Who are we? By Thomas L Friedman

The debate will be eternal, are there two Islams or one Islam?

Rasha al-Aqeedi's comment is the kind of comment, that we the Muslims need to think it through, She says,  "I hear people saying: ‘I am not going to the mosque and pray as long as they (the ISIS Rogues)  are here. They don’t represent Islam. They represent the old Islam that never changed.’ ” -

This is the problem, a bad usage of the phrase, "Old Islam" - What period they refer to? Ottoman, Mameluke, Abbasid, or Rashidun? The right usage should be Islam during the times of Prophet and Rashidun, and again during the Spain and Mogul Rule.

We should actually go back to the old Islam, the Islam during Prophet's time and during the times of Rashidun, may be partially during the Ottoman Empire. I would yield to an Islamic Historian,.

Mike Ghouse
www.MikeGhouse.net
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Who Are We?
NOV. 15, 2014
Inside

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html
Thomas L. Friedman

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — THE 9/11 suicide attack, spearheaded by 19, mostly Saudi, young men in the name of Islam, ignited a debate in the Sunni Arab world about religion and how their societies could have produced such suicidal fanatics. But it was quickly choked off by denial, and by America’s failed invasion of Iraq. Well, conversations here in Dubai, one of the great Arab/Muslim crossroads, make it clear that the rise of the Islamic State “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, and its barbaric treatment of those who are against them — moderate Sunnis or Shiites, Christians, other minorities and women — has revived this central debate about “who are we?”

Why? Because the Islamic State, or ISIS, is homegrown; its aim is not to strike at enemies far away, but to spread and impose its vision of an Islamic society right here and right now; it’s attracting Muslim youths from all over, including the West; its ideology is a violent mutation of the puritanical, nonpluralistic, Wahhabi Islam, the dominant trend in Saudi Arabia, and it is being beamed via Twitter and Facebook — parents here know — directly to their kids. That’s why it’s forcing an inescapable and painful look in the mirror.

“We can’t avoid this fight any longer — we’re on a train heading for a cliff,” said Abdullah Hamidaddin, an adviser to the Dubai-based Al-Mesbar Studies & Research Center, which tracks Islamist movements and works to promote a more pluralistic culture. What is most striking, though, is how much Al-Mesbar sees ISIS not as just a religious problem that has to be combated with a more inclusive Islamic narrative but as the product of all the problems ailing this region at once: underdevelopment, sectarianism, lagging education, sexual repression, lack of respect for women and lack of pluralism in all intellectual thought.

Rasha al-Aqeedi is an Iraqi editor from Mosul working at Al-Mesbar. She has stayed in touch with people in Mosul since ISIS took over. “What is happening,” she told me, is that the Sunni Muslim population of Mosul “has now awakened from the shock. Before, people would say, ‘Islam is perfect and [the outside world] is after us and hates us.’ Now people are starting to read the books that ISIS is based on. I hear from people in Mosul who say, ‘I am considering becoming an atheist.’ ”

She added: When a young man who has not passed the sixth grade joins ISIS and then “comes and tells a teacher at the university what he must teach and that he must wear a long gown, you can imagine the shock. I hear people saying: ‘I am not going to the mosque and pray as long as they are here. They don’t represent Islam. They represent the old Islam that never changed.’ ”

Besides the religious zealots in ISIS, you also find many adventurers and impoverished youths attracted to ISIS simply to be able to lord it over others. Many of the Sunnis who rushed to join ISIS in Mosul came from the much poorer town nearby, Tel Afar, whose citizens were always looked down upon by Mosul Sunnis.

“You see these boys [from Tel Afar]. They smoke. They drink. They have tattoos,” said Aqeedi. One of them who joined ISIS came up to someone I know who already covers her head with a hijab — but not her face — and he told her to put on a burqa and cover everything. He told her, ‘If you don’t wear a burqa, I will make sure one of the rural women, who people like you ridiculed your whole life, will come and give you a beating.’ ” This was about who has power — radical Islam was just the cover.