So much of what we hear on the news about the Islamic State (or ISIS), especially in the immediate wake of any terrorist attack, is emotionalized propaganda. Anyone who chooses to know the truth is swimming upstream against a strong flood of this crap. I wondered what Muslims are hearing and thinking. Does anyone else ever wonder that? Does anyone really care? You should. I'm talking about the Muslims I meet everyday, here in Canada, those who I know are not "radicalized" by extremist interpretations of the teachings of the prophet Mohammad. How do these people understand what's going on?
Sometime back, I had a brief, private conversation with a Muslim friend, who immigrated to Canada over 40 years ago, as a young man, from a country that borders Iraq. In nearly every respect, he's completely "westernized" in dress, speech, lifestyle ... the one glaring exception: he practices the faith of Islam. He's also a Sunni; should it matter? He says that all Muslims worship together in the same mosques in Canada; they don't regard one another as Sunni or Shia; they are all Muslims.
I had many questions for my friend, and we talked about many things. Essentially, he told me that the Arabs were not a powerful people until the prophet Mohammad united them with a religion, Islam. Then the Arab world threatened to eclipse the Western world (the remnants of the Western Roman Empire), in fact, Arabs laid siege to Rome in 846. After the Crusades, the West was determined never to let Arabs unite again as one large nation.
Arabs possess three things, my friend told me, that make a nation great: 1) a shared language (Arabic), 2) a single religion (Islam), and 3) a common history. They are one people. A nation, with the potential of being a powerful nation. The West is determined to prevent this, and has done so by fomenting divisions between Arabs whenever they possibly can. After the fall of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire in 1917, much of the territory that was conquered by the British and the French was split up into the countries we know today ... Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE. And many of these tiny countries were created with a thin strip of land between them that belonged to neither bordering country ... that "no-man's land" was left as something to dispute about and fight over. In most cases, the majority sect was placed under the control of a leader from a minority group ... as in the case of Iraq, where the majority Sunnis were repressed by a Sunni minority. The result has been constant tension. The West wants that tension, those sectarian divisions, to continue. A peaceful Arab nation is not something they'll permit.
ISIS takes advantage of these tensions and, essentially, presents itself as the only alternative to Western domination. ISIS is promising to restore the Muslim "caliphate" (or Arab nation, if you wish) and to deliver the Arab nation from its oppressors. That caliphate, incidentally, was promised by the British during World War I to Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, if he agreed to lead the Arabs in revolt against the Ottomans. Sharif Hussein kept his part of the bargain, fully, but the British and French conspired (in Sykes-Picot) to divide control of his lands between themselves. ISIS is the direct result of that treachery. ISIS is correct when it says, "We cannot trust the West." They've learned the hard way; they cannot afford to trust the West.
Whenever it is suggested that ISIS should take another path toward pan-Arabic nationhood, they can point to history and say, correctly, "we tried that path – we tried all the alternatives to violence; now it is time to fight." And, like al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, which morphed into al-Qaeda in Iraq and then into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), their goal is to draw the Americans (primarily the Americans) into a protracted war on their turf, and their terms, which they can win.
I asked my Canadian Muslim friend if he thought the US intentionally created ISIS and he replied, "No, not intentionally, but they created the conditions that allowed it to happen."
Then he added, "read this if you want a better understanding of what is happening over there," and he sent me this link. If you choose to read this, bear in mind, it was written over ten years ago (September 2014), but it is as true today as it was then.
In attempting to use terrorism as an instrument to advance its own foreign policy, the US unwittingly unleashed forces it cannot now control. Forces that I believe they should have understood. Americans are learning that history is more than just the body of lies they've agreed to believe.
Will there be new targets to justify America's "forever wars" in the Arab countries of the world? Friend, you can count on it.
Charles
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