The beginnings of the angry Muslim

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-270614.html



The beginnings of the angry Muslim
By Ramzy Baroud
Jun 27, '14

"Brother, brother" a young man called out to me, as I hurriedly left a lecture hall in a community center in Durban, South Africa. This happened at the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, after all efforts at stopping the ferocious US-Western military drives against these two countries had failed.

The young man was dressed in traditional Afghani-Pashtun attire, and accompanied by a friend of his. With palpable nervousness, he asked a question that seemed completely extraneous to my lecture on the use of people history to understand protracted historical phenomena using Palestine as a model.

"Brother, do you believe that there is hope for the Muslim ummah?" He inquired about the future of a nation in which he believed we both indisputably belonged to, and anxiously awaited as if my answer carried any weight at all, and would put his evident worries at ease.

Perhaps more startling than his question is that I was not surprised in the least. His is an intergenerational question that Muslim youth have been asking even before the decline and final collapse of the Ottoman empire, the last standing caliphate, by the end of the first world war.