A Witches Brew in the Middle East

Harvard University Professor Niall Ferguson today keenly puts his arms around the vast witches brew of bloody conflict and competing interests in the Middle East, forecasting that we are likely on the precipice of another world conflict, if not Armagedon:

Divide and rule was an old maxim of Britain's Empire. In the Middle East today, there's certainly no shortage of division. But who is ruling as a result? Any lingering hopes of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians evaporated last week as the Islamist extremists of Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip. President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the more secular Fatah party, now finds himself president of the West Bank only. The next Middle Eastern peace plan will have to be a three-state solution: Israel, Hamastan and Fatahland.

Did I say three? I meant four. Because no peace could last long if it didn't somehow end the threat to Israel posed by Hezbollahstan - the strip of Lebanon controlled by the Iranian-backed terrorists whom Israel failed to obliterate last summer.

Meanwhile, even as hooded Hamas gunmen and Fatah forces traded bullets in Gaza, and even as another anti-Syrian politician was blown to pieces by a car-bomb in Lebanon, Sunni militants in Iraq destroyed the twin minarets of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, finishing a job they began last year, when they demolished the shrine's golden dome. Nothing could be better calculated to intensify the sectarian conflict that has been tearing the country apart for 16 months, pushing it another step closer to bloody partition.

And don't forget Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous republic in northern Iraq which is set to be the third state in Iraq's three-state (dis)solution. Or maybe not. In recent weeks the Turkish army has been massing troops on the Turkish-Iraqi border, threatening to launch raids against bases allegedly being operated by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Terrorism by the PKK has been a thorn in Ankara's side for more than 20 years. But this is also a renewed attempt by the secularists in the Turkish army to put pressure on the moderate Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Only the other day, the generals threatened to stage a coup if one of Erdogan's colleagues was elected president.

As I said, there's no shortage of division in the Middle East. But who gets to rule is less clear.

For some time I have been warning that the next great global conflict will begin in the Middle East, just as the two world wars had their origins in eastern Europe. The lethal combination of ethnic disintegration, economic volatility and an empire in decline (in this case, the United States) makes an upward spiral of violence hard to avoid. Add to that the demographic pressures due to high Muslim birth-rates, the money generated by vast deposits of oil and natural gas, and the risk that the most revolutionary power in the region will soon possess nuclear weapons, and you have a recipe for Armageddon.

What can the rest of the world do to defuse the Middle Eastern timebomb? According to that compulsive contrarian Edward Luttwak, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the answer is: ignore it. In a recent article, Luttwak dismisses the entire region as "the middle of nowhere", arguing that overblown prophesies of doom are, after oil, the Middle East's biggest export.

Luttwak's argument is twofold. First, we exaggerate the importance of violence in the Middle East. As he puts it, "the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000". Iran is no more of a threat to the west than Saddam Hussein's Iraq was. "Most Middle Eastern populations," he writes, "can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces". And Iranian-sponsored terrorism is an overrated counter-threat to the possibility of American air strikes. Iran is in any case so ethnically divided that it will probably break up sooner or later.

At the same time, Luttwak insists, we exaggerate the economic importance of the Middle East. It is an under-achieving region where "almost nothing is created in science or the arts". It boasts the second-lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa). Excluding Israel, its per capita production of patents is even worse than Africa's. Practically the only thing the Middle East exports is oil, but global dependence on that is declining.

Hence, since neither a hard line nor a soft line will cure the Middle East's inhabitants of their propensity for low-level violence, and since the region is economically stagnant and increasingly irrelevant, the only rational policy must be one of benign neglect. "Backward societies", concludes Luttwak, "must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily."

Of all the commentaries I have read in the past six months, this stands out as the silliest.

. . . Today, the Middle East is in many ways just as explosive as eastern Europe a century ago; perhaps even more so. Does Luttwak seriously believe that the disintegration of Iraq (or for that matter Iran, which he envisages) can be compared with the trivial disorders of Corsica and Sicily? Violence in Iraq is currently claiming the lives of around 3,000 people a month. Since 1998, according to the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, Middle Eastern terrorism has killed 24,289 people and wounded nearly double that number - more than half of all the worldwide casualties due to terrorism. Is this Luttwak's idea of an acceptable level of violence? And would he like to estimate how many people may die in the next 10 years, as Iraq falls apart and the Israel-Iran showdown reaches its climax?

