Guest
Column - Radical Islam Exists: Islamism IS the New Totalitarianism
by Qanta Ahmed
Special to IPT News
February 12, 2015
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In contrast
to others, I confirm Radical Islam exists. Political scientists, including
Muslim political scientists, know it as Islamism. Only part of Islamism
expresses violence – violence frequently identified as terrorism. Much of
Islamism pursues non-violent ambitions devoted to a new but entirely 20th
Century totalitarianism, which is now the preeminent threat of our age.
Islamism is the new totalitarianism.
ISIS, and other such organizations, self-identify as Muslim, offending
sentiments of believing Muslims everywhere, including my own. Raised a
Muslim by birth and observing Islam life long, I maintain that ISIS's
values in no way represent Islam because like its fellow Islamist groups,
al-Qaida, Jamaat Al Nusra, al-Shabbab, Hamas, Hizballah, the Pakistani and
Afghani Taliban and others. ISIS shares a rank disregard for Islamic
morality as shown in its salacious appetite for human rights violations.
For now, ISIS merely exceeds others in barbarity.
As I mentioned on CNN last week, words matter.
Most Muslims are not Islamists. But all Islamists are incontrovertibly
Muslim. Even so, the most numerous subjugates of Islamism, including its
violence, are Muslims. Islamism is connected to Islam while representing no
aspect of Islam. Islamism is connected to Islam at Islam's expense. Without
Islam, there would be no Islamism which steals both legitimacy and shelter
from Islam. This parasitization is not to be blamed on Islam, but it is to
be blamed on Muslims who are Islamists, and on Muslim patrons of Islamism.
Muslim patrons of Islamism include several Muslim majority countries.
The deliberate nurturing of jihadists in defeating the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan – the mujahideen, cultivated as violent Islamists – served
political interests of superpowers, including the United States and
regional geopolitical heavyweight, Muslim Pakistan. Iran, Turkey and Saudi
Arabia are either explicitly Islamist in government, or support Islamism.
Until recently the same could be said for Egypt. Saudi Arabia finances
Islamist ideology in a tacit agreement to keep Islamism from disrupting the
Kingdom internally. Pakistan has long abandoned its secular democratic
ideals in favor of the Islamist hybridization through a
"Sharia-ization" which has led to the erosion of pluralism in
exchange for political expediency.
Muslim states have very much reared Islamism, as the viper in our bosom,
for their own self-interest, never thinking their own status might
ultimately be threatened by such venom.
To suggest Islam and Islamism are not connected, as a denial of Radical
Islam requires, is at best amateurishly simplistic and at worst
intellectually dishonest. There is a further risk in simplifying the
discourse whether because of ignorance or deliberate evasion. By asserting
there is no Radical Islam offering 'there are only terrorists who are
Muslim' deception confines Islamism to one dimension- the pursuit of
evolutionary terrorist jihadism. This is false. Islamism has equally lethal
non-violent ambitions- the weaponized version of blasphemy, for one, which
directly inspired the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
Islamism benefits from the intellectual confusion which surrounds its
debate. Critical scrutiny of Islamism is all too often smeared as
Islamophobia, serving only to shield Islamism from exposure and preserve a
convenient falsehood – that Islamism is Islam.
Totalitarian regimes crave an external appearance of legitimacy, the
veneer of being a legitimate state. Unsurprisingly Islamism has as its
central tenet that Islam can only be expressed as 'Dawla' ('state').
Islamic expression mandated as statehood cannot be found in the Quran but
is well documented in the charters of Islamist entities, including that of
Hamas, and has been the hallmark of ISIS since its outset.
ISIS makes its intentions for statehood obvious. The Arabic acronym for
ISIS, 'Da'esh' is in fact "ad-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fī al-'Irāq
wash-Shām," which translates as the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant (ISIL). Statehood is both in ISIS' self-declared name, as well as
its deeply held political ambition. Seeking to express Islam in the form of
a State is a specifically Islamist ambition.
Terror is integral to any totalitarian state. Its appetite for
terrorizing violence defines ISIS. Like all totalitarian powers, ISIS
monopolizes all communications, appropriates a monopoly on all armaments,
and holds central and absolute control on the economy. A year into its
nascent state, ISIS has clearly expressed its totalitarian intentions in
all these sectors. Part of ISIS's absolute power is expressed through total
domination of its population which is daily terrorized and indoctrinated by
ISIS's appetite for evolutionary jihadist terrorism.
The immolation of Jordanian pilot Lt. Col. Moath Kasasbeh, far from being
dismissed as 'medieval barbarism,' is in fact the ghoulishly principled use
of terror in line with totalitarian Islamism. ISIS's use of terror to
dominate, as well as to propagandize, is deliberate. Through such terror,
ISIS seals absolute control over its subjugated population through a pall
of fear and the perverse allure (to sympathizers) of pornographic violence.
While the Jordanian pilot's murder has rightly triggered an intense
global reaction including in the Muslim world, this outrage is long
overdue. Sadly other atrocities have long failed to mobilize sentiment in
the same way. Perhaps this is because the viper is now uncomfortably close
to home, its venom readily apparent, and Muslims long sedated to the beast
that parasitizes us are finally ready to admit Radical Islam exists,
nesting in our midst.
Qanta Ahmed, M.D., author of In the Land of Invisible Women: A
Female Doctor's Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, is 2014 Ford Foundation
public voices fellow with the OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter
@MissDiagnosis.
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