In "Osama's godfathers" in Canada's National Post (thanks to Waterdragon52), Salim Mansur identifies jihad terrorists as modern-day Kharijites -- a heretical sect from the earliest days of Islam. Mansur did not originate this equation: go onto jihadist websites and you will find numerous articles refuting the assertion that Osama and Co. are Kharijites, and pointing to the Qur'an and Muhammad's example to justify their actions. Mansur doesn't address this, or the fact that jihad warfare has been pursued throughout Islamic history by many non-Kharijite Muslims. Nonetheless, it is refreshing to see even a partial acknowledgment of the fact that the problem lies within Islam -- and from a Muslim. Will the mainstream media listen when Mansur says it?
Nine days after the London bombings of July 7, Tony Blair gave a clear-headed speech about the threat to the West. "What we are confronting here is an evil ideology," he said. "This ideology and the violence that is inherent in it did not start a few years ago in response to a particular policy. Over the past 12 years, al-Qaeda and its associates have attacked 26 countries, killed thousands of people, many of them Muslims. Their cause is not founded on an injustice. It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such it can't be moderated. It can't be remedied. It has to be stood up to."What Blair did not say, however, is that al-Qaeda's ideology is deeply entrenched in the Muslim tradition and reaches far back, into the earliest years of Islam.
Al-Qaeda's terrorists are a throwback to those Muslims in the first decades of Islam who believed their faith was the purest, while doubting the belief of others around them, and approved of violence as the right way to advance their views of faith and power. They are known as khwarij (meaning those who secede) or Kharijites.
Muslims in general, fundamentalists in particular, hearken back to the founding years of Islam as the perfect age when the Prophet Muhammad and his companions instituted the divine plan on Earth. In this view, what followed was a regression from belief to unbelief. This picture of Islam's early years is a myth that deprives most Muslims of a critical and rational perspective on history.
The reality, as documented by the earliest Arab-Muslim commentators on Islam's founding decades -- from Ibn Ishaq (d. 761) to Al-Tabari (d. 923) -- was one of internecine strife, bloodshed and war. Immediately after the Prophet died in 632, wars were fought to compel Arabs of contemporary Saudi Arabia and Yemen to re-submit to Islam as the only permissible religion of the new empire. Three of the Prophet's first four successors as rulers of the expanding realm of Islam -- Umar, Uthman and Ali -- were murdered as a result of grievances and factional strife. The Prophet's immediate family were the most conspicuous massacre victims in these seventh-century conflicts. The wars of succession left permanent schisms within Islam.
Ever since those early blood-lettings, Muslims have been the primary victims of Muslim violence.
The Kharijites held the view that since a perfect religious and political order had been instituted, anything outside it was impure and corrupting. Any diminution of this pure system of worship and rule, and any compromise with the outside world, reflected a weakening of faith, a commission of sin and a departure into apostasy that had to be fought and annihilated. Consequently, any Muslim who differed from the impossibly rigid Kharijite view of faith and politics was to be hunted down.
Politically and militarily, Kharijites were systematically eliminated by Muslim rulers within their domain in the first century of Islam. But Kharijite ideas persisted, breeding an exclusive, militant and sectarian body of followers outside the mainstream of Muslim belief and practice. The Kharijite view would re-surface through the influence of Ibn Hanbal (780-855), a founder of one of the four legal schools in Sunni Islam, and in the work of Ibn Taimiyya (1263-1328), who in turn was influential in shaping the view of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-87), the founder of the Wahhabi sect that is the dominant school of Islamic thinking in Saudi Arabia.
Read it all.
I'm wondering if CAIR-CAN is going to sue this fellow over spewing 'bigotry' and inflaming 'religious intolerance', as its American counterpart did with Michael Graham, whose assertions didn't differ much from those of Salim Mansur.
It would be a grest sight.