What's more, it is ludicrous to claim that the Middle East is economically irrelevant. True, the west is less dependent on oil from the region than in the Seventies, but has no one pointed out to Luttwak the recent and future trajectory of global oil supply and demand? The oil fields of the rest of the world are likely to be exhausted much sooner than the oil fields of the Middle East, which today account for 62 per cent of proved reserves, compared with 54 per cent in 1980. Meanwhile, Asia's economic boom is causing an unprecedented increase in demand. If Middle Eastern oil is so unimportant, why were crude futures up to $67 a barrel last week?

Far from benign neglect, what is desperately needed in the Middle East today is a more effective policy of diplomatic intervention - to establish some kind of rule amid the division. My worry is that, with two US aircraft carrier strike groups off the Iranian coast, and an admiral newly appointed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, precisely the wrong kind of intervention may be about to happen.

Read the entire story here. While I find Mr. Ferguson's analysis, as usual, spot on, I find his conclusion unrealistic. Diplomacy has not and will not work in the Middle East. I think, in fact, the Armagedon of which Mr. Ferguson warns is inevitable unless we succeed in breaking the cycle and bring stability to Iraq. The only thing that will achieve that end is the use of force. It is the one single tool of diplomacy that has ever proven effective in the Middle East.

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Turkey To Resolve Constitutional Crisis By Holding June Elections

Prime Minister Erdogan has opted to resolve Turkey's contstitutional crisis by calling for new elections to be held June 24. The background to this crisis is here, here and here. The crisis, nominally about legal requirements to elect a President, actually turns on the fundamental issue of what the nature of the Turkish state should be. Should Turkey retain its identity as a wholly secular state, or should secularism be discarded in favor of political Islam? This from Reuters, reporting PM Erdogan's decision to resolve the issue democratically:

. . . The AK Party has proposed bringing forward the parliamentary election to June 24 from November 4. Erdogan is expected to win a second term after five years of strong economic growth since his party came to power in 2002.

The AK Party will also propose that in future the president be elected by popular vote, not by parliament, Erdogan said.

Deniz Baykal, leader of the secularist main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), said it was too late for this parliament, elected in 2002, to overhaul the constitution.

"This is about a fundamental power struggle. Erdogan is saying 'ok, you're using everything in order to stop me, then I am going to the public and I will ask them (what they want)'," said Mehmet Ali Birand, a leading Turkish commentator.

A threat by the army, which regards itself as the guardian of Turkey's secular system, to intervene in the presidential poll, an opposition boycott of the first round vote in parliament and an anti-government rally of up to one million people on Sunday sharply increased tension in Turkey.

The decision to bring forward the election brought relief to financial markets which had suffered their biggest fall in a year over the previous two days on fears of instability.

The European Commission welcomed the planned early election. Italy said recent events in Turkey showed caution was justified over its admittance to the 27-nation European Union.

Turkey, constitutionally secular and its 74 million people predominantly Muslim, began EU membership talks in 2005. . .

Read the entire article here. The AKP Party is clearly quite popular becasue it has very successfully managed a reform of the economy and a period of rapid economic growth during its years in power. That said, this election will almost certainly turn far less on the economy and far more on the issue of retaining a strictly secular government.

(H/T Dinah Lord)

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Turkey's Electorate To Make A Stark Choice - Islamic or Secular Government

The ongoing saga of whether AKP would succeed in appointing an Islamist to the important post of President took another turn today when Turkey's highest court ruled in favor of the secularists, holding the Turkish Parliament's vote to make Abdullah Gul President void. This lessens the liklihood of a military coup and will probably be resolved by a new election in Turkey that will leave the voters a very stark choice - whether to cling to the strictly secular government format instituted by Ataturk after World War I, or whether to embrace political Islam.

Turkey’s constitutional court today supported an effort to block a candidate for the country’s presidency whose background is in political Islam, pitching the country into early national elections and a referendum on the role of religion in its future.

In a 9 to 2 ruling, the court upheld an appeal by the main secular political party to stop Abdullah Gul, the current foreign minister and a close ally of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from becoming president, objecting to what it says are his Islamic credentials.

But the ruling, which involved the legality of a parliamentary vote for Mr. Gul that was held last Friday, was more political than legal: The court is part of Turkey’s secular establishment, which is now mounting an assault against Mr. Erdogan and the emerging class of devout Turks that he represents, and its decision did not come as a surprise.

Both Mr. Gul and Mr. Erdogan have their roots in political Islam, and the prospect of a president — the highest secular post in the country — whose background is in political Islam has alarmed some Turks.

. . . The court’s ruling appears to have brought Turkey to a defining moment.

Since Mr. Gul’s emergence as the sole candidate for president, a powerful post chosen by parliamentary vote, the country’s opposition parties and its military have warned that his selection would bring an end to the era of secular modernism that began with the Ataturk revolution in 1923.

