FTAC – Brief Comment On Islamic Reform

10 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion

Tags

Geller, Islam, Islamic Small Wars, Muslim, reform, religion, shimmer

Argue the facts. She’s not making them up. They lend themselves to independent verification and reflection. And they lead to reasoned conclusions.

I argue — and I think she knows this (for a sliver of a second in FB-type chatyping) — for “Shimmer” — that the humanity of the humanity of Muslims writ large cannot today countenance Islam as Bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood, Wahhabi royalty (perhaps — some only nod and take), and Ayatollah Khamenei (or Hamas) would have it. That Islam is over, and while Muslims in its various paths, or the paths of zealots, may know it, they’re not well defended from it, either within themselves or externally.

Pakistani Usman Ali and I could probably title a piece “The Islamization of Pakistan in 2013” and as absurd as they may sound for a state with a constitutionally chartered investment in Islam, it might turn out just as full a report.

All at this point have heard or read the rule: “Qur’an 9:29—Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

In our still spunky United States of America, that ain’t gonna work.

Yet it stands.

It — and much else — need to be stood down.

The source of inspiration for the thread (one of mine): Pamela Geller’s “The Islamization of America in 2013“.

The source of inspiration for the comment was a bit of mud slinging: “Her book could be better titled The Protocols of the Elders of Islam.”

Perhaps I should have answered, “Not really — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had to be fashioned out of hate and thin air. Geller’s observations, as noted, may be independently verified for factual validity and challenged on the pedestal of reason.

I believe Geller’s conclusions and her position will stand up to criticism quite well.

Even so, “shimmer” coincides with the absolute position.

Islam is killing Muslims today en masse, often impersonally, and viciously in several states — Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria, at least — and that alone should signal the bankruptcy of the civilization hewing in absolute and literal terms (!) of the Qur’an or, equally so, the humanity of those struggling to channel or reform Islamic thought away from urgent supremacist ambitions and separated forever from the desire to deal death and subjugation to the whole world that is not within the post-Qur’an political concept that is Dur al-Islam.

Additional Reference

Wood, David. “Quran in Context 1: ‘Fight Those Who Do Not Believe (Surah 9:29)'”. Answering Islam. Up to this point, I have looked for a neutral scholarly resource in quoting scripture, but here, for once, I’ve drawn from the American analytical anti-Jihad. Quite a few of the demands, injunctions, and warnings sustained in the Islamic cultural intellectual legacy have proven in invention and continuation infantilizing (“O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends: They are but friends to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them is of them. Verily Allah guideth not a people unjust” – Surat 5:51), inflammatory, as with Surat 9:29, and deadly (e.g., “”They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of God; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper” – Surat 4:89).

Islam and Freedom of Religion – “Apostasy”.

Islam and blasphemy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From the news and on the monitor as I’ve type: “Blast in Pakistan Kills Senior Police Official” – NYT – 1/9/2014.

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http://youtu.be/jHmsL0p6jnI

▶ Qur’an in Context 1: “Fight Those Who Do Not Believe” (9:29) – YouTube – 28 minutes – David Wood – 5/20/2012.

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FTAC – On Islam in Conflict

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by commart in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Tags

failure, Islam, measurement, religion, shimmer

The ideology writ culturally large (Quran + Hadith + Sectarian Emotion) affords license and then the character and chemistry of a certain kind of zealot does the rest. Whether that zealot represents a diseased branch of the whole or an ever latent perverse florescence is a part of “shimmer”, and if it’s always there, the religion will continue to fail as observed and measured by the external conflicts it foments and the internal violence it hosts.

Yesterday’s “Islamist” bombing of a bus in Volgograd becomes unfortunately another defining moment in the fate of Islam in the world even though it represents a comparatively thin “intelligraphic” band of Muslims, i.e., those engaged in murder integrated with a religious program, whether by Quran-based imperative, the inspiration of an Hadith, or culture-wide invention and emulation (shared cultural attitude).

