Iraqis Turn On Islam
I saw this with my own eyes there. Met a couple of ‘terps who had renounced their religion because of all the terror and slaughter. They realized the clerics were full of shit, preaching peace, love and slaughter in the same breath. They realized that the clerics would rationalize killing anybody in the name of Allah, when in reality it was just in the name of self-interest.
NY Times:
BAGHDAD — After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.
In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.
“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”
Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”
The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.
While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught in the act of smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its wearer. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold.
It is far from clear whether the shift means a wholesale turn away from religion. A tremendous piety still predominates in the private lives of young Iraqis, and religious leaders, despite the increased skepticism, still wield tremendous power. Measuring religious adherence, furthermore, is a tricky business in Iraq, where access to cities and towns far from Baghdad is limited.
But a shift seems to be registering, at least anecdotally, in the choices some young Iraqis are making.
Professors reported difficulty in recruiting graduate students for religion classes. Attendance at weekly prayers appears to be down, even in areas where the violence has largely subsided, according to worshipers and imams in Baghdad and Falluja. In two visits to the weekly prayer session in Baghdad of the followers of the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr this fall, vastly smaller crowds attended than had in 2004 or 2005.
Such patterns, if lasting, could lead to a weakening of the political power of religious leaders in Iraq. In a nod to those changing tastes, political parties are dropping overt references to religion.
‘You Cost Us This’
“In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics; they trusted them,” said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. “It’s painful to admit, but it’s changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this.”
“When they behead someone, they say ‘Allahu akbar,’ they read Koranic verse,” said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad, using the phrase for “God is great.”
“The young people, they think that is Islam,” he said. “So Islam is a failure, not only in the students’ minds, but also in the community.”
A professor at Baghdad University’s School of Law, who identified herself only as Bushra, said of her students: “They have changed their views about religion. They started to hate religious men. They make jokes about them because they feel disgusted by them.”
That was not always the case. Saddam Hussein encouraged religion in Iraqi society in his later years, building Sunni mosques and injecting more religion into the public school curriculum, but always made sure it served his authoritarian needs.
Shiites, considered to be an opposing political force and a threat to Mr. Hussein’s power, were kept under close watch. Young Shiites who worshiped were seen as political subversives and risked attracting the attention of the police.
For that reason, the American liberation tasted sweetest to the Shiites, who for the first time were able to worship freely. They soon became a potent political force, as religious political leaders appealed to their shared and painful past and their respect for the Shiite religious hierarchy.
“After 2003, you couldn’t put your foot into the husseiniya, it was so crowded with worshipers,” said Sayeed Sabah, a Shiite religious leader from Baghdad, referring to a Shiite place of prayer.
Religion had moved abruptly into the Shiite public space, but often in ways that made educated, religious Iraqis uncomfortable. Militias were offering Koran courses. Titles came cheaply. In Mr. Mahmoud’s neighborhood, a butcher with no knowledge of Islam became the leader of a mosque.
A moderate Shiite cleric, Sheik Qasim, recalled watching in amazement as a former student, who never earned more than mediocre marks, whizzed by stalled traffic in a long convoy of sport utility vehicles in central Baghdad. He had become a religious leader.
“I thought I would get out of the car, grab him and slap him!” said the sheik. “These people don’t deserve their positions.”
An official for the Ministry of Education in Baghdad, a secular Shiite, described the newfound faith like this: “It was like they wanted to put on a new, stylish outfit.”
Religious Sunnis, for their part, also experienced a heady swell in mosque attendance, but soon became the hosts for groups of religious extremists, foreign and Iraqi, who were preparing to fight the United States.
Zane Mohammed, a gangly 19-year-old with an earnest face, watched with curiosity as the first Islamists in his Baghdad neighborhood came to barbershops, tea parlors and carpentry stores before taking over the mosques. They were neither uneducated nor poor, he said, though they focused on those who were.
Then, one morning while waiting for a bus to school, he watched a man walk up to a neighbor, a college professor whose sect Mr. Mohammed did not know, shoot the neighbor at point blank range three times, and walk back to his car as calmly “as if he was leaving a grocery store.”
“Nobody is thinking,” Mr. Mohammed said in an interview in October. “We use our minds just to know what to eat. This is something I am very sad about. We hear things and just believe them.”