Last week, the country’s military, which has ousted four elected governments since 1960, issued a stern warning, hinting that it might act against the government if it strayed too far from secularism.

. . . Before today’s court decision, Mr. Gul had faced another round of parliamentary voting this week in order to be confirmed as president. Mr. Erdogan may now propose another candidate or, more likely, call a general election.
In a speech to the nation on Monday night, he avoided directly mentioning the political troubles, instead appealing for Turks to come together. “Turkey needs this togetherness, this unity, this love that has been freed of prejudices,” he said.

Read the entire article here. This will be a watershed moment with perhaps permanent ramifications. As any woman in Tehran with too many strands of hair showing will tell you, once your government goes Islamic, its hard to ever go back.

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300,000 Turks March Against Islamism

In Turkey, the Parliament elects the President. It is not merely a ceremonial post, as the President can veto legislation. And over the past several years, the secular President Ahmet Necdet Sezer has vetoed several pieces of legislation that threated to introduce Islam into Turkey's secular government and education system. But now, with the President's term expired, the Islamist AKP party, which has a maority in Parliament, voted for Abdullah Gul, an Islamist, as President. Opposition secularists boycotted the vote, and because it is unclear whether the Constitution requires a certain number of legislators to be present for the vote, the matter has now gone to the judiciary for a decision. In any event, neither the military, who last led a coup in 1997, nor much of the Turkish citizenry appear happy to see the strictly secular system of Turkey coming under threat:

At least 300,000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey's leaders threatened to destroy the country's modern foundations.

Like the protesters _ who gathered for the second large anti-government demonstration in two weeks _ Turkey's powerful secular military has accused Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of tolerating radical Islamic circles.

"They want to drag Turkey to the dark ages," said 63-year-old Ahmet Yurdakul, a retired government employee who attended the protest.

. . . Sunday's demonstration . . . came a day after Erdogan's government rejected the military's warning about the disputed presidential election and called it interference that is unacceptable in a democracy.

The ruling party candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, failed to win a first-round victory Friday in a parliamentary presidential vote marked by tensions between secularists and the pro-Islamic government. Most opposition legislators boycotted the vote and challenged its validity in the Constitutional Court.

The military said Friday night that it was gravely concerned and indicated it was willing to become more openly involved in the process _ a statement some interpreted as an ultimatum to the government to rein in officials who promote Islamic initiatives.

Sunday's crowd chanted that the presidential palace was "closed to imams."
Some said Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc was an enemy of the secular system, because he said the next president should be "pious."

In the 1920s, with the Ottoman Empire in ruins, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk imposed Western laws, replaced Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, banned Islamic dress and granted women the right to vote.

The ruling party, however, has supported religious schools and tried to lift the ban on Islamic head scarves in public offices and schools. Secularists are also uncomfortable with the idea of Gul's wife, Hayrunisa, being in the presidential palace because she wears the traditional Muslim head scarf.

"We don't want a covered woman in Ataturk's presidential palace," said Ayse Bari, a 67-year-old housewife. "We want civilized, modern people there."

Read the article here.

Photo by AP

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Turkey's Army Raises The Stakes With The Islamists

Turkey's army is sending very public signals to the government that it may act to protect Turkey's system of secular government if the AKP party elects the Islamist Abdullah Gul as President. This from the ETB24 News Service:

Turkey's Islamist-rooted government condemned on Saturday an army threat to intervene in the nation's presidential contest while the EU and the United States urged a peaceful resolution of the crisis.

The army, which has ousted four governments in the past 50 years, issued a toughly worded statement on Friday expressing concern over the election and said it was ready to act in defence of the secular system separating state and religion.

Government spokesman Cemil Cicek's attack on the army marked an escalation in an election row pitting Turkey's secular elite, including the powerful army generals, against a government they accuse of trying to increase the role of Islam in politics.

. . . The secularists believe the ruling AK Party's presidential candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist, would chip away at the secular state if elected. As president he would be commander in chief of the armed forces.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan spoke on Saturday by telephone with Turkey's top general, Yasar Buyukanit, Cicek said, adding the military must stay under strict civilian control.

Cicek said the army statement was aimed against the government and was timed to influence the Constitutional Court which is set to study a legal challenge to Friday's inconclusive first round of the presidential election.

. . . The European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, and Ankara's NATO ally the United States urged respect for democracy. "This is a test case if the Turkish armed forces respect democratic secularism and the democratic arrangement of civil-military relations," EU enlargement chief Olli Rehn told reporters in Brussels.

