An Islamic
State or a State of Islam?
- By Don Joshua
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Chasing a Mirage:
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The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State
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By Tarek Fatah
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John Wiley & Sons
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432 pages, $31.95
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ISBN-13:
978-0470841167
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http://www.chasingamirage.com
The target audience of
this book, namely Tarek Fatah’s
co-religionists will either be shocked and
dismayed; or fascinated and motivated by its
contents. However, chances are it is likely
that this book will be read more by
non-Muslims than Muslim, which would be a
shame.
Tarek has done his
community a favor and his reading public a
service by highlighting, at great personal
risk, the problems he sees with Islamic
fanaticism and the extremists desire to
force-feed the illusion of an Islamic State on
an unsuspecting world.
This book is worth
reading because it is well-written,
well-documented, and reaches out into
uncharted waters. Hot-button items such as
Human Rights in the Islamic context; the
Apostasy Bill in Pakistan; Sharia laws; the
Hijab controversy; and Jihad are discussed
boldly and intelligently by the author. A
section of this book dealing with the genesis
of the Islamic State will appeal to history
buffs. The research he has done is impressive
but this section is heavy reading with long,
hyphenated names and gory details.
The thesis of the book is
the distinction Tarek makes between Islamists,
who work towards the creation of an Islamic
State; and Muslims, who live in a state of
spirituality. To explain this, he offers the
example of a multi-faith sub-continent which
split up on religious grounds. He avers that
Muslims in Pakistan live in an Islamic State
governed by the Sharia Laws; while the Muslims
in India live in a state of Islam following
the tenets of their religion as citizens of a
secular country. Interestingly in 1947,
India was partitioned to give the Indian
Muslims a homeland but, as Tarek astutely
observes “Today, 150 million of South Asia’s
Muslims live in Pakistan, another 140 million
live in Bangla Desh, and 160 million in India
yet the apologists of the 1930-40s Muslim
segregationist movement that splintered
India’s Muslims into three countries celebrate
this catastrophe as a victory.”
One of his more
fascinating chapters is the case study he has
made of the Palestine-Israel problem which has
been a global sore point for many years. He
makes an excellent presentation showing that
this problem could have been resolved had the
Geneva Accord been implemented in 2003. Both
representatives of the two communities “showed
a readiness to cede a part of their dream” and
“there was a realization that both sides had
to compromise, and they did.” The Accord
addressed the tough questions of legitimate
and secure borders; shared sovereignty of the
city of Jerusalem; and the question of
Palestine refugees. In evaluating this, one
commentator admitted that “the Geneva Accord
was not a plan of dreamers. It was not a
Utopia, rather a concrete plan, precisely
negotiated, almost maniacally meticulous.”
If the Accord had been implemented and not got
lost in the polemics of the dispute it would
have removed one of the major stumbling blocks
between the two Abrahamic religions and the
animosity against the West.
Tarek isolates himself
from the “mosque establishment” in
acknowledging that the community problems and
“the pain we suffer is caused mostly by
self-inflicted wounds.”
It is Tarek’s contention
that the “mosque establishment” is making
Muslims into Islamists, who seek an Islamic
State through violence and terrorism. He
deplores the teaching that makes susceptible,
young Muslims thinking that it is good to die
for God. Killing in the name of religion is
not what clerics should teach. What is
important is developing an intimate personal
relationship with God, based on individual
judgment on what constitutes piety.
He decries the attitude
of the Muslim immigrant who comes to the West
but “seemingly refuses to integrate or
assimilate as part of Western society, yet
wishes to stay in their midst.” He has
difficulty understanding the mind-set of a
Muslim who is willing to share in the benefits
of a Western secular civil society but then
works to destroy it. An extreme example of
this is probably the 9/11 attack on the World
Trade Centre in 2001, which was perpetrated by
Muslim youth, some of whom had grown up in the
USA.
A true Muslim, according
to Tarek, is one who is guided by Islamic
spiritual values and it is difficult to equate
this with the killing of non-believers as an
article of faith. Is God so impotent or weak
that he needs the assistance of men to get rid
of unbelievers? And who made the others
“unbelievers”? Surely God who is Almighty
and the Creator of all things made us all -
both those born in the faith and those outside
the faith. Tarek points out to those who wear
their religion on their sleeves and segregate
believers from non-believers that, “The way
out (of this trap) is to identify all of
humanity as the Ummah, as God’s children, and
not think of ourselves as apart from all
others.”
Most of the arguments
presented by Tarek are in a thoughtful,
reasoned way but it is in the chapter devoted
to Jihad and specifically the “lesser” jihad
(war in the cause of Islam) that he is most
forthright. He states unequivocally that the
Islamists motivation to wage jihad is not a
defensive war but perhaps one of revenge in
response to the Crusades, or as “an outburst
on seeing themselves as unable to compete in
or contribute to a globalized world.”
It takes courage to write
a book like this. After making an honest
appraisal of the malaise that affects Muslims
he makes a plea to them to “oppose the
extremists and present the more humane and
tolerant face of our community” to the world.
His may be just a voice in the wilderness but
as Mother Teresa said in context, “What we are
doing is only a drop in the ocean but the
ocean would be worse but for that one drop.”
Tarek is a person who is
strong in his faith but disillusioned by the
way the world views Islam. It would be a
shame if his book shared the fate of the books
by Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani, which were
“unfairly dismissed as attention-seeking
apologists for the West.”
Throughout his life and
through this book, Tarek has sought to make a
difference. He is concerned that the young
men of his community may be led by Islamic
scholars and clerics to “blame others for our
shortcomings” and seek violently to establish
a mythical Islamic State. He hopes that
those who read his book will be secure enough
in their faith to stand up and be counted so
that the imbalance between the Islamists and
Muslims is tilted in favour of the true
Muslims. Maybe this is the wake-up call.