The two opposite poles of the global Islamic movement

Abu Dharr

Shawwal 22, 1431 2010-10-01

Opinion

by Abu Dharr (Opinion, Crescent International Vol. 39, No. 8, Shawwal, 1431)

Deep down inside the recesses of the Islamic movement there is what one may call a dichotomy — two mutually exclusive subclasses of the worldwide Islamic movement. One of them is centered on Islamic Iran and the other around what is today called “Saudi” Arabia.

Deep down inside the recesses of the Islamic movement there is what one may call a dichotomy — two mutually exclusive subclasses of the worldwide Islamic movement. One of them is centered on Islamic Iran and the other around what is today called “Saudi” Arabia. This animation is so intense and profound but no one wants to express it in public. It is limited to the inner circles of the inner circles of the polite and well-educated members of the worldwide Islamic movement. In a sense, the active and informed Muslims who belong to one or the other branch of this umbrella Islamic movement are alienated from each other because their individual organizational hierarchies have to answer to either one of these two divergent and many times mutually exclusive official umpires. Currently there is a detente between the government in Arabia and the government in Persia; both, of course, affirming in strong terms their Islamic credentials. But are they both legitimate points of reference for the larger Islamic movement in the world? Our humble but strong opinion is an emphatic NO. We say this with the support of facts on the ground and the record that speaks for itself.

In the first demonstration of facts, there is the Islamic political willpower in Iran that has, in word and in deed, taken on the imperialist and Zionist superstructure of kufr and shirk, and their combined might. Because of this, the loudmouths and bullhorns of racist Zionism and socioeconomic class imperialism are frothing at the mouth. Their corporate media fumes with the same, now tiresome, innuendo against the leadership of the Islamic state in Iran because of its self-willed and unwavering opposition to both militarist and political Zionism. This fearless and daring position by the Islamic leadership in Iran should remind every active Muslim who knows his history of the Yahudi forerunners (of today’s Zionists) in Arabia 14 centuries ago — the same ones who were also seething with rancor and conconcting countermoves against the Prophet (pbuh) when Islamic self-rule was on the rise in Arabia at the time.

Contrast Islamic Iran with the official Saudi sponsorship of a grand plan to reconcile the dispossessed Palestinians with their Israeli overlords. The official Saudi creatures and their unofficial Egyptian and Jordanian tools are what they call the “moderates”. And, who said there are no “moderate Muslims”? The real power-brokers in Arabia and its extensions into Egypt and Jordan among other countries along with that strain of the Islamic movement that answers to royal Riyadh are all showing excessive and compulsive concern with a slowly-but-surely consolidating front that will eventually move all the Muslims from Central Asia to the Mediterranean in a wave of military determination to pluck the regime of Zionist Israel out of existence. The American hegemon who went into Iraq and Afghanistan, giving both Israel and Saudi Arabia a decade of wiggle time, is beginning to pack his bags and gradually but surely moving out of Iraq and eventually out of Afghanistan. We call forth the wits and wisdom of this long paralyzed branch of the Islamic movement that has been sheltered and weltered by the financially obese and mentally anorexic Saudis to open its eyes and see the light!

This past month the top news item from Arabia concerned the $60 billion dollar military contract that the Saudi halfwits signed with the American military-industrial-banking complex. What an insult to every living and thinking Muslim everywhere! Are the Muslims in Arabia so brainless as to be unable to begin to build a military industry of their own? Let them begin with manufacturing their own guns and bullets and then proceed from there to manufacturing their own tanks and aircraft. This is also an insult to the larger Muslim population of the world; do the Saudi statesmen and representatives not believe that the 1.8 billion Muslims in the world are capable of initiating their own military industry that will free them from being dependent on their enemies for purposes of self-defense? And at the end of the day all these weapons purchases will end up injecting much needed cash into the corporate coffers of weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Grumman and Northrop among others as well as the predatory policies of imperialist occupation and invasion forces — the ones that occupy Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan to be precise. We can almost hear their chief executive officers say behind closed doors “Thank God for Saudi Arabia”. Of course, Saudi Arabia returns the thanks to the US by making sure that its contingent of the worldwide Islamic movement does not forget that the USA [and even Israel] are Ahl al-Kitab!

Contrast this Saudi capitalist cash-cow with an independent Islamic Iran that has crossed the rubicon on its way to becoming the first independent Islamic nuclear powerhouse in the world. The quality and quantity of enriched uranium in Iran this coming year will be enough for the Islamic Republic to kiss all Western offers of “uranium exchanges” good-bye.