. . . Karl Duckworth, U.S. State Department spokesman in Washington, said: "The United States fully supports the constitutional process of Turkey's secular democracy. The Constitutional Court will have to decide on any questions regarding Turkey's presidential elections..."

Friday's army statement followed Gul's failure to win enough votes in parliament in the first round of the presidential election. A second vote is set for next Wednesday.

Secularist opposition parties boycotted Friday's session. One of them has asked the Constitutional Court to annul Friday's vote because there were fewer than two thirds of deputies in the chamber at the time. The government says the vote was valid.

If the court upholds the opposition appeal next week, Erdogan would have to call a snap election. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a staunch secularist, would stay in office until a new parliament could elect his successor.

. . . Ten years ago, Turkey's army ousted Islamist premier Necmettin Erbakan's government, in which Gul also served, with strong public backing and without tanks on the streets.

Few are predicting another military coup in Turkey, where economic growth is robust and Erdogan's government popular, but the army statement has raised the stakes in the battle of wills. Analysts say an early general election may be the only way to defuse the tensions and allow the country to move forward.

Read the entire article here. I am unsure how to feel about the EU's warning. On one hand, it is comic for being utterly meaningless. There is no military threat behind it, and it is pretty clear that the EU will not forgo a single euro in trade over it. On the other hand, it is rather ironic for being issued in protection of Islamists. If Gates of Vienna's compelling arguments on Islamicization in Europe and its likely course are accurate, this continued EU willingness to do business with and support Islamists may be biting them sooner rather then later.

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Turkey Sliding Towards Islamism

There is an article in the New York Times today on the ruling Turkish Islamic party AKP's choice for President, Abdullah Gul, (shown in this AP photo with his wife) Mr. Gul is, in terms of his desire to inject Islam into Turkish government, a clone of PM Erdogan, the man whose potential candidacy for President generated huge protests in Turkey recently. As to be expected from the NYT, the article glosses over concerns that millions of Turks have about the Islamicization of their secular government based on the track record of the AKP.

Turkey’s ruling party on Tuesday chose a presidential candidate with an Islamic background, a move that will extend the reach of the party — and the emerging class of devout Muslims it represents — into the heart of Turkey’s secular establishment for the first time.

The selection has focused the worries of secular Turks who fear that sexual equality, as well as drinking alcohol and wearing miniskirts, could eventually be in danger.

Abdullah Gul, 56, the foreign minister, whose wife wears a Muslim head scarf and who is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's closest political ally, is expected to be confirmed as president by Parliament in several rounds of voting that begin Friday. That will boost Turkey’s new political class — modernizers from a religious background.

“These are the new forces, the new social powers,” said Ali Bulac, a columnist for a conservative newspaper, Zaman, in Istanbul. “They are very devout. They don’t drink. They don’t gamble. They don’t take holidays. They are loaded with a huge energy. This energy has been blocked by the state.”

Turkey is a Muslim country, but its state, founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is strictly secular, and the presidency is its most important office. The current president is Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a secularist with a judicial background whose term is expiring.

Mr. Gul, an affable English speaker who has long been his party’s public face abroad, nodded to secular concerns in a news conference in Ankara after his nomination, saying, “Our differences are our richness.” His candidacy was a concession: the choice most distasteful to the secular establishment was Mr. Erdogan himself, who deftly bowed out.

Still, if Mr. Gul is confirmed, his party would occupy the posts of president, prime minister and parliamentary speaker, a lineup that the opposition party leader, Deniz Baykal, called “unfavorable.” His party later announced that it would boycott the vote.

In the Middle East, where mixing religion with government has been seen as poisonous for modernity, Turkey’s very light blend stands out as unusual, even unique.

“This party has done more for the modernization of Turkey than all the secular parties in the previous years,” said Joost Lagendijk, a member of the European Parliament who heads a committee on Turkish issues. “They were willing to open up the system, to challenge the elite.”

The party that Mr. Gul helped found, known by its Turkish initials, AK, sprang from the Islamic political movements of the 1990s. But the AK became significantly more moderate after taking power on a national scale in 2002. Since then, it has applied pragmatic policies that helped create an economic boom and opened up the state in ways that the rigid secular elite, which relied heavily on state control, had never imagined, in part to qualify for membership in the European Union.

Although the party is publicly adamant about keeping religion separate from policy, bristling at shorthand descriptions of it as pro-Islamic, it draws much of its support from Turkey’s religiously conservative heartland. Once on the periphery, these traditional Turks are now emerging as a powerful middle class that has driven Turkey’s boom. The economy has nearly doubled in the four years that the AK has been in power, largely because it has stuck to an economic program prescribed by the International Monetary Fund.

