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It is politics, not religion

Jul 07,2015 - Last updated at Jul 07,2015

Some weeks ago I was party to a discussion with an important European institute willing to cooperate in joint cultural efforts meant to protect the youth from religion-oriented indoctrination and mobilisation for wars extremists such as Daesh are now waging all over the region.

Unprecedented devastation and bloody violence have been widely committed against otherwise peaceful communities in Iraq and Syria, in particular, in the last 13 months.

Terrorist attacks have been planned for European and Arab capitals out of the region as well.

And because all such indiscriminate killing has been perpetrated in the name of a particular religion, Islam, the mainstream opponents of the threatening phenomenon, in and outside the Muslim and the Arab world, seem to be misled into believing that if the problem is in the religion, which is not, the solution must also be in the religion, which it will not be.

This is not a new concern; it has actually been growing for more than five decades.

The trend preceded the rise of Al Qaeda as a major terrorist challenge at the beginning of this century by a few more decades.

Since Al Qaeda leadership was basing its jihadist wars, and consequently its recruitment schemes, on religious stipulations — first against the Soviets in Afghanistan, on the side of the US and its Arab and Western allies, and later, when the Afghan mission was over, against those exact allies — the counter anti-terrorism strategy was also based on religious concepts.

Political strategists as well as security experts have been unanimous in their standard belief that the war on religious terrorism should combine any military effort with a long-term patient campaign of educating people on the true values of religion to protect them from the deception of religious pretenders.

In large part such an approach is right, provided that: 1) the balance between the two factors, security and ideology, is maintained in appropriate proportion; 2) Islam should not be singled out as the only abused religion for justifying extreme violence, for producing dangerous fanatics and for supporting fundamental political trends.

There are other fanatics in the other religions, too. Most of the radical Israeli politics and the ultra right-wing trends against peace and reconciliation with the Palestinians are entirely justified on the basis of controversial rigid religious grounds.

Both Daesh and Al Qaeda pursue intensive recruitment efforts to entice young males and females to join their fighting forces to perform the religious duty of Jihad against all sorts of infidels, including some Muslims.

Both offer tempting incentives, instant and in afterlife.

There is no question that some join out of naïve persuasion. But many others, perhaps the larger majority of those who join, do so for unlimited reasons of their own that range from political frustration, desperation and hopelessness at home, to economic deprivation, injustice, anger, marginalisation, reckless adventurism, discontent and many other causes.

Manipulators of religions tailor their recruiting tactics to suit the specific needs of the vexed categories.

To make them join their ranks, they promise them far better prizes and alternatives than the little their governments and societies do avail for them.

That includes earthly as well as heavenly plunders.

On earth they are offered status, recognition, money and, now, Daesh seems to be offering young female sex slaves too, while in heaven, the promise is far more elaborate and generous.

Many young adolescents and adventurers, from European countries as well, have been lured to grab the offer. By the time they realise the trap they were coaxed into, the price paid is already too high, if they could still escape.

What happens therefore is that religion is dragged into politics as a suitable engine for facilitating political and material gains for both recruiters and their victims.

It is a means of deception and exploitation that plays well on the vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and psychological brittleness of the hapless sectors in societies.

There is no question that there are those who take the authenticity of the religious recruiters’ message for granted and join out of conviction, and for those, religious enlightenment might provide help.

But for the other categories the solutions have to be purely political because the nature and the origin of their grievances are largely political.

The needed solutions, therefore, should include recognition of their lost rights, democracy, political reform, social justice, fair government, good education, decent jobs, better living conditions, secure future for them and their children, peace of mind and, most importantly, hope.

Balancing the various ingredients of the treatment recipe is an essential requirement for its effectiveness.

The formula in current use is far from even. It puts most of the emphasis on the religious component while totally ignoring the others.

Not only has this been largely counterproductive, but, worse, it diverted the course of action by turning a host of complex political problems into religious issues and bloody sectarian disputes.

However, transforming pure political problems into religious confrontations has not been accidental; it was part of a grand and a deliberate plan meant to deflect attention from the real problems.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is not a religious issue between Arabs (Muslims and Christians) and Jews, as many great but mostly biased historians like Bernard Lewis wanted to portray it.

Although it is clearly a dispute over land and rights, and despite the fact that Jews lived peacefully in Palestine for centuries with Arab Muslims and Christians, Lewis strenuously strives to prove that the conflict is both religious and cultural, primarily to distance the Zionist plan to colonise Palestine from any responsibility for the ongoing violence and instability in the region.

Lewis, the author who coined the phrase “clash of civilisations” — not Samuel Huntington who only picked the idea from his mentor and publicised it — insists that Islam is locked in a perpetual war with the Christian West.

His standard claim is that the Crusades were no more than Christian retaliation for the previous Islamic conquests in Europe.

He also believes that Islam is yet to settle old accounts with the Christian West, writing, just after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington that the attacks were the first volley of the last battle Islam was starting against the West.

Lewis rushed then to use a tragedy that shocked the entire world, including its Muslims and Arabs, to give further credence to his absurd assumption that Islam is the threat and nothing else.

Unfortunately, decades of distraction and distortion of history succeeded in creating new and commonly accepted myths.

It is extremely difficult these days to repair the great damage caused to the image of Islam as a religion that condones violence, hatred and abuse.

As a result of an old and a determined sinister conspiracy to vilify Islam, combined with massive atrocities committed in the name of the noble religion by extremist zealots and sponsors of murder like Daesh, the myth that Islam is the enemy, Islam is the source of trouble, Islam is the religion of backwardness and abuse of civilised manners is becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Without searching too deeply in the annals of this region’s past, we will find the truth.

Though buried under heaps of distortion and deliberate misrepresentation, the truth is still there. It will tell us that our problems are political not religious; that religion was deeply dragged into the prevailing mess for purely opportunistic and manipulative purposes, that all the current sectarian and ethnic conflicts are no more than side effects of the original political problem; that the discord between the Shiite Iran and Arab Sunni neighbours is also political, not sectarian; that despite the distinct religious identity of Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, both formations came into existence as a direct result of Israel’s occupation and wars of aggression as resistance movements bent on combating military aggression rather than fighting for their religious beliefs, and they will cease to exist once the political disputes are justly resolved; and that all extremists and terrorists have only been able to thrive in an environment of perpetual lawlessness and political mayhem.

Locating the truth is the first step towards determining the right ways of addressing the crisis. 

If we do not do that, we will only be fooling ourselves, like the man who was spotted searching for his lost keys not where he had actually dropped them, but nearby, under a street light.

His explanation was that searching under the light was easier than looking in the dark.

Also viewing the entire issue as religious is easier and for its perpetrators is indeed convenient, but it does not yield any results.

 

If we are serious, let us search for the required solutions where they really exist.

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