The origin of total war on freedom of political Islam, the market and secularization
The ones posted here are excerpts of the book “the West and its enemies”, released by Rubbettino, written by Luciano Pelicans, sociologist, emeritus professor at Luiss Guido Carli University and a columnist for the Gazette. And ‘from now on all libraries.
The end of the ideological war waged by the revolutionary mass movements against liberal civilization has led the political scientist Francis Fukuyama to proclaim, in an essay that sparked a lively international debate, which we were on the eve of ” coming of the Spirit supremacy postulated by Hegel “and the” end of history “. Western civilization had won on all fronts. Its ideas, its values, its institutions were to prevail everywhere. Communism had lost permanently the challenge, starting from the conquest of the Winter Palace, had launched the liberal society. (…) So before the peoples of the Earth there was a prospect: to rely on the economic and political liberalism. Therefore – concluded Fukuyama -, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the consequent disappearance of the proletarian revolution myth, the prediction made by Daniel Bell in the fifties – the “end of ideology” – had been massively supported: the world had ceased to be an arena in which the military clashed alternative models of society and mutually incompatible and values and Western institutions set out to become the values and institutions of all mankind.
rELATED If Fukuyama had merely pointed out the bankruptcy planetary of communism, most likely would not have elicited any response. (…) But it is not clear that all mankind is heading towards the American way of life. On the contrary, many phenomena of macroscopic size force us to believe that the pacification of the planet Earth in the name of the values and institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism is a more like a wishful thinking perspective in a reasoned and reasonable prognosis. Among these phenomena, the most eye-catching is undoubtedly the Islamic fundamentalism, which represented, even before 11 September 2001 – when the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed by suicide terrorists of Al Qaeda – the most striking refutation of the thesis Fukuyama. It, in fact, since the Iranian revolution (1979), appeared on the scene as a declaration of war against Western civilization, which refuses every institution and every value, from representative democracy to the market, from individual freedom to the secular state . After proclaiming State Sharia law, the Ayatollah Khomeini did not just raise a granite barrier to prevent the spiritual pollution of the Umma (the community of true believers); did more radical: he elaborated an ambitious plan to bring Islam to the head of all the dispossessed peoples of the Earth, replacing in that role the marxleninista revolutionary communism. This grand plan was expressed most clearly in the letter that he, shortly before his death, sent to Gorbachev. In it, the charismatic leader of the Iranian hierocracy asked the Secretary of the CPSU to recognize publicly that communism was now reduced to a historical fossil, because, being devoid of a spiritual principle, had the same problem that was dragging into nothing materialistic society based on worship of the god of money; and also recognize that now on the world stage that remained was one force able to pursue the goal of freeing the people who were in the “prison of the West and the Great Satan”: Islam.
such a program constitutes a real zealot reaction of the Sacred against the process of secularization. In fact, the values and institutions of Modernity are rejected because they are based on a conception of life devoid of any reference to Transcendence. Not surprisingly, therefore, to note that the ideological construction of the Islamists is based on the contrast between the post-Koranic story and that pre-Islamic. It uses the concept of jahiliyya – the dark and unholy previous era Revelation of Rasul Allah – to connote as “pagan” Western cultural products secularized. According to the ideologues of Islamic fundamentalism, the moral crisis facing humanity is the logical and inevitable consequence of secularism and materialism. Rejecting the revelation, the West has chosen the “path of Nothing” characterized by the idolatrous worship of reason and matter. But, while the traditionalists they just ask that the people of Dar al-Islam is respectful of the principles of the sacred tradition (salafiyya) and you do not do contaminate the “impure” customs of the peoples living under the tyranny of the Great Satan, the fundamentalists are beyond: declare bluntly that Islam must come out of his defensive position and must militarize to conquer and destroy the foundations of “society without God”, an indispensable premise for “restore the sense of Gemeinschaft”. (…)
It ‘clear that we are facing a war cry launched against modern civilization, guilty of having turned their backs on God and the prophetic revelation; and it is equally clear that this other war cry that is not the revival of what was the program of the Muslim Brotherhood – the association founded in 1928 by the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, mother of all forms of fundamentalism in the Islamic world – fixed from their theoretical maximum, Sayyid Qutb, in these terms: “Islam is forced to fight the objective that is his own, namely the guidance of mankind. The war is an individual obligation, against obstacles to preaching, but under the collective form of a small group, organized and deeply cemented. Opponents are also of individuals, grouped into classes, into states, in coalitions. Jihad, in reaction, it is therefore absolutely necessary in all its breadth. And a worldwide Jihad, permanent. So being a Muslim means to be a warrior, a warrior sincere permanent communities, ready to be used or not by God, if he wants and when he wants, because he alone is the head of the battle. “
Therefore, it is not enough to say that the goal of the fundamentalists is the re-Islamization of our societies and states of the Dar al-Islam; It must also point out that their program is far more ambitious and disturbing. They want to wage a real war of religion to conquer the whole world, and establish the rule of Sharia – the Sacred Law, eternal and immutable – of all humanity. In other words, it is in addition to demand the restoration of the Dar al-Adl – the House of Justice, as it was proclaimed by the Prophet -, want to destroy the source of pollution of the Umma: the West pay as secularized. Hence the double face in which today are committed fundamentalists: against the “apostates” who, while proclaiming themselves Muslims, in fact they are “corrupt and corrupting governments” as “do not observe the law of God”; and against what Osama bin Laden has branded as the Great disbeliever America, maximum power of the imperialist system of domination that they want to raze. So, their holy war – jihad – is both an internal war – namely a war between Muslims “that the stakes are the definition of Islam”; more precisely, a war unleashed by the religious to snatch the power to the military – and an international war conducted with the only weapon the Mujahideen – fighters of the holy war, dominated by the burning desire to become “martyrs of the faith” (shuhada ) – have – global terrorism – and with the declared goal of destroying the wicked “infidel world”, from which emanate the miasma materialistic that are poisoning the Umma.