Related: BBC News – Russia bus bomb: Volgograd blast kills six – 10/21/2012.

Beside the thin band of evildoers actively plotting violence — one may imagine the Rings of Saturn here — there seems to be a broader one of affiliates and sponsors bent on imposing Muslim will on non-Muslims or producing shadow governments tuned to Muslim Brotherhood imperatives regardless of surrounding cultural, economic, political, and social states of affairs.

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FTAC – “I see no value in political correctness.”

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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Tags

empiricism, global, intelligentsia, Islam, Islamic Small Wars, reformation, reinterpretation, shimmer, skepticism

Anyone got the monopoly on truth?

Who decides (anything, everything)?

You do.

One listening or reading and reasoning soul at a time.

From The Awesome Conversation (on Facebook), and just ten minutes old, if that:

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I see no value in political correctness. Period. I do see value in the global promotion of integrity, especially in the communicating and information sectors, and specifically educators, reporters, and researchers, and I might give some elevation to those toiling everywhere in the arts and humanities. These assume their roles with a debt already in place, whether they’re having a conversation with souls across time or writing a next series in pop songs.

This is the one way in which I’m glad Chomsky ascended to the barricades and become a Far Left (New Old Now Old and Lost Left) folk hero — he set the mark for Daniel Everett, a personality so much less of a Boston peacock, who has seen language a little differently and has an abundance of hard data and penetrating logic to support his views.

Let’s get to the shimmer, the “what’s coming over the berm” in the way of Islamofascism: is it “rising as one man” as my friend Tammy Swofford — it will take the curious two seconds to locate her conservative blog — has played with the title of a brief; is stumbling (and I think the stories in Somalia and Mali tell that story); are its adherents striving toward some kind of humanist reformation, and such seems to be appearing, if in small numbers, with Tarek Fatah, Qanta Ahmed, M Zuhdi Jasser, and many other co-aligning personalities across the Islamic Small Wars and their fronts.

Is there a line to be held?

I think so.

Is it only where Al Qaeda and its ilk have an active presence?

I don’t know.

I do know I have asked various others at time with regard to the Umman and their Kavkaz Center-like “Christian Crusader West” vs. the Aafia Siddiqui image of Islam whether any had a transition plan for about 1.2 billion souls nominally affiliated at minimum. None have yet to provide me — or anyone — with a politically correct or incorrect answer to that puzzle.

My tack: try not to get to the end of the story — the apocalypse, the messiah, Judgment Day, and such — too fast; and while slowing it down, let’s have a good look at culture, language, and psychology.

If a global intelligentsia, however cobbled together, has any value, it might have its own mission in evolution, one supplanting “all against all” with “all for all”.

This takes work, but between the possession of a somewhat common global English and some nifty computers, we get to invent our own extraordinarily democratized people’s diplomacy, and that alone may well subvert any state monopoly on information and image.

FTAC — “Shimmer” and Other Coins

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Islam, shimmer

I’ve started work on new pages for the library within which I work — I’m going to share my catalog — and for the vocabulary, a fair part of it newly minted, with which I work.

Among the latter such and out of the cycle of assumed victimization –> aggression –> fear possessed by the target –> expressed criticism (and warnings about the true aggressor) –> aggressor self-defense of image (by the time one hits the scrawls having to do with “anti-‘Islamophobia'”, the conversation has gotten quite convoluted) comes an effect characterized by the questions it generates: what is it (e.g. blowing up innocents in suicide bombings)? How big is it? Where is it coming from? What is its distribution? How dangerous is it? How potent? How does it work? In response to all of the above, I’ve coined a use for an old term that has some overtones for curtains that shine and mirage that appear and disappear on the horizon: “shimmer”.