Mr. Gul’s candidacy goes to the heart of the secular-religious debate, because the presidency is such a revered symbol with real powers — he is commander in chief and has a veto. Turkish military leaders in the past have remarked that they would refuse to visit the presidential palace if a woman in a head scarf were living in it.

“How can she now become the host of a palace that represents the very same principles?” said Necmi Yuzbasioglu, a professor of constitutional law at Istanbul University.

Mehmet A. Kislali, a columnist with the newspaper Radikal, who has contacts with the military, said: “The military should not be underestimated. Thousands of officers are watching the developments.”

But the party’s only real application of Islam has been its grass-roots approach. In practices that would be familiar to Shiite Muslims in Lebanon or to Palestinians in Gaza, women’s groups go door to door offering aid, community centers offer women’s literacy classes and sports centers give free physical therapy to handicapped children.

The question of religion aside, economic progress under the AK has been extraordinary, with a steady rise in entrepreneurship. In Istanbul, fuel-efficient taxis zip down tulip-lined streets. New parks have sprung up. The air is less polluted.

. . . It is precisely the open question of religion’s role in society that makes secular Turks so uncomfortable. Mr. Erdogan may be explicit in his opposition to Islam’s entering policy, but what about the rank and file who are filling jobs in public administration — what is their view of sexual equality? Secular Turks worry that their conservative worldview will lead to a reinterpretation of the rules and lower tolerance for a secular lifestyle.

“People like me are not calculating the economy or what sort of policies they are making,” said Basak Caglayan, 35, a financial consultant who will be married next month. “The life we expect, we want, for our children, is changing. I worry about that.”

Read the entire article here. Credit must be given to the AKP for liberalizing and making capitalistic reforms to Turkey's economy. But it ends there. See the articles here and here, discussing many aspects of Islamicization in Turkish society that appear straight out of the Wahhabi / Salafi playbook. Besides all of the issues, under the AKP, Islmaists are threatening the independence of the judiciary, and have tried to stop the appointment of secular generals in the military to key positions. They have also tried to take over the university system, tried to legalize the wearing of head scarves in government buildings and schools, and claim that Turkey's overriding national identity is its religion. The NYT seems to miss most of that.

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Turks March Against the Rising Tide of Islam

As Turkey's pivotal election approaches on May 16, a large portion of the populace is protesting the islamicization of their country that will likely occur if Prime Minister Erdogan is elected President. This from al Babwa:

More than 200,000 Turks protested against Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Saturday, demonstrating the intense opposition he could face from Turkey's secular establishment if he decides to run for president next month.

According to the AP, protesters called on the government to quit and chanted slogans including, "We don't want an imam as president."

Tens of thousands traveled from across the country overnight to attend the rally in downtown Ankara. Police cordoned off the meeting area - near the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Police on the scene estimated the crowd at more than 200,000.

Turkey's president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, said Friday that the threat Islamic fundamentalism posed to the country was higher than ever. "For the first time, the pillars of the secular republic are being openly questioned," Sezer said in an address to military officers.

The fact that Turkey's President Sezer made his remarks to military officers should be seen as ominous by those that would see Turkey bcome an islamic state. Turkey's military has a long history of coups, and one could well imagine another if the military perceives the secular republic established by Attaturk as under threat.

Update: Much more on this at Instapundit.

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Will Turkey Stay Secular?

Turkish elections will be held May 16, and the secular nature of Turkey's government instituted after World War I by Attaturk, may well be in the balance:

As the countdown proceeds towards the May 16 presidential election in Turkey, a sense of panic pervades Turkey's secular circles, which fear for the secular and democratic nature of the Turkish republic. The possibility that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will bid for and win the presidency heads the national agenda, with daily polls, wagers, and guessing games.

According to the Turkish constitution, the president is elected by parliament; at present, the AKP party, whose roots are Islamist, holds the majority in parliament.

To date, Erdogan has been secretive about his candidacy, saying that the AKP will disclose its presidential candidate on April 16, a month before the election.

The thought of an Islamist occupying the highest position in the land has thrown the country into turmoil, and has deepened the rift between Islamists and secularists - and this is reflected in Turkey's divided media.

Business circles, NGOs, and the general public have been expressing their wish for nominating a candidate by national consensus, so as to prevent chaos and instability.

Many of the AKP government's Islamization attempts during the past four years have met with rejection and vetoes by the current president, the staunchly secular Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who has acted as a force for checks and balances. This will be lost if he is replaced by Erdogan.

It is thought that if the AKP adds the presidency to its monopoly on the executive and legislative bodies, it will constitute a serious threat to the core principles upon which the modern Republic of Turkey is built. Such absolute, unchecked rule will even give the AKP the power, in the period between the presidential and general elections, to change the constitution and make Turkey into a religious state.