-----------------------------
dolphin, CAGE co-founder.
http://www.acage.org
"Al-Qaeda's terrorists are a throwback to those Muslims in the first decades of Islam who believed their faith was the purest, while doubting the belief of others around them, and approved of violence as the right way to advance their views of faith and power. They are known as khwarij (meaning those who secede) or Kharijites."
-- from the article above
We have been here before with the blame-the-Kharijites escape-hatch. One of Bush's main advisers on Islam (whose name I cannot recall)kept prating about the "Kharijites."
So now it is not a "tiny handful of extremists." It is something larger. It is not even just "extremists" but a main current in Islam. So again we are told to identify these people as "Wahhabists" until someone rather rudely brings up all the blood-curdling remarks of Khomeini about killing Infidels, and other remarks by Shi'a arch-enemies of Wahhabi Islam. And then there is the term "Salafist" picked up from its use by the F.I.S. in Algeria. And then there are those who see the problem, and fess up to part of it, as the author above -- not a bad fellow, no doubt, but still someone who insists on misleading both himself (not wonderful) and unwary Infidels (very unwonderful indeed).
We have to read between the damn lines. It is Islam, Islam, Islam, not "extremist" Islam, not "Wahhabi" or "Salifist" Islam, not the "Kharijites" whose "ideology is deeply entrenched in the Muslim tradition and reaches far back, into the earliest years of Islam."
No, it is Islam itself, and the doctrine of Jihad, so carefully worked out, elaborated, and acted upon whenever the possibility, and the wherewithal to conduct Jihad, came together -- as, with OPEC riches, and Muslims deployed everywhere in the Bilad al-kufr, and the horrible encounter with Infidels that simultaneously offers the mental clash between the undeniable expression of Infidel superiority and the Islamic teaching that Islam, and Muslims, are and must be superior in every way.
There is no "clash of civilizations." There is no "civil war within Islam." There are the tenets of Islam. They haven't changed. What has changed is the ability to act upon them, with the power that trillions of dollars in unearned wealth has brought, and the power that unchecked Muslim migration, and overbreeding, continues to supply.
And those tenets are not those, pace Salim Mansur in the National Post, of "Kharijites" alone. Perhaps he would care to read, and read closely, the forthcoming "Legacy of Jihad" and then get back to us all on what he, like some other Muslims in the West, themselves either innocently or wilfully (and therefore not innocently) ignorant of the centrality of Jihad, and the historical record of Muslim conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, may not fully be aware of. That at least is one's hope -- that it is a question of ignorance and naivete, and not one of deliberate taqiyya, designed to protect his own position and that of other Muslims in the West, by seeming to forthrightly denounce Muslim outrages (not only "terrorism" but also a great many other things, including the demands to suppress free speech in the West, and to make other demands on host countries, such as changes in political and social understandings, to take advantage of "pluralism" in order to work toward a system where "pluralism" will no longer exist -- i.e., the imposition of the Shari'a or something asymptotically approaching it).
Again, as with al-Nabulsi, a highly unrepresentative view, and one which, while welcome, should be welcomed with great care, and great wariness -- and not hosannas of gratitude and joy.
Salim Mansur:
I don't know if this guy is a Muslim.
He is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario.
I think he is a secularist. If he is a Muslim, he is an apostate and taking his life in his hands. You cannot speak the truth without being killed.
Certainly,none of his publications indicate that he is a Muslim. You guys can google him yourself to find out what his publications are. I am not going to make it easier for the Jihadists to kill him.
Look, here is another article by him:
The Myth of the Moderate Muslim
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2005/07/20/1138956.html
If he is a Muslim, he is clearly an apostate. All I can say is: what courage! Ghee whilikers, in my neighborhood, with giant Masjids going up everywhere I look, hijabs sprouting like fungal growths on all the women I see, and "bearded ones" in lace caps and thobes, I wouldn't even dare go around with a t-shirt that said, "Kaffir and Proud". The guy has cojones.
