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  • johnpi 11:44 am on December 30, 2009 | 13 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: 'grave worshipping', 'new age Islam', , , , , , , , , , sihr, , wahhabi, ,

    Photobucket

    The flyer for the event being held at the East London Mosque on January 1st by Noor Pro Media, which will also be selling Anwar al Awlaki tapes there.

    One of the contributors over at The Spittoon blog analyzes it. Anybody have a problem with this or care to rebut?

    Grave Worship – Salafi-inspired Islamism has long accused both the Shi’a and Sufi of being “grave worshippers”.

    The destruction of the tombs of Sufi shaykhs in Somalia by Islamist terrorists, the destruction of the tombs and shrines of the family of the Prophet in Medina and elsewhere by the Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia (together with repeated threats from such to destroy the tomb of the Prophet) remain an enormous loss not just to Muslim believers, but to the world.

    New Age Islam – This is clearly targetting the new Sufi orders that have sprung up in the West, and more widely the emergence of Western Islam, with its criticism of Islamism and its support for liberal, progressive, reformatory interpretations of Islam – interpretations that stress the seperation of religion and state, secularism, tolerance and democratic norms.
    Sihr – the traditional Arabic for witchcraft. For Salafi-inspired Sunni Islamism, sihr is not simply witchcraft, but any pre-Islamic or allegedly non-Islamic cultural practices that may be embedded in the various forms of Islam that have grown up over the centuries across the world. Equally, this is an assault on the dhikr of the Sufi and other non-Salafi groups. In contrast, the Islamists stress a monolithic and ultimately totalitarian brand of Islam that is completely intolerant of the rich plurality of traditions and practices that have historically marked Islam.
    In all, the sinister flyer advertises the narrow-minded, ahistorical, authoritarian bigotry of the Salafi-inspired Islamism at the very heart of the “Islam” being promoted by ELM and its followers.

     

  • johnpi 10:35 am on December 30, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , wahhabi, ,

    Abdulmutallab praised the 9/11 attacks as a teenager.

    The bomber also praised the 9/11 terrorist attacks when he was a teenager, telling one schoolfriend they were “an act of war”. The unnamed friend said: “We were talking about 9/11. I was saying under no circumstances could it ever be OK to kill all those innocent people. He was much more equivocal.

    “He called 9/11 an act of war – American troops were on Saudi soil and had humiliated Muslim countries so these actions might be necessary. That’s the only time I had an argument with him.”

    US troops were invited into Saudi Arabia by the royal family. There is precedent for making military alliances with Western nations. No less an authority than Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (Mr. Wahhabism) and Ibn Saud entered into an offensive alliance with the English to help bring down the Ottoman empire, since it was unconscionable to them as ethnic supremacists that a Turk could be considered equal to an Arab, let alone govern Arabs. “Abd al-Wahhab was, in part reacting to the old ethnocentric belief tht only Arabs can represent the one true and authentic Islam.”

    You can’t condemn one and not the other without being a hypocrite, but hypocrisy was never a problem for Wahhabis:

    While consistently condemning non-Muslim influences and rejecting any form of cooperation with the West, in reality the Wahhabis were incited and supported by English colonialists to rebel against the Ottomans, which effectively meant that Wahhabis sided with non-Muslim Englishmen against their Muslim Ottoman enemies. Moreover, while condemning all forms of nationalism as an evil Western invention, in reality Wahhabism was a pro-Arab nationalistic movement that rejected Turkish dominance over Arabs under the guise of defending the one true Islam.

     

  • johnpi 10:25 am on December 6, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , wahhabi, ,

    The Taliban movement in Afghanistan, when it controlled large parts of the north and west of that country in the 1990s, had a goal of “forced reIslamization” (Rashid’s phrase) toward the other ethnic peoples they gained control over in placed like Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif. The “correct” practice they sought to instill in local populations was – of course – Wahhabi-Salafism.

    So can “forced reIslamization” work? the answer is ‘yes,’ and it’s been done before – in Saudi Arabia. But it comes with a price, and by looking at the Saudi-Wahhabi project we can estimate and make some projections.

