[Mb-civic] Taking Back Islam - David Ignatius - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Taking Back Islam
The U.S. Has Little to Contribute to the Theological Struggle

By David Ignatius
Sunday, September 18, 2005; Page B07

Rarely has a big idea gotten more lip service and less real substance 
than the argument that there is a war of ideas underway for the soul of 
the Muslim world. Do a Google search on war of ideas and Muslim, and you 
get more than 11 million hits. Yet, four years after Sept. 11, 2001, the 
real battle is only now beginning.

The Bush administration's response has been to throw former White House 
spinmeister Karen Hughes into the fray. The implication is that Muslims 
will stop hating America if we can just improve our "public diplomacy" 
through Hughes's new office at the State Department. Forgive me, but 
that idea strikes me as dangerously naive. This is not a propaganda 
problem, nor is it one that the United States can solve.

The war within Islam takes place every day in mosques, study groups and 
televised sermons. And although it's about ideas, it has deadly 
consequences, with hundreds dying from suicide car bombings this week in 
Iraq alone. It's hard for a non-Muslim such as me to fully understand 
this struggle, but after years of reporting on the Middle East, reading 
and talking to Muslim friends, I'm beginning to see some connections.

Traditional Islam is under assault from a puritanical fringe group known 
as the Salafists. The name is drawn from an Arabic word that refers to 
the seventh-century ancestors who walked with the Prophet Muhammad. For 
a Christian analogy to the Salafist extremists, think of the fanatical 
monk Savonarola, who in the 15th century burned the books of Florence in 
his rage at the corruption of the Medicis. The difference is that the 
Salafists have access to the Internet and car bombs -- and perhaps far 
more dangerous weapons.

An important new book by Quintan Wiktorowicz, titled "Radical Islam 
Rising," makes clear that the Salafists operate like a cult. They draw 
in vulnerable young people, fill them with ideas that give their lives a 
fiery new meaning, and send them into battle against the unbelievers. 
Combating this seductive Salafist preaching requires the same kind of 
intense "deprogramming" used to wean away converts from other modern cults.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/17/AR2005091700975.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050918/d364da6f/attachment.htm