He sounds like a Muslim trying to analyze Islam without indicting Islam. Muslims, even when they know that Islam is a death cult in their mind, refuse to let go. That pull is so hard to break.
Mentat:
Mansor is definitely a prof of poli sci at UWO (London, Ont.) and most likely secular. He is also now a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies.
CCD Mission Statement http://canadiancoalition.com/
Hey Waterdragon52:
Thanks for the link to the CCD. Here is a great article by David Frum that I found on it:
http://canadiancoalition.com/forum/messages/9229.shtml
"The world wants a Palestinian state? Very well let them have it."
The Secret of Gaza, by David Frum
Why is Ariel Sharon evacuating Gaza?
It is not because he believes that a decent Palestinian state will emerge after the Israelis withdraw. Nobody believes that. The almost universal consensus among experts on the region is that post-occupation Gaza will became a Mediterranean Somalia: an unstable failed state in which gangs compete for power and extremist Islam finds a sanctuary.
Nor was Sharon responding to international pressure. His plan for unilateral evacuation surprised and displeased the United States and the European countries. They wanted Sharon to negotiate with Abbas. They wanted the deal to involve all the Palestinian territories, not just Gaza. And they wanted the whole thing to happen very, very slowly.
Israel's strategic situation did not force Sharon's hand: Israel was more than capable of holding Gaza for years to come. Domestic public opinion is not the explanation: Sharon won Israel's 2003 elections by ITAL opposing END ITAL a Gaza withdrawal.
So why, why, why?
Let me try a theory.
Israel is the victim of an organized international hypocrisy.
After the experience of the 1990s, few people retain an illusions about the likely character of any Palestinian state. The Palestinian leadership is corrupt through and through. The only effective opposition to that leadership is violent and extremist. Palestinian public opinion utterly rejects coexistence with Israel. A Palestinian state, whatever its borders, will wage terror war against Israel and give sanctuary to Islamic extremists from around the world. It will murder Israelis and threaten the security of Europeans and Americans.
European and American political leaders recognize this depressing fact. But they also recognize that Palestine issue has excited passions throughout the Muslim world and among Muslim minorities in the West. These leaders believe that if they want to quell Muslim extremism, they must be seen to work toward the creation of a Palestinian state.
In Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield there is a character who answers every request with a sigh: Ah, if it were up to him, he would of course say "yes" with pleasure but his partner, Mr. Jorrocks,* is so very difficult .. In just such a way, European and American political leaders favor a "peace process" that moves the Palestinians ever closer to statehood, without ever quite reaching it; a process that positions the Israelis as the Mr. Jorrocks of the world.
Ariel Sharon has decided to put an end to this play.
The world wants a Palestinian state? Very well let them have it. And the result, as we are seeing, is something close to panic in the foreign ministries of the West. Not just the West: the Middle East too. The Egyptians do not want a Hamas state on their borders. They had expected Ariel Sharon to place a cordon between Egypt and Gaza. He has said he will not do so that he is leaving the job up to the Egyptians. And indeed last month Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz announced that 750 Egyptian soldiers would soon arrive to replace the Israeli Defense Forces.
Is this Egyptian role on the border a precursor to a larger Egyptian role within Gaza? Egypt after all remains far more vulnerable to Islamic extremist ideology than Israel. The Egyptian authorities have crushed the extremist movement within their borders. Do they wish to see a jihadist state emerge on their borders? It seems unlikely.
Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth:
The Palestinian leadership is incapable of creating a state that can live at peace with anyone, not Israel, not the other Arab states, not Europe, not the world. Somebody else must govern the restless and violent Arab-majority territories west of the Jordan River. Israel has suffered four decades of condemnation for doing the job. Sharon is now resigning the task to anybody else who would like to step in and take over the job. Nobody wants to. But Egypt and Jordan may soon realize that they have no choice. If there is a secret behind Sharon's plan that is it.
END
* I should of course have said Jorkins. Thanks to NRO's Dickens-loving readers.