in these circumstances, it is understandable why Islamic fundamentalism has been called communism of the twenty-first century, as well as, at that time, communism was defined the twentieth century Islam. Not unlike the marxleninismo, Islamic fundamentalism appears on the scene as a revolutionary movement animated by the certainty of owning an ecumenical character saving message; and, not unlike the marxleninismo, believed to have rightduty to lead a ruthless permanent war against the West. And it is, of course, of a total war, which must be conducted by all means and in all locations, until the triumph of Truth revealed and the establishment of the Government of God.
Of course, l ‘ emergence of fundamentalist movements does not mean the point that Islam as such has declared war on the West. Fundamentalism is a particular interpretation of the Koran, whose legitimacy is disputed by Muslims themselves. The fact is, though, that the vision of the fundamentalist world – that is, political ideology that divides the world into in-groups and out-groups of Islam of others, perceived as enemies to fight until their annihilation – has largely spread throughout the Islamic world. It so happens that the jihadists – the activists of the Party of Allah, ready to sacrifice their lives to strike the agents and symbols of the Great Satan – are – thanks to the rise of the Islamic State (Isis) – a fearsome force, not only because they are determined to use the most ruthless and devious means to achieve their own purposes, but also because it expresses the intense resentment of Muslims in front of the arrogant and imperialistic Western civilization. A resentment whose roots date back to the time when the peoples of the Dar al-Islam – which for over a thousand years they had lived in the narcissistic belief that their civilization was the best form of social organization ever appeared on Earth – were forced to acknowledge that – by virtue of the fact that the West had achieved a superiority. Material at the same time humiliating and dangerous – the world had become “a paradise for infidels and the hell of the believers.” The nature of the challenge in front of which found themselves Muslim peoples, starting from the moment when the European powers began to extend their tentacles to the Dar al-Islam, it will become clear once you keep in mind that what characterizes so strong modern Western civilization is not only his formidable technological equipment that requires other civilizations-take the path of ” imitative upgrade “to avoid being subjected; it is also and especially the formidable radioactive power of his spiritual culture, which knows no limits whatsoever. Modernity is a constitutively imperialist civilization, whose central institution is the market. The market, former definitione, has no borders: it is an institution in worldwide vocation, which tends to refer to impersonal imperatives of logic catallactics everything in its path – interests, values, beliefs, institutions, traditions, established practices, etc. . – And proceeds as a huge cultural avalanche that grows on itself. And, indeed, wherever capitalism has penetrated, it produced cataclysmic changes that have spared nothing and no one. Because of his “destructive creativity” and his irrepressible self-propelling dynamism, all the peoples of the Earth have been forcibly incorporated into a single historical destiny. The result was that Western civilization has taken to besiege other cultures-and has placed them facing a challenge of enormous proportions, whose essence is as follows: or find an “answer” adequate or be degraded to the status of colonies of the Center capitalistico.Un such phenomenon is an absolute historical novelty. (…) And ‘why the permanent cultural aggression is what characterizes the relations between the West and the East for centuries. It ‘true that you left the scene colonialism in its politico-military form; but it is not out of the picture the cultural colonialism, so that the Eastern peoples, despite having gained their independence, were struggling with a tremendous “challenge”. They are located in front of a allogeneic culture that tends to overwhelm them with its impressive flow of technical, of goods, of messages, symbols and values; and this can not but profoundly alter their traditional way of life and the image they have of themselves. It ‘happened so that the Western cultural invasion was not limited to make havoc of the institutions, customs, values that he found in his way; also he tortured the men, depriving them of their ancestral habitat and condemning them to live in a world that has gradually turned into an alien reality or even hostile. Capitalism, attacking the companies put beyond the reach of its endogenous development area, has uprooted millions of human beings, turning them into a gigantic mass alienated and, thereby, resentful. These millions of individuals – scattered in all cultural areas where the market system has been presented as an aggressive and destructive power exogenous – constitute, for generations, the “external proletariat” of Western civilization.
