ISLAM BETWEEN TERORIST
MENTALITY AND LOST DEMOCRACY
070108
Synthetically speaking,
terrorist mentality can be considered as a characteristic name given
to the period following de events on September 11th. It’s
not a new phenomenon in history, as it exists for a long time now, but
lacking space for manifesting itself in the free democratic societies
of the modern world, short of moral benches and social premises. We
find though an unprecedented development of this mentality in a series
of Islamic societies, formed under the burden of some corrupted
Islamic dictatorial regimes.
The conflict between the
terrorist organization Al-Qaida and the rest of the world is the most
vivid expression of what we call terrorist mentality. It’s not about,
as we sometimes may consider, a conflict between civilizations, a
fight involving this organization and the human civilization in its
whole, just as we do not find ourselves in front of a “clash” between
the Islamic world and civilization, Muslims themselves being victims
of Al-Qaida and Bin Laden`s mentality. The growing threats upon
intellectuals, cultural inclined people and all the others who have
the courage of not sharing the way in which the terrorist thinking
interprets Islam represents a serious threat for the democratic world,
which thinks that the church and the state exist to serve society and
not that society was created to serve the state and the church. The
sole thing that, in these democratic and free societies, can not be
contested is the right to criticize and have a different opinion. In
Islamic societies though, the individual finds himself constrained
totally to obeying the power and religion, self-proclaimed as absolute
instruments of Divinity.
In our opinion, today’s Islam
needs a “surgical intervention” through which religion should be
separated from the “worldly things” because, like Abraham Lincoln said,
those who deny the right of others to freedom do not deserve
themselves to be free. Healthy education is one of the fundaments of
the human being and a social instrument through which communication
and harmony amongst people is achieved and, mainly because of this,
when education and culture are infested by radical perceptions, it
produces lack of major discrepancies on the level of the entire social
structure. An individual carrier of such viruses will only understand
culture as Jihad, violence and hatred, with all the negative impact
they bring on civilization and communication with other societies. In
this frame, we can state that Muslims live exclusively focusing on
their own universe, incapable of dialogue not only with other human
communities, but also with the “insides” of the community of which
they are part of and in which they are grouped in sectarian
confessions, hostile one to another and in permanent challenge.
We posed a series of questions
which we find suited to reproduce:
1.
Why the Arabs and the Muslims left the
trajectory of progress, followed by others with no interruption ?
2.
What is the defining structure of
these people, what makes them different or alike, from and with others
?
3.
What is their religious and
cultural background and to what extent has it contributed to their
progress or downfall ?
4.
Is the concept of “pure salafism”
the factor which gives them glory and power ?
5.
Which alternative is to prefer:
turning to account the inherited values or the systematic brake from
them ?
6.
Do the Arabs and Muslims cross a
cultural crisis, or are we looking at an ideological and social crisis
of communities governed by totalitarian regimes ?
7.
Is the oriental Islamic world
capable of conciliation with the democratic world on the level of
values and mechanisms, or it remains a culture as itself and for
itself , grim in the dialogue with those who do not share its beliefs
?
8.
Why is the main feature of the
Islamic inheritance a partisan one, warlike, one of violence ? (“the
sword is a better advisor than the book”)
9.
Does Jihad represent a national
and religious orientation, or a political one (Hezbolah, AlQaida,
Hamas) ?
10.
How can the modern Arabs from
Europe disseminate their ideas ? Why haven’t the secularized Muslims
managed to make their voices heard , remaining dependent to the
despotism of Al Kawakibi, who’s book “Totalitarism” is still popular,
just like Machiavelli’s “The Principe” ?
We look to answering all of these questions in the
following numbers of our publication.
We shall concentrate, briefly,
on the matter of human rights in the Arab – Muslim world. We will
observe that man’s natural right comes from his duty to serve God and
circumscribes to the strict order of Islamic canonic right(shari`a)
which organizes and dominates his life and can not be submitted to
critics or interpretations. In Islam, human rights are duties imposed
by dogma, which have to be protected and carried to duty by the state,
the community and the individual. When the majority of Islamic states
are ruled by dictatorial regimes, notions like democracy and human
rights becomes instruments of propaganda and sterile slogans.
Democracy is absent even on the social level of the family. The man is
the absolute master, and the woman has the status of absolute slave,
while the children, exposed to this drama, can easily become victims
of terrorist ideologies.
On the level of the state,
Islamic governors consider their countries as personal tribes,
inherited from their fathers, and of which they dispose freely. They
are the only ones who can decides the rights and duties and who decide
the future of the tribe and society. This is the environment where the
terrorist mentality germinates and grows.
We consider that in the Muslim
countries governed by the principles of Islamic dogma, human rights
are broken in several domains:
Religious freedom: Islam
imposes to one who is born in this religion or embraces it, the
impossibility of ever switching from it, leaving it; lacking to do so
is punished by death;
Women’s rights, which is set at
a lower level than the man by Islamic precepts: she can only marry
with the approval of her tutor or father; once married her husband
becomes her absolute master, and marriage can only be broken by the
husband by divorce; the husband has the undisputed right to be
polygam. All of these facts and many others explain why a series of
states refused to sign some international agreements on women’s
rights.
Rights of sexual minorities:
total infringement of Islamic law, a possible marriage between two man
or women is punished with death.
Jihad as an obligation of
fighting against the non Muslims, Today, a strong fundamentalist
current is developing in the majority of Islamic states, gaining
basically the dimensions of a fixation, an obsession. European states
are promoters of respect for peace, the opinion of “the other” and
truth, while not few of the Islamistwhich they host just fake the
European values and make a mask for themselves out of them, to little
preoccupied by the respect for the countries and societies that accept
them and host them, giving them social and financial security. Events
that took place in Madrid and London speak for themselves.
Uncensored campaigns launched
by Islamist environments after the publishing of so called caricatures
of the prophet in the media are nothing more than an impulsive
manifestation of this extreme mentality which we were discussing.
We dare to believe that an
obscure force wishes to attract Islam in an open conflict with the
western civilization and we believe that Islamic regimes have the duty
of approaching the relationships with the western world more
cautiously. Movements and currents in the Islamic world have the duty
of recognizing electoral democracy on their territories and moreover,
to impose it, in the conditions that the ballot boxes are a complete
blasphemy for the radical Islamists; and the sustainers of the idea
are spreading like mushrooms in the Muslim world.
Unfortunately, when an Islamic
state engages in electoral competition, the role of the CEB is taken
by the mosque, like it happened in Algeria or in the free Palestinian
territories. A disappointing alternative, because the victory of
Islamic factions in ballot boxes has nothing to do with democracy or
free will, or peace. An “Islamic” democracy where the women’s right,
in the name of democracy, is forbidden in the parliament, in the
government , in diplomatic missions, in which the society is split in
men and women, Muslims and non Muslims, in first hand and second hand
men.
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