It is good to read a Muslim journalist admit this, as Salim Mansur does:
The arguments in the West that organized Muslim terrorism associated with al-Qaeda and its global network can be ended through concessions are ignorant and naive. Muslim violence is independent of anything Western democracies might do to accommodate grievances that are mostly rooted in their own dismal failures to meet the modern world's political and economic challenges
Mentat, that's an interesting theory. The risk of course is of very dangerous weapons entering Gaza that can be shot into Israel with devastating consequences.
Mentat:
Frum's piece is interesting. Indeed this is what I have alluded to occassionally. Not well reported by the exempt media, but WND reported that the EU types stationed in Ramala and terrories were giving PA reps the cold shoulder when they came crying about IDF actions to clear out nests of rocket launchers and targetted assassinations of the likes of Sheikh Yassin. Allegedly the PA was told to quit killing women and babies if they wanted any sympathy. I suspected that Sharon's apparent about-face was motivated by a calculated bet that if the PA doesn't rain in violence in the face of the withdrawals he was prepared to make, that the rest of the world would wake up and smell the coffee and drop the Palestinians as everyone's favourite victims. Muslim extremists operating in Europe may also have contributed to the jaundiced POV.
On the other side, though, I read a report this morning that one of the West Bank settlements is being enlarged by Sharon and that Gaza was merely a trade-off for more strategic land.
While Islam itself is heretical and inferior to Christianity and Judaism, within Islam there are also plenty of heretics and heretical sects that speak and act as though they are the Word of God. Jesus Christ is vastly superior to Mohammed. Christ is also the final prophet. Clearly, any individual that believes in a humanistic prophet would choose Christ over Mohammed. Belief in a Divine prophet would also lead to Christ. The belief that you must do miracles, be morally impeachable, and have God as a witness to you're Divinity would also lead to Christ and certainly not Mohammed.
Oops! I meant impeccable.
"Ever since those early blood-lettings, Muslims have been the primary victims of Muslim violence."
-- from the article by Salim Mansur above
This is nonsense. The chief victims of Muslim violence have been the non-Muslims whose lands were conquered, who were either killed (as the 60-70 million Hindus killed over 250 years of Muslim rule in India, which works out to about 1/4 million per year, for the Muslim masters quite a manageable figure), or subject to sudden massacres even where they seemed to be living in harmony or that much-ballyhooed "convivencia" (as all the Jews of Granada, killed overnight in 1066). Whether Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, or others belonging to other religions and animist sects and freethinkers -- in short, every possible kind of non-Muslim -- has suffered from Muslim violence.
When Salim Mansur makes a remark so obviously false, he calls into question his own motives. Perhaps he is simply trying to both recognize Muslim violence, and yet at the same time to quietly ascribe it not to Islam but only to one group, these "Karijites," and along the way to suggest that it is Muslims themselves who have been the chief victims.
Nonsense. And for Infidels, highly misleading nonsense. For it plays with that theme that there is really a "struggle for Islam's soul" and a "civil war within Islam." This is crap. There is Islam, only Islam. There are those who are born into Islam who may not accept all of it, or be ignorant of some of it, or who, especailly those living in the West, who know it behoves them to distance themselves from it, or to try to convince Infidels that it is really limited to this or that subset of Islam -- i.e., not Islam itself -- and if only the "good Muslims" who just happen to include, among their leading members, the writer himself, were to be supported, they would easily "reform" Islam on their own once this non-existent "civil war within Islam" is brought to a successful conclusion.
There is a war. It is not a civil war within Islam. It is Islam, as always, against the entire rest of the world. That it has gotten this far, with so many millions behind enemy lines, and without arousing suspicion, and even now managing to hold Infidel suspicions at bay, is astounding.
But it cannot continue. Not for long.
Hugh
Let's assume that your theory of Islam being an evil ideology that sucks up everything in it's path like a blackhole is true. And let's also assume that it needs to be put to death. What are your thoughts on how to rid it from America from a political and legal perspective?
