Iraq: Out of the desert into Mosul (closed)

[TheCurmudgeon]

The core question then becomes why are they disaffected in their various European countries?---my answer is for some reason the Muslim communities much as say the Hispanic communities in the US tend to not want to fully integrate into the standard society out of fear of losing their identities and language.

I have my own theories on why this is. My guess is that you will find a relationship between two factors, the income/wealth and time spent in a secular country of the Muslim (or Hispanic) individuals, and their attachement to the idea of nation-state political legitimacy versus religious political legitimacy.

[TheCurmudgeon]

The idea of the restored Caliphate has a powerful impact on Muslims across the Islamic world:

The point can be argued, and has been,4 that the caliph was not only the temporal and spiritual (meaning able to head worship services and conduct religious ceremonies and rites) ruler, he was also God’s Deputy on Earth and thus was qualified to comment on, or more importantly, reinterpret Sura, Hadith and Sunna. Therefore, the caliph also had scholarly authority, could exercise religious authority and revise or establish religious doctrine. If the caliphate is restored, the potential struggle to define these differing interpretations would be critical not only to the US but to all Muslims.

...

Yet there are those today who seek to re-establish a caliphate, say that they want a caliphate or point out that a caliphate is the goal of Islamism. Also, there remains an undeniable ‘longing’ by many Muslims for a caliphate, based on views of a not necessarily ‘Golden Age’ of Islam. In a 2007 poll conducted by the University of Maryland of 4,384 Muslims in four nations (Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia), over 65 per cent interviewed answered positively to the question: ‘To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or caliphate.’9 Further, 65.5 per cent of the respondents said yes when asked if: ‘To require a strict application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.’10 In fact, an electronic ‘Caliphate OnLine’ site has been established in Great Britain which seeks to raise awareness about a new
caliphate and has even drawn up a tentative organizational chart of how a modern caliphate would be organized politically.11

Unfortunatley, there is not an open link to the article. Here is the cite:
Vernie Liebl (2009) The Caliphate, Middle Eastern Studies, 45:3, 373-391, DOI:
10.1080/00263200902853355

[OUTLAW 09]

Further prove the US has no strategy for both Syria and Iraq other than lets just wait for it to somehow improve.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-key-city.html

[TheCurmudgeon]

As I tend to do, I went back to find the source documents of the poll referenced in the article. It can be found here: http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pi..._Apr07_rpt.pdf

Now, the poll was really aimed at determining how much support there was in the Muslim world for AQ and its aims. Threrefore, there will be a slight skew in the results based on a psychological bias created by "priming" - inserting an idea in the head of the person who is asked the question. With that in mind, here is the paragraph from the report citing the results:

The two remaining goals [of AQ] represent potential threats to governments in the Islamic world. The first is “to unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or caliphate.” Majorities in all countries polled perceived correctly that al Qaeda wanted to achieve this: 67 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Indonesia, 60 percent in Egypt and 52 percent in Pakistan. Majorities in three countries also agreed with this objective themselves: Pakistan (