Islam At War

Jihad is serious business. It has an ancient lineage, and is a valued heritage. As an institution of defending the purity of Islam is has no peer. Islam spread by the sword, not through the dissemination of the holy Koran. In Islamic countries in the east, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Somalia, Indonesia, no one speaks and reads the Arabic tongue. But Arabic is the Koran, and the Koran is accessible only in Arabic. The language and the religion are as one.

The ownership of Islam is with Arabs, who, though performing their sacred duty to Islam to promulgate, perpetuate and perpetrate, to convert the unbelievers, the infidels, the kuffars to Islam, view them with scorn, belittle them as lesser beings, for they are not, after all, of the Arabic, Bedouin tribes with the honourable heritage of the desert culture that spawned Islam.

On the other hand, even between Arabs there exists a gulf of enmity broad enough to convince the two main branches of Islam that the other is idolatrous, heretical, that though they claim to be Muslims they are in reality, infidels, non-believers. Iranian Shia clerics sneer at the Wahhabist Islam of the Sunnis: "the infidel, atheist Saudi regime", named so by the Iraqi Wathiq al-Batat of Hezbollah.

In Syria, the majority Sunnis, held as an inferior sect by the governing Shia-led Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad wage bitterly unrelenting, vicious war against one another. The fundamentalist Shia triumvirate of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah and Syrian forces, wage deadly combat against the Syrian Sunni revolutionaries whose numbers have been augmented by the ferocious Islamists from Libya, Tunisia and Iraq.

And there is the United Nations, NATO and the West in general wondering how, when and where it should be involved. Support the Free Syrian Army with its al Nusra contingent and other al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamists, not to mention the cadres of the Muslim Brotherhood in the hopes of extinguishing the aspirations of the Iran-Syrian-Hezbollah triad? And see in its place the implacable Islamism of Sunni extremism?

Quite the choice. Either one of which will go on to wreak havoc within the Middle East - quite a long way above the 70,000 slaughtered men, women and children in Syria. That ancient country has been groaning under its weight of hate for a long time, and now its civil infrastructure, its heritage, its monuments and its memories are being expunged from the human record. This is Islam.

Hamas, another Islamist terror group lauded by both Turkey and Qatar, and now handsomely entitled through Qatar's generosity to avail itself of a better, more impressive grade of rockets the better to attack its neighbour Israel once Iran and Hezbollah feel the time is just right to enact an all-points attack in the hopes that warming relations with Egypt will see inclusion there, remains an exception; Sunni and Shia can co-operate when they identify a common enemy.

In Iraq the Shia majority has now taken the ascendancy where it was once under the boot of the Alawite Sunni Baath Saddam Hussein. And Sunni terrorists have been making life miserable ever since for the majority Shia, with suicide bombings and bloody atrocities at each and every opportunity. The sacred appurtenances of Islam, turbans, burqas, mosques, have all been used to host and to hurl incendiary devices to send unfortunate souls to their maker, Muslims all.

In Somalia, and Mali, in Libya and Algeria, Muslim upon Muslim atrocities proliferate. Pakistan, the holder of a nuclear arsenal, bred a fierce tribe of Islamists to point them toward India where Muslims are able to live among Hindus and Sikhs, but never the opposite can occur. Now Pakistan, itself a fundamentalist Islamic nation, sees an even more vibrantly vicious brand of Islamists turn against its institutions and government.

In Tunisia the prime minister criticized the Salafi jihadists among the country's various Islamist groups, and in so doing has signed his death warrant; the head of Ansar al Sharia Tunisia linked with al-Qaeda is threatening to wage war against the government of Tunisia "until their downfall and their meeting with the dustbin of history."

Egypt is coping with day after day of burgeoning protests. Egyptians, rather dissatisfied with the fact that having usurped the tyrannical powers of a secular ruler who in retrospect seems downright avuncular in comparison to the replacement power of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, have wrought havoc in the country. And the militant Muslim Brotherhood have responded with lethal violence.

This is Islam.