Comments on: Another conspiracy theory

By: Turgai Sangar

Turgai Sangar — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:15:18 +0000

“Hizb-ut-Tahrir al Islami thoroughly criticizes the experience and objectives of former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser and completely rejects the experience of the Baath Party. It believes the members of the al Saud family of Saudi Arabia are “historically British agents” and that they have become American agents ever since the mid-fifties.”

http://www.ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16391

By: Turgai Sangar

Turgai Sangar — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:05:24 +0000

“Of course, as far as the Baath tradition is concerned, the existence of a strong inspiration by European Fascist thought is not in doubt. It was explicit in the original Baathist ideological writings, and especially that of the Syrian Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of the Baath Party. But Aflaq was a Christian Arab, and his pan-Arab nationalism, though violent, racist and extreme, was also secular and modernizing. He believed religion, whether Islamic or Christian, had no place in Arab politics.

In both Iraq and Syria, the overall tone of Baathism remained secular. In this, the Baath were following the original Italian Fascist model. The Fascists had their roots in bitterly anticlerical Italian radical nationalism, Mussolini himself having been a Socialist leader until the First World War. When in power, like Saddam Hussein’s Baath in the 1990s, the Italian Fascists made pragmatic deals with religion in the form of the Catholic Church; but in Italy and Germany, Fascism was never in any sense influenced by or close to the Christian religion. This does not, of course, make the Baathists or the Fascists more likable. It does make them very different from the forces of political religion.

Like their Fascist predecessors, on the one hand, the Baath ideologues have regarded religious allegiances and beliefs as backward, superstitious obstacles to modernization and development. On the other, they have seen them as fomenters of sectarian discord in what should be the united Arab nation. This ideological stance underlies the ferocious persecution in the past of the Islamists in Baathist Syria and Iraq, and the bitter hatred between the Baath and the fundamentalists. Of course, both the Baath and the fundamentalists have been hostile to the West and Israel, but for largely different reasons. In the case of the Baath, this reflects first and foremost secular pan-Arab nationalism. Islamist radicals for their part often draw strength from local ethnic and national resentments, whether Kashmiri, Chechen, Pashtun, Palestinian or Sunni Iraq Arab; but their central allegiance is always to the idea of the undivided umma, or transnational community of all (or, for Al Qaeda, right-thinking Sunni) Muslims.”

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041025/lieven/2

By: Turgai Sangar

Turgai Sangar — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:41:14 +0000

“I think Islamic Fundamentalism is an import into Central Asia (…) What the hell do Turkic Hanafi Muslims in Central Asia care about the problems of Arab Nationalism, the Ba’ath Party, and the anti-Zionist movements? (…)”

Timur, why do you almost automatically equalize Ba’athist Nationalism and so-called ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’?

For the rest, why should Eurasian Hanafi Turks care? Well, maybe because the Western (and Israëli) support for criminal regimes like that in e.g. Uzbekistan is part of the very same strategy and agenda to subjugate ‘the Islamic world’ than the support given to Israëls policy towards the Palestinians for instance.

http://qirim-vilayeti.com/content/view/1283/97/