THE MANY FACES OF JIHAD
by George Jonas
National Post
July 25, 2005

Many people regard the Middle East as the main battleground between
militant Islam and the non-Islamic world. There's even a view that the
central
conflict is between Israel and the Palestinians. If that conflict could be
resolved, the problems of radical Islam, terrorism and so on, would go
away.

I don't think so.

The struggle between the Islamic and non-Islamic world has been going on
for
some 1,400 years. In the words of the eminent Princeton scholar Professor
Bernard Lewis, it began "with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century,
and
has continued virtually to the present day."

For the first thousand years, Islam had been triumphant. Then the crescent
moon started waning. "For the past three hundred years," Professor Lewis
writes, "since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683
and the
rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, Islam has been on
the
defensive."

There have been lulls in the contest. The latest one lasted from 1918 to
1979.
This 60-year gap -- between the collapses of the Ottoman Empire and the
Peacock Throne of Iran -- wasn't so much in the struggle itself as in its
perception. A low-grade war was going on between the Islamic world and its
neighbours even during these 60 years, especially on the Indian
subcontinent
and in the Middle East. Still, when Islam's jihad picked up speed again
after
1979, it caught most Westerners by surprise.

"Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems
living peaceably with their neighbours," wrote Harvard professor Samuel
Huntington in his much-quoted book The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order. Conflicts were alternately smouldering and raging
again at Islam's borders all over the globe. Some flash points, such as
Kashmir
and Kosovo, were well-covered by the media. Others were hardly noted.

People were aware of the conflict between Pakistan and India over Kashmir
--
not surprisingly, since the clash threatened to erupt in a nuclear
exchange.
Muslim ambitions in the Balkans were also reported, though only in terms of
autonomy, not dominance. Islam's aspirations in south-eastern Europe were
supported by the West. NATO ended up going to war, first to secure Muslim
Bosnia's desire for independence from Yugoslavia, then Muslim Kosovo's
desire for secession or union with Muslim Albania.

Far less has been written about Dagestan, or Xinjiang, or Indonesia's North
Maluku and Central Sulawesi regions. Yet there would have been much to
write
about. In Indonesia, scores of Christians were murdered by Laskar Jihad, an
Indonesian Islamist movement, in 2001. In the village of Lata-Lata, 1,300
Christians were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Though
Lata-Lata's Christians were rescued after 18 months of captivity, many
others
were not so lucky.

Geographic Islam spans the globe. The continuum ends at Xinjiang in
northern
China. From there Islam's spheres of influence trace back northwest into
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and eventually the North Caucasus to regions such as
Dagestan and Chechnya, and southwest into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran,
Turkey and ultimately the Middle East. In the last 20 years, there have
been
clashes at every point along this immense frontier.

The bombs aren't going off in Madrid, London or Sharm el-Sheikh alone. The
Muslim population of Xinjiang is about 35 million, of whom some five
million
are Uighurs (also known as Taranchis or Kashgarliks). Some Uighurs have
come under the sway of militant Islam. According to China, Uighur
separatists
have been responsible for more than 200 violent incidents in the past 14
years.

Dagestan, a poor region of the Russian Federation, is at the other end of
the
Islamic continuum. It neighbours Chechnya. Its population of about two
million people, mainly Muslims, belong to more than 30 different indigenous
ethnic groups (Chechens, Laks, Avars, Dargins, etc.) speaking 27 different
languages. Dagestan's backwardness and tribal diversity are troubled
waters,
ideal for Islamist militants to fish in. Recurring terrorist incidents
related to
Chechnya and Dagestan culminated in a horrible mass murder of Beslan
schoolchildren in 2004.

A clash of civilizations may not be inevitable, but far more needs to be
resolved than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to avoid it. Arab-Jewish
hostility
isn't the root cause of the tension between the Islamic and non-Islamic
worlds.
Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo, Xinjiang and North Maluku are very distant from
the conflicts of the Middle East. Iranian theocracy, Saudi Wahhabism or
Pakistani-Afghan talibanism have nothing to do with the creation of the
Jewish state.

In 2001, Robert Fulford wrote:

"Of all the smug and foolish delusions that were part of conventional
wisdom
when I was young in the middle of the 20th century, two stand out in
memory.
One was the idea that nationalism was a 19th-century concept, on its last
legs.
The other was that religion, as a force in worldly affairs, was slowly but
inevitably fading away. At times I was stupid enough to believe both of
these
preposterous fallacies; but then, so was nearly everyone else."

This world of illusion ended when we re-entered the age of religious wars
in
Tehran 26 years ago. We heard no bang at the time. There was barely a
whimper.

© National Post 2005

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