Wednesday, November 27, 2002 |
22:38 - Wheeere's the Wahhabism?
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory111802.asp
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In Saudi Arabia, East Africa, the political veneers of Iraq, various mosque leaderships here and there throughout the Muslim world-- and the US. And not many other places, says Stephen Schwartz in NRO, via UNMEDIA. Stephen Schwartz, that is, a Sufi Muslim convert with a very sane viewpoint, a retained Western name, and a refreshingly tolerant attitude toward the rest of the world's faiths-- something I wish we could see more of.
He methodically lists the countries where Wahhabism is prevalent, and the countries where it has an influence-- and the nature of that influence.
Unfortunately, the U.S. is the only country outside Saudi Arabia where the Islamic establishment is under Wahhabi control. Eighty percent of American mosques are Wahhabi-influenced, although this does not mean that 80 percent of the people who attend them are Wahhabis. Mosque attendance is different from church or synagogue membership in that prayer in the mosque does not imply acceptance of the particular dispensation in the mosque. However, Wahhabi agents have sought to impose their ideology on all attendees in mosques they control.
I hope those in charge of the WOT have this kind of filter to look through at the Muslim world, because this does exactly what we've been hoping for for a long time: it identifies who should be (and who should not be) the targets of the WOT, in a religious, political, economic, and national sense. And it tells us where we should be able to find sympathy, and why; and who in the Muslim world we should consider long-term allies and assets, once we've established that Wahhabism, specifically, is what needs to die.
I'm comforted to think that leaders like George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard have all made public statements that establish that they realize exactly what the score is, as Schwartz lays it out. They know what path the WOT will have to take as soon as the roadblock of Iraq is out of the way. (In a way, Iraq probably is going to turn out to be about ooooiiil as much as the other reasons, largely because we'll need it from the Iraqi fields in order to take on Saudi Arabia when the time comes.)
Anyway, there's lots of good stuff in this article, including admonishments against the media (for oversimplifying Islamic sects into a single entity, and for failing to present any kind of respected Muslim figureheads and their viewpoints to the Western public), and a reality-check about where our attention should be when looking for pan-Islamic sentiments that condemn terrorism (hint: it's not going to come from the Arab Street, but the Arab Street is not and never has been strategically important).
Of course, for much of the media, the primitive and simplistic image of Muslims as uniformly extremist and terrorist is easier to report, more popular, and "better TV" than that of a complex conflict inside a world religion. It also supports the left-wing claim that it's all our fault, or Israel's. It's so much easier to say they all hate us because of our hegemony and Zionism than to say, as I do, that they don't all hate us, and that the real issue is the battle for the soul of Islam.
Maybe there are some holes in what Schwartz is saying; it may not even be based in facts. But at first blush, it appears to be just what I've been waiting to hear for a very long time.
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