As another anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington approaches it can be said no other subject during this period has been discussed as widely as Islam and Muslims.
Yet much about both remains clouded.
The Muslim world is not a monolith, and Muslim understanding of their faith-tradition—Islam—in lacking a centre analogous to the Vatican, remains widely dispersed.
The differences among Muslims on how the Koran should be read and Islam practised reach back to the earliest years of Muslim history and have been the source of much internal conflict. These differences are compounded by the convulsions in varying degrees the Muslim world is experiencing presently from the effects of the fast moving global economy.
The internal conflicts among Muslims were of little concern to others until very recently. Since Sept. 11, 2001, understanding the Muslim world’s internal map has become vital to the West for its own security interests.
Muslims ethnically are a diverse people, and Islam is no more an Arab religion than Christianity is a Jewish heresy. More than 80% of over one billion Muslims are non-Arabs, and most Muslims are located in south and southeast Asia.
Muslims in Indonesia, India, Turkey and Malaysia, for instance, are citizens of countries in varying degrees democratic and embracing of the modern world.
Muslims in India have shown how Islam is not less adaptive to democracy than Christianity and Judaism, and a recent delegation of senior Muslim religious leaders from India reciprocated the visit of Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger in a significant gesture by journeying to Israel.
Turkey was an ally of the West through the Cold War, fought alongside Americans in Korea, and is a strategic partner with Israel.
Abdurrahman Wahid, former democratically elected president of Indonesia and head of the world’s largest Muslim organization—Nahdatul Ulama—is an outspoken friend of the West, Israel, Jews and Christians.
It is mostly the Arab world including Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where religious extremism and political tyranny in a volatile mix have reduced the greater Middle East into a political wasteland, and the internal quarrels of a broken civilization most acute here have spilled over into Europe and beyond.
Saudi Arabia is the Muslim world’s heart of darkness, though the clout from oil-income gives the Saudis an undeserved influence among the majority Sunni Muslims.
Three decades of Saudi cult of Wahhabism—considered until lately by most Muslims as bigotry and ignorance of desert nomads—preached in mosques and religious schools across the Muslim world, including Muslim enclaves in the West, have taken its toll.
Saudi bigotry financed by oil-wealth has pushed a large segment of the Muslim population on a reverse course of violence and fanaticism directed against the modern world and Muslims who seek to be reconciled with it.
SAUDI BIGOTRY
The full effect of Saudi bigotry and Iranian Shiite fanaticism is on display in Iraq, the Muslim land most broken by tyranny. Here the quarrel between tyranny and freedom is fully unmasked.
The convulsions inside the Muslim world are no longer a local affair. And the world’s awakening to the perils of Muslim quarrels has made many in the West aware that defeating Muslim extremism is as vital for their security as helping Muslims make the transition to the modern world.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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