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  • From: "Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>
  • To: "Homestead mailing list" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] all together now, sing "Remember ...."
  • Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 18:37:16 -0700

http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/islam/blis_extrem_binladen.htm<http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/islam/blis_extrem_binladen.htm>
Osama bin Laden's Goals

Waging War on the West

"Many Americans seem to think that bin Laden is just a violent cult leader.
But the truth is that he is tapping into a minority Islamic tradition with a
wide following and a deep history." -Michael Doran, professor of Near Eastern
Studies at Princeton University

What does Osama bin Laden want, and why does he want it? These questions can
best be answered by studying the development of this tradition of Islamic
extremism in the Middle East, especially since World War II. Although these
fundamentalist groups preach a theology which values the earliest traditions
of Islam, it remains nevertheless a very modern movement which has achieved
broad popularity, especially among like-minded thinkers who have created what
has become known as "Islamism."

Many devout Muslims are aghast at the idea that their faith is being used to
justify terrorism, yet they must understand that bin Laden and the people
like him are not simply strange aberrations: they are, instead, a natural
extension of extremist theology which has been in development since at least
the 1930s, and in some cases well before that.

Bin Laden's personal history can be easily found on the internet. Born to a
rich Saudi family, he became in the 1980s the prime financier for an
organization that recruited Muslims from mosques around the world for the war
in Afghanistan. When he returned after the war, he founded an organization to
aid that war's veterans, many of whom went on to fight elsewhere (like
Bosnia) and/or comprised the basis of his al-Qaeda terrorist group.

So what is it that bin Laden wants today? His basic argument is that Muslims
in the Middle East are currently suffering from political, social and
economic deprivation for the simple reason that their governments have not
fully implemented shari'a , or Islamic law. Because their rulers have failed
to do this, bin Laden no longer considers them to be truly Muslim.

So, he would claim, rather than living in Islamic states, Muslims in the
Middle East are really living in jahiliyya , an Arabic term used to describe
pre-Islamic paganism, ignorance and barbarism. Muslims are forbidden to make
war on each other, but they are allowed to make war on non-Muslims who are
persecuting them - thus current rulers are made open to attack. But they
aren't the only targets, because these leaders are not solely responsible for
the current state of affairs.

On the contrary, Muslims are victims of a centuries-long Crusade by Jews and
Westerners which has been driven by the goal of undermining and eventually
destroying Islam. They colonized Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam, those
lands under Muslim administration), divided it up into nation-states, and
even left people there to rule over the Holy City of Jerusalem (Israel).

Some Westerners, including President Clinton, have argued that the West does
not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists.
Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise, especially to
Islamic extremists. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both
Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's
Other. The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and
Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon
compared with the continuing and deeply conflicted relation between Islam and
Christianity. (Huntington, p. 209)

This is not to say, of course, that this is a conflict simply against the
religion of Islam. Western leaders are correct in that they have not launched
an armed conflict against a religion. But Muslim leaders are correct in that
an attack is being made against a cultural, historical and political
civilization centered around the religion of Islam.

Currently, Westerners are perceives as attempting to impose their own secular
values which are at odds with fundamental and traditonal Islamic values and
practices. They claim altruistic motives, but Muslims know the real purpose
is to undermine their faith. Thus, the West must be resisted and attacked.
Some think that because the West is the bigger enemy, it should be attacked
first, whereas others believe that the local rulers, being the closer enemy,
should be the top priority.

Such would bin Laden argue, yet none of this originates with him. All reports
indicate that he isn't much of an original thinker - he is neither a
religious scholar nor a political philosopher. Instead, he has tapped into a
fully-formed tradition which has given him all the ideological tools he needs
to both explain current problems and offer a solution. Muslims in the Middle
East can accept these arguments because the ground has already been prepared
by centuries of development.



  • [Homestead] all together now, sing "Remember ....", Toni Hawryluk, 09/19/2004

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