What Motivates A So-Called “Muslim Fundamentalist”? A Personal Observation 2.0 – Robert Wei
We have a fantastic article from new Mont Order Associate Robert Wei.
Link to the original article is here.
I originally wrote this article in response to the collective question of ‘who are the members of ISIS in July of last year’ and ‘why are they operating?’ Given recent events in Paris it may interest the readers of this site to share my personal insights and add to these further. I have decided to write a new introduction to explain why it may be relevant to you or to ideas we may all entertain in regard to the future of our shared planet. Warmongers and extremists of all stripes that can be found in all nations, whom I can only consider as divisive at best, threaten all our best efforts to create a better world and a better future. Any peaceful and prosperous future is predicated upon a greater understanding of all socio-religious communities and steadfast tolerance in response to the divisiveness of efforts to which we are exposed to through media and / or the indoctrination of national even international elites.
Actually this is easily achieved with a humble attitude and a sincere desire to understand our fellow travellers on planet Earth. The consequences of not doing so will be dire yet it is also important to note the potential, for some as yet unimaginable, future. We have no choice but to propose a positive future for our world and strive towards it. There are many ways to fight for this future but the best is to re-humanize all our world’s participants and then understand their actions within the contexts presented.
A main theme of that effort here is to understand the range of mentalities and characters that get involved in these sometimes nefarious struggles. While the institution of the Caliphate is the one in question here – we should look just as carefully at the concepts of what is ‘sacred’ and what is ‘blasphemous’ to ourselves (or an equivalent feeling / inspiration or abomination) in regard to what motives anyone to do what they do.
In the case of the attacks on the controversial cartoonist in France I honestly believe it is likely a false flag attack – but it could have as likely been an act supported or motivated by a people who believe that their entire world and way of life is under attack and particularly what they hold most sacred. If you felt that way what lengths would you go to to defend what you love? As some Westerners may hold their personal opinion inviolable due to a millennia of cultural practice so to do other cultures hold inviolable. To say someone is not a being and negate their view and in essence negate their world constitutes blasphemy to some in the still rather highly individualistic West. As we can see that many react to such an offense with violence as it is unbearable for them. Likewise to a certain mentality of individual what they deem sacred is certain worth defending even with violence. In reality humanity is violent by nature and only through trial and error do we manage at our best moments to stay our hand.
Dear reader, I hope that you ponder this within your own personal context and then imagine what if you were someone else entirely; would you still place value on the same concepts or personages?
If you accept the narrative of the so-called Paris Massacre (that just happened to have a TV crew on hand to film the assailants leaving the building and shouting “God is Great!” in Arabic) then what motivated these so-called “Islamists” – which is in itself a bigoted use of the term and totally devoid of any real or original meaning. Are the KKK Christianists then? Correctly and most currently a better label is Salafists though I tend to use Wahabi given my belief that they are all linked to Saudi socio-political structures.
Of course only an all-knowing Divinity can answer that – we do not have privy to their minds. What I can share though is an account of my time among such people that would certainly have advocated the death of anyone insulting the Prophet of modern Islam, Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him – this is what all Muslims say). Imagine the person you personally love most and imagine them violated sexually – this gives you an idea of the anger that such believer feel towards those doing said insulting. To them stating a right to individual free speech in this context is like saying:
I as an individual assert my right to rape any other individual at any time that I like and if you don’t like it, it is because you are evil and uncivilized.
Of course as you will see from my account I believe few to be so sincere or so devout but that could be said of any group anywhere in the current time certainly…. I have a very meandering type of narrative style but we will arrive at the station eventually:
“I studied Islamic history while at university years ago and read widely on the subject of the Islamic civilization’s political structures, writing a few undergraduate research papers on related subjects. Particularly I wrote a very in depth paper on the history and evolution of the concept of Jihad. These studies that I made were a personal attempt to fully understand individuals that I had meet and spent some quality time with in my travels in the preceding years.
I was in Pakistan at the time the Soviets pulled out of Kandahar (Winter – Spring 1989) and I myself flirted with the romance of the idea of becoming a religious freedom fighter, meeting such people who had already become involved in such endeavours in Afghanistan. My personal impressions and particularly the impressions of the individuals that I meet and the judgements I made sometimes intuitively in regard to their manner and actions are what guided me in my amateur scholastic investigations and in my own commentary here even today. That means that either, my account and conclusions are highly accurate, or highly biased, which only time and the unfolding of events can reveal.
