The question of restoring tranquility in religion

This slogan has been repeated in my articles since 2013. It was one of three demands or slogans: restoring tranquility in religion, renewing the experience of the national state, and restoring normal relations with the world. To whom were these demands directed? It was directed to all rational Arabs and Muslims, who at that time had great fear for religion and the state in the Arab and Islamic worlds. If we thought a little, we would find that the revolution in the name of Islam was the one that placed its burden on the security and stability of countries, and that it was the one that, with its terrorist acts, spoiled the relations of Muslims with the world. I was teaching in the Middle East Department at Harvard University in 1993 when I bought the new issue of the American “Foreign Affairs” magazine in October or November and read Samuel Huntington’s article on the clash of civilizations (it became a book in 1996). Huntington's goal was to repeatedly announce the final victory of the West and the Judeo-Christian civilization and the transformation of political and strategic conflicts into cultural conflicts and tensions. According to his claim, all living civilizations, including the Chinese civilization, will be compatible with Western victory, with the exception of Islam, which has bloody borders (!) While dozens of Western scholars began responding to this or that point of his enormous vision, hundreds of us went off to defend Islam, historically and presently. None of us thought about the signs of revolt and violent extremism among groups of young people in the name of Islam, even though in 1998 bin Laden announced the establishment of a front to combat the West (!). The attacks of 2001 and the attacks that preceded and followed them in Europe revealed deep rifts in Islam, whose creators and supporters targeted them.The overthrow of the national state in the Arab and Islamic worlds, then events resulted in the establishment of the terrible and legendary “ISIS state” in Iraq and Syria, and the violent movements in Africa are still inspired by it to this day! This destructive revolution was not limited to massacres and claims of establishing Sharia, but also climbed on the shoulders of what was called, in 2011, the “Arab Spring,” which many of us returned to being deceived by until political Islam began to take over. Governance in several Arab and Islamic countries. Thus, it has been proven that the dissident revolution has several manifestations, phenomena, and effects on the public and middle groups in societies, as happened in the Iranian movement in 1979. What I want to reach is that the root of the difficult situations and turmoil in several Arab countries is the fragility that, during the strike on “Al-Qaeda” and “ISIS,” allowed regional countries and international parties to either exploit the fragments of the two terrorist organizations, or create their own militias to intervene through them. Taking advantage of the sectarian structure and raising the slogan of the Palestine issue, within several countries that are still struggling to regain their sovereignty and stability. The wars raging in the region have come to unleash a new wave of religious extremism, and raging desires to encourage an increase in wars that strike people and stone and threaten regional and global security. Why does the Islamic world not have the immunity that prevents being tempted, engaging in turmoil, and listening to all Whoop? There are those who link this to the multiplicity of religious references or their absence. But strategic experts believe that all the new waves are made by countries and groups whose main concern is sabotage of religion and national states. How?Do we keep young men away from temptation and enticement? It was my belief that accommodation in religion supports national states and corrects the world's vision of Islam. But since my book “The Struggle over Islam,” in 2004, I have come to see the opposite, meaning that the national state is what prevents divisions from occurring in religion, and it is also our gateway to the world. But what do the religious, cultural and media elites do? It has two tasks remaining: launching initiatives that change the “world view” of the religious public in the long term, and establishing partnerships with scientific, cultural, and religious institutions across the world to read and understand other experiences with religion as well as with the state.

Professor of Islamic Studies - Mohammed bin Zayed University for Humanities