Weary of Bloodshed
By 2006, even those who had initially taken part in the violence were growing weary. Haidar, a grade-school dropout, was proud to tell his family he was following a Shiite cleric in a fight against American soldiers in the summer of 2004. Two years later, however, he found himself in the company of gangsters.
Young militia members were abusing drugs. Gift mopeds had become gift guns. In three years, Haidar saw five killings, mostly of Sunnis, including that of a Sunni cab driver shot for his car.
It was just as bad, if not worse, for young Sunnis. Rubbed raw by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence says is led by foreigners, they found themselves stranded in neighborhoods that were governed by seventh-century rules. During an interview with a dozen Sunni teenage boys in a Baghdad detention facility on several sticky days in September, several of them expressed relief at being in jail, so they could wear shorts, a form of dress they would have been punished for in their neighborhoods.
Some Iraqis argue that the religious-based politics was much more about identity than faith. When Shiites voted for religious parties in large numbers in an election in 2005, it was more an effort to show their numbers, than a victory of the religious over the secular.
“It was a fight to prove our existence,” said a young Shiite journalist from Sadr City. “We were embracing our existence, not religion.”
The war dragged on, and young people from both the Shiite and Sunni sects became more broadly involved. Criminals had begun using teenagers and younger boys to carry out killings. The number of Iraqi juveniles in American detention was up more than sevenfold in November from April last year, and Iraq’s main prison for youth, situated in Baghdad, has triple the prewar population.
Different Motivations
But while younger people were taking a more active role in the violence, their motivation was less likely than that of the adults to be religion-driven. Of the 900 juvenile detainees in American custody in November, fewer than 10 percent claimed to be fighting a holy war, according to the American military. About one-third of adults said they were.
A worker in the American detention system said that by her estimate, only about a third of the adult detainee population, which is overwhelmingly Sunni, prayed.
“As a group, they are not religious,” said Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, the head of detainee operations for the American military. “When we ask if they are doing it for jihad, the answer is no.”
Muath, a slender, 19-year-old Sunni with distant eyes and hollow cheeks, is typical. He was selling cellphone credits and plastic flowers, struggling to keep his mother and five young siblings afloat, when an insurgent recruiter in western Baghdad, a man in his 30s who is a regular customer, offered him cash last spring to be part of an insurgent group whose motivations were a mix of money and sect.
Muath, the only wage earner in his family, agreed. Suddenly his family could afford to eat meat again, he said in an interview last September.
Indeed, at least part of the religious violence in Baghdad had money at its heart. An officer at the Kadhimiya detention center, where Muath was being held last fall, said recordings of beheadings fetched much higher prices than those of shooting executions in the CD markets, which explains why even nonreligious kidnappers will behead hostages.
“The terrorist loves the money,” said Capt. Omar, a prison worker who did not want to be identified by his full name. “The money has big magic. I give him $10,000 to do small thing. You think he refuse?”
When Muath was arrested last year, the police found two hostages, Shiite brothers, in a safe house that Muath told them about. Photographs showed the men looking wide-eyed into the camera; dark welts covered their bodies.
Violent struggle against the United States was easy to romanticize at a distance.
“I used to love Osama bin Laden,” proclaimed a 24-year-old Iraqi college student. She was referring to how she felt before the war took hold in her native Baghdad. The Sept. 11, 2001, strike at American supremacy was satisfying, and the deaths abstract.
Now, the student recites the familiar complaints: Her college has segregated the security checks; guards told her to stop wearing a revealing skirt; she covers her head for safety.
“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”
Worried Parents
Parents have taken new precautions to keep their children out of trouble. Abu Tahsin, a Shiite from northern Baghdad, said that when his extended family had built a Shiite mosque, they did not register it with the religious authorities, even though it would have brought privileges, because they did not want to become entangled with any of the main religious Shiite groups that control Baghdad.
In Falluja, a Sunni city west of Baghdad that had been overrun by Al Qaeda, Sheik Khalid al-Mahamedie, a moderate cleric, said fathers now came with their sons to mosques to meet the instructors of Koran courses. Families used to worry most about their daughters in adolescence, but now, the sheik said, they worry more about their sons.
“Before, parents warned their sons not to smoke or drink,” said Mohammed Ali al-Jumaili, a Falluja father with a 20-year-old son. “Now all their energy is concentrated on not letting them be involved with terrorism.”