Waterdragon52:
Well, I think both POVs might be true at the same time. At the same time as Sharon is saying, "The world wants a Palestinian state? Very well let them have it.", he is also playing to the religious right constituency by saying, the settlements in the West Bank which are more significant religiously speaking than Gaza, we will keep, more or less. That way, he can play a double game: placate the international community who are upset with the settlements and placate the religious right who want the settlements to continue for religious reasons. I don't know: sounds like the work of a genius to me. May be Sharon can work for the State Department next?
pedestrain infidel
Salim Mansur wrote this as well
2005-07-20
The myth of the 'moderate' Muslim
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2005/07/20/1138956.html
Salim Mansur is an assoc prof of political science. He is also dancing where angels fear to trod.
Mentat
Didnt see your posting. Apologies. Anyway, we all seem to have concerns for Salim's health.
Mansur wrote: "Ever since those early blood-lettings, Muslims have been the primary victims of Muslim violence."
In one sense I have to agree. Muslims have been the primary victims of islamic servitude.
Islam is a religion that forcibly converted others at the point of a sword. Virtually all muslims in the world are descendents of those poor people, who were so horribly treated by muslim invaders. Islam not only enslaved those people in body but also in spirit and in mind. In effect muslims are POW of a warlord who has been dead for 1400 years or so.
Years ago, while browsing literature on political Islam, I ran into a number of references to Muslim authors who accused the radicals of being "Khairijite". This article makes me interested in picking up this thread of research again--although I'm wary of treading too deeply into the pools of Islamic theology and jurisprudence.
"Let's assume that your theory of Islam being an evil ideology that sucks up everything in it's path like a blackhole is true. And let's also assume that it needs to be put to death. What are your thoughts on how to rid it from America from a political and legal perspective?"
-- from a posting above
"Your theory of Islam being an evil ideology that sucks up everything in its path like a blackhole is true" is not an accurate statement. I do not have a "theory" of Islam; I have not used the phrase "evil ideology" -- that smacks of the floundering administration. And the second brisk assumption -- "let's also assume that it needs to be put to death" -- is also something I do not recognize.
There are texts. They seem to be immutable texts. Over a very long period, people who have taken those texts to heart, or who have been unable to publicly dissent from a society that takes those texts to heart, have acted in ways, remarkably similar in time and space, that have not been good for Infidels, nor for certain kinds of intellectual activity, including art and science (have I left something out?).
I simply suggest, again and again, that always and everywhere it would be intelligent to allow the conditions to develop, or to do nothing to stand in the way of their development, that would force Muslims themselves to confront this fact: that the political, economic, social and intellectual failures of Muslim peoples and polities do not reflect genetic deficiencies, but Islam itself. And while this is a salutary lesson for Muslims to learn over time, it is an essential lesson for non-Muslims to learn not over time, but nearly overnight -- within the next few years.
As far as the United States goes, ending Muslim migration, refusing to appease Muslim demands, and educating people in the theory and practice of Islam, are all things which will lead to a diminishment of Muslim power. And private parties need not wait for a timid and ignorant government. They need not buy their goods or services from those whose presence swells the ranks, and hence the power, of Muslims in this country. They need not accept the excuses and apologetics of a vast army of propagandists, some malevolent, some filiopietistic, some simply embarrassed, who continue to explain away the behavior of many Muslims, and to obscure an ideology that, to those of us who find convincing Ibn Warraq's essay on "Islam and Fascism," is distinctly dangerous to the civilization of Infidels and to their physical well-being.
Salim Mansur: a most impressive fellow, indeed.
Geoff
"We have been here before with the blame-the-Kharijites escape-hatch."
This what could be called Kharijitology and Wahhabitology strike one as typical of the stopgap measures one sees in shoddy theodicies -- these so-called moderate Muslims are engaging in a theodicy of Islam, an Islamodicy to coin another term. In traditional theodicy, one is trying to explain the existence of evil while at the same time letting God off the hook.
