Muslims v. Muslims:
Accuracy in Media has a story today that targets the notion that Americans are insufficiently protective of Muslim holy buildings. The author argues that the real story, if you want to talk about the destruction of Muslim holy sites, is the story of other Muslims doing it.
Ironically, however, during the same month that thousands of Pakistanis took to the streets in a furor over what America was doing in Iraq, zealots with the backing of the Pakistani police stormed the Ahmadiyya mosque in Nakhalpara, Pakistan, to remove books deemed offensive to Islam and banned by the government. The Ahmadiyya sect of Islam has had its mosques attacked and reduced to rubble and their creeds erased from the front of mosques. This sect is singled out as heretical because it is dedicated to non-violence and opposes terrorism....
Giving Pakistan a run for their money, though, is the astonishing scope of destruction of Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia. Historic tombs, landmarks, mosques and battle sites, all central to the Muslim faith, have either been destroyed or been ordered to be destroyed. The birthplace of Mohammed, founder of the Islamic faith, was razed over and turned into a public restroom.
These clashes within Islam -- clashes over how it should be interpreted, and by whom -- have always been more important than the clashes between Islam and the outside world.
Jeremy Black of the University of Exeter wrote a piece for last year's
Orbis called "The Western Encounter with Islam." For most of Islam's history, he argues at length, Islam was only barely interested in the West at all, even during the occasional wars with Christendom.
The West’s primary concern with the relationship between Christendom and Islam appears to be underlined by the traditional world map, with its depiction of an Islamic world stretching into the Balkans and the Western Mediterranean. However, if the conventional map— an equal-area cartogram— is replaced by an equal-population cartogram, then a very different perception of Islam emerges. It becomes a religion not primarily of the Arab world but of South Asia: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Iran....
In every century of its history, more people have been killed in the Islamic world in conflicts among Islamic powers than in conflicts between Islam and the West. We tend to think that the major external problem has always been Western power. But from an extraordinarily early stage, Islam fractured between a large number of polities, some of which were linked to religious and/or ethnic divides. These divisions were much more important in many senses than what took place on the margins.
Thomas Friedman argues today that
these divisions are the very challenge we face in Iraq:
This is a tough call, but I hope the elections go ahead as scheduled on Jan. 30. We have to have a proper election in Iraq so we can have a proper civil war there. Let me explain: None of these Arab countries — Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia — are based on voluntary social contracts between the citizens inside their borders. They are all what others have called "tribes with flags" — not real countries in the Western sense. They are all civil wars either waiting to happen or being restrained from happening by the iron fist of one tribe over the others or, in the case of Syria in Lebanon, by one country over another.... [U]nlike in Eastern Europe -- where a democratic majority was already present and crying to get out, and all we needed to do was remove the wall -- in Iraq we first need to create that democratic majority.
This seems to be the evolving consensus. But it is not complete.
In fact, there
is a democratic polity in Iraq. There is a large section of the population that is urbane, and that identifies itself first as "Iraqi," and only second or third as "Shi'ite" or "Sunni," or a member of this sect, or a follower of that traditional clan of imams. Both LtCol Couvillon, and Omar and Mohammed of
Iraq the Model spoke about that group, and how large it is. Both Omar and Mohammed are members of the group -- witness Mohammed's new year's poem about the "Sons of Iraq." The Colonel said that his experience holding local elections suggested a turnout that neared one hundred percent, and was certainly ninety percent, of all eligible voters.
There are universities and students, professionals, and tradesmen -- even Communist-oriented unions. The "tribes with flags" still do exist in Iraq. Primarily they are out with the insurgency, but some -- for example, the Kurdish
Peshmerga -- are fighting on our side. These tribes exist alongside the polity Friedman says we need to create. But to a large degree, those tribes which are participating in the process are being drawn into it, and thereby transformed into members of the democratic polity:
In Kirkuk... I could sense that there's an alliance between the Arabs and the Turkmen to balance forces with the strong Kurdish alliance. Many Kurds have demanded to postpone the elections of the city board as they felt that it's not easy to compete with the Arabic-Turkmen alliance. Still, this demand didn't include the general elections as Iraq is considered one electoral region and local alliances that are limited to a certain spot will not have an effect on the big picture.
In the south, the tribes decided to contribute to the IP and the army efforts in protecting the electoral centers within their regions and this was agreed on after a meeting for the higher commission with the tribes' heads in Hilla and Nasiriyah.
Compare the attempts to use democratic politics to "balance" ethnic tensions in Kirkuk with the story from Georgia of yesterday. Consider the tribal warriors, serving alongside the Iraqi Police and the National Guard to protect polling stations from insurgents. Remember the democrats, the Omars and Mohammeds, going back and forth about the country even in this time of chaos, talking about democracy, manning polling stations, organizing parties, teaching the tribes.
There is the civil war Friedman says he wants.
