The West, the low world and the Islamic State
Violence intensifies between the Islamic State and the Western powers, overtaken by the sudden and brutal rebirth of a Caliphate that revives in the hearts of the “real” Umma a militant political Islam, and more and more clearly, the question of war is raised.
Tunisia and Beirut have been hit, Brussels aswell, and Paris, again Paris, and again Tunisia… The states slowly become aware of the expansion of the threat and the necessity for solidarity that imposes itself onto all. But the Tunisian and Lebanese citizens ask themselves if they are part of a Lowly World, that has to, contrarily to others, apply their national flags onto world-famous monuments with the help of software, whilst in Sydney or Cairo they have been coloured blue, white and red.
Washington has since a while tied closer ties again with Tehran and, in Paris, the President François The Little has recently discovered a new friend in Moscow, after having claimed loud and clear that the only enemy of France is Bashar al-Assad, and that no alliance is possible with those who support him.
Even the very Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, who not long ago still fed the Jihadists and Islamists of Syria, Iraq and elsewhere with petrodollars to counter the growing influence of Shia Iran, have found themselves, even their leader Saudi Arabia, to be targets of that Islamic State to whose growth they contributed and which has by now emancipated itself into self-sustainability and independence of its former bankers.
In Turkey, the crazy (or at least unintelligible) President Erdogan seems more than ever since his political wanderings as of the “Arab spring” to strive for a restauration of the Ottoman dream and to bring his country to the position of holy protector of the Sunni world. Following the failure of the Syrian revolution, after the removal of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Ankara – or should we say Istanbul, the ‘Sublime Porte’ again? – has given way to its last ‘hope’ to bring life to its nightmare: the Islamist hordes of Daesh, who receive weapons and logistics of the Turkish government and arrange with the latter to flood its petrol production onto the international market. The latest folly from Turkey: the Turkish destruction of a Russian fighter jet deployed against the Islamic State, at the Syrian border…
But increasingly the question of Islam poses itself now, and in particular that of Islam in the West, but not only.
What is this “moderate Islam”? And what is “authentic Islam”? What is the “Islam of France” of which the Parisian editorialists have been writing so much? Can it be that various Islams exist? That of the “real Umma” and that of the “couscous-merguez muslims”? That of the “radicals” and that of the “moderates”? An “intransigent Islam” and a “toned down Islam”? The “Islam of origins” and the “delinquent Islam”? The orthodox and rigorous Islam, that placed God above laic societies and their laws, and the Islam of compromise with the imperatives of Western capitalism?
The laic states of Europe and a quieted down Islam, can they de facto be allies in a war against “fanatic Islam”? Because the question of choice poses itself, in conscience and religion… to all Muslims, wherever they may live: which of the two Islams holds the truth?
Whatever the answer may be, a new page of world history is being written, a long page, that of a war to come and that will last, a perpetual war and a diffused war, a new sort of war that replaces conventional war, one to which the West had gotten used to and that guaranteed the security of its populations.
It is always poignant indeed, when an unconscious people, whose governments begin wars all over the world, is struck, very suddenly, by violence just at the corner of the street and that they realise simultaneously that their values are not universal and that they are no longer untouchable.
Those realities, with which the low world is confronted with daily since a very long time already, as opposed to the dominant West…
To fight the new enemy efficiently it will be necessary to quit taking refuge in the certainty and the conviction, that on the other side are the bad and evil terrorists, some evil-loving bandits.
It will be necessary to admit the problems in the Middle East, admit that they exist, objectively, and that the West has its share of responsibility for them.
