WSJ – Tesi Melik Kaylan,
scrittore di origini turche, in USA:
Contro il
“colonialismo” della versione wahabita dell’islam (Arabia),
che si impone nel mondo
islamico con la forza dei petrodollari sauditi,
sostenere versioni
locali islam, e nazionalismi progressisti filo-occidentali.
Islam è molto variegato,
con numerose versioni locali e regionali.
Campagna di
“colonizzazione” wahabita cerca di imporre la sua ortodossia con la sua forza
finanziaria
In Bosnia, Kosovo i
wahabiti hanno costretto a togliere tutte le lapidi dai cimiteri, togliere
decorazioni da moschee (iconoclasti), se volevano avere finanziamenti per
ricostruzione. Hanno dovuto vincere forte resistenza popolare.
In Asia Centrale (Uzbekistan,
Kirgizistan e Turkmenistan), dove tradizioni islamiche si erano assopite
sotto l’URSS, sono i wahabiti legati ad Al Qaeda a fornire scuole
religiose.
Waabiti attaccano
tradizioni locali come ignoranza del vero islam, imponendo i loro dogmi e puritanesimo.
Da Asia centrale partì “scuola spiritualista” di Gurdjieff, che mescolava
misticismo sufi, sciamanesimo e danza, e che si diffuse in Europa all’inizio
del secolo scorso.
In Turchia
rivitalizzareed esportare il misticismo poetico, ecc.
Occorre sostenere la
rinascita delle tradizioni locali, sia nella teologia che nei riti e costumi,
contrapponendole al colonialismo reazionario wahabita.
Li
accuseranno di essere collusi con l’imperialismo? “La diffusione dell’islam
fondamentalista fu anch’essa promossa dall’Occidente via penisola arabica per
ragioni politiche” [tesi da verificare]. Ora è divenuto forza colonialista
di forza propria.
Wahhabi Colonialism
By MELIK
KAYLAN
September
18, 2006; Page A18
Pope
Benedict XVI recently cited a Byzantine-era critique of Islam, and the usual
hubbub of outrage ensued. Various self-appointed and official Islamic spokesmen
(they’re always men), including the head of Turkey’s religious affairs
directorate (why does Turkey have one?), responded sharply in the name of their
faith. One might argue that a confident, evolved religion welcomes all kinds of
open debate. Or one might intone gravely that the West continues to mishandle
its relations with the umma — the sphere of active Muslim believers — with
the implied assumption that there is such a unified entity of tens of millions,
and that they all feel outrage in the same way at the same time. Islamist
polemicists, in particular, cherish the archaic umma concept, evoking, as it
does, a premodern utopia of monolithic harmony.
Many in the
West buy the notion, with its familiar en bloc echoes of the proletariat. But
should the rest of us believe them? Do we insult Muslims by buying into it,
too, or insult them the more by considering it antiquated and bogus?
Mishandling and
misinterpreting Muslim sentiments appears to be a habit we acquired in the
post-Soviet age. Until then the West couldn’t go wrong. We didn’t need to know
too much about radical Islam because we knew this much: Marxism was a shared
enemy because it imposed atheism on subject populations, and primitive Islamic
fervor worked in our favor. During the Cold War years, the West did indeed
encourage the spread of a unitary and evangelical form of the religion wherever
possible, as a counter to secular values. We have belatedly realized that to
the doctrinaire Islamist ideologues, the Wahhabists, the Sayyid Qutbs, the
Muslim Brotherhoods and now their bin Ladenite inheritors, modernism, too, was
a kind of atheism.