While some secularists are looking to Turkey's strong military, as the custodian of the republic and of the constitution, to intervene as a last resort, the senior commanders are remaining silent on the matter of the presidential election and on internal politics, with reference to the democratic process and in line with demands by the E.U. to lessen the military's influence.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Islam, History, and Defunding the UN

The reason we face the problem of radical Islam today is that, in its entire history, Islam has seen no Renaissance, no Reformation, no Period of Enlightenment. These titanic events in Western history led to the development of secular values that came out of, but were separate from, the Judeo-Christian religion that birthed them. And they led to the critical development away from religion driving nation states and into religion being subsumed into the private lives of members of each nation state. Each of these events was founded upon critical thought - questioning and challenging religious ideals and dogma, seperating the wheat -- the belief in God and universal concepts of moral behavior -- from the chaff of religion – dogma that restricted development in all aspects of society – political, artistic, scientific, philosophical. Thus, today do our universities turn out the finest scientists, the finest writers, the finest mathematicians and astronomers, while the universities in Saudi Arabia primarily turn out Wahhabi clerics, the morals police in Saudi Arabia hunt down sorcerers, and the courts apply Wahhabi Sharia law to order the flogging of victims of gang rape.

Year 1 to Muslims begins with Hijra, Mohammed’s emigration to Medina in 622 A.D. When Mohammed died, Islam was still largely confined to Arabia. It is important to note that, before Mohammed died, he left his followers with a concept most clearly stated in a hadith - an authenticated saying of Mohammed. That hadith provides that the ummah – the community of Muslims – can “never agree on an error.” Complimenting this in the Koran, it says “People, you order what is right, forbid what is wrong, and you believe in God.” (3:110)

These concepts, taken together, allow for the evolution of Islam. And in another critical development following Mohammed’s death, as Islam progressed, there came the concept of ijtihad (see here and here). Ijtihad is the practice of reasoning from the texts, the hadiths, the sunna and the works of scholars to determine what Islam should mean, what it should approve and disapprove. If there will ever be a moderation of Islam, it will come from those concepts of the hadith and the Koran mentioned above, and from the practice of ijtihad.

But to continue with the chronological history - following Mohammed’s death, Islam spread at a pace never before or since duplicated. Its rapid expansion – by the sword – continued almost unchecked for the next several hundred years. Actually, in this regard, for any Muslim to criticize the West as imperialistic is irony of the highest order. The West are pikers compared to the Islamic caliphates. Within 130 years following the Hijra, Arabic Muslims had conquered the Middle East, Turkey, all of North Africa and the better part of Spain, and they were fighting battles inside France.

Through about 1100 A.D., Islamic society, led by the Arabs, far outshone the West in learning and technology. It was a far more enlightened society then what was to be found in Europe at the time. Indeed, at the turn of the first millenium, the premier city in the world was not London, Paris or Rome, but Baghdad. But, along with this vast expansion powered by the belief in Islamic destiny came the desire to control the precise nature of Islam by the Caliphs. At the end of the tenth century, the “gates of ijtihad” were ordered closed by the Caliphs and the Muslim philosophers cooperated. The concept of free reasoning fell from grace in Islam. This closing of the gates of ijtihad is credited by many scholars as the cause of the stagnation of Islam in succeeding centuries.

But there was much worse on the horizon. In the late 12th century came invasion by the Turks, followed closely by Ghengis Khan and the Mongol horde in the thirteenth century. For the Arabs, this was a catastrophe of titanic proportions. They were overrun, and it was the Turks, practitioners of Sufi Islam, not the Arabs, who emerged as the leadership of Islam. And into this time of turmoil was born Ibn Taymiya, the man whose philosophy and writings would be the foundation for Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Islam.

Taymiya started from the proposition that Islam was from God, and it was God’s intent that Islam should spread to the four corners of the earth. In this light, Taymiya saw the success of the Turk and Mongol conquers as a punishment from God because Arab Muslims had allowed Islam to be corrupted. His answer was to return to what he believed animated Islam at the time of Mohammed. He was puritanical and a literalist. The Islam he envisioned was one of absolute tenets – dogmatic and beyond questioning.

