Adonis Diaries

Concise Political Islam; (Apr. 11, 2010)

            There were three major tendencies in Islam for resolving political conflicts and divergences; they functioned hand in hand in the first two centuries until the new converts to Islam from Central Asia and the Caucasus regions effectively began to control the political and military decisions of the central power in Baghdad around the 11^th century:  The Abbassid Caliphates in the 10^th century started to hire and rely heavily on the far away newer converts as military leaders and personal guards.  The new converts were much more interested in the personal stories of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith of what the prophet said and did) than the Coran; thus, they declared that the Coran cannot be interpreted or commented.  Self-autonomous provinces mushroomed in the vast Islamic Empire.

            The first category of divergent alternatives to social unrests was pure political violent acts and represented by the Khawarej (those who were supporting Ali and decided to walked away from a meeting in the battlefield as Ali accepted negotiation with Muawiya) and plotted to simply assassinate the imams and caliphs presumed not to follow the shari3a (the direction to go to the water source) or the correct laws and Islamic guidance. This archaic movement started before the assassination of the third Caliph Othman bin Affan and then followed by the assassination of the fourth appointed caliph Ali bin Abi Taleb.  Muawiya was targeted for assassination but he survived the attempt.

Many imams and caliphs were assassinated through the centuries up to now.  Most of the victims were the vulnerable and fragile imams who had no political backing or clout: a Moslem not satisfied with an imam’s advice or ruling on the correct behavior to adopt could be assassinated.

            The second category of contenders is related to the alternative order of justice (fiqeh) or the correct Islamic guidance in daily routine life.  Sunni or orthodox Islam is divided into four main schools of justices (ways to obeying the shari3a).  They are the Malekite (North Africa), Shafi3ite (Egypt), Hanbalite (Near East people), and the most obscurantist of all, the Hanafi (Wahhabi sect) of Saudi Arabia. 

The Shiaa sects that respect their imams as infallible are also divided into many schools but they dare interpret and comment everything in the Coran or hadith.

            The third category in divergences is the class of the intellectuals, physicians, scientists, astronomers (lumped as philosophers) and known as Mu3tazalat (rational thinkers who preferred middle solutions before gathering facts, analyzing the problem, and pondering on the consequences.)

The main split with the other categories is the critical problem: Is man’s behavior pre-set by God or is man fully responsible for his acts and actions?  The answer was “Man must be responsible for all his acts and should be using his brain (akl); otherwise, all evil actions would be attributed to God.”  This category of rational thinkers was backed by the emerging Abbasid Dynasty to discredit the Omayyad Dynasty. 

The first century of the Abbasid Dynasty witnessed full-scale translation of Indians, Persian, and ancient Greek manuscripts and culture that grew simultaneously with Islamic progresses in sciences such as in physics, medicines, astronomy, and mathematics.  The translation of foreign knowledge was done mainly by the Syriac scholars (of the many heretic Christian sects not abiding by the Orthodoxy dogma of Constantinople or Rome) residing in Syria and Lebanon.  The Indian manuscripts were translated by the Iranian scholars.  If the Renaissance Men of Europe could talk then they would acknowledge the sources of their knowledge.

            The turning point came when the new converts in Central Asia wanted to revert to the “sources” and believe word for word what was written in the Koran and the Hadith: interpretations were banned and philosophers were discredited and persecuted.  The Arab World had to wait for the middle of the 19^th century to start a new revival in rational thinking.  The hot beds for this rival were Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon.

            The main sources for financing and planning terrorist acts and military coups up till 1975 were the US, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.  After 1975, the evil triangle of the US/Saudi monarchy/Israel have been planning, financing, training, and tele-guiding most of terrorist activities in the Middle East. 

After the first invasion of Iraq in 1991 by the US and its alliance then, it was the Saudi monarchy (fully backed by the US and Israel) that invested billions of dollars into disseminating its brand of obscurantist Wahhabi schools of justice or shari3a.  Thousands of Mosques were built and thousands of hired imams were preaching the exclusive Hanbali school of Islam.  Most of the fancy books (sold at cheap prices) were targeting the best techniques for the confinement of women in their residences and pressuring Arab and Moslem States from withholding to women their individual rights to voting, working, and acquiring education.  Al Qaeda and its many factions are the creation of the Saudi monarchy, financed and directed to target terrorist activities against rational thinking scholars, Moslems and Christians.