Triumphant Irrelevance

The West Does Not "Get" Islam

The usual world-view applied to the Islamic wars in the West  is, unsurprisingly, Western.  Wars such as the Syrian civil war are understood through Western glasses, which see the "real" conflict as fundamentally secular, non-religious, focused upon political struggles over power and of who is going to rule, and not infrequently with a Marxist chaser thrown in--poor versus rich, possessed versus dispossessed.  It is assumed that issues of freedom, democracy, free elections, the rule of law, and so forth, are intrinsic to the struggle.

Western diplomacy presupposes that all these Western pre-occupations are the "real issues" and seeks to persuade, cajole, bribe, and threaten accordingly.  If the Sunni rebels are "freedom fighters" they have our support.  If the Shi'ite Alawites are authoritarian tyrants, they become a Western opponent, if not an enemy.

Rarely does the role and critical contribution of Islam come into consideration.  The explanation for such a glaring omission is straightforward.  In the West's worldview, religion is an irrelevance.
  All religions are  erroneous and false, concerned with unreal matters, with fantasy, and whilst the Western humanistic doctrines of liberty whilst professing  to respect religion, only tolerates a religion which stays within the confines of one's home. 

But there is an exception.  The only time the West will give a fig for religious belief is when it can be co-joined with a deeper Western narrative of neo-Marxist oppression.  If devotees of  a religion can be fitted into a narrative of exploitation by Western capitalist and imperialist forces, then suddenly their religion becomes something to respect, nurture, and even celebrate in the face of Western hegemonism.

Hence the wide-spread kowtowing to Islam amongst the chattering classes and the Commentariat.  Islam is the religion of the poor and the exploited, of the oppressed and the downtrodden.  Therefore, the West must not join with the oppression of Islam.  It must seek to lift it up, respect it.  Eventually, or so runs the eschatology of the neo-Marxists, Islamic religion will wither away, to be replaced by "scientific" Darwinian secularism, even as it has in the West.   The West's "respect" for Islam is, thus,  paternalistic and condescending at best.  

Herein lies the reason why Western "policy" towards Islam and Islamic nations has been an abysmal failure in recent decades.  It fails to see the elephant of Islam sitting in the room, because the ruling paradigm of the West is secular, which means that the religion of Islam is not in any sense an elephant, but a mouse, or a cockroach--an irrelevance.  But as for free elections, and human rights, that's another matter entirely.  We doubt not that the most perplexing question furrowing the brows of Western leaders and Foggy Bottom bureaucrats is whether Syrian Sunni "freedom fighters" can be persuaded to hold free and fair elections sooner rather than later, in exchange for more Western support. 

But let's move outside the suffocating myopia of the West to reality on the streets of Damascus.  Mariam Karouny, has been published in Yahoo News! explaining what is going down on the on the ground. 

Conflict in Syria kills hundreds of thousands of people and spreads unrest across the Middle East. Iranian forces battle anti-Shi'ite fighters in Damascus, and the region braces for an ultimate showdown.  If the scenario sounds familiar to an anxious world watching Syria's devastating civil war, it resonates even more with Sunni and Shi'ite fighters on the frontlines - who believe it was all foretold in 7th Century prophecies.

From the first outbreak of the crisis in the southern city of Deraa to apocalyptic forecasts of a Middle East soaked in blood, many combatants on both sides of the conflict say its path was set 1,400 years ago in the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad and his followers.  Among those many thousands of sayings, or hadith, are accounts which refer to the confrontation of two huge Islamic armies in Syria, a great battle near Damascus, and intervention from the north and west of the country.  The power of those prophecies for many fighters on the ground means that the three-year-old conflict is more deeply rooted - and far tougher to resolve - than a simple power struggle between President Bashar al-Assad and his rebel foes.

You don't say.  At least Karouny gets it, whilst most in the West don't.  At least Karouny takes the Islamic narrative seriously, and thus gets far closer to reality than most.

"If you think all these mujahideen came from across the world to fight Assad, you're mistaken," said a Sunni Muslim jihadi who uses the name Abu Omar and fights in one of the many anti-Assad Islamist brigades in Aleppo.  "They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised - it is the Grand Battle," he told Reuters, using a word which can also be translated as slaughter.

On the other side, many Shi'ites from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran are drawn to the war because they believe it paves the way for the return of Imam Mahdi - a descendent of the Prophet who vanished 1,000 years ago and who will re-emerge at a time of war to establish global Islamic rule before the end of the world.  According to Shi'ite tradition, an early sign of his return came with the 1979 Iranian revolution, which set up an Islamic state to provide fighters for an army led by the Mahdi to wage war in Syria after sweeping through the Middle East.  "This Islamic Revolution, based on the narratives that we have received from the prophet and imams, is the prelude to the appearance of the Mahdi," Iranian cleric and parliamentarian Ruhollah Hosseinian said last year.

This apocalyptic tradition teaches that there will be universal war in the Middle East, leading to such destruction that blood will flow knee-deep.  The protagonists believe that now is the hour foretold and promised by Muhammad.  In the face of this narrative, the world-view of the West might as well be from Mars.  It is a complete irrelevance.

Into the room the diplomats come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. 

The West's grasp of what is actually driving the Syrian conflict is Prufrockian in its simplistic, irrelevant, naive inconsequence.

Syria's civil war grew out of the "Arab Spring" of pro-democracy revolts in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 after Assad's forces cracked down hard on peaceful protests.  But because Assad is a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shii'ism, and most of his opponents are Sunni Muslims, the fighting quickly took on a sectarian character, which has largely overwhelmed the political issues.

"These hadith are what the Mujahideen are guided by to come to Syria, we are fighting for this. With every passing day we know that we are living the days that the Prophet talked about," said Mussab, a fighter from the Nusra Front, a Sunni hardline group linked to al Qaeda, speaking from Syria.

Murtada, a 27-year-old Lebanese Shi'ite who regularly goes to Syria to battle against the rebels, says he is not fighting for Assad, but for the Mahdi, also known as the Imam.  "Even if I am martyred now, when he appears I will be reborn to fight among his army, I will be his soldier," he told Reuters in Lebanon.  Murtada, who has fought in Damascus and in the decisive battle last year for the border town of Qusair, leaves his wife and two children when he goes to fight in Syria: "Nothing is more precious than the Imam, even my family. It is our duty." . . . .

Abbas, a 24-year-old Iraqi Shi'ite fighter, said he knew he was living in the era of the Mahdi's return when the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003.  "That was the first sign and then everything else followed," he told Reuters from Baghdad, where he said was resting before heading to Syria for a fourth time.  "I was waiting for the day when I will fight in Syria. Thank God he chose me to be one of the Imam's soldiers."

Abu Hsaasan, a 65 year old pensioner from south Lebanon, said he once thought the prophecies of the end of days would take centuries to come about.  "Things are moving fast. I never thought that I would be living the days of the Imam. Now, with every passing day I am more and more convinced that it is only a matter of few years before he appears."

Peace?  Not a chance.  At least not until Islam in the Middle East becomes so weary of bloodshed it is prepared to look for another way.  But hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people will likely die before that day.

But in the meantime there is one thing to be done--humanitarian aid, as much of it as possible, delivered as effectively as possible, to whomever seeks it.  The more Christian charities that can become involved the better.  They will be far more likely to deliver aid without Western political strings attached. They will deliver aid out of genuine compassion for those who suffer, all in the Name of the Prince of Peace.  In the long term, He is our last and only hope.