In other words take everything I say with a pinch of salt and perhaps add that to your own impressions and information and we may thereby arrive at a true picture of events.
On to the historical review:
For the uninitiated what one needs to understand is that the concept of a Caliphate is rooted in the origins of historical Islam and is inseparable from an authentic belief in the religion in almost any variant despite a century or more of obfuscation and hyperbole in regard to that institution in the face of Western Imperialistic dominance and its aftermath which brings us up to the present day worldwide predominance of Western-oriented consumer culture.
In essence and for all intents and purposes if a Muslim community exists then too should a sanctioned political structure that certainly in mainstream Sunni Islam is embodied by the institution of a Caliphate. {Shi’a Islam is another story — or several stories really — and one branch of it has its own penultimate figure and variation in the person of the Agha Khan who has a direct lineage going back to the Fatimid Caliphate and prior.} Contrary to being some kind of extremist doctrine or threat to mankind by its mere existence to the world at large the Caliphate ought to be as basic to a Muslim’s world-view as prayer and fasting during this very month of Ramadhan. What is amazing is that nearly a century has passed since there was any real claimant to that institution which ceased with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Imaging for a moment an alternate reality in which Islam predominates in the world and where there has not been the election of a Pope for a century among billions of Catholic believers worldwide due to socio-political dominance by Muslims who declare the idea “extremist” and in some cases cause to be labelled as terrorist (as certain governments have done with the pan-Islamic non-violent political group Hezb-ut-Tahrir).
This should indicate to you dear readers to what extent Islamic civilization has been eclipsed and subsumed. Ironically, it is also a case in which the narrative of the dominant culture has redefined and repositioned some of the original concepts of Islam to become a sort of anti-status quo / polar opposite to the dominant culture’s narrative.
A Muslim of any stripe be he or she not Westernised and acculturated away from the original culture(s) associated with historical Islam should by any reasonable extension accept and even demand that there exist the institution of the Caliphate. However the exact nature of what that Caliphate should be has been in question, debate and conflict since the moment of the death of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH). Yet, the Caliphate or its cognate form is essential to the Muslim world.
Thus, the modern precedent set by this truly extremist “Islamic State” Caliphate formed by a Rolex wearing ex-US prisoner released for good behaviour is profound and will have one of two results. First, optimistically for the world as a whole it will lead to a rebirth of Islamic civilization in the modern context within a tolerant multi-polar world led by enlightened morally upright modern Muslim leaders who seize back the reins of this initiative from the caricature boogie men that are the so-called “faithful” of this so-called “Islamic State.” I fear this is the less likely of the two outcomes.
The more likely outcome is that this Islamic State Caliphate becomes the perfect propaganda tool to dis-inherit mainstream Muslims worldwide of their original socio-political model, assimilate them and make them a caste within the actual New World Order, the ever convenient scapegoat upon which new weapons can safely and “ethically” be tested. I do not preclude the belief that this very outcome has been indirectly engineered by certain powers that be.
Let’s look more carefully at what this Islamic State is, its ideological origins, and who are its actors. There was a time 20 years ago that I could have joined these black-clad “religious freedom fighters” myself, so here is where I can share something a bit unique.
A personal perspective:
After my journey to Pakistan (1989) I met those whom might have become my colleagues. I made a decision based on my impressions of those involved particularly of foreign extraction that they were not sincere in their idealism to liberate Afghanistan from tyranny. In fact quite a few of those involved read like a who’s who of the unsavoury.
An example from outside my personal experience but within my later purview of research on Central Asia is the much in the news of late organization the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) that staged the recent attack on Karachi airport. That organisation was basically founded by a rogue soldier and a bandit, who somehow found playing the boogie men of Soviet propaganda and becoming religious bandits, kidnappers and drug smugglers somehow fit their own personal ideals. I believe that these individuals were rejected by Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbek society and found an identity for themselves in becoming to a tee the “religious bandits” (basmachi) fighting authority, i.e., the boogie men they had grown up hearing about. The authentic article had died out with their grandfather’s generation, even as Ahmed Shah Masoud’s grandfather had fled (become muhajir from) the Soviet dominion.
It is safe to say that each generation re-writes history to their own tastes and sensibilities. I believe that the original authentic Caliphate bore only a passing resemblance to this new “fangled” version established by these fundamentalists.
