OPINION:
How little we know about holy Islam. When those poor wretches who were imprisoned at Abu Ghraib were pictured for all the world to see naked with underpants on their heads, we were told that the naked male Islamic body must never be seen in public. Yet we have been seeing naked male Islamic bodies for years. Often with their hands tied behind their backs and their heads chopped off. Their assailants were devotees of Islam, often very zealous. Few Westerners committed those atrocities, and if they were caught, they were punished. Then, too, we were told that mosques were revered places of worship in Islam, and they must not be subject to attack or used in acts of violence. Alas, for years, mosques have been blown up. Their inhabitants have been gunned down, even impaled on sharp blades. Those were not the acts of unbelievers or of warriors from the godless West. Rather, they were the acts of the faithful, often members of the same sect or tribe.
Just this weekend in Libya — now freshly liberated from Moammar Gadhafi, his body perforce treated roughly — ancient and venerated shrines of the majority Sufi persuasion were destroyed. In Tripoli at the crack of dawn on Saturday, the centuries-old Sidi Al-Sha’ab shrine was flattened by bulldozers. Two separate government security forces stood by idly. The day before in the city of Zlitan, Libya’s most revered Sufi mosque was vandalized and an adjoining library had its priceless collection of theological treatises torched. The attackers were fellow Libyans. No Westerner was in sight.
The leader of Libya’s new congress, Mohamed al-Magariaf, condemned the violence and sought answers from the heads of the Interior and Defense ministries as to why their forces did not intervene. In fact, they seemed complicit in the destruction. Now Interior Minister Fawzi Abdel Aal has resigned in a huff, and other newly elected members of the congress, which is pretty liberal by Arab standards, have compared the weekend’s destruction to the destruction of Afghanistan’s great statues of Buddha by the Taliban.
The whole controversy thrusts into question how stable the government is. A coalition of mostly liberals won heavily in elections held earlier this summer, but they have yet to name a Cabinet. The religious parties that did not do well in the elections may be ready to make a move on the government.
Why do the religious parties tolerate the desecration of sacred places such as mosques and libraries containing holy treatises? Supposedly, the desecrators were from the Salafi school of Islam. Most Libyans follow Sufi teachings. The Salafis derive their strength from the Arab Gulf countries. Most of northern Africa is Sufi. Is this a power struggle by members of Islam from outside the region aided by the Libyan Ministries of the Interior and Defense? Do power struggles in holy Islam involve destroying one another’s places of worship? The Sidi Al-Sha’ab mosque was centuries old and is unlikely to be restored. It looks to me, from pictures, that it was reduced to rubble.
The problem with Islam, as I see it, is that it has never reformed itself to accord with the modern world. Of all the major religions, it looks not to the future but to the past. Its impulse comes not from reformers looking to a future living in comity with Westerners. Its impulse comes from fundamentalists looking backward to centuries long gone, and the fundamentalists want to impose their vision of the world on all civilizations.
If there are modernizers in Islam, they do not speak up. They do not even protect their ancient mosques. While the fundamentalists blow things up and savagely slaughter people for failing to observe one or another of their arcane rules and regulations, the voices of modernity hunker down, if they even exist. When will the voices of modernity speak up?
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of the American Spectator and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. He is the author most recently of “The Death of Liberalism” (Thomas Nelson, 2012).
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