The Wars Against and From Within

By Gwynne Dyer

14 January 2015

The Islamic civil war is about modernisation of the Muslim world. Should it continue down that track or should it be reversed? Islamists want the latter

After Ahmed Merabet, a French policeman was killed outside the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris last week, his brother Malek said: “My brother was a Muslim and he was killed by two terrorists, by two false Muslims. Islam is a religion of peace and love.”

It was moving, but to say that all Muslims who commit cruel and violent acts in god's name are ‘false Muslims’ is like saying that the Crusaders who devastated West Asia 900 years ago were ‘false Christians’.

The Crusaders were real Christians. They believed that they were doing god's will in trying to re-conquer the formerly Christian lands that had been lost to Islam centuries before, and they had the support of most people back home in Europe.

Similarly, Said Kouachi, Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly believed they were true Muslims doing god's will, and some people in Muslim-majority countries agree with them. But there is an important difference from the Crusades: The supporters of the young French terrorists are a minority everywhere, and among Muslims living in Western countries they are only a tiny minority.

This is not a ‘war of civilisation’. Seventeen innocent people killed in Paris is not the equivalent of the Crusades. For that matter, neither was 9/11. These are wicked and tragic events, but they are not a war. There is a war going on, but it is a civil war within the ‘house of Islam’ that occasionally spills over into non-Muslim countries. As foot soldiers in that war, the three killers in Paris probably did not fully understand the role they were playing, but they were serving a quite sophisticated strategy.

Two of these Muslim civil wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were ignited by US-led invasions in 2001 and 2003. Four others, in Syria, Libya, Yemen and the northern, mostly-Muslim half of Nigeria, have begun since 2011. In every one of these wars, the victims are overwhelmingly Muslims killed by other Muslims. From time-to-time non-Muslims in other countries are killed too, as in New York in 2001, in London in 2007, in Mumbai in 2008 and last week in Paris, and these killings do have a strategic purpose, but it's not to ‘terrify non-Muslims into submission.’ Quite the contrary.

The great Muslim civil war is about the political, social and cultural modernisation of the Muslim world. Should it continue down much the same track that other major global cultures have followed, or should those changes be stopped and indeed reversed? The Islamists take the latter position.

Some aspects of modernisation are very attractive to many Muslims, so stopping the changes would require a lot of violence, including the overthrow of most existing Governments in Muslim countries. But that is the task that the Islamists in general, and the jihadi activists in particular, have undertaken.

As they are minorities even in their own countries, the Islamists' hardest job is to mobilise popular support for their struggle. The best way to do this is to convince Muslims that modernisation — democracy, equality, the whole cultural package — is part of a Western plot to undermine Islam.

This will be a more credible claim if Western countries are actually attacking Muslim countries, so one of the main jihadi strategies is to carry out terrorist atrocities that will trigger Western military attacks on Muslim countries. That was the real goal of 9/11, and it was spectacularly successful: It tricked the United States into invading not one but two Muslim countries.

But smaller terrorist attacks that lead to the mistreatment of Muslim minorities in non-Muslim countries also serve the cause. They can create a backlash that victimises the local Muslim minorities, thus generating yet more ‘proof’ that there is a war against Islam.

Source: http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/oped/the-wars-against-and-from-within.html

URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/the-wars-within/d/101019