I'm not going to crosspost this whole diary from the Clark Community Network. For one thing, it's very long. For another, it has lots of images, and I'm not going to post them all to an "approved image hosting service". I'm not going to add the links, either. But I am going to ask any Kossack who's interested in learning more about Islam to visit this blog entry (and/or its predecessor, Understanding Islam) from the CCN International Affairs series. Here are a few snippets to whet your interest. Feel free to drop on by the Clark Community Network and comment or ask questions about the whole thing. Of course you can comment or ask questions here, too, but you can't read the whole thing unless you move over to the original.
(quotes on the flip)
It is important to remember that Islam has not usually converted people by force but by persuasion. Although there has been forced conversion in the history of Islam, it is the exception rather than the rule, and has been condemned by most Islamic lawyers. However, it is not only the philosophical arguments and Sufic experiences of Islam that have converted people to the religion. The extra tax on non-Muslims, the jizya, has been an economic incentive for followers of other religions to convert to Islam. But the philosophic and experiential aspects of Islam have been important attractions of the religion and are therefore important in attracting people to it. In sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia in particular, Islamic rule spread more by peaceful persuasion and conversion of existing dynasties than by conquest.
Most people are by now familiar with the fact that early Islam split into Sunni and Shi'ite branches according whether Muslims thought succession to Muhammad as leader of the 'Ummah (Islamic community and state) should be by consensus (the Sunni position) or by heredity (the Shi'ite position). The historical details of the struggle over succession, and the fact that there was a third group (the Khawarij or Kharijites) who have almost died out, are arguably irrelevant today.
Issues of law (e.g. temporary marriage - see the last installment) and traditional communal identity are probably more important today in distinguishing Sunnis from Shi'ites. Ironically today the leading Shi'te power, Iran, is a republic, while their leading Sunni opponent, Saudi Arabia, is a monarchy. So much for the ideological influence of a 7th century struggle for succession on Islam today!
and to jump to the conclusion:
Ironically, most of the fanatics, outside of Saudi Arabia itself, are western educated. In the Sudan, seats set aside for those with western college degrees were monopolized by Communists and Muslim brothers during the democratic periods of Sudanese history. The Muslim Brothers in particular are composed largely of western educated persons. In Iran the extremist president Ahmedinejad is a western educated engineer and not a traditional Islamic scholar. Traditional Islamic scholars are among his fiercest opponents.
I have heard two reasons advanced for the fact that extremists seem more likely to be western educated. One is that they need to get publicity for their opinions, since they are not traditionally looked to for Islamic advice. As they say in Hollywood, there is no such thing as bad press, and anything that puts them in the newspapers is good as far as they are concerned. The other is that Western scholarship of Islam has created an Islamic extremism in its own image. Whichever explanation is correct, perhaps neither, it is commonly noted that a disproportionate percentage of extremists are western educated, although most western educated Muslims, like most Muslims in general, are not fanatics. The life of the influential but controversial Sayid Qutb is not atypical in this respect.
A further caveat about extremism, and especially terrorism, is probably in order. Suicide bombing has become associated with Islam in the minds of many, but in fact it was invented by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a Sri Lankan secular movement which attracts support only from Hindu Tamils. Muslims on Sri Lanka have nothing to do with the civil war, which pits Hindu insurgents against a Buddhist government. Christian terrorists bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. A Japanese new religion with roots in Buddhism put sarin gas on the Tokyo subway. There is nothing necessarily Islamic about terrorism, nor is there anything innately terrorist about Islam. What should concern us about Islamic terrorist groups like al-Qa'ida is not just that they are better at it than the other terrorists, or even that they are anti-American, but that they have been given a great boost by the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, which allowed them to argue that the "Crusader-Zionist alliance" was intent on destroying Muslim societies in general. We are not just observers in the ongoing struggle for the future of Islam, but we are involved in the struggle whether we know it or not, and whether we want to be or not. Our actions can help convince Muslims that their future lies in moderation, modernization and cooperation with others, or it can help convince them that the future will be a world-ending conflict that ends in the Day of Resurrection and the fire set aside for unbelievers, as the Qur'an (22:9) puts it.