Chapter 11. Jihad Inc.
The Arab Muslim. In this chapter we have referred to Muslims in general but that fact of the matter is that most of the people in the Middle East are Arabs who happen to be Muslim and who also happen to have oil on their land.
The decline of Islam has led down a road to where the modern Arab, for the most part, wonders how his faith and culture fits in with a rapidly changing world. This is a far cry from originally belonging to one of the greatest cultures in the history of human kind.
Whether it is acknowledged or not, the Middle East (because of Israel and oil) is a vital part of the modern world and as such has to make changes and concessions to its own religion and culture.
As of this writing in the early part of the twenty-first century, Arabs, and Islam, have one hell of a public relations problem in the Western world.
One of the main problems with the Arab-Muslim religion of the Middle East today stems from outright religious intolerance combined with an insular culture that is still stuck in the tribal twelfth century!
It is a curious situation where on the one hand the average Arab confesses to overwhelming piety and subservience to Allah; while at the same time he looks with arrogance down on everyone else as being “infidels” and inferior.
This, combined with the rage average Arabs have against perceptions of them in the West as being nothing more than camel herders living somewhere in the middle ages, makes for a truly schizophrenic outlook on their part.
Just as Christianity was stuck in the Middle Ages for a long time, so the religion of Muhammad has, among certain groups, been stuck in the past.
It needs to be dragged into the modern age, kicking and screaming if need be!
One of the best examples of this can be seen in the recent practices of the Taliban in central Afghanistan. They held a whole nation hostage to their religious zealousness and it took the intervention of outside forces to finally remove them.
To gather some insight into this volatile situation in the Middle East, (other than the never ending conflict between Arabs and Jews over the Palestine issue) we need go back only a few short years to discover how the situation got to the point it is at today!
It all revolves around the discovery of oil!
Oil is both a blessing and a curse for the people of the Middle East. It brought the region great wealth, and at the same time exposed them to the rest of the world on a scale never before experienced.
Gone is a centuries old way of life as their governments and population are thrust unto the world stage. Their religion and lifestyle has been given a millennium long drop kick from the eleventh to the twenty-first century. The cultural shock alone has seriously disrupted the social order and fabric of their society.
The fact remains that without oil, this situation would also not get nearly the attention it does.
It is now fashionable to blame Western colonization and economic domination for most of the woes and predicaments of the Muslim countries.
** Nevertheless, I would like to point out that Muslims themselves bear the most responsibility for the situation they are in right now.
Their complicity in the rise of militant Islam must be borne just as much by themselves as by their former colonizers.
When we look at the tensions between East and West in the light of day, religion is a handy way to rile the population against the “infidels” of the West.
The fact of the matter is that it is more of a fear of Western ideals and culture, combined with jealousy of Western affluence that drives the leaders in the Middle East into such fits of rage.
The Western influence is a direct threat to their authority, especially amongst the young!
Don’t forget that no matter what form of government a Middle East country has, outside of some large urban areas it is still largely controlled by the tribes and Imams!
By the end of the 1970’s America, Europe and various Arab regimes extended too many fundamentalist and extremist groups military, diplomatic, financial and logistical support for two main reasons.
The first was to deflect the attention of Muslims around the world from the anti-American Iranian understanding of Islam that was being fostered by the clerics under the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The second was of course to reduce American casualties in trying to counter the U.S.S.R. incursions into Afghanistan.
Sponsored by petrodollars, all aggressive interpretations of Islam were published and abundantly distributed in the Muslim world.
This was accompanied by a vigorous publicity campaign assuring Muslims that this was the only right path and correct understanding of Islam.
Other interpretations quickly disappeared amongst the uneducated masses. Religious and cultural tolerance was slowly eroded while fundamentalism was on the ascent.
However, literature and propaganda didn’t work alone amongst the frustrated Arab citizens living under totalitarian regimes for the better part of a century. The extreme interpretations of Islam that were circulating provided them with a fascinating religion based Utopia.
A dream that the Imams were only too glad to foster and spread.
The truth of the matter is that Islam now enjoys the same sort of power over the masses as Christianity displayed a thousand years ago.
Why should the power structure of Islam give up any of their perks? It does not matter whether it is Al-Qaida, the Taliban, the clergy running Iran or the militants in Egypt and half a dozen other countries. They all want to turn their little piece of Eden into an Islamic state.
In other words, a state that is run according to their own ideals, beliefs and benefit; and to hell with everyone else! (Literally)
The problems in the Middle East are not only religious, insofar as the clergy is all to glad to foster discontent to further their own ends, but is also cultural and political. It is what might be described as a:
“Political agenda seeking justification in religion!”
The Islamic State, as it has come to be known, exists in the Middle East on the principal of obedience being due to God only and that Muslims reject the Western, secular idea of separation of church and state!
This is a nice trick fostered by the Islamic clergy to hold on to as much power as possible in spite of the emergence of democratic and populist movements in the world at large.
TOMORROW: The "Infalibility of Islam!"
Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com
Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com
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