Yes, they are, but probably not in the way Sheikh Ali Bapir thinks. The main way they’re ignorant is that here we have an Iraqi warlord explaining how he studied the Qur’an and Islam, and is ready to wage a war of ideas, while American TV talking heads (both the “liberal” and the “conservative” one) go out of their way to make sure that everyone understands that the equation of Islam and violence is offensive, and that in any case guys like this Sheikh are purveying a “twisted version of Islam.” Yet I doubt that Sheikh Ali Bapir, if he were to see this clip, would find it daunting. He knows a lot more about Islam than either Alan Colmes or Sean Hannity, and he is secure in his knowledge that he is following the correct religious path.
Can we meet the ideological challenge he is intending to present, or do anything to counter the influence of his religious appeal to peaceful Muslims, by pretending that his appeal isn’t religious at all, or that his appeal is self-evidently false on Islamic grounds and that most Muslims will immediately see it as such? Wouldn’t it be more effective to discuss realistically the basis of his appeal within the teachings and traditions of Islam, so as to gauge the strength of that appeal and formulate effective ways to counter it?
“Iraqi warlord’s defeat only hardens his resolve,” by Borzou Daragahi for the Los Angeles Times (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):
IRBIL, Iraq “” The Muslim warlord reclines in suburban opulence. He smiles mischievously despite his recent troubles.
Over the last five years, his once heavily armed Kurdish militia has been disbanded, his mountainside base crushed by U.S. cruise missiles, his movement thrown into chaos. He was locked up at Baghdad’s notorious Camp Cropper with his former blood enemies, including former President Saddam Hussein.
But Sheik Ali Bapir, the charismatic 46-year-old leader of a Kurdish organization called the Islamic Group, believes he has come through his travails as a winner.
His bestselling memoir has gone into a second printing and has been translated into Arabic. He leads a large political movement with its own satellite channel, news publications, six seats in the Kurdistan regional parliament and a plush compound on the outskirts of this predominantly Kurdish city.
Even his time in prison wasn’t a waste.
“I took the occasion to study Islam with my fellow prisoners,” he says during a rambling chat with a reporter he first met before the Iraq war. “I held Koranic classes. I succeeded in teaching them to recite the Koran by heart.”
Bapir says he remains every bit the warlord. But he now sees himself as a general waging a battle of ideas against secular forces. His 22-month detention without charge, widely chronicled in the Iraqi press, only hardened his resolve against the West and what he calls its hypocrisies.
“According to their own laws as well as Sharia [Islamic law], it’s not legal to put someone in jail without any evidence. Yet there I was, though I was never charged with committing any crimes.”
He added: “The Americans are very ignorant about us Islamists.”