Step by step, there is a serious behind-the-scenes Euro-American discussion and at times argument to factor in Iran as the up-and-coming undisputed regional power in the “Middle East” and to factor out Saudi Arabia as the undisputed last-ditch stand by the old-school of political imperialist political thought that seeks to prevent Iran from becoming the acknowledged regional superpower. We have to remind the pre-Imam Khomeini “Shi‘i” faithful that these audacious and resolute strides are not attributable to a “theological” or “historical” superiority that some diehards never tire of expressing to the outside world. No indeed; it is the result of the hard work of the sons of the revolution who never forgot the eight years of imposed war and all the characters involved in those eight years, including the war financiers — the crude oil Arabians.

Listen, O sons of the broad Islamic movement in the world! If we were to rip this whole issue to its bare bones we could agree, I hope, to see that there is a real core conflict that puts the Islamic Republic of Iran on one side and the Zionist regime of Israel on the other. The rest are, let us say, “fillers”. The number one supporter of racist Israel is the United States of America. Any run-of-the-mill Muslim knows that. And the number one supporter of Islamic Iran is Syria, in the shaping up of the not-too-distant firestorm between an Israel of Zionism and an Iran of Islam.

In the distorted view of things within the Saudi sponsored wing of the Islamic movement the Americans turn out to be Ahl al-Kitab and nasara while the Syrians turn out to be kafirs and zindiqs. Before this begins to strain the minds of the indoctrinated Saudi types, would it not be fair if we were to look at how the Ahl al-Kitab American officials came down on all the Islamic fringes that are under the Saudi umbrella. Washington even went as far as demanding the Saudi embassy in Washington, DC close down its religious department which employed scores of da‘is and is said to have had a budget of scores of millions of dollars annually. The American Ahl al-Kitab officials are going to the Arabian nation-states — tribal states to be more precise — and to other Islamic countries and rearranging their educational curricula, seeing to it that all Qur’anic ayat and Prophetic hadiths mentioning Yahud in a negative way are deleted from textbooks.

Can we compare that to a country that has accommodated Palestinian fighters and Hizbullah to the detriment of Israel? Don’t rush to conclusions; no one here is trying to paint a rosy picture of the Syrian regime, we know it has its own agenda against Islamic self-determination in Syria and it should be addressed at the appropriate level. But in the larger scheme of things, the Islamic Republic in Iran has managed to deploy specific Syrian tactics to help with a groundswell program that intends to place all their common resources and assets into the up-and-coming fight with the Zionist tormentors of the Holy Land and its original population.

If the leading light and the momentous policies come from Islamic Iran then what is the Saudi Arabian government’s problem with a free trade agreement between Tehran and Damascus? Why are the Saudi national security functionaries so upset with Tehran and Ankara raising their economic ties to higher and unprecedented levels? Why do we sense nervousness in the Saudi financed Arabian media when Islamic Iran declares that it will begin to refine its own petroleum? One would think that the Saudi lords would feel a pinch of ardor and eagerness to do the same; but no, the Saudi officials are downright resentful and begrudging.

The Saudi royalists are hoping against hope that the Euro-American economic measures against certain banks belonging to the Islamic Republic will pay off. But the brave leadership in Iran called upon the people to adopt a “resistance economy”. And when Wall Street and Western economies have been gripped by structural problems such as inflation, unemployment, currency erosions, recessions looming into depressions, the economy in Iran with all its loopholes has weathered these troubled economic times with relative success. According to some sources, when the American economy in the past two years has been in a free-fall the overall economy of the Islamic State has grown by about one-third.

Its economy is strong enough to make Russia think twice before it decides to cancel a $13 billion S-300 missile system deal. If Islamic Iran’s economy were not doing well Russia would not have had second thoughts about canceling that deal, especially when it is prodded to do so by the US on generous terms. Add to this Islamic Iran’s policies that nudged Syria — its strategic ally — to acquire the Yakhnut surface-to-sea advanced missiles. The Israeli leadership tried in vain to persuade the Russians to call the deal off. No success.

Sure, Islamic Iran buys advanced military technology just as the Saudis do; but the difference is that in Islamic Iran there is an advanced military industry that will make buying weapons from foreign sources obsolete in another decade or so; while in American Saudi Arabia the plan for buying foreign military hardware goes on and on and on and may continue for another century if the status quo continues.

Is he who moves along, head beneath, more apt to be guided [the contemporary Saudi establishment] or he who walks composed on a path [head-up] straightforward [the current Islamic government in Iran]?