Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Radically Communitarian Islam
Radically Communitarian Islam
Nov 14, 2024 12:02 PM

Graeme Wood’s excellent piece in The Atlantic has justly been making the rounds for the past week or so. It is well worth reading with a number of insights and points that strike at the heart of the contemporary conflict between modernity and religious violence. mend “What ISIS Really Wants” to your reading. (Rasha al Aqeedi’s “Caliphatalism,” which looks more closely at the situation in Mosul, makes a panion read.)

One of the elements of Wood’s piece that stuck out to me was this exchange with a couple of the “ex-members of a banned Islamist group called Al Muhajiroun (The Emigrants)” in London:

[Anjem] Choudary [48, the group’s former leader] said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its plete application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead murderers and cut off thieves’ hands. “The problem,” he explained, “is that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.” That whole package, he said, would include free housing, food, and clothing for all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work could do so.

Abdul Muhid, 32, continued along these lines. He was dressed in mujahideen chic when I met him at a local restaurant: scruffy beard, Afghan cap, and a wallet outside of his clothes, attached with what looked like a shoulder holster. When we sat down, he was eager to discuss welfare. The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit. Health care, he said, is free. (“Isn’t it free in Britain, too?,” I asked. “Not really,” he said. “Some procedures aren’t covered, such as vision.”) This provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy choice of the Islamic State, but a policy obligation inherent in God’s law.

The emphasis on “economic justice” construed as “free housing, food and clothing for all” reminded me of a passage in Rev. Robert Sirico’s Defending the Free Market, in which he reflected up on the al-Qaeda attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. Rev. Sirico reads this selection in the video below:

Wood’s piece goes into some detail in describing the differences between al-Qaeda and ISIS, but this munitarian aspect of radical Islam seems to be an important point of agreement. Like ISIS, as Sirico writes,

In many people’s minds, Osama bin Laden was simply a holdover from a primitive form of Islam. But if you listen closely to some of the man’s own recorded messages to the world, a plex portrait emerges. In what may have been his last recorded video message, released after he had been killed and just after the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attack, bin Laden said that “the path to stop the hegemony of capitalism is to carry out a real radical change” so that President Obama “will be liberated, and with him, everyone else, from the hegemony of these corporations.”

We don’t need to decide whether or not this interpretation of Sharia and Islam is authentic to recognize the danger that it represents to Western civilization. To the extent that ISIS’s vision of social justice resonates with the marginalized in the Middle East and across the world, it es a major challenge to the legitimacy and potency of Western regimes.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Free Cubans by dropping trade restrictions
In today’s Detroit News, Rev. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, argues for the end of the trade restrictions against Cuba. Fidel Castro, recently retired from the position of el lider maximo, held the small island nation in the tight grip of his totalitarian regime, effectively stagnating all economic development for the past 50 years. The United States embargo against Cuba gave Castro a scapegoat to blame for the economic woes that oppressed the Cuban population and helped him...
Coal-powered hybrids
As I said in 2006: Without too much exaggeration, you could say that today’s electric cars are really coal-powered. If you look at the sources of electricity in the US, “coal provides over half of the electricity flowing into American homes.” That means that in one ideal world of the alternative fuel crowd, when you plug your car in, you’re plugging it in to a coal plant (this is also why the idea of consumer carbon credits is catching on)....
Business fighting poverty
Peter Heslam, a friend of the Acton Institute and sometime contributor to our journal, is the founder of a promising initiative at Cambridge University. Begun a couple years ago, the “Transforming Business” program has recently been revamped, with a new and improved website, including a blog. The program’s goal, as I understand it, is to bring together academics and businesspeople in an effort to understand and articulate how business can play a fundamental role in distributing prosperity more widely. Acton...
William F. Buckley – 1925-2008
Buckley & Sirico – Acton’s 2nd Annual Dinner – May 12, 1992 One of many remembrances at National Review Online: Bill died doing what he loved doing — he never left this movement he built, never left NR, he never stopped writing, never left home, never left thinking. And he’s as much a part of us today and forever as he was all these years. He’s left a remarkable legacy. ...
The NFL on PCA (or ELCA, or CRC…)
Among the critical issues at the confluence of religion, culture, and economics is the question of TV screen size. In a move hailed by gospel-focused churches everywhere, the NFL has modified its rules, which had previously prohibited churches from sponsoring showings of the Super Bowl on screens larger than 55 inches. Church interests had argued that there was no such restriction on, for example, sports bars. One is tempted to conclude that there will no longer be any noticeable difference...
Solid economics at L’Osservatore Romano
Good news is not always so hard to find. Case in point: Free-market economics is making eback at the Vatican’s daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Previously known as a dry read, L’Osservatore Romano (which means The Roman Observer in English) now contains provocative interviews and real news stories from around the world. This is attributable to the paper’s new editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, who was appointed to the post by Pope Benedict last October (see here for the interesting background on...
WFB: In Memoriam
Buckley & Sirico – Acton’s 2nd Annual Dinner – May 12, 1992 Rev. Robert Sirico reflects on the life of William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in his study on Wednesday, praising him as a friend, a literary genius, and a supporter of the Acton Institute. Sirico writes, “He will be lauded by numerous pendants and scribes for the incredible number of his plishments, preeminent of which is his historic role as godfather of the modern conservative/libertarian movement in the...
Conference for clergywomen in Wesleyan tradition
UMAction, the Methodist wing of IRD that supports traditional and historic Methodism is encouraging women in the United Methodist and Wesleyan tradition in ministry to consider attending the “Come to the Water” conference in Nashville from April 10-13. John Lomperis of IRD appropriately notes, “Many evangelical clergywomen in the United Methodist Church feel sidelined or excluded in some of the denomination’s official clergy women’s networks because of a dominance of intolerant theological liberalism.” Just last night I was talking to...
Radio Free Acton – Remembering Buckley and contemplating religious consumerism
On this week’s edition of Radio Free Acton, Rev. Robert A. Sirico pays tribute to the late William F. Buckley, the RFA regulars are joined by Professor Joseph Knippenberg from Oglethorp University in Atlanta, Georgia to discuss the Pew Forum’s newly released research on the American religious landscape, and we listen in to some bonus audio from Dr. Glenn Sunshine’s Acton Lecture Series address, Wealth, Work and the Church. You can listen at this link. With regard to the discussion...
The fight over charitable choice
Howard Friedman, at his ever-noteworthy Religion Clause blog, reports on the brewing battle over charitable choice language in the US Senate. The Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD), which includes Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is pushing for language in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Act of 2000 to be removed that allows for faith-based charities receiving government funds to limit their hiring practices along confessional/denominational borders. This is just the latest in the long...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2024 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved