Islamism is the Problem -- Where is the Solution?

The world has a problem. One of monumental proportions. Of course there are always problems, threatening one part of the world or another. Or, in the instance of a problem as universal as Climate Change, a problem whose dimensions are difficult to grasp, let alone for nations to agree on whether and how, when and why each will pledge to restrain their use of energy that carbonizes our atmosphere interfering with nature and causing implacably dangerous weather systems to arise.

And, as it happens, there is a link to greenhouse gas emissions and the vulnerability of our environment to forces both natural, repetitive and cyclical and the way that humans manipulate our environment, corrupting it and endangering all of life. For it seems that the more we advanced our technologies to enable us to extract natural resources the more we compromised our habitat.

There are countries whose vast natural store of fossil fuels enriched them beyond imagination, countries which were entirely devoid of any economic mechanism and recognized resources as well as initiatives to further themselves economically to advance into the future. This is where countries of the Middle East like the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia in particular derived their financing and their power; from the exploitation of their vast stores of oil and natural gas.


And it is Saudi Arabia upon which the focus should be held. For this is a puritan country of elites in the Arab/Muslim world, a country that sees itself as the exemplar-devotion of divine faith as the acknowledged protectors and stewards of the two most sacred sites in the world's second-most-followed religion, Islam. Mecca and Medina, which the Prophet Mohammad conquered in the 7th Century, through bloodshed and appropriation is what motivates the House of Saud.



Their vast stores of oil have lent them authority and power and fabulous wealth. They have used all three to monumentalize themselves as the custodians of the faith. The country is zealous with an epic strain of religious bigotry, celebrating and spreading a 'pure' form of Islam that dates from its founding, Wahhabism. Non-Muslims are not permitted entry to those sacred cities, and nor is any religion other than Islam officially permitted to be worshipped in Saudi Arabia.

It is a country, like other Islamic countries that is Islamist in its form and function and purpose, and it looks to the Koran and Sharia law to address due punishment for crimes against Islam. Apostasy is a crime deserving death. But then, in Sharia law many 'crimes' against Islam and against the state are seen to be deserving of death. And the most common death sentence carried out in Saudi Arabia is by beheading, grotesque and grisly, a cultural/religious practise that has gained huge notoriety for a Wahhabist offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but preferentially ignored for Saudi Arabia.

With its vast wealth, the rulers of the country set about ensuring that their Islamist brand of Islam would prevail. When the Muslim Brotherhood was rejected in Egypt where it was born over 80 years ago, it found an appreciative home in Saudi Arabia. Salafist Islam is a stern, medieval, unrelenting form of Islam. Sunni Muslims are in the majority of roughly 80% in the community of Islam, the ummah, and Shiite Islam is the minority. The standard-bearer for Shia Islam which reveres descent from Mohammad is Iran, whose own Islamist credentials rival Saudi Arabia's.



The West views Wahhabist and Salafist Islam as 'radical', but it is Islam itself that practices an excess of manipulation of humanity, whose values are most often directly opposed to human rights in favour of total submission to the will of Allah. And the will of Allah is, needless to say, the human-imagined will of an all-powerful spirit whose expectations are that human beings live for the sole and singular pleasure of worshipping the divine.

All gods are jealous gods competing for human devotion and all inform their faithful of their obligation to convince others that theirs is the only way to salvation. Wahhabist Saudi Arabia does this by funding madrassas throughout the world; schools of religious teaching whose mandate is to transform people into Islamist fundamentalists. Of course, social tradition and culture has its part to play, as well; the madrassas formalize all of that, emphasizing jihad as the tool by which non-believers can be convinced they should believe in Islam.



Out of Wahhabism has come the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and Islamic State. And these are the nemesis of liberal democracies whom they decry as decadent insults to the sacredness of Islam. The pervasive nature of Western culture, Western values and Western goods is seen as inimical to Islam, weapons that the west uses in its war of ideas and possessions over the pure and selfless self-vision of Islam; a clash that is interpreted as an existential war.

Should the West succeed, they will diminish Islam. Should Islam succeed, it will destroy the West. Fanatical Islamism is the culture common to Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Arab/Muslim states, most of whom view the values and culture of the West as degraded and vulgar and a threat to Islam. To decry the violence that oozes out of Islam is to be labelled Islamophobic, a handy shaming tool for sensitive Western consciences.



And so, the West, out of a sense of colonialist guilt and sheer politeness, side-steps the questions that should be asked of Islam; that if it is as it insists, a religion of peace, how can it be that it is the foremost instigator of, and fount of institutionalized violence, human-rights abuses, slander, corruption and oppression, not only targeting its own, but impressively in its sheer savagery, non-Muslim democracies in regular paroxysms of raging psychopathy?