Ingres: Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808).

Reverse-engineering
Militant Islam

by Catherine Ozanic

6.5 billion humans. Of that number, how many are striving to join the techno-gravy train of Late Capitalist prosperity? Almost everybody, from Sri Lanka to Sarajevo, from Irkutsk to, well, Ireland.

In fact, apart from a few pockets of remotely placed indigenous people, there’s only one sizable group that doesn’t want on the gravy train.

Not only does this one group not want on, they want 1) everybody else to get off, and 2) to destroy said train, toute de suite and complètement.

That would be, of course, our more militant Islamic brothers (and a few sisters).

Stranded in the desert, sky above, sand below, they (and for some centuries their forebears) have tried bravely and and with some cleverness to answer the riddle of a particularly hard existence.

Answered they have. Exoterically with the Koran and its many expedient popularizers. Esoterically with some of the most astoundingly, double-take-inducing mystical texts.

Add petro-dollars galore to the sandy mix, throw in a few ancient tribal frictions, and for just that added touch of over-the-top spice, plop a wee nation right in the middle that’s got its own set of exclusive answers (ours alone in all the world!), and you’ve got the makings of the devil’s brew that is now the Middle East.

To even begin to enumerate the resultant tragedies is a daunting task. The Jews seeking to create their own haven and refuge. The various Arab factions seeking to right many perceived wrongs, some old, some new. While various external interests, corporate and national, seek a share of the flood of petroleum and its wondrous profits.

It is not so much a clash of civilizations as a clash of uncivilizations.

Apart from the myriad tragedies of countless deaths and inconceivable amounts of wasted wealth, there is an invisible Islamic tragedy at the heart of the whole mess.

It is a tragedy of absence, a tragedy of what might have been—and perhaps, perhaps of what might be.

Just about any organized religion can pretty easily have its tenets, its prescriptions and proscriptions twisted into militancy. Anyone for a crusade? The worst of the militant Christians shed blood (both their own and that of others) bigtime some centuries back, so we have only history books to tell us about what happened. It’s hard to realize now how bloody the church militant, for centuries, was.

The militant Islamists are doing it now, in the full glare of all available electronic media.

Religious crusades are always a tough go, but especially so when your daily spreading of body parts over the landscape is immediately viewable on TV and the Internet.

But on the militant Arabs go, petro-dollars feeding the violence, the violence feeding the petro-dollars.

Hidden away behind this crimson scrim is a quiet, utterly convincing pacifism of which the non-Arab world is largely unaware. So caught up are the Arabs themselves in the cycle of attack and retribution and attack that they themselves pay little attention to this other way of Islam.

While the 20th century certainly provided role models of violent revolution in abundance, that era also gave us two great teachers who changed the world in a very simple way: by not hitting back.

Gandhi changed India. King changed America. And both planted seeds that still thrive.

The hidden tragedy—and hope—of 21st century Islam is that the Arabs don’t have to go outside their culture to find this way that is more powerful than bombs, more powerful than tyrants, more powerful than misguided presidents.

The Muslims have their own invincible path to peace in the texts of Sufi mysticism, whose poems and parables are the equal of any source on which Gandhi and King relied. The great Arab mystics knew as well as Gandhi and King that death only brings more death.

Where is the 21st-century Muslim leader who can bring the ancient texts to life, who will act on the most profoundly practical and revolutionary of human discoveries, namely, that violence begets violence, but non-violence begets peace?

That is the real heart of Islam, which could turn the Middle East topsy-turvy, changing it into a true oasis, one to shame the belligerent materialists of the rest of the world and where we outsiders might learn something of the infinite value, power, and rewards of non-violence.

END

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