It happens so that, even today, two things characterize in a strong way the existential condition of Muslim peoples struggling with what they call sadmat al-hadatha (the trauma of modernity): their immense sense of anger and frustration and the fact that they live the West as a presence at once oppressive and intrusive. Oppressive, for its overwhelming material superiority; intrusive, because Modernity constitutes a permanent threat to the traditional forms of life of the Dar al-Islam. These, for Muslims, are of divine origin and, as such, can not be the subject of critical analysis, or, even less, can be changed. Sharia is the “way” that God, through his Prophet, opened before men, who can not deviate from it without committing an inexcusable sin. In Islam, law and religion are indistinguishable, so that science judges, being the study and knowledge of the Divine Law, is a theological science. The making of Muslim law a sacred right, inextricably linked to religious tradition. And this is not a component or dimension of life, which regulates some issues and other matters which are excluded: it is a system of rules that surrounds and shapes our entire existence. Its jurisdiction is total; at the limit, even totalitarian. In the Koranic religion “the binomial Church-State” makes no sense. Not exist – and can not exist – Two distinguishable reality. religious authority and political authority are the same thing. Hence the stubborn resistance from Muslim societies to modernity. Modernity, in fact, means, first and foremost, “life without sacred values” or, at least, strict separation between the political realm and the realm of religion. In typical fashion, the modern state is a secular state, ie. means a State which, on the one hand, is not identified with a particular religious belief, and, on the other, recognizes the legitimacy of all religions. It, therefore, is the exact opposite of the state as it has always been conceived in the Dar al-Islam: an institution with the inescapable function of ensuring the impersonal rule of the Divine Law, then, as the political expression of the same religion. Hence the judgment of Khomeini: “Islam is political or not.” A judgment is perfectly in line with Islamic tradition, for which religion and state – din wa Dawlah – are one reality, so that any attempt to separate the temporal power from spiritual power can not. not be considered a wicked away from the Divine Law, eternal and unchanging. It also means that there is no incompatibility in principle between the Sharia and Modernity. This is inseparable from the process of secularization, which ended the organic link between the state and religion and turned it into a private matter. But a reduced religion to a private matter is precisely there. that penalty takers Muslims can not accept, because it implies the abandonment of the Sharia as state law.
It can not be surprising, therefore, to note that – with the exception of the Turkish Republic founded by Kemal Ataturk on a complete secularism – in the countries of the Dar al-Islam, the secular intelligentsia. a small minority, unable to channel the masses towards modernity. Especially since Modernity has made intrusion into the lives of Muslim peoples not only as secularized civilization, centered on Enlightenment reason and individual liberty, but also as an imperialist power, animated by a boundless desire for domination and exploitation. Hence the fact that the aggression of Western cultural trauma caused in the Islamic world a state of endemic crisis.
The imperialist nature of Modernity in recent decades has been powerfully intensified by globalization, that is, by the spread – because of the huge transport cost reduction and communications and of reduction of artificial barriers that prevented the free international movement of goods, services, capital, and knowledge workers – the catallactics logic; which it made it even more. penetrating and threatening Western cultural pressure on the peoples of the Dar al-Islam. In fact, the phenomenon of globalization is not, properly speaking, a historical novelty. Capitalism has always had a global vocation, in the sense that its objective logic of development tends to turn the whole world into a single, huge Weltmarkt governed by impersonal laws of supply and demand whose irresistible dynamism makes “all things sacred is desecrated “(K. Marx and F. Engels). It so happens that the bourgeois spirit – this “deadly enemy of the sacred” (Berdyaev) – takes to erode the traditional spiritual foundations of the social order. It penetrates everywhere, generates the “disenchantment of the world” and, consequently, religion ceases to be the sole regulator of human life (individual and collective). A perspective that can not be judged impious by those who live by faith and faith. Hence the fact that Modernity appears to them as the Great Satan, the tempter and devious enemy of man and of God. And if today the ideologists and activists of Islamic fundamentalism see grow day by day, the audience to which they submit their , us. It happens because behind the peoples of Dar al-Islam that there are no failures along the way that would lead to the cancellation – or, at least, reduction – of the scientific gap, technological and economic separating them from the industrial society. In particular, the “Arab socialism” is miserably wrecked, leaving the field open to the preaching of those who indicate in the West imperialist and an atheist because of the growing frustration in which they struggle Muslim peoples and that – as a remedy to their humiliating condition “external proletariat” – calling for the restoration of Sacred Tradition Immutable, the rejection of everything that is somehow connected to the intrusive Modernity and the permanent mobilization against the West. Brief: fundamentalists intend to solve the painful identity crisis in which there are the Muslim people, sparking a global holy war whose objective is the destruction of those powers that have turned the “world of true believers” in hell.
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