First and Second World Wars; Korea and Vietnam wars; Afghanistan and Iraq wars; and Libya and Syria wars.
When the neo-liberals commit the fallacy of blaming religion for all our woes, I am not sure which ancient global order they conjure up in their minds, the Holy Roman Empire perhaps? Religion may have been a paramount factor in the ancient times, if at all, but the contemporary politics is all about economics and power: the Western corporations rule the world, and politics and diplomacy is all about protecting the trade and energy interests of the Corporate Empire.