Fast forward to eighteenth century Arabia, where Ibn Wahhab was born. Wahhab embraced the teachings of Taymiya and built upon them, arguing that any deviation therefrom was heretical and that the offender should be put to death. Wahhab promoted a triumphalist and imperialistic religion that saw anyone not in its membership as an enemy to be converted, conquered or killed. There has been little if any deviation from Wahhab's original dogma through to the modern day. Indeed, for example, one aspect of Wahhabi doctrine, taught in Saudi schools at least as recently as 2003, is that it is permissible to enslave “polytheists.” That comes from a Saudi textbook. If you are a Christian, by the way, you are a polytheist. Wahhabism is the soul of radical Islam. To go against any tenet of Wahhabi Islam is to conduct impermissible innovation and thus, to be labeled a heretic – and in this day and age, subject to losing your head.

To continue with the chronology, Wahhab found his way to Najd, a backwater of Arabia controlled by tribe of the Sauds. Wahhab partnered with the Sauds and what followed, over the next two centuries, was an incredibly savage conquest of the Arabian peninsula by the House of Saud. And in each place they conquered, they imposed Wahhabi Islam.

Fast forward now to the 20th century. Two events of note occur. Turkey, home of Sufi Islam and the caliphate presiding over the majority of the Islamic world, came into World War I on the side of Germany and was ultimately defeated. Its Middle Eastern empire was divided up among the European counties. Attaturk took power in Turkey and divested Islam from politics, secularizing the country. This was, in essence, the first step towards a revolution in the Islamic world – the divorcing of religion from the nation state and limiting it to the private lives of Turkish citizens. Unfortunately, as time has gone on, Wahhabism has infected Turkey, and today we see the creep of Islamism into the state apparatus. Turkey has withdrawn from the precipice of a revolution to moderate and modernize Islam that its combination of secular government and classical Sufi Islam may have led.

The second event of note was the triumph of Wahhabi Islam with the conquest of Arabia by the House of Saud. Indeed, even before the final conquest, Wahhabi Islam had already influenced – or infected, if you like – many of the other schools of Islam. Two prime examples are the Pakistani Deobandi school that today is the basis for the Taliban, as well Islam in Egypt, from whence arose the first truly modern radical Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.

But Wahhabi Islam only truly became an engine of conquest with the growth of the oil industry and the influx of billions of petrodollars into Saudi Arabia. Today, Saudi Arabia is spending these billions to spread its brand of Islam to the four corners of the world and to supplant the other schools of Islam. Other then oil, Saudi Arabia’s main exports are Wahhabi clerics, Wahhabi mosques, and Wahhabi schools in every corner of the world. Further, the petrodollars are used to fund the Middle East studies program at most major colleges in the Western World – whose teaching invariably cover, cover for, and cover up Wahhabi Islam – and to fund Wahhabi organizations such as CAIR that perform much the same function in Western society at large.

I do not know that Wahhabi Islam also influenced and radicalized Ayatollah Khoemeni. But, given that he took Iranian Shia Islam out of its historically nonpolitical role in Iran and thrust Shiaism, for the first time in history, into the political realm with the creation of Iran’s theocracy, I would suspect that it did. I would be absolutely amazed if some scholar did not eventually catalogue such an influence.

To sum up, the whole of the Islamic world is endangered by the growth of Wahhabi Islam. And Wahhabi Islam holds it dogma to be beyond question – upon pain of censure and, often, death. If there is to be a moderation and modernization of Islam – a Reformation and Period of Enlightenment if you will – it will not will arise out of Wahhabi Islam without tremendous bloodshed.

Ultimately, in the world of ideas, it is only through questioning and critical reasoning that advancements occur. To put an Islamic face on that, it is only through the embrace of ijtihad and the concepts of Islam discussed earlier that there is any chance that Islam will finally see a great historical change to moderate and modernize from Wahhab’s vision of 7th century Islam into a form of Islam that can coexist with the rest of the world in the 21st century. And Western society has an obligation not to be coerced into silence, but to openly criticize what we find dangerous and wrong in Islam. If our voice is cowed, how can we expect the voice of would be moderates in the world of Islam to stand up - and withstand the inevitable Wahhabi onslaught to their existence. The cost to humanity and the world if Islam does not have its Reformation and Enlightenment will almost assuredly be apocalyptic.

Which brings us to today, and the United Nations Human Rights Organization. I have already posted that I believe the UN exists in an alternate Islamic universe. It finds fault with illegal acts or human rights violations only in Israel. See here and here. But we have now reached the final Islamic straw.

Friday, March 30, 2007, Islamic countries pushed through a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council demanding a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion. Lest there be any doubt about which religion they are concerned with, the only religion mentioned in the resolution is Islam. As stated in the minutes from the UN Human Rights Council meeting:

The Council expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations; notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions, and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities, in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001; urges States to take resolute action to prohibit the dissemination including through political institutions and organizations of racist and xenophobic ideas and material aimed at any religion or its followers that constitute incitement to racial and religious hatred, hostility or violence; also urges States to provide adequate protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions, to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and their value systems and to complement legal systems with intellectual and moral strategies to combat religious hatred and intolerance; . . .