In Islamodicy, Islam is de facto divine (because the Muslim doesn't believe in the principle of God working through imperfect humans) and therefore can't be the problem; no, it must be some offshoot or splinter or deviation (the Kharijites, the Hassasin, the Wahhabis, Sayyid Qutb, etc.) that is the source of the problem.
With an Islamodicy, the moderate Muslim can have his cake of placating non-Muslim critics (with cake crumbs) who hunger for some more substantial self-criticism from Muslims, while at the same time eating his Islam perfect and blameless beyond the nasty deviations and perversions that have happened around its periphery.
MENTAT, Re: Gaza.
I can only hope that the reasons you give for the pullout are that thought out as a strategy. It would definetly place Israel in a better position with the "sleeping world" of the West and Europe as well as over the PA, Hamas, and Hezbollah in political strategy. Heres one reason why.
As a dutifully constituted "country", Palestinians would no longer only be considered terrorists to be hunted down on an individual basis; but would be subject to complete invasion and wipeout (even though Israel did not wipeout all of Egypt or Syria etc. during the 67 war mass destruction would result in the Palestinian State)as an invading country. No longerwould they be considered as the oppressed living among the oppressors!
kwg1
MENTAT, Re: Gaza.
I can only hope that the reasons you give for the pullout are that thought out as a strategy. It would definetly place Israel in a better position with the "sleeping world" of the West and Europe as well as over the PA, Hamas, and Hezbollah in political strategy. Heres one reason why.
As a dutifully constituted "country", Palestinians would no longer only be considered terrorists to be hunted down on an individual basis; but would be subject to complete invasion and wipeout (even though Israel did not wipeout all of Egypt or Syria etc. during the 67 war mass destruction would result in the Palestinian State)as an invading country. No longerwould they be considered as the oppressed living among the oppressors!
kwg1
MENTAT, Re: Gaza.
I can only hope that the reasons you give for the pullout are that thought out as a strategy. It would definetly place Israel in a better position with the "sleeping world" of the West and Europe as well as over the PA, Hamas, and Hezbollah in political strategy. Heres one reason why.
As a dutifully constituted "country", Palestinians would no longer only be considered terrorists to be hunted down on an individual basis; but would be subject to complete invasion and wipeout (even though Israel did not wipeout all of Egypt or Syria etc. during the 67 war mass destruction would result in the Palestinian State)as an invading country. No longerwould they be considered as the oppressed living among the oppressors!
kwg1
Sadly I think the time is going to come when all Western and non-islamic nations are going to have to indulge in some systematic illimination, if they don't wish to be over-run and drowned in the filth and evil, that is radical islam.
I know we all want to stay kind and nice but this is only perceived as weakness by those radicals.
Salim Mansour is indeed a brave man .......I do not know if he is secular or not but I do know that he is a Ishmailie Muslim which in itself is considered heretical from a Orthodox Muslim POV....he is a good guy for sure...
kwg1:
You are absolutely right. Sharon is worried, as always, about the survival of Israel. He would never do anything that would jeopardize that survival. Once the Palis have their state and they keep attacking Israel, the gloves will come off and then they will be completely and utterly defeated at which time then they may consider making peace with Israel. I don't think Sharon is a fool in any way whatsoever.
kwg1:
You are absolutely right. Sharon is worried, as always, about the survival of Israel. He would never do anything that would jeopardize that survival. Once the Palis have their state and they keep attacking Israel, the gloves will come off and then they will be completely and utterly defeated at which time then they may consider making peace with Israel. I don't think Sharon is a fool in any way whatsoever.
kwg1:
You are absolutely right. Sharon is worried, as always, about the survival of Israel. He would never do anything that would jeopardize that survival. Once the Palis have their state and they keep attacking Israel, the gloves will come off and then they will be completely and utterly defeated at which time then they may consider making peace with Israel. I don't think Sharon is a fool in any way whatsoever.