Monday, August 01, 2005

Civilizations clashing? (part 1)

Magister opens his latest with the following little prologue:

Everyone is talking about it, but few know what it is. The Vatican is confusing matters. Pietro De Marco analyzes Islamic terrorism and the Christian response to it in the light of Huntington's theory.

Going on, he introduces the gist of what everyone is talking about:

ROMA, August 1, 2005 – "There is no clash of civilizations, there are only small groups of fanatics," Benedict XVI responded last July 20 to a journalist who asked if Islamic terrorism shows that a clash of civilizations is underway. The pope had been besieged by journalists during his first public appearance outside the protected solitude of his mountain retreat, at Les Combes in Introd, close to Mont Blanc, and this was one of his fragmentary responses.

Read the complete article Required Reading: A Brief Catechism on the Clash of Civilizations from www.chiesa.

I urge you all to read the full article and Di Marco's essay before going on with this.

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You've read the article and essay, right? Good. We're on the honors system here. First a disclaimer. I've never read Huntington, though I've personally listened to various authorities and read various articles from different sources. As a student of political science, I'm not a sociologist and 'trends' in mass behavior are not my area.

But here's what I think...
Aside from all the talk on culture, civilization, religions of peace or war, we have to realize one very important fact. The metaphorical gates of Ijtihad (independent juridical reasoning and interpretation of the Islamic law) closed in the Sunni world in the fourteenth century (1). All legal decisions had from that point on to be based on past decisions. Shariah law is effectively the same now as it was when the Turks were on the verge of taking Constantinople. (The Shi'ites on the other hand still allow their judges to interpret Islamic law according to present circumstances.)

Depending on which Muslim country one examines, the Shariah law is more or less enforced in just about everywhere. From places like Pakistan where Shariah law exists side by side with a western-style court system to places like Saudi Arabia, where the Shariah law (coupled with Wahhabi fundamentalism) is the law of the land, totally and without exception, the ancient law is paid at the very least lip service and at the most it is enforced without question.

In addition to its archaic nature, Shariah law also has a fundamental quality that is recognized among all objective scholars. Despite what true believes may believe, the Shariah represents the fourteenth century legal landscape rather than the laws and doctrines of Muhammad. The legal landscape it represents may have retained traces of the old ways of the early Muslim community, but it had also acquired much in the way of local cultural custom from various sources that do not represent Islam. The veil and all the subsequent extensions in burqas and other garments meant to completely cover a woman are perhaps the most well known examples of social custom infiltrating the Shariah law and being accepted as what was handed down from Muhammad's time.

The rise of al-Qaeda is intimately tied with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and I won't delve into that here. But it suffices to say that the particularly extreme Wahhabi doctrines imported from Saudi Arabia by the likes of ibn Laden and diffused among the many young men who had come to fight the atheist Soviets from around the world. These young men fought a jihad against the godless communists under the auspices of the United States. The war, when it was concluded, saw the Soviets expelled and the US involvement basically ended completely. Without a foreign power, that land in central Asia slipped into anarchy and civil war from which it is just emerging due to the renewed intervention of the United States.

Unfortunately, the damage was already done. The freedom fighters of Afghanistan watched as the US abandoned the land they'd fought to free. They watched as the US entered a period of material prosperity while Afghanistan destroyed itself in civil war. These young men returned home, taking with them their well-learned skills. When Osama ibn Laden issued his call against the United States, these jihadists were scattered around the world and well placed to begin forming and organizing terror cells.

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Footnotes
(1) Armstrong, Karen. Islam: A Short History. New York: Random House, 2000

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