Thomas L Friedman is an author and journalist now working for the NY Times. He has written a number of books and was based in the Middle East for many years.
He is a well respected author and columnist and has recently penned a few columns around the theme of radical islam, protest and events in France in early 2015.
The following two articles which appeared in the NY Times in early January are part of his comments on the unfolding theme around Islam and reformation.
Google his name to see the extent of his writings and books.
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We
Need Another Giant Protest
JAN. 13, 2015
This makes it sound as if the Charlie Hebdo terrorists set out to commit
a random act of violent extremism and only subsequently, when they realized
that they needed some justification, did they reach for Islam.In short, jihadist zeal is easy to condemn, but will require multiple
revolutions to sPresident Obama was criticized for failing to attend, or send a proper surrogate to, the giant anti-terrorism march in Paris on Sunday. That criticism was right. But it is typical of American politics today that we focus on this and not what would have really made the world feel the jihadist threat was finally being seriously confronted. And that would not be a march that our president helps to lead, but one in which he’s not involved at all. That would be a million-person march against the jihadists across the Arab-Muslim world, organized by Arabs and Muslims for Arabs and Muslims, without anyone in the West asking for it — not just because of what happened in Paris but because of the scores of Muslims recently murdered by jihadists in Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria and Syria.
tem — revolutions that will require a lot of people in the
Arab-Muslim world and West to shed their ambivalence and stop playing double
games.
Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, one of the most respected Arab journalists, wrote Monday in his column in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat: “Protests against the recent terrorist attacks in France should have been held in Muslim capitals, rather than Paris, because, in this case, it is Muslims who are involved in this crisis and stand accused. ... The story of extremism begins in Muslim societies, and it is with their support and silence that extremism has grown into terrorism that is harming people. It is of no value that the French people, who are the victims here, take to the streets. ... What is required here is for Muslim communities to disown the Paris crime and Islamic extremism in general.” (Translation by Memri.org.)
The truth is there is a huge amount of ambivalence toward this whole jihadist phenomenon — more than any of us would like to believe — in the Arab-Muslim world, Europe and America. This ambivalence starts in the Muslim community, where there is a deep cleavage over what constitutes authentic Islam today. We fool ourselves when we tell Muslims what “real Islam” is. Because Islam has no Vatican, no single source of religious authority, there are many Islams today. The puritanical Wahhabi/Salafi/jihadist strain is one of them, and its support is not insignificant.
Ambivalence runs through Europe today on the question of what a country should demand of new Muslim immigrants by way of adopting its values. Is Stratfor’s George Friedman right when he argues that Europeans adopted multiculturalism precisely because they didn’t really want to absorb their Muslim immigrants, and many of those Muslim immigrants, who went to Europe to find a job, not a new identity, didn’t want to be absorbed? If so, that spells trouble.
A
mbivalence runs through Washington’s ties with Saudi Arabia. Ever since jihadists took over Islam’s holiest shrine in Mecca in 1979, proclaiming that Saudi Arabia’s rulers were not pious enough, Saudi Arabia has redoubled its commitment to Wahhabi or Salafist Islam — the most puritanical, anti-pluralistic and anti-women version of that faith. This Saudi right turn — combined with oil revenues used to build Wahhabi-inspired mosques, websites and madrassas across the Muslim world — has tilted the entire Sunni community to the right. Look at a picture of female graduates of Cairo University in 1950. Few are wearing veils. Look at them today. Many are wearing veils. The open, soft, embracing Islam that defined Egypt for centuries — pray five times a day but wash it down with a beer at night — has been hardened by this Wahhabi wind from Arabia.
But U.S. presidents never confront Saudi Arabia about this because of our oil addiction. As I’ve said, addicts never tell the truth to their pushers. The Saudi government opposes the jihadists.
Unfortunately, though, it’s a very short step from Wahhabi Islam to the violent jihadism practiced by the Islamic State, or ISIS. The French terrorists were born in France but were marinated in Wahhabi-Salafi thought through the web and local mosques — not Voltaire.
Also, the other civil war in Islam — between Sunnis and Shiites — has led many mainstream Sunni charities, mosques and regimes to support jihadist groups because they’re ferocious fighters against Shiites. Finally — yet more ambivalence — for 60 years there was a tacit alliance between Arab dictators and their Sunni religious clergy. The regimes funded these uninspired Muslim clerics, and these clergy blessed the uninspired dictators — and both stifled the emergence of any authentic, inspired, reformist Islam that could take on Wahhabism-Salafism, even though many Muslims wanted it. An authentic reformation requires a free space in the Arab-Muslim world.