The UN is only doing the work of radical Wahhabi Islamists at this point. If there is ever to be a peaceful coexistence with Muslims, it is not the West that needs to bend to Wahhabi Islam – as CAIR and the Islamists at UN would have us do. We can coexist with Muslims as long as they are not trying to kill us and impose their religion by coercion or by working fundamental changes to our Western secular values by crying Islamaphobia and changing our laws. Unfortunately, many adherents to Wahhabi Islam cannot exist without trying to kill us and impose their religion by coercion as they see that as part of their religious duty. Thus, it is their religion that needs to change. It needs to go through its Reformation, and there needs to be a period of Enlightenment. The clearest way to stop this transformation from ever occurring is to outlaw criticism of Islam. This would be putting a nail into the coffin of Western civilization, in addition to insuring the ultimate domination of the Wahhabi philosophy in Islam.

If this is what we can expect from UN as reformed, it needs to be defunded by the U.S. In the Senate hearings for his confirmation as the new U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad has argued against defunding the UN but has also stated that the UN faces a “mortal threat" if it fails to reform.

I agree on the issue of reforms, but disagree as to the funding issue. The UN must be defunded until the Human Rights Commission and other ancillary organizations are taken from the hands of Islamic nations and their functions made to comport with reality. I would further not give a cent to the UN until there is formed a UN Commission on Islam that has its mission suggesting revisions to current Islamic tenets that do not comport with modernity or basic human rights upon principles that can be reasoned from the Koran, etc. – to be in essence a central engine for ijtihad. I have no doubt that ijtihad and the concept of the supremacy of the ulma, rather then the supremacy of the radical Wahhabi clerics, can accomplish this. Until that day, I would leave the UN to subsist on Rials.

Update: This post cross linked at the American Thinker Blog

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Turkey takes to Iran

I have long suspected that the great secular experiment undertaken by Attaturk to secularize and westernize Turkey would fall to radical Muslim resurgence in the middle east, particularly after Erdogan was elected. From all I have read and researched, it would seem that in Ankara, the two competing ideologies balance slightly in favor of Islamism at this point.

Now it appears that Iran is courting Erdogan with billions in cheap oil -- offering to increase trade from $6 billion to about $17 billion. Iran's purpose, of course, is to offset the effects of current and proposed sanctions over Iran's nuclear program. This could be ominous, or it could be simple a temporary engagement in byzantine politics that many full members of the EU are playing. By that I mean Germany and Italy have extensive economic ties to Iran, and neither is going along at this point with significant sanctions. In fact, both are seeking to hold off on further sanctions and reopen talks with Iran -- in essence, throwing in with Iran and allowing the U.S. and the U.K. to shoulder the vast majority of the burden and costs of protecting the West from the threat Iran poses. It may well be that, under the circumstance, Erdogan is playing real polotik and sees it to Turkey's advantage to take current economic advantage.

Certainly Iran and Turkey are not natural allies in the grand scheme of things -- Iran being a Shia nation, Turkey being a Sunni nation, predominantly Sufi with an increasing influence from the Wahabbists. And the U.S. has been a strong ally of Turkey for many years. Nonetheless, with Islamism on the rise, even a shia may appear more palatable to Erdogan in the long run then does the support of U.S. military action against a Muslim state.

Villagers with Torches, posting on the Maverick News Network site, sees this closening of ties with Iran as a very ominous step by Turkey out of the secular and into the Iranian camp. And he may well be right. I certainly agree with him that Turkey, as a member of NATO, cannot have it both ways in this matter and that we need to impress upon Erdogan, as well as our other European NATO allies that all of them need to make a choice of who to support in this matter. And they need to do so soon. The greater they delay and hinder sanctions against Iran, the greater looms the possibility of war, with all the attendant ramifications that such may have for NATO as a whole and Turkey in particular.

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HOW SERIOUS IS THE IRANIAN THREAT TO SUNNI STATES?

Apparently serious in the extreme. Harretz is reporting that at least three Gulf states, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, have consented to allow Israel to fly through their airspace enroute to Iran. Turkey is apparently also going to follow suit, though I would imagine that would be for U.S. Air Force access.

That brings up a fascinating question. If the Sunni majority states come under a greater threat from Iran, will they turn to Israel for substantive help? What would Israel ask in return? Will hell ever unfreeze in the aftermath? This could be the law of unintended consequences in the extreme.

Hattip: Drudge

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