Recruiters are relentless, and, as it turns out, clever, peddling things their young targets need. General Stone compares it to as a sales pitch a pimp gives to a prospective prostitute. American military officers at the American detention center said it was the Qaeda detainees who were best prepared for group sessions and asked the most questions.
A Qaeda recruiter approached Mr. Mohammed, the 19-year-old, on a college campus with the offer of English lessons. Though lessons had been a personal ambition of Mr. Mohammed’s for months, once he knew what the man was after, he politely avoided him.
“When you talk with them, you find them very modern, very smart,” said Mr. Mohammed, a non-religious Shiite, who recalled feigning disdain for his own sect to avoid suspicion.
The population they focused on, however, was poor and uneducated. About 60 percent of the American adult detainee population is illiterate, and is unable to even read the Koran that religious recruiters are preaching.
That leads to strange twists. One young detainee, a client of Abu Mahmoud, the moderate Sunni cleric, was convinced that he had to kill his parents when he was released, because they were married in an insufficiently Islamic way. General Stone is trying to rectify the problem by offering religion classes taught by moderates.
There is a new favorite game in the lively household of the young Baghdad journalist. When they see a man with a turban on television, they yell and crack jokes. In one joke, people are warned not to give their cellphone numbers to a religious man.
“If he knows the number, he’ll steal the phone’s credit,” the journalist said. “The sheiks are making a society of nonbelievers.”
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There’s hope for Arabs, yet! Imagine how fast the entire Middle East could come together if Iraq embraces secularism loudly and clearly and publicly executed their mullahs and clerics?! Saudi, Iran and the rest would go as well. Saudis detest the Mutawain and would love the chance to slaughter them.
The answer to the Middle East problem is the eradication of the religious institutions and thought police. And it looks like it is taking hold in Iraq!
This is better news than the surge.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:06 amReligion shouldnt preach death.
Just one example of Christianity vs Islam:
God sent his only son to die for our sins so we could live.
Their God asks them to die for him. how messed up is that?
March 4th, 2008 at 9:11 amMaybe it would be best for people to not have religion for a while over there. It would definitely free them from the restraints that Islam puts on them.
Our children shall be our saviors.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:24 amIs Iraq going to be the place where you see the enlightenment of Islam forming?
Where moderate Islamic leaders are free to speak out against the jihadis and radicals and bring about a new dawn for a peaceful and modern form of the religion. Could be. I know I certainly hope this is the case.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:26 amThey say the extremists number a little over one-hundred million, ten percent of islam. Reign in Blood, there’s only one cure for those infected with islamorabies.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:34 amseems like those in the arab world have been living in a hypnotic trance, or something similar to Stockholm syndrome, since the time of mohammad.
here’s the test of any religion/philosophy; give people a choice and they still choose it, there must be some element of truth to it. if you give them choice and they flee and begin to hate/resent it… then it is wrong in totality and only the lack of choice can preserve those beliefs.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:39 am@John
March 4th, 2008 at 9:44 amYep, and most importantly, if we have the other 90% or nine hundred million on our side of the fight we will have a much easier time locating and liquidating the 10%.
“islamorabies”
You really need to copyright that term!
March 4th, 2008 at 9:57 amThey need to find something to replace Islam, or the next generation will fall into the same trap.
What it can be doesn’t matter much, as long as it gives the sense of belonging and identity most people need. Christianity, Zoroatrianism, Buddhism, whatever. Although I doubt Judaism will make any inroads.
Personally, I think the Catholic church should start a well-supported missionary effort in the whole Middle East.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:36 amI’m just glad to see that some of them are waking up and smelling the coffee.
Maybe, just maybe there might be a tiny seed of hope happening over there.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:51 amKevin M, help yourself, if it fits use it.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:55 amHow stupid would you have to be to demand we leave Iraq now?
March 4th, 2008 at 11:02 amWOW!
THIS just might be [their] “parting of the sea” … [their] “tearing-down of the Temple … and rebuilding it in [three] days …”
I partly agree … WHAT IS NEEDED here is a sane, moderate leader to come in and guide these young people down a better path … whether religious or even secular.