“Muslims need to ‘upgrade their software,’ which is programmed mainly by our schools, television and mosques — especially small mosques that trade in what is forbidden,” Egyptian intellectual Mamoun Fandy wrote in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. (Also translated by Memri.org.) “There is no choice but to dismantle this system and rebuild it in a way that is compatible with human culture and values.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 14, 2015, on page
A25 of the New York edition with the headline: We Need Another Giant Protest.
Say It
Like It Is
JAN. 20, 2015
I’ve never been a fan of global
conferences to solve problems, but when I read that the Obama administration is organizing a Summit
on Countering Violent Extremism for Feb. 18, in response to the Paris killings,
I had a visceral reaction: Is there a box on my tax returns that I can check so
my tax dollars won’t go to pay for this?
When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in
trouble. And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia,
is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of
violence against civilians (most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by
the Taliban in Pakistan, by Al Qaeda in Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq.
We’ve entered the theater of the absurd.
Last week the conservative columnist Rich Lowry wrote an essay in Politico Magazine
that contained quotes from White House spokesman Josh Earnest that I could not
believe.
I was sure they were made up. But I checked the transcript: 100
percent correct. I can’t say it better than Lowry did:
“The administration has lapsed into unselfconscious ridiculousness.
Asked why the administration won’t say [after the Paris attacks] we are at war
with radical Islam, Earnest on Tuesday explained the administration’s first
concern ‘is accuracy. We want to describe exactly what happened. These are
individuals who carried out an act of terrorism, and they later tried to
justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own
deviant view of it.’
The day before, Earnest had conceded that there are lists of recent
‘examples of individuals who have cited Islam as they’ve carried out acts of
violence.’ Cited Islam? According to the Earnest theory ... purposeless violent
extremists rummage through the scriptures of great faiths, looking for some
verses to cite to support their mayhem and often happen to settle on the holy
texts of Islam.”
President Obama knows better. I am all for restraint on the issue, and
would never hold every Muslim accountable for the acts of a few. But it is not
good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist
violence isn’t coming out of their faith community. It is coming mostly, but
not exclusively, from angry young men and preachers on the fringe of the Sunni
Arab and Pakistani communities in the Middle East and Europe.
If Western interventions help foster violent Islamic reactions, we
should reduce them. To the extent that Muslim immigrants in European countries
feel marginalized, they and their hosts should worker harder on absorption. But
both efforts will only take you so far.
Something else is also at work, and it needs to be discussed. It is the
struggle within Arab and Pakistani Sunni Islam over whether and how to embrace
modernity, pluralism and women’s rights.
That struggle drives, and is driven
by, the dysfunctionality of so many Arab states and Pakistan. It has left these
societies with too many young men who have never held a job or a girl’s hand,
who then seek to overcome their humiliation at being left behind, and to find
identity, by “purifying” their worlds of other Muslims who are not sufficiently
pious and of Westerners whom they perceive to be putting Muslims down. But you
don’t see this in the two giant Muslim communities in Indonesia or India.
Only Sunni Arabs and Pakistanis can get inside their narrative and
remediate it. But reformers can only do that if they have a free, secure
political space. If we’re not going to help create space for that internal
dialogue, let’s just be quiet. Don’t say stupid stuff. And don’t hold
airy fairy conferences that dodge the real issues, which many mainstream
Muslims know and are actually starved to discuss, especially women.
The Arab journalist Diana Moukalled, writing
in the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat last week, asked: “Don’t all
these events now going on around us and committed in our name require us to
break the fear barrier and begin to question our region and our societies,
especially the ideas being trafficked there that have led us to this awful
stage where we are tearing at one another’s throats — to mention nothing of
what as a result also happens beyond our region?”
And a remarkable piece in The Washington Post Sunday
by Asra Q. Nomani, an American Muslim born in India, called out the “honor
corps” — a loose, well-funded coalition of governments and private individuals
“that tries to silence debate on extremist ideology in order to protect the
image of Islam.” It “throws the label of ‘Islamophobe’ on pundits, journalists
and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion. ... The
official and unofficial channels work in tandem, harassing, threatening and
battling introspective Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere. ... The bullying
often works to silence critics of Islamic extremism. ... They cause governments,
writers and experts to walk on eggshells.”
I know one in particular.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 21, 2015, on page
A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Say It Like It Is.
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