DAR AL HARB / ISLAM: THE "MOSLEM STREET" HAS NO MORAL VOICE WHATSOEVER

Why don't Muslims decry Iraqi carnage?

It's hard to know what's more disturbing: The barbaric sectarian murders by Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq or the deafening silence with which these mass murders are received in the Muslim world. How could it be that Danish cartoons of Muhammad led to mass violent protests, while unspeakable violence by Muslims against Muslims in Iraq every day evokes about as much reaction in the Arab-Muslim world as the weather report? Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King? Where is the "Million Muslim March" under the banner "No Shiites, No Sunnis: We are all children of the Prophet Muhammad"?

I can logically understand the lack of protest when Muslims kill Americans in Iraq. We're seen as occupiers by many. But I can't understand how the mass slaughter of 70 Baghdad college students last week by Sunni suicide bombers or the blowing up of a Shiite mosque on the first day of Ramadan in 2005 evoke so little response. Every day it's 100 more.

I raise this question because the only hope left for Iraq -- if there is any -- is not in a U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. That may be necessary, but without a Muslim counter-nihilism strategy that delegitimizes the mass murder of Muslims by Muslims, there is no hope for decent politics there. It takes a village, and right now the Muslim village is mute. It has no moral voice when it comes to its own.

"The Quran describes the Prophet Muhammad as a Prophet of Mercy," said Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani-born director of Boston University's Center for International Relations. "Muslims begin all their acts, including worship, with the words: 'In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.' The Quran also says, 'To you, your faith, and to me, mine.' But unfortunately, these mercy-focused, peacemaking ideas are lost (today) in the overall discourse in the Muslim world about reviving lost glory and setting right the injustice of Western domination. "For a Muslim Martin Luther King to emerge, Muslim discourse would have to shift away from the focus on power and glory and include taking responsibility as a community for our own situation."

In fairness, for a Martin Luther King to emerge requires some free space, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the courageous Egyptian democracy campaigner, remarked to me. But right now, many liberals in the Arab world are in one way or another under house arrest by their regimes. "While Islamists in Egypt have access to thousands of mosques and can meet with their followers five times a day," Ibrahim said, liberal members of his own institute "can barely move in Cairo, let alone organize a march."

This is one reason Ibrahim hopes the Islamists will take up the democratic agenda. They could carry it to the masses. One of the most popular Islamist leaders in the Arab world today, he notes, is Hezbollah's Sheik Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon. Up to now, though, the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas seem to prefer being pawns of Syria and Iran than agents of democratic change and Muslim reconciliation.

There's a lot at stake. If Iraq is ultimately unraveled by Muslim suicide-nihilism, it certainly will be a blot on our history -- we opened this Pandora's box. But it will be a plague on the future of the whole Arab world.

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Can any of these people actually imagine what it would mean for the entire world if the likes of Nasrallah came to power in Egypt, Jordan, etc...etc...etc...?!?

Of course Islamists (the Nasralla's of the 'moslem street') adore democracy because the ummah wants nothing more than to be lorded over by leaders that are guided by or are the ulemma and they would vote them in a flash...Just take a look at the elections amongst the Palestinian Squatters, they elected Hamas...

In Egypt, representatives from the Moslem Brotherhood would be elected with no problem, etc...

The next step would be the establishment of the caliphate and then, well then you would have the completion of the conquest of Europe...


Pertinent Links:

1) Why don't Muslims decry Iraqi carnage?