According to the NYT, the prolonged internecine fighting in Iraq may be having an unintended consequence – rather than exciting long term religious fanatacism, it appears to be suppressing it:
After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach…
“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”
Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”
While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught in the act of smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its wearer. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold…
In Falluja, a Sunni city west of Baghdad that had been overrun by Al Qaeda, Sheik Khalid al-Mahamedie, a moderate cleric, said fathers now came with their sons to mosques to meet the instructors of Koran courses. Families used to worry most about their daughters in adolescence, but now, the sheik said, they worry more about their sons.
“Before, parents warned their sons not to smoke or drink,” said Mohammed Ali al-Jumaili, a Falluja father with a 20-year-old son. “Now all their energy is concentrated on not letting them be involved with terrorism.”
Interesting.
I wonder what the consequences might have been if congressional leadership had successfully opposed the surge last spring, or brought coaltion forces home before the right conditions were set for security and – hopefully – eventual national and political reconciliation.
I really hope I live long enough to see all of this weighed on the scales of dispassionate history rather than ardent partisanship.
An army that has fought and bled to free the children of others has opened the minds of their parents. Parents who love their children just as much as we do.
When you send your very best individuals to help others they don’t even know, the worth of the individual is affirmed at the most personal level. A basic, emotional level that cannot be erased by partisanship.
Whatever future the Iraqis make for themselves, this may be our longest lasting gift to them.
And our greatest victory.
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the russians love their children too
Sting was right. He just had the wrong part of the world.
Profound, CPT J.
Thank you.
Looks like they don’t want to live in the 9th century, either. I read somewhere that Iraqis have the highest literacy rate and are generally the most educated among Arab state’s peoples. Perhaps education can be a bad thing for religious extremism ’round those parts, hopefully.
Iraqis certainly don’t seem to be so well-educated. I hear about 70% can read enough to get common signs, maybe 30% can read to nearly high school level, and a few percent are college-educated, but even many of them purchase their diploma rather than get educated.
I’ve run into many people here that I suspect cannot read Arabic. I would say that Egypt is likely to have better literacy rates, Lebanon probably as well, perhaps even Syria.
This seems to be a perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. If this can help bring even more stability to the situation in Iraq, then G-d bless. Pun intended.
“Why would the jihadists make them disenchanted with Islam if their fight has nothing to do with religion in the first place? Unexplained, of course. ”
Quite a different take on this article at Jihadwatch (http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020184.php)
Spencer is right, though. All through the article is that strange dichotomy, in which sharia/jihad is not caused by Islam, and yet the religion itself is discredited in the eyes of those quoted by the implementation of sharia and jihad.
Take Sara in Basra. Is she free to ditch the headwrap? Free to head to another town, another country? Hell, is she free to leave her house without the supervisory male of her own family? How did this reporter find her, and who was around when she spoke to the reporter? And if her identity was found out, what would happen to her? She might not be gang-raped by Saddam’s sons now, that much the war brought her. Now she gets to be gang-raped and honor-killed by Khomeini’s heirs. Somehow, I don’t consider that much of a success.
It’s all good and well that fathers are trying to keep their sons from running off to jihad, since in Iraq that means death in the near term. That doesn’t mean that jihad is rejected, or Islam is rejected. In fact, Sharia (depending on school) does not allow young men to go to jihad without their parents’ permission. And while jihad is compulsory, there are specific exceptions in cases where there is no way the mujahidin can win the battle. Then it is better to cut a deal (“hudna”) and wait for a better opportunity.
In other words, Iraqis are exercising that small discretion in not joining the gangs that are getting clobbered by the USA, but really, I don’t see anything here to tell me that anything has changed.