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Tace

(6,800 posts)
Thu Jun 26, 2014, 07:40 AM Jun 2014

Reverting to the Ummah: Who is the ‘Angry Muslim’ and Why | Ramzy Baroud

Last edited Thu Jun 26, 2014, 08:31 AM - Edit history (1)



Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

June 25, 2014

“Brother, brother,” a young man called on me as I hurriedly left a lecture hall in some community center in Durban, South Africa. This happened at the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when all efforts at stopping the ferocious U.S.-western military drives against these two countries terribly 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 a 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.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/reverting-to-the-ummah-who-is-the-angry-muslim-and-why-ramzy-baroud

(edit: fixing story date)
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Reverting to the Ummah: Who is the ‘Angry Muslim’ and Why | Ramzy Baroud (Original Post) Tace Jun 2014 OP
related DU-thread: DetlefK Jun 2014 #1
Thanks for posting that. It's a really good article n/t Violet_Crumble Jun 2014 #2
Thanks for the positive feedback Tace Jun 2014 #3

DetlefK

(16,423 posts)
1. related DU-thread:
Thu Jun 26, 2014, 08:28 AM
Jun 2014
http://www.democraticunderground.com/123024055

Basically, extremist Muslims long for the good old times, before the West spoiled everything. Before the philosophical machinations of the West lead to critical thinking about Allah in medieval times (attacking religion) and before the military machinations of the West fractured the Middle-East in later centuries (attacking political unity).

They want to return to medieval times. A time when Muslims were the most advanced and the most pious and the most righteous civilization of mankind. When political superiority could be attributed to having the right religion. State and religion unified in one rule and one belief only, with the rest of the world being uneducated and sinful barbarians.

Follow the right religion, bring back the past, and everything will be fine.
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