Picnic jihad update, from the Washington Post Foreign Service in Uruknet, with thanks to Nicolei:
BASRA, Iraq, Celia Garabet thought students were roughhousing. Sinan Saeed was sure a fight had erupted. Within a few minutes, on a sunny day at a riverside park, they realized something different was afoot. A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles, pistols, thick wire cables and sticks had charged into crowds of hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students and hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men dancing and singing, music playing and couples mixing.That melee on March 15 and its fallout have redrawn the debate that has shadowed Iraq's second-largest city since the U.S. invasion in 2003: What is the role of Islam in daily life? In once-libertine Basra, a battered port in southern Iraq near the Persian Gulf, the question dominates everything these days, from the political parties in power to the style of dress in the streets.
In the days that followed the melee, hundreds of students, angry about the injuries and arrests, marched on the school administration building and then the governor's office, demanding an apology and, more important, the dissolution of the dreaded campus morality police. The militiamen who attacked the picnickers at first boasted of stamping out debauchery, even distributing videos of the event. But, gauging the popular revulsion, they later admitted to what they termed mistakes. The governor, himself an Islamic activist, urged dialogue to calm a roiled city and deemed the case closed, even as students insisted they remained unsatisfied.
To many in Basra the students managed what no local party or politician had yet done: They interrupted, if briefly, a tide of religious conservatism that has shuttered liquor stores in a city that once had dozens, meted out arbitrary justice and encouraged women to wear a veil and dress in a way considered modest.
"The students broke through the barriers of fear," said Ali Abbas Khafif, a 55-year-old writer and union organizer jailed for 23 years under former president Saddam Hussein. "This was the first mass response to religious power."
The victory may be fleeting in a city where Islamic activism and guns often go hand in hand. Even in their moment of triumph, many secular students acknowledge they are fighting a losing battle; some suggest it is already lost.
"We have felt both our weakness and our strength," said Saif Emad,
24....
Read it all.
Brave people. I wish them luck in standing up to their religious edicts. Words are nothing against guns, when the wielders care nothing for words.
And Allah knows best.
Geoff
Freedom's on the march.... marching away for good.
I dunno KJ; I don't think freedom's necessarily on the march, but imagine the old days in which we'd never have heard about this story. It seems more likely that islamic belief is going to be broken down into secularism (20%+ secret secularists in islamic society is something of note). There'll be more conflict before anything is 'decided' but I don't know that we can say it's not working 'at this juncture'.
Geoff
You gotta fight....for your right.....to paaarty!!!
JLP
Dear kj and geoff,
I think at this juncture in history it is way too early to tell which way Iraq is headed. Whether one is optimistic (geoff) or pessimistic (kj) is irrelevant right now. It is extremely presumptuous and dangerous to take the short view of things in a demonically infested country like Iraq (Babylon of old). Yes, things are improving but there is still much work to be done. As for me, this story is actually very revealing at second glance. Islam, like the Communists of yesteryear, owes it's power over the people in it's ideological and theological orthodoxy. Christianity, prior to Martin Luther's Reformation, was suffering the same fate. Once the church's exclusivity on God's holy word was broken, then and only then could the little people pursue the Gospel without fear. Many Muslims, once freed of their insufferable clerics, are looking for same (freedom, that is). If any large group of Muslims decide to act quite independently of clerical fatwas (and this idea catches fire in the ME), then Islam as a system of control is finished (it was never a 'religion' in the first place). The chinks in the armor are beginning to manifest itself to the rest of the world and this should offer us some hope. As always, JHVH is still sovereign (hallelujah) and fully in control of the situation (AMEN!).
"As many arrows,loosed several ways, come to one mark....so may a thousand actions, once set afoot, end in one purpose".
As the years slowly drifted by in iraq and students learned of a living paradise (or so it should be)in America and the rest of the free world, where people are cordial and we have roads and water,sewage systems and freedoms never heard by them before they came alive at the thought of it and that if enough people wanted it it could be had for all.
The events in Lebanon, Bosnia,Kurgytsystan?,Afghanistan and many more that WILL know a new found freedom has sparked many an interest by many and they should assisted any way to acheive liberty so they may be removed from the foreign nations relations welfare roll.
Oh this feels so gooood.
'
A little sarcasm there John Lee, are you perchance a fundie Christian?
You know there isn't much difference between a Fundie Christian and say, the mullahcracy of Iran.
Giaour writes, "You know there isn't much difference between a Fundie Christian and say, the mullahcracy of Iran."
Giaour it probably makes you feel special in some way imagining that Christians fret about you watching porn when your wife's out of the house or you getting drunk at a party and making an ass of yourself. Maybe you fantasize about a group of Christians attacking you and demanding you submit to them and their God. Maybe you fantasize the Christians will rape your sister in order to achieve your submission. You're probably aroused by the whole idea. But, no such luck. You'll just have to settle for prayer. May God bless you and give you discernment.