Interview with Eric Walberg on Radio Islam: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization

https://soundcloud.com/radioislam1450/2014-01-08

The Pinochet-style coup in Egypt in July 2013, 40 years after the Chilean coup, gives pause to reconsider Islamic political strategy.  It took Chile 25 year before Pinochet was arrested (ironically, in Britain on a Spanish warrant), and he died eight years later without being convicted at the age of 91. Chilean socialists retook power 27 years after the coup, but their party was no threat to capitalism, a pale ghost of Allende’s revolution. Is this the fate of the Arab Spring?

Muhammad’s political legacy

Reflecting on the state of political Islam in the post-1979 world, in Stages of Islamic Revolution (1996), Kalim Siddiqui looks for guidance to Muhammad’s political legacy:

Interview with Kevin Barrett: The near future looks bleak for Muslims who struggle to free the umma from its neocolonial straightjacket. But the revival of Islamic civilization continues.

http://noliesradio.org/archives/69928

if you are asked for password, it is coup

Now that the smoke is clearing in Tahrir Square after two and a half years of upheaval—and thousands of deaths—the meaning of the Arab Spring and the intent of the Islamists is becoming clear. First, the Arab Spring was/is an Islamic Awakening, as confirmed in five elections/ referenda in Egypt, where Islamists consistently won two-thirds of the vote in the freest elections in any country in recent times.  Money was not a significant factor thanks to limits on candidates’ financing (no corporate or Super PACs a la US, or foreign donations), the brainwashing of the old order no longer worked, and the Mubarak thugs who stuffed ballot boxes were hiding in their holes. We can only envy the Egyptians.

The strategy of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) for 80 years has been to patiently build alternative social structures to the corrupt ‘soft state’ (especially in education, health, charity), and eventually overthrowing the old corrupt order peacefully through the ballot box. Then to work with other forces, both left and right, to usher in a new Islamic order based on their grassroots experience, where—just as in the first Islamic state under Muhammad in Medina—all facets of society would have their place, where laws and government would conform with sharia, as confirmed by senior Islamic scholars. Foreign relations were shifting towards a more confrontational stance with Israel, and more cooperation with other Islamic governments and movements, in particular Iran, but throughout the Muslim world. President Morsi’s first stop was Saudi Arabia, which initially promised support. Qatar’s Sheikh Hamad sent a whopping $8b in aid ($2b of which was since returned by the coupmakers).

Ramadan is a good time to reflect on what Islam has to say about two of Canada’s burning problems—our penchant for environmental destruction and Prime Minister Harper’s attempt to return to a blatant assimilation policy for Natives.

Canada has become an international embarrassment from an ecological point of view. One of Harper’s most shameful acts was formally withdrawing from the Kyoto Accord in 2011. The greatest ecological crisis facing Canada is without a doubt the Conservative’s relentless pursuit of the tar sands project and the accompanying massive Keystone, Northern Gateway and Transmountain Pipelines. The environmental damage from the insane project to ‘wash’ oil from sand deposits is indescribable, poisoning land, air and water—a crime by any standards, subsidized and promoted by ‘our’ government.

The usually timid EU labels such oil extraction as “highly polluting” and has threatened to boycott any Canadian oil extracted from the tar sands. But the Canadian government takes well-meaning Euro-criticism, intended to help Canadians, as an affront, and works closely with the oil lobby, whose sole interest is in making profit, come hell or high water, to promote the project.

What does Islam say about how humans should relate to the environment? Even if the valiant campaign against the tar sands, which has been taken up by people around the world, miraculously succeeds, the American writer Abdul-Matin argues in Green Deen (2010) that the environmental movement today, restricted by its secular, legalist approach to problems—pass enough laws and you can curb the negative practices of business and consumers—is still lacking. He interprets Islam’s focus on one Creator as giving “humankind the opportunity to be one and to have a common purpose”, to bring back ethical principles into our daily lives.