    Khalid Abou El Fadl writes about it in The Great Theft.

    …the various Wahhabi rebellions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were very bloody, as the Wahhabis indiscriminately slaughtered Muslims especially those belonging to Sufi orders and the Shi’i sect. In 1802, for example, the Wahhabis executed a large number of Sunnis in Mecca and Medina, whom they considered for one reason or another heretical. The number of those executed or massacred by the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance has never been counted, but from historical accounts it is clear that it is in the tens of thousands if not more. In the course of the second conquest of the Arabian peninsula, for instance, acting under orders from Ibn Sa’ud, the Wahhabis carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations.

    So what would be the comparable figures for executions and amputations today in Afghanistan? I’m going to have to make a few assumptions here, but follow along.

    The population of Afghanistan today is roughly equivalent to that of Saudi Arabia – around 28 million. The Saudi population was probably around 3 million in the 1800s. Assuming Afghanstan’s population has always been close to Saudi Arabia’s, we can set up simple equations:

    40,000 is to 3 million as ? is to 28 million. And,

    350,000 is to 3 million as ? is to 28 million.

    Among today’s population in Afghanistan, if the Taliban executed an equivalent proportion of the population for heresy that number would be 373,333.

    An equivalent proportion of amputations among the currently living Afghan population would be approximately 3.2 million.

    El Fadl refers to these figures as only accounting for those slain in the “second conquest,” most likely the “heretical Sunnis.” So we should probably double these numbers (at least) to capture the slain and disfigured Sufi and Shia.

    So there you have it: The price in lives would be over a half million, and the cost in amputations would be more than 6 million, following the historical Saudi model of ‘forced reIslamization.’

     

  • johnpi 2:15 pm on November 11, 2009 | 14 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: 'Islam under siege', , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , wahhabi, ,

    Pakistani magazine article: The Saudi-isation of Pakistan.

    Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
    ….

    Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court.
    ….

    Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.

     

  • johnpi 11:26 pm on November 9, 2009 | 8 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , wahhabi, ,

    Asra Nomani has discovered a man who attends the Silver Springs, MD Muslim Community Center who said he had many, many conversations with Nidal Malik Hasan about religious topics.

    …a closer look behind the doors of the mosque and inside the conversations between the engineer and the doctor reveal a more complex picture of a young first-generation American Muslim man living a life of dissonance between his identity as an American and his ideology as a Muslim who had accepted a literal, rigid interpretation of Islam, akin to the puritanical Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam that define the theology of militancy inside the Muslim world today, according to community members who knew Hasan.

    Along the way of reporting and describing the two men’s conversations, Nomani has a critique of the common use of the word “ummah” among some in the Muslim world today.

    It’s critical that we ditch the concept of the “ummah” with a capital “U” and recognize that we are an “ummah” with a small “u,” meaning our religious identity doesn’t have to supersede other loyalties and identities. This attempt to push an “Ummah” is the politics of ideologues of puritanical Islam who want to mollify dissent. Sadly, too many moderates have bought into it. We aren’t monolithic, and we shouldn’t try to be. Look at al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistani militant groups: They don’t have a problem with killing Muslims, slaying Muslims in attacks from Amman, Jordan, to Islamabad, Pakistan.

     

  • plimfix 4:08 am on March 12, 2009 | 6 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , wahhabi

    I am against war, not least because it is rarely a viable political solution. But in my dreams, there is one victorious battle I fear I might approve of. It would be the victory whereby a pious Muslim army, independent of the West or any specific nation and led by Sufis (yes, there have been Sufi soldiers), ceases control of Makka and Medina. This is just one reason why.

     

  • johnpi 4:23 pm on January 3, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , wahhabi

    A diary I wrote
    Criticizing Hamas, and a look at what is likely to replace it if Israel succeeds has been front paged over at Open Left. I take a look at the rise of the proud-to-be-Al-Qaeda salafi extremists as the growing movement that could replace Hamas if the Israelis manage to destroy it.

     

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