I’ve always said the Muslims need to take back their [religion] from these vampires … if they have any hope of not having it seen as a plague on the whole of mankind, and treated as thus and thrust into the bowels of human history.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:19 amticticboom
There is a satellite station called Daystar if you ever heard of it. Its actually allowed and very popular Christian programming shown all over the middle east right now. its channel 369 on directv. but they are in almost every country in the world now.
These very brave Iraqis may very well spark a massive change in that whole region. I wish them the best and we cannot pull out Iraq now, we would be missing out on a great thing here. If another extremist takes over that country we will never find out there full potential
March 4th, 2008 at 11:36 amIslam is ripe for a reformation. Let’s hope the current dynamic of Islamic extremism will lead to a modernizing trend in the faith. Interesting enough, Turkey has already started.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:38 pmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm
Granted Turkey has a head start but somebody has to lead the way just like Germany (in the form of Martin Luther) led the way in the 16th Century.
“I used to love Osama bin Laden,” proclaimed a 24-year-old Iraqi college student. She was referring to how she felt before the war took hold in her native Baghdad. The Sept. 11, 2001, strike at American supremacy was satisfying, and the deaths abstract.
Now, the student recites the familiar complaints: Her college has segregated the security checks; guards told her to stop wearing a revealing skirt; she covers her head for safety.
“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”
The above excerpt from the NY Times piece SHOULD bring some reality to Clinton, Obama, the Hollywood elites, etc that have been preaching for years that the Iraq war is a disaster that has only increased hatred of the US while galvanizing sympathy for bin laden….but it won’t.
I have to wonder why the NY Times would run such an article. Evidently even the leftist NY Times knows what a disaster it would be for the people of Iraq if the US was to pull out of Iraq. Now that it appears a reasonable possibility that a dem will replace Bush in the White House, maybe the NY Times is trying to undo the portrayal of US involvement in Iraq as a bad thing…i.e. - with Bush gone the NY Times doesn’t have to use Iraq as a weapon against Bush any longer. In doing so, the NY Times could help remove some of the public pressure on a possible dem President to rapidly pull out of Iraq and not suffer the political consequences of staying on in what will certainly be further defined by the press with a dem administration as a humanitarian role.
Regardless, this is certainly vindication for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others in the Administration that had the foresight to see what Iraq could become under a free government and persisted when it appeared at least by reporting in the demedia that everyone else in the world was against regime change in Iraq.
March 4th, 2008 at 1:04 pmHere’s the problem with ‘reforming’ Islam: it’s already been reformed. By the Salafis and Khomeinists.
The comparison to the Protestant Reformation is inherently flawed. In the case of the Church, by the Middle Ages it had become extremely corrupt and had strayed from it’s roots. The Reformation gave the Church a much needed wake-up call, and overdue changes were made. Of course, following an all-too-common pattern of history, the Protestants quickly became guilty of the same things they left the Church over, and began their constant splitting into sects which has continued to this day.
In the case of Islam, throughout the Modern Era, since the Enlightenment in Europe, it had become more moderate and modern, culminating in the abolishment of the Caliphate and the rise of Ataturk. The ‘keepers of the mosques’ did not like this, obviously, and blamed secularism for all that had befallen the House of Islam. The result is Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
At it’s core, Islam is living your life with Mohammed as the example of what a muslim should say and do. Just as a Christian might say, “What would Jesus do?”. And there the similarity between faiths ends.
Mohammed was a thief, rapist, murderer, and pedophile who made de facto slaves of his women. His religion reflects this. Any attempt to reform Islam will run into a wall named Mohammed. The closest things to reforming Islam I know about are the Sufis and Koranists.
The Sufis ignore the things about Islam and Mohammed that horrify normal, well adjusted human beings, such as redefining jihad as ’struggle against sin’. But they’re still there, waiting to take disgruntled, alienated kids down the path to Salafism.
Koranists throw away the hadith, the biography of Mohammed, and cherry pick peaceful verses from when Mohammed was a street preacher in Mecca, before he became a bandit king in Medina. They also re-interpret words from the original Aramaic, often with comical results. They translate ‘72 virgins’ as ‘72 raisins’. The whole movement is basically a way to get away from Islam without being declared an apostate. Once the threat of death is removed from over their heads, they usually convert to Christianity or abandon religion altogether.
The Protestant Reformation knocked tarnish off of silver. Trying to reform Islam is like trying to polish a turd.
