Daily Times

There is this story of a kafan chor (shroud thief) who would dig out a newly buried corpse from its grave and steal the funeral shroud. He was so despised by the people of the village that, after his death, his son could not bear to hear the abuse that was heaped onto the deceased man. So, he decided to do something to improve his late father’s image. Like his father, he continued to dig out corpses and steal their shrouds. However, unlike his father, who would rebury the corpse minus the shroud, he left the dead body lying out on the open ground. The villagers now cursed him even more, saying that his deceased father at least had the decency to rebury the corpse after taking the shroud. It pleased the son to hear his father spoken of in these terms. Confronting a similar situation, the grandson hit upon another idea to deflect abuse from his own father. After taking the shroud and leaving the dead body lying on the ground, he would also poke a stick through its backside. The angry villagers now recalled his father as a decent man, for he did not desecrate the dead in this way.

I am reminded of this parable in the light of what “Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” of the Islamic Caliphate (IS) is doing to attract the wrath and hatred of the world’s people. One is now tempted to think of the late Osama bin Laden as being decent enough to not slit the throats of innocent journalists and charity workers. Even the infamous Abu Qatada of al Qaeda fame has called IS “the dogs of hellfire”. The outsourcing and reincarnation of al Qaeda in the form of brutal regional outfits operating from Mali to Nigeria, Somalia to Kenya, and Yemen to Iraq and Syria has been so swift and comprehensive that some even in the White House might be wishing they had not gotten rid of Osama bin Laden.

As recently as the 1980s, there was no such thing as transnational or supranational “Islamic terrorism”. All we knew of was the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Russian invasion of their country with US support and the Palestinians struggling against Israeli occupation in spite of US hostility. Then, at the turn of the century, Osama bin Laden came onto the scene and the rest, as they say, is history. President Barack Obama considered Osama’s liquidation as a major success, just as his predecessor, President George Bush, had an air of triumphalism when Saddam Hussein was captured and, again, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. The US was now safe, thought the White House each time.

However, instead of the much despised Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, we now have an Islamic State, headed by its ‘caliph’, occupying a significant swath of territory straddling two major Arab countries, Iraq and Syria, with an impressive defensive and offensive capability, thousands of dedicated computer savvy young men and large funds. The IS seems to possess all the characteristics of statehood except legitimacy and international recognition. And, truth be told, the caliph and his henchmen are no worse than Hitler and IS no more evil than the Nazis, though it hates infidels, oppresses everyone but their own sect, exercises tyranny over its subjects and hates the US.

The IS is grist for the mill of Islamophobes. But a personal account by Michael Muhammad Knight in The Washington Post (September 3, 2014) titled ‘I understand the Islamic State — I almost joined a similar group’ is instructive and I quote from it at some length: “Twenty years ago, I ditched my Catholic high school in upstate New York to study at a Saudi-funded madrassa in Pakistan. A fresh convert, I jumped at the chance to live at a mosque and study the Koran all day.

“This was in the mid-1990s, during an escalation of the Chechen resistance against Russian rule. After class, we would turn on the television and watch feeds of destruction and suffering. The videos were so upsetting I soon began thinking about abandoning my religious education to pick up a gun and fight for Chechen freedom.

“It wasn’t a verse I’d read in our Koran study circles that made me want to fight, but rather my American values…I believed this world was in bad shape. I placed my faith in somewhat magical solutions claiming the world could be fixed by a renewal of authentic Islam and a truly Islamic system of government. But I also believed working towards justice was more valuable than my own life.

“Eventually, I decided to stay in Islamabad…It’s easy to assume religious people, particularly Muslims, simply do things because their religions tell them to. But when I think about my impulse at age 17 to run away and become a fighter for the Chechen rebels, I consider more than religious factors.”

Defying their parents, families and imams, many young US Muslims are now joining hundreds of UK citizens, Canadians, Australians, Germans and Scandinavians, not to mention Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and others, to fight for the IS and its caliph. These young Muslim men (and some women) of impressionable age are full of rage. This rage has its roots in a litany of genuine grievances starting with the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, the most recent destruction of Gaza and the terror unleashed against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt by the military regime the US supports for Israel’s sake.

The IS can be and will be destroyed by the combined might of the US and its western and Middle Eastern allies. But so long as the causes of Muslim rage, at the very core of which is the humiliation of Palestinians by Israel with unstinted US support, are not addressed, these issue will return again and again.

The writer is a former academic with a doctorate in modern history and can be contacted at www.raziazmi.com or raziazmi@hotmail.com