DAR AL HARB/ISLAM: A CONFLICT WITHIN ISLAM?!?

The conflict within Islam is the conflict of our time
by JEFFREY SIMPSON

The most consequential international story, the one our media are failing to grasp, remains the conflict within Islam.

The news is everywhere apparent. Sunnis and Shiites bloody each other in Iraq. The Taliban and al-Qaeda strike other Muslims in Afghanistan. Lebanese leaders are assassinated. Bombs go off in Algeria. Pakistan remains deeply unstable. Authoritarian regimes squelch simmering conflicts in Egypt, Iran, Jordan and Syria.

Part of that conflict within Islam is how to deal with those of other faiths; the other part is how believers should deal with each other.

With a few exceptions (Indonesia and Turkey), Islamic countries have been unable to become pluralist democracies. They have also largely failed, again with a few exceptions, to make economic advances. Even the ones with huge oil revenues cannot create democracies or strong civil societies, or effectively spread their oil wealth around their citizens.

Within the Arab world, economic stagnation has been particularly evident, as a series of United Nations reports by Arab economists have showed. These reports on human development have been devastating, although they seem to have had no effect on their intended targets: Arab governments and civil society.

We in the news media focus on the external manifestations of the internal Islamic struggle: the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, al-Qaeda attacks, fiery speeches by Iranian leaders. But the internal struggle is about ideas, ideologies, interpretations of history and sacred text, ethnicities, power struggles.

These intellectual struggles are hard to understand, harder still to report. But these struggles are at the core of Islam's conflicts. The result is less a clash of civilizations than a clash within a civilization, the reverberations of which cause clashes with others.

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Pertinent Links:

1) The conflict within Islam is the conflict of our time