March 4th, 2008 at 1:22 pmI’m stunned this was in the New York Times.
Maybe it’s a product of trying to appease the minority share-holders that are revolting.
Never the less, it’s a good news story from the MSM for a change.
March 4th, 2008 at 1:48 pm‘terps?
What are ‘terps?
March 4th, 2008 at 3:36 pm@Kevin M:
Interpreters/translators. Iraqis who work with the US military. They’re at the top of the terrorists’ hit list.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:21 pmjadedSage
yeah, it’s coming in the 22th century, cause they still got a lot to worry with honor killings
March 4th, 2008 at 5:52 pmWe win.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:30 pmCaligula’s point: “if you give them choice and they flee and begin to hate/resent it…” is precisely why Islam has flourished over the centuries.
1. Apostasy carries a mandatory death sentence.
2. No other religions are tolerated…at all.
3. All notion of other religions (remember the giant Bhuddist rock carvings in Afghanistan?) are destroyed.
Assimilate or die. Resistance is futile.
This is how you strangle choice.
Establish choice and only a certifiable moron clings to Islam. This is why Islamic converts (Adam Ghadan) are always dumber than the poor suckers born into this death cult. Target the religious establishment (mullahs, Mutawain in Saudi) and you’re on the way to a civilized Middle East. Establish democracy, give women the right to vote and slaughter all jihadis = HAPPILY EVER AFTER!
March 4th, 2008 at 6:32 pmIs it as stunning to everyone else, as it is to me, that this is a NY Times article? Two theories:
One: Success in Iraq is so obvious that we have to at least say some thing about it, (perhaps in preparation for a Democrat Pres taking credit for it) or..
Two: The editorial staff was so caught up in their circle jerk that they missed this story.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:36 pm“I’m stunned this was in the New York Times”
I can beleive it.
It is an attack on religion. Sets em up for an attack on Christians. Not to mention it plays to their separatist audience that has to label everybody by race, (while at the same time calling everyone else racist)
The piece seems to look at the conflict through a different glass, but it is all much the same. You could spend 10 minutes anywhere in the states and find folks that would say the same things about Christianity.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:48 pm“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”
This is music to my ears. We wont hear of this in the MSM. this is Islam in action. I met an Iraqi doctor in africa and he was a sunni, but his wife walked around unveiled from time to time. He hated the way islam was being preached.
there is one iraqi cleric and MP who is shiite who has said he doesnt blame individuals for leaving islam, but blames himself and the clerics for doing things that cause people to lose their faith. Incidentally, he also belives in secular democracy and private faith. He has said that because muslims believe muhammed was a perfect ruler that only muhammed can rule today. Since he is dead, then no person should pretend to know islamic law as well as him.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:21 pm“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”
This is music to my ears.
there is one iraqi cleric and MP who is shiite who has said he doesnt blame individuals for leaving islam, but blames himself and the clerics for doing things that cause people to lose their faith. Incidentally, he also belives in secular democracy and private faith. He has said that because muslims believe muhammed was a perfect ruler that only muhammed can rule today. Since he is dead, then no person should pretend to know islamic law as well as him.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:22 pm@ PhilNBlanx
“I have to wonder why the NY Times would run such an article.” I was wondering the same thing, especially when they described our military presence as “American liberation”. For the entire length of the war the NYT has portrayed our military as the “American invasion”. I’m very suspicious, but like your theories.
@ ticticboom
Loved your history lesson, especially your summary statement!
March 4th, 2008 at 10:33 pmalqaeda SUKAWNIT
March 4th, 2008 at 10:50 pmgood triumphs over evil every time
March 5th, 2008 at 3:04 amThe seeds of freedom have been planted and are beginning to sprout.
March 5th, 2008 at 2:02 pmtictic;
Actually, the “raisins” is accurate. A missing diacritical mark changed the word from “white raisins”, a great delicacy at the time, to “pure virgins”. So, think bottomless Sun Maid boxes.
Similar to the copying error (missing mark) that transformed “rope” into “camel”, to the enduring brain-knotted confusion of literalists.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Islam, the curse of the world.
March 5th, 2008 at 6:33 pmGood for those youngins. Maybe they will be the start of something better in Iraq.
Quick, somebody hand them The Holy Bible.