Rise of New Fundamentalist Caliphate...from Mole's Blog

I'll tell you, one of the things that scares me the most about the political soap opera in the world right now, is the building and consolidation of fundamentalist power, Muslim style. While Christian fundamentalism and Judaic fundamentalism are also hard to take, at LEAST these two desert religions have been through Reformations and Enlightenment periods. The Catholics have their Jesuit intellectuals and there are countless enlightened Jewish philosophers and intellectuals whose influence extends into the community at large. But Islam......to this date, has NEVER had a reformation and that is because the Koran states that it is the final word of god.....that nothing can be changed or added. So Islam is still operating out of a mindset prevalent 700 years ago, we're talking positively Medieval. How women are perceived and treated under this system is a subject for another, much longer post, but that aspect of fundamentalist Islam is the most agregious in my book.

This is what "Mole" has to say about recent developments within the worldwide community. Mole can be found on "Culture Kitchen" .....one of my links in column to the left.

Submitted by mole333 on 13 August 2007 - 3:09pm.
caliphate | fundamentalism | Islam

I have been discussing for more than a year now how Bush's horrible foreign policy is enabling the rise of a Fundamentalist Islamic Caliphate, uniting fundamentalist Sunnis against us world wide.

I discussed this regarding Somalia and its neighbors (which got me invited onto BBC Radio twice, though I only went on once,

I discussed this regarding Pakistan, our supposed ally which Barack Obama is right not to trust (remember, the elite forces of the Pakistani army put the Taliban in place in Afghanistan and are probably sheltering them now),

And even regarding such normally stable nations like Morocco, Bahrain, and Bangladesh.

My simple message is Bush is actively antagonizing pretty much every Muslim in the world while ignoring the REAL fundamentalists, thus allowing those fundamentalists to become heros almost across Islam. In fact, about the only nation that is almost certainly NOT open to the rising al-Qaeda/Taliban/Saudi style fundamentalism is Iran...and look what we are doing there.

Bush is, in my mind, enabling the rise of a fundamentalist Caliphate.

Funny thing about predictions...sometimes they show signs of coming true. I chose the term "Caliphate" deliberately because I saw it as a future endpoint of Muslim extremist sentiment someday. I wasn't even aware whether any movement was actually USING that term. It was the concept of a fundamentalist, Sunni, unified Muslim empire that I was referring to.

But there is a movement that is USING the term and using it in much the way I am. From BBC News:

Some 100,000 Islamists have met in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, to press for the re-establishment of a caliphate across the Muslim world.

The Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir - which organised the conference - said it had been the largest gathering of Muslim activists from around the world...

Hizb ut-Tahrir - or Liberation Party - was founded in Jerusalem in the 1950s by Palestinian religious scholar Taqiuddin an-Nabhani.

Today it has a mainly clandestine following in the Middle East, a large presence in Central Asia - where hundreds of its members have been jailed - and active supporters in the West, including London, which is believed to be one of its main bases.

Many experts see it as ideologically close to jihadist groups, and suspect its commitment to peaceful means is purely tactical.

Indonesia did its best to keep the most extreme speakers away and keep everything quiet. But what we have is a wave of fundamentalism sweeping across Islamic nations, either in terms of taking over governments (Somalia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain...) or leading armed terrorist rebellions against the government in an attempt to set up a fundamentalist government (Morocco, Bangladesh, Iraq...) and a political wing that is pushing for a unified Caliphate.

And all of this has been going forward merrily under Bush's watch almost unchecked. If anything, Bush's failed policies have ENCOURAGED the growth of this nasecnt Caliphate.