Arabian
fundamentalists concluded that if post-medieval progress in the world made
their values unworkable, then it was the world’s fault, and the world should be
stopped in its tracks. This is a bit like the Flat Earth society resolving to
retro-authenticate its views by nuking the earth flat. The Islamists found in
Afghanistan that this could be done, after a fashion: Reduce the environment to
premodern conditions, and, miraculously, the ideology applies precisely — as
it did wherever nature, not tamed by progress, had to be tamed by repressive social
discipline. In some places, such as parts of Africa and Pakistan’s tribal
areas, a weak central state offered ready conditions for that ideology. In
other places, like Chechnya, Palestine and now Iraq, chaos needed encouragement
with car- and-suicide bombings. There’s nothing new or particularly Islamic to
this prescription. Remember Mao Zedong’s revolutionary slogan: "Chaos
under the heavens and all is right with the world."
An
apparently impossible predicament, then, confronts Western policy makers today:
whether to uphold corrupt and often hostile tyrannies, as in Egypt and
Uzbekistan — or to topple them and open the door to religious extremists
applying their iron dialectic. A terrible inevitability is born, so it seems. In fact, a way
through exists, but the West must quickly shed ignorance of matters Islamic.
As many
Muslim apologists contend, though often for disingenuous purposes, the
Islamic world is indeed not monolithic. It remains highly fissiparous and
regional, inmixed with a myriad of localized customs, superstitions and
hagiologies. The indigenous Islam of Central Asia, for example, combining
Sufi mysticism, shamanism and dance, gave rise to the spiritualist école
of Gurdjieff, et al., that swept through Europe early last century. Until
recently, a branch of it held sway in Chechnya, where men danced the
ecstatic zikhr circle dance on holy days — until, that is, al Qaeda crept
in just 10 years ago.
When
fundamentalists confront such diversity, they do so with dogmatic force,
huge resources and a fully schematized set of ideas. They bully local Islam
into puritan uniformity. In Bosnia and Kosovo, whenever
Saudi and Gulf agents offered funds to rebuild war-damaged communities, they
insisted first on flattening cemeteries, destroying tombstones and whitewashing
mosque décor, on the principle that pure iconophobic Islam abhorred the worship
of idols. (This, despite the ubiquity of giant-sized idolatrous portraits,
in their own countries, of Gulf and Saudi emirs on public walls — not to mention
currency notes.)
One can
imagine the initial distress followed by resistance from local communities
against such arrogant sacrilege from outside — a resistance that, alas,
fades with pressure and neglect. In the Balkans, inhabitants had to be
restrained, weeping, from forcefully defending their family graves. This is
where the opportunity lies for the West to break the extreme Islamists’
strategy for indoctrination and for sowing jihad upon chaos. Both in Western
mosques and in the Islamic world, the reintroduction of regional forms of
belief and practice should be fostered.
* * *
In such
Central Asian countries as Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan,
where sub-al Qaeda groups now clandestinely offer the only full-fledged
religious instruction available to the populace, national leaders should be
encouraged instead to revive their own indigenous practices (long dormant under
Soviet rule), to arm their citizens with a regional pride in their organic
Muslim traditions, even to export them to nearby Afghanistan — where such
practices endured until the Soviet invasion. In Turkey, the vast heritage
of poetic mysticism accumulated in the Seljuk and Ottoman dynasties,
visible now only in the Rumi-Dervish order, should be revitalized and
exported to neighbors (assuming the religious affairs directorate agrees,
of course). In Central Asia, Indonesia, the Philippine Islands and elsewhere, Wahhabists
should no longer expect to meet with no counterargument when, as a prelude to
conversion, they accuse the locals of ignorance and godlessness. They
should be confronted with a literate, individuated and self-confident Islam,
deeply rooted in local history and all the more resistant to their
internationalist, one-size-fits-all template.
In such
conditions, local Muslims will also defend the progress and development they
have achieved nationally, thereby short-circuiting the messianic
return-to-rubble logic of jihadists. To the argument that such
initiatives imposed from above or initiated in the West will be dismissed as
imperialist or collusionist, there’s a simple answer. The spread of
fundamentalist Islam was itself fostered by the West via the Arabian peninsula
for political reasons. It has become the ultimate, invasively colonial
force and aims to subjugate the entire umma to its tenets.
Mr. Kaylan,
born in Istanbul, is a writer in New York.