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Where does the Jihadist violence come from?

24 May 2020 Expertises   77574  

Hamid Zanaz
Hamid Zanaz

According to Islamic ideology, no way of life is valid or deserves to be experienced, other than the one defined by the Koran. And so, even if all problems were solved, fundamentalism would remain. The long-awaited, long-desired Islam of Light, this dreamed Islam, is an “impossible”. It only diverts young people away from universal values, attracting them more to Islam, then to fundamentalism, and eventually to terrorism. There’s no hope of change other than destroying this whole system. But Muslims in Europe are taking the opposite approach by exploiting the multicultural environment in order to demand that host countries adapt to their religious requirements.

 

Naipaul, Nobel Prize for literature in 2001, did not understand the “multicultural racketeering where immigrant’s descendant claims rights and protection without showing a minimum of empathy for his adopted country”. But what kind of empathy can we expect when the intolerable is tolerated? In his book in Arabic, entitled “On Earth’s Division According to Islamic Fiqh”, a member of the Dublin-based European Council on Fatwa and Research, Abdallah B., wrote, in the chapter devoted to jihad: “Make jihad against unbelievers via your word, your persons, your goods, and your hands”. Isn’t this a good integration advice for young people of Muslim origin in Europe?

All sincere Muslims, who do not practice concealment or Taqiya, advocate for application, even imposition, of Sharia law by force. They consider non-Muslims as lost people who must be brought back to the true religion: Islam!

Every Muslim, wherever he is, comes to politicians with such questions as: Allah has allowed me to take four women, why do you forbid it? Why don’t you apply Islamic Koranic criminal law, at least in territories where Muslims are concentrated?

Islam therefore carries within it the rejection of secularism. Indeed, the expression “political Islam” is a perfect pleonasm because in Islam, there is no separation between orthodoxy (what we must believe) and orthopraxis (what we must do). Law and faith are the two sides of a same coin. Yet, many “Muslim scientists” succumb to myths, their supposed critical minds seem to have no impact on their conception of the world: if facts are wrong about Sharia law or contradict Islamic “truths”, for them reality is wrong, not the Sharia law!

A good Muslim feels guilty for failing to establish the Islamic state, either by persuasion or by force. This ideal, this ultimate goal is based on his pride as a Muslim. He is proud of who he is, not of what he does. Instead of being what he’s going to become, he wants to be what he was. This blockage results in a dichotomous attitude and, if he accepts technical modernity, he rejects its metaphysics. He thus lives a development without progress because he remains stuck to the sacred: the forbidden, the halal, paradise, hell, the torments of the grave… In his case, purity and fear prevail over freedom process. But since he feels guilty for not advancing the cause of Islam, which is to spread Allah’s law throughout the world, he is in conflict with himself.

This intrinsic guilt eats away any Muslim who suffers from a blatant “lack of being” in a not yet completely Islamicised world, which makes him an unhappy conscience! Living in an open culture framework and in a secularized society, while at the same time immersing himself in an archaic and closed Islamic culture, he suffers from tragic instability. It is this ambiguous citizenship that makes him unassimilable.

Religious practice has nothing to do with whatever spirituality, it is the result of community pressure, a diversionary let off. Isolationist Islamic communitarianism is a “ready-not-to-think” hypermarket. That is why it is very difficult to meet a well-rounded Muslim believer today because he is crushed under the weight of a Leviathan: the Fiqh, the Muslim canon law, being his only GPS in life. Faith in Islam is not accompanied by any inner peace. A Muslim is a fighter who assails evil, meaning anything that is contrary to the spirit of his religion. It is at constant war with the non-Islamic world. His ultimate goal in life: to see Islam triumph, to impose its law everywhere, to govern all humanity! For him, Western legislation is blasphemy because it aims to replace the law of Allah, the Shariah. This is the logical result of his mental conditioning in his family from an early age.

Activist fundamentalism reaps the fruits of this ordinary Islamic socialization that provides it with beings prepared to blindly obey the precepts of Islam. It is said, when the student is ready, the teacher arrives and only has to show the way to paradise. Exploiting whatever Islamic families, mosques, Islamic colleges and grammar schools, Koranic satellite TVs and (so called) Islamic cultural centres have sown in the minds of young Muslims living in the Western world.

The rapid evolution of society further complicates the life of a Muslim obsessed with the “lawfulness” of everything. To be in line with his time without throwing away his cultural identity, his reflection is limited to finding answers to questions posed by novelty: does Islam prohibit this, tolerate that, disapprove or recommend this or that thing, this or that innovation, this or that fashion?… A colonized life, burdened by the myth of its supposed glorious past.

This is why followers of Islam define themselves as “Muslims in Europe” rather than “European Muslims”. Doesn’t the “Islamic-World-being” carry war and “clash of civilizations”, as clouds carry rain? The pressure is beginning to bear fruit: did the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual head of the Church of England, not consider the implementation of Sharia law in Great Britain inevitable?

The task of Muslim intellectuals is immense. It is a question of undermining a false idea deeply rooted in the unconscious of a majority of Muslims. The idea that their unease would be due to abandonment of their founding norms and that a complete return to these forgotten Islamic norms alone would guarantee them a better future and an assured glory… Will Muslims one day detach themselves from the Marja’iyya Islamiya, the Islamic reference, or will they wade forever in a firstly isolationist, then warlike, “self-referencing”?

Should the intellectual help the masses out of voluntary servitude or comfort them in their dangerous convictions? Should he approach Islam from within, according to a religious approach in conformity with what it says about itself, or should it approach it from outside through social sciences, which, alone, enable to objectively see how the Koran was constituted, what are its sources, its influences, its rewritings…?

* Writer and essayist, latest book published “L’Europe face à l’invasion islamique” (Editions de Paris, 2019).