Born Muslim, Part Five

January 30, 2011 12:46 PM

Having written four installments in this series on the millions of the world's humans born into a Muslim society, I focused my attention elsewhere. The Arabic-speaking people of Tunisia and Egypt brought my attention back to this topic. Rebelling against the thugocracies which ruled those two nations, the individuals suffering under tyranny have risen up, largely making use of the Internet to communicate. How will this turn out? Do those millions of Tunisians and Egyptians stand a chance of gaining true individual rights, which will bring them prosperity and freedom of movement, or will they succumb to an even greater tyranny, that of Salafism?

Salafism, as exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and its Saudi cousin, Wahhabism, is an attempt to return to the early days of Islam, when the armed followers of Muhammad took over most of the southern Mediterranean region and the Near East. (The first conquest of the followers of Muhammad, by the way, was Arabia, starting with Mecca, and including southern Arabia, Yemen, a prosperous region which the Romans called "happy Arabia" - Arabia felix.)

If the individuals living in Tunisia and Egypt want to be free, which means having government protection of their individual rights, they must be inspired by an ideology of freedom. That ideology still exists in the united States of America, as exemplified by the popular movement which the press, and many of its participants, calls the Tea Party. As readers of this weblog know, the current governing class of the USA, with some exceptions in the House of Representatives, and in some state and local governments, are hostile to the Tea Party movement. Though Obama mouths platitudes concerning the Tunisia-Egypt uprisings, it is obvious that he opposes the ideology of individual rights, and therefore will provide no material or moral support to stop the Salafi takeover of eastern North Africa.

What, then, is the role of Iran? In my view, Iran has been under the thumb of Salafis since the early Muslim conquest at the time the original Salafis were in power. The 1400-year-old tale of the Persian folk hero named Pirouz Nahavandi, most interestingly, reflects on the current situation. Nahavandi, a military officer for the Persian Shah at the time of the Arab Conquest, was made a slave to an Egyptian, who then freed Nahavandi after 100 days in slavery. Nahavandi's master explained that the Egyptians themselves were slaves to the Muslim conquerors. Nahavandi was said to have risen through the ranks of the Muslim army until he got close enough to the Muslim leader to carry out a plan to kill him.

Today Iran is under the thumb of Muslim clerics and their military supporters, even though recently the majority of the Persian people have taken to the streets in rebellion, just as the Egyptians are doing as I am writing this. Though the mullahs of Iran are technically not Salafis, since the are members of the rival Shia sect, they share the goal of the Salafis, which is to unite the Muslim world into a single great empire with a single leader. The Salafis and the mullahs of Iran are totally opposed to individual rights; the very name of their religious ideology, Islam, means "submission."

Without inspiration from the American government, can the heroic Egyptians and Tunisians preserve their individual rights and resist the Salafi conquest? In my opinion, it would be something like a miracle. Perhaps they will take their inspiration from America's founding fathers and their writings. Americans themselves are fighting their domestic enemies in a psychological war on two fronts.