From The Awesome Conversation (i.e., my chatyping online):

The term I use is “shimmer”. Whatever it is looms large with a 9/11 or Mumbai . . . or an Hamas or Hezbollah . . . but there are other facets that become more quietly apparent or speak to the “better angels of our nature.” Anti-Semitism is real, and the denial of it, along with Holocaust Denial and such, underscores it. Ours is a dynamic and fast moving world in which older events occupy their space in history (in 12th Century Hungary, for example, laws promulgated to discriminate against Jews, including with the wearing of arm patches, were once signed equally applied to Muslims) and past is not prologue. Comparing casualty numbers, especially historical ones but also ones coming out of asymmetrical war does not compare morals or values involved.

Those who are not Muslim — and those who are — must nonetheless deal with violence linked to or cloaked by Islamic motivations or Islamist interpretations of Islam, and such acts — IEDs, car bombs, suicide bombs, kidnappings, etc. — seem to go hardest on Muslim communities from Afghanistan to Somalia. In his speech yesterday, Bashar Al-Assad embraced Iran and pointed his finger at Al Qaeda, KSA, and the United States as the source of his woes, and yet he had his army, under the command of his brother, Maher, unleash its fury indiscriminately against whole neighborhood and noncombatants, and while AQ is in Syria today, so are numerous other bands.

The shared faith in God and in one another moves some forces toward the margins, but those forces, whether they loom large or small, smile with friendliness at one moment and plot murder in private in the next, seem to have a presence in the world.

“Shimmer” responds also to the magical: now you see it . . . and now you don’t.

Abu Sayyaf Group, Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, Afghan Taliban, Al-Gamaat, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, Ansar al-Islam, Armed Islamic Group, Boko Haram (“Western education is forbidden”), Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Harakat ul-Mujahiden, Hezbollah, Imarat Kavkaz, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Jemaah Islamiya, Lashkar-i-Taiba, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

In addition to the above-named terrorist groups, each of which has an acknowledged track record, there are other entities that would seem to have broad interests in governance and human services while maintaining a permissive to encouraging view of the imposition and implementation of sharia law — i.e., by their interpretation — by all means available.

Here is a clip by Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy pitching the center’s course “The Muslim Brotherhood in America”:

Organization by organization, name by name, readers in the United States have for interest a few organizations associated with and representing Islam that from the western perspective send up caution flags at least. This is not about choosing sides or preferring one set of critics to another but rather about gathering data enough — and data that can be tested for reliability — to form an accurate impression of states of affairs.

For independent look-up, one may suggest the following acronyms or nouns:

Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)

Holy Land Foundation

Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)

Muslim Brotherhood in America

Other continents and states host similar organizations and movements. Sometimes merely reading about them can be a bit arch. This quote comes by way of Wikipedia’s current (01/09/2013) entry on Jamaat-i-Islami:

The Jamaat’s objectives is establishment of a Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. The JI opposes Western Ideologies such as capitalism, socialism and secularism, and practices such as bank interest and liberalist social mores but party advocates democracy as integral part of Islamic political ideals.

One may hope with both capitalism and socialism ruled out that the material needs of humans within a civil society may still be addressed. Somehow.

In whatever strident dogma or ideology it may be couched, the denial of the humanity of humanity — the loss of concern for the fate of others, the licensing of cruelty — never ends well however autocrats and their throngs may swell themselves for a while in false pride and grandiose ambitions.

Be that as it may, this “thing” that doesn’t exist but has a way of informing and motivating terrorism and war at every level, and today every day somewhere and in some way, “shimmers” at the edge of the consciousness of the good.

No Muslim who may be judged as not Muslim enough by any self-appointed “Takfiri” is safe from it, and the unbeliever, the infidel, the Christian and the Jew and everyone else provides an ample sea for those who have adopted or constructed for themselves this way of swimming in blood and trying to hide it.

Islamic Humanist, Islamic Liberalism, a less political Islam (see, for example, the American Islamic Forum on Democracy) may not be a given takfiri’s idea of Islam, but such drifts may prove more an Islam for the world and with the world.