coversions - biggest challenge?
Reader comment on item: Converts to Terrorism

Submitted by Concerned European (Lithuania), Dec 11, 2005 at 04:09

Fanatical white converts have the inconvenience that they cannot be as easily detected as people born in Muslim culture. Yet it is in my mind not the biggest problem. If the number of converts would grow considerably, this would change the very nature of the "war against islamism". It would be no more a war "us versus them" with relatively clear frontlines it would be a war "among us".

Another danger is that if the number of white converts increases, various neo-nazi and similar radical rightists groups, which currently are put off by "non-white" caracter of Islam and often pretend to be the "champions" of the Western culture, could be easily attracted to islam. Precedents of white nazi islamists, such as "murabitun", already exist.

Obviously, various anti-globalist groups could even more easily attracted to radical islam, once islam is no more perceived as the religion of "theirs".

The number of white radical converts has not yet reached the critical mass in the West, but when it reaches one can expect very serious trouble.

In my mind, to contend with the radical islam is not enough to criticize islamism as a radical political movement, it is necesary to criticize some basic premises underlying exoteric (scripturalist. literalist, shariatic) islam as such - for example the literalist principle of scriptural interpretation, the idea that the greatest aim of religion is to obey the dictates of the willful and whimsical God, or perhaps even the very idea of the "personal" God who creates the world from nothing and rules it at will, and what is even more important - the ideas of prophetism and religious exclusivism("there is the only way to God and it has been communicated by the prophet X").

Yet such criticism is currently hardly feasible in the West, especially in America, since it would require the criticism of the very principles of which the Christianity also dwells. The West one day can stand before a very inconvenient choice - either try to reject the principles of the Abrahamic religiosity altogether, or maintaining these principles and remain helpless againt the radical islam.

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