In the nineties while at university I had a subscription to a periodical on Sufism that ran a very astute article about what indeed is “fundamentalism.” That article asserted, and I quite agree – having flirted with many romantic notions in my youth – that any fundamentalism is essentially an emotional, nostalgic response to modernism and alienation to the existing order of things in societies around the world – a point of view that tries to return some society to a presumed golden age where perfect right order existed. However, when one analyses, and that need not be cynical, such ideas one finds it has more to do with the imagination of its participants and their often false ideology and even idolatry in regard to the essence of the beliefs they claim to espouse.
Think of any strict ideology and one can find the lie in its claims. For example what real “Aryan” Nazi of 1940’s Germany would have had the time day even – though perhaps a bullet – for today’s wanna-be SS legion Ukrainians from Lvov? Ha! It is absurd.
Likewise these so-called “mujahideen” – some of whom I’ve met – do they truly represent historical trends of Islam, or is it just a fanciful antithetical role assumed by those looking to oppose what they know or believe to be wrong? Reaction as I’ve said is a dangerous slippery slope to Hell. Are fundamentalist Christians anything like the original believers in a mystery sect shrouded in history? Are Zionists actually like authentic Jews in history? Are patriots in the US anything like those figures of that nation’s founding fathers? Are Buddhists in Greater China bowing before statues like the original Buddhist Sangha whatsoever? I think none of the above would be recognisable to their predecessors.
Culture is an ever evolving mechanism of adaptation to circumstances and environment that is time-dependent. The culture and practices and labels of one age hardly ever bear resemblance to their prior age even though certain dynamics remain the same.
My personal experience when an 18 year old youth eager for some heroic quest of freedom fighting and re-identification with ancestors scores of generations removed was for me to question if I could sincerely believe in what I would be fighting for? And who was trying to do as I wanted? A former drug addict with a grade school education who was a disposable third-class citizen in the West, a Palestinian-American angry at the Israelis but nowhere near being able to fight them as his uncles did, Arabs awash with cash carrying the latest weaponry and looking at non-Arabs as second-class cretins, a disaffected Black Panther, several Desis who had gotten beaten up by skinheads in London, a long list of criminal elements types who talked of the bounties of jihad, a chubby man who eyes lit up with lust at the mention of young boys, others who joked about the joys of goat’s backsides or breasty women “slave girls,” some would have fits and talk about the joys of killing (and they would be pulled back from newcomers – ‘killing makes some men crazy’ I was told) and so on – these are 60 to 80 per cent of the odd fellows I met in a mujahideen office in Islamabad, one funded by the Wahhabi KSA (Saudi Arabia). These de facto officials waiving around translations of the CIA’s training manuals and the future Al-Qaeda guide to terrorism and parading nationalities and stacks of passports for any country (my own that had been stolen likely among them) had an adverse effect on my opinion. There were of course those who were very sincere, who longed for a distant divinity that they could be gathered to in loving martyrdom, and practical men who said ‘I am a Muslim, I’m ugly and poor, no woman would marry me, I have no responsibilities or debts, so let me help my fellows.’
And then there were the Afghans who almost to a man were personally invested and who gave me knowing looks before entry and gently took my arm upon exiting and said “Brother, do not judge Islam by these men, though a few are good most are confused, we only endure them for their money and the help that they might give to liberate our homeland.” They were perhaps tolerant to a fault. Though I was a non-Muslim, an abject kafir by Arab standards, they treated me respectfully and were honoured that I hoped to help them. As the Soviets were pulling out many said that they soon would have no need of foreigners, Muslim or otherwise, and urged me to go anywhere and live a good life and if it was suitable perhaps I should consider becoming a Muslim. One suggested I help set up an NGO to help Afghans return home.
Become one with such a body of men dedicated to an alternative society is appealing. Racism is largely non-existent. Physical and cultural differences tolerated in so far as everyone sticks to the doctrine espoused by that body’s leaders. Many romantic ideas are entertained about overcoming and avenging both real and perceived wrongs levied upon these believers. But most strikingly is the tendency to be reactionary and in opposition to much of the world’s existing order without much practical thought about how to get to any just alternative and much blind faith in a select few attributed with qualities one might find among the “Companions of the Prophet (PBUH)” as conveyed in certain narratives that have little basis in the actual body of the religion, and a rejection of what is reasonable through logic and even observation.
Personally, I could not join that body of fighters. I did not question everything about my own upbringing and culture only to accept wholesale someone else’s culture and upbringing without even being given circumspection on the issue. One hierarchy is no better than another, in my opinion, and there is truth to the Muslim saying ‘There shall be no intercessor in your religion.’ Hence, in a short period of time I became quite familiar with the mind-set of those who might flock to this so-called “Islamic State” though that was a circumstance somewhat different; it acted as a forerunner to the trend that is “jihadism” in the world today.
I believe to some degree this is the constituency of the foreign volunteers that make up the force of the so-called “Islamic State”; people made radical by the absurd and unethical excesses evident to them in their own lives and societies.
And even as the US and their proxies initiated such easily fractious organisations in Pakistan and Afghanistan I feel certain that has happened in the Syrian case. And like the Taliban who took their money and weapons and then thumbed their noses at the US and certain proxies, so too now do the ISIL/ISIS/IS.
And the tail wags the dog:
I personally believe that all such organizations and their very model were envisioned by the CIA, and Mossad and assorted allied intel agencies like ISI. There were dodgy characters that seem to really be on assignment in such organisations as I visited. One fellow even blew his cover I feel assuming that a straight talking guy like me must be an intel asset straight out of college like himself. He got back on script when I was obviously uncomprehending about certain references.
These organizations then may or may not get out of hand or may be initiated by design to get out of hand. Like the French organised AQIM (I’ll try to find this one reference at least), I think that ISIS is the creation of the agencies and the ideal way to vilify Islam to the world here ever after. The Iranians have believed that for a long time and is it is referred to in Ayatollah Khomenei’s speeches “the false version of Islam taught by the West.” Of course one can interpret that as merely the cultural bias of the West teaching its citizens this and that stereotype the way they used to infer that black men were mere animals in centuries past, but I do not think that is what he meant.
My take on the most recent events is this:
One must go back to US policy junctures involving the thwarted red line we must bomb Assad in Syria juncture, and the faux thaw in relations with Iran bait and ditch policy being pursued. With the passing of the portfolio of the Syrian regime change project from Qatar to the KSA, certain wheels were sent in motion by “Bandar Bush.” {I don’t have time as an amateur commentator to connect the dots for you all with citations here – any of you please take my ideas and run with them and prove or disprove – I’m an open source guy all the way.}
When things went South on the plan by the true “axis of Evil” (gov’ts of USA – Israel – KSA) to bomb Syria into regime change and set off falling dominoes that would take down the entire Shi’a edifice from the Mediterranean to Khurasan per long-term Neo-Con planning, the KSA claimants playing for power both internally and externally were nonplussed to say the least and it effected their own positions. I believe a green light was given then to plan to run amok. What the hell was Bandar Bush going to Moscow to threaten / cajole a deal out of Putin? Certain elements within the US foreign policy community were also badly stung by this set back. Their push back can be seen in an arc stretching from Ukraine to Afghanistan and that is coupled by strong economic (read: Petro-dollar interests) motivations decided in rooms from Texas to Saudi. If the US does not comply with their proxies wishes this time around the blow back will make them wish they did even as the junior disagreeing partners like Turkey and Qatar are beginning to experience.
ISIS is the perfect loose cannon to achieve such an end. If it plays its cards right the KSA and GCC can be officially brought on side with ease in a so-called “jihad” again Shi’a who are less respected by certain Saudis than the Zionists. At the least a KSA oriented mini-state will be formed by a Sunni Iraq and an Israeli leaning fully independent Iraqi Kurdistan can cut off Hezbollah and Syria from Iranian help. These have been long-term strategic aims, if regime change could not be accomplished in Syria and Iraq.
If one looks carefully peripheral issues also show this trend in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey and Qatar, and within the KSA. There are realignments on-going in these nations. A palatable ideological successor to Al-Qaeda has been formed and posed the question if not the acceptable reality of a Caliphate. Alternatively, the spawn may eclipse it creator. In a world where the “hegemonic superpower” maintains its position through soft power, printing money, and wild over-extension of a de facto empire that is 17 trillion dollars in debt, let us watch for who directs whom to do what in this era.
The irony of a Caliphate formed by people seeking out roles in one of Hollywood’s B-movies on a quest to avenge and assuage an imagined ideal provided in part as an antithesis to the world’s similar morally bankrupt cultural narrative is however in this case likely to become a great travesty for Muslims and everyone else around the world.
May the Most High help us all.
