NationStates Jolt Archive


Religion vs Politics - Islam vs. Political Islam

Syniks
03-08-2005, 19:31
Comment: More good work by the folks at FMC. If only the US media would listen to them instead of CAIR....

Note: Bold added
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The Free Muslims Coalition (FMC), a national Muslim organization with 15 chapters, will give a presentation titled "The Struggle for the Future of the Middle East, Who Will Win?" at the National Defense University to a group of 50 government officials from the Department of Defense, Department of State and other agencies.

The presentation will be given by FMC president Kamal Nawash and FMC senior Islamic scholar, Dr. Ahmed Mansour.

Among the topics of discussion are the causes of terrorism by Muslims. This topic is especially important following the terrorist attacks in London and Egypt. Following the attacks, many "experts" in Europe and the Middle East blamed the attacks on American and British foreign policies in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. The Free Muslims Coalition
(FMC) absolutely rejects this explanation and argues that those who offer such explanations are inadvertently helping the terrorists by repeating their insincere justifications for murder.

"Islamic" terrorism is the result of an ideology called "Political Islam." Political Islam is an ideology that totally rejects the separation of religion and state and instead seeks to create theocratic "Islamic States" based on the delusion that Muslims are not sufficiently religious and that if they were to return to a strict interpretation of God’s "laws" that the problems in the Muslim world would be solved. The problem with governments that chose to enforce "God’s laws" is that they don’t work.
Every modern example of an "Islamic State" has been a total failure. Iran, Afghanistan and the Sudan all failed to deliver the prosperity they envisioned or promised their followers.

Unfortunately, the failures of Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan have not quelled the desire to create theocratic Islamic states. Instead, those who call for theocratic Islamic states continue to argue that theocracies are the best governments but that Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan "did not implement the system correctly."

Ironically, the explanation that those governments that tried theocracies and failed "did not implement it correctly" is the same explanation given by the various communist states during the communist era. This is why there were various versions of communism including, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism. They all said that communism works but that others did it incorrectly. At the end they all failed because communism was an inherently a flawed system.

It is important to keep in mind that Islamic theocracies are not the only theocracies that fail. Christian theocracies failed just as miserably. In fact, it was only after Europe finally rejected the theocratic model that Europe experienced a renaissance and prospered.

More importantly than being inherently flawed, political Islam will almost definitely lead to terrorism and extremism. Because political Islam is based on the desire to enforce God’s laws, it leads to religious absolutism. Religious absolutism results from a belief that a particular faith represents the absolute truth and therefore must be accepted by everyone else without question. Such an absolutist ideology encourages bigotry of the highest order and promotes extreme hatred of other faiths.

Since intellectual enlightenment respects diversity and rejects bigotry, religious absolutists, as a matter of faith tend to be anti-intellectual. That is why absolutists are by nature, fundamentalists. They preach literalist philosophies and demonstrate an intrinsic repulsion for modernity. Political Islam, as was the case with political Christianity, abhors open societies and works to destroy any system that promotes tolerance and advances the cause of democracy.

This is why the Free Muslims Coalition constantly argues that the war on terrorism has to be more than a military battle. It must also be an ideological battle and only Muslims can defeat the ideology of hate caused by political Islam.

To prove that political Islam leads to terrorism, consider that the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism is about 25 years old. This is about the same time of the Islamic revolution in Iran which ignited political Islam throughout the Muslim world. There is a direct relationship between the rise of political Islam and the rise of Islamic terrorism.

It should be noted that the positions of the Free Muslims Coalition does not mean that we don’t love our religion. To the contrary, we are very devout Muslims. It is because we love our religion that we take these positions. Having said this, we again urge the American Muslim leadership and Muslim leaders throughout the world to come to terms with the fact that political Islam does not work. We also encourage Muslim organizations to advocate for the separation of religion and state in the Muslim world.

http://www.freemuslims.org
The Mindset
03-08-2005, 19:41
Unfortunately, the failures of Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan have not quelled the desire to create theocratic Islamic states. Instead, those who call for theocratic Islamic states continue to argue that theocracies are the best governments but that Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan "did not implement the system correctly."
Sounds a lot like the advocates of Communism.
Sabbatis
03-08-2005, 19:47
Good to see the credible Moslem groups identifying Islamic terror for what it is: "islamofascism". We'll see some progress on the war on terror when both moderate Moslems and citizens of the west agree on the motivation for Islamic terror. Anyone who has seriously studied this phenomenon will agree that they are not "freedom fighters", and that these are dangerous fascists who would rule others by force.