Islam
The International Herald Tribune details the process of Islamization, using the case of Egypt.
In Egypt and other Arab lands, faced with frustrated hopes and poor economic prospects,
the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments along with them. With 60 percent of the region’s population under the age of 25, this youthful religious fervor has enormous implications for the Middle East. More than ever, Islam has become the cornerstone of identity, replacing other, failed ideologies: Arabism, socialism, nationalism.
The article offers these implications:
- “The focus on Islam is also further alienating young people from the West and aggravating political grievances already stoked by Western foreign policies.”
- An Islamized populace has less distance to travel to reach Islamic radicalism.
Curiously, one of the drivers of social frustration in Arab countries is delayed marriage, due to high marriage costs, the article explains. In other words, given that these economies are not producing widespread wealth, the social system has developed a malfunction.
This trend has implications for stability:
- States may find it harder to control populations that have been primed for political Islam.
- Populations used to thinking in terms of Muslim solidarity may be more actively provoked by the current Israeli-Palestinian situation, and hostile to the impotent peace practiced by states such as Egypt and Jordan.
- Political Islam, with its statist inclinations and hostility to aspects of scientific reasoning, could reinforce the economic malaise that many Middle Eastern countries tend to suffer.
Der Spiegel adds more detail to the Islamizing trend in Indonesia.
An Indonesian editor asserts that “We are on the brink of a comprehensive Islamicization of Indonesia.” That is not yet clear, but Islamic parties continue to press for an “anti-pornography” law that would actually restrict many freedoms, and impose new limits on dress, movies, and the arts.
Meanwhile, conservative Islam continues to spread in Indonesian society, inspiring more women to wear headscarves and clearing alcohol from more supermarkets. Says an Indonesian activitist, “The religious agenda is shaping more and more areas of daily life.”
The article also makes it clear that this is another example of the cultural power of Saudi Arabia, successfully using its wealth to export its version of fundamentalist Islam. Representatives of one of the fundamentalist parties sometimes speak Arabic in parliamentary committees.
As Future Atlas has noted in the past, the consequences of Islamization could be severe.
The NYT reports on an important potential driver of Middle East futures: the probably- widening divide between Sunnis and Shiites, propelled by events in Lebanon and Iraq.
Says one Egyptian expert, “The reality of the current situation is that we are approaching an open Sunni-Shiite conflict in the region. And Egypt will also be a part of it as a part of the Sunni axis.”
Egypt and other Sunni-led states such as Saudi Arabia are said to see this divide as a means to counter Iran, which has benefitted from the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli war in Lebanon last year.
Overall, this suggests that disunity in the Mideast may be more likely than some kind of united neo-caliphate.
The International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a warning on Somalia today. It begins:
The draft resolution the U.S. intends to present to the UN Security Council on 29 November could trigger all-out war in Somalia and destabilise the entire Horn of Africa region by escalating the proxy conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea to dangerous new levels.
The resolution would authorize regional intervention on the side of the weak Transitional Federal Government (TFG), to protect it against Somali Islamic forces.
The ICG warns that outright foreign intervention on behalf of the TFG
would likely fracture the parliament beyond repair and reinforce the impression that the TFG is simply a proxy for Ethiopia. The loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the Somali public would be irreversible.
Ethiopian and other states are hostile to the Islamic forces in Somalia because “of its irredentist views, and support for international terrorist elements and cross-border Ethiopian rebel groups.”
US backing for this course of action, and prior support for Somali warlords who opposed the Islamists, also hint that the United States is in danger of repeating a dire mistake of the Cold War.
In places such as Vietnam and Central America, the US tended to misunderstand the relationship of local events to the main contest of the Cold War, and take action without regard for the real strategic stakes or the moral consequences.
Action to oppose the Islamists in Somalia might be warranted by American interests and morally preferable to the alternatives, but it might also be a sign of a kneejerk anti-Islamicism.
Recent articles highlight a potentially dangerous combination.
US cities and states are increasingly pursuing anti-immigrant measures, enforcing federal laws and checking immigration status in the course of other police business.
These measures are targeted against growing Hispanic immigrant populations, and are clearly motivated in part by a basic hostility toward difference.
Widespread adoption of these policies might in fact discourage immigration, but also heightens the danger of creating a separate and hostile foreign population on American soil.
That danger could be made more acute by another development, now in its early stages: Hispanics are turning to Islam in growing numbers. The Muslim Hispanic population is estimated to be 200,000 now.
More alienated Hispanics could find the extreme ends of Islamic fundamentalism attractive, and serve as an American vector for terrorism.
Though still a low-probability outcome, the two trends might achieve a dangerous synergy.
Indonesian poltics are “increasingly dominated by fundamentalists” seeking to “purify the nation,” the Sunday Times reports.
The fundamentalists are trying to legislate strict rules on clothing and public affection. Local governments have already begun to imprison people for offenses such as praying in Bahasa Indonesia rather than Arabic, or arguing that non-Muslims can go to heaven.
This could strain relations between the Muslim majority and the roughly 30 million Indonesians who practice other faiths, as well as worsening the relationship between the central government and regions such as Papua and Bali. Murmurs of Balinesian separatism could grow louder.
Others suggest that this process cannot go too far, as Indonesia is “overwhelmingly moderate” — but it does not take a majority to restructure a society.
The Washington Post reports on popular Islamic activism in Saudi Arabia.
Spurred in part by the Danish cartoon controversy, people are joining grass-roots groups, signing petitions, promoting boycotts, and raising money for pro-Islamic ads to be shown in Europe.
An activist argues that this could reduce support for violence and terrorist groups such as al Qaeda, instead giving “people opportunities to take matters into their own hands and do something positive for their religion.”
It is not clear from the article that this is more than a short-term response to the cartoon flare up.
It is even less clear that this represents a new and constructive direction for Saudi Arabia. It appears more to be an intensification of fervor, and is partially manifested as hostility to the outside world (the boycotts) and a desire to control: activist lawyers “are studying ways to make insulting Islam and its prophet illegal.”
A writer attributes the new activism to “anger” — and anger can contribute to support for violence, whether by terrorists or the state.
A Syrian-American psychiatrist has provoked anger and discussion in the Arab world with her harsh assessments of the current state of Islam, and unfavorable comparison of Muslims to Jews, in appearances on Al Jazeera satellite TV.
Two aspects of this story are salient:
- Al Jazeera, for all the distress it causes the United States, is a powerful vehicle for bringing new ideas to the Middle East and challenging ossified thinking.
- The tens of millions of migrants who have moved from the Third World to developed countries are an important source of cultural flows, transmitting ideas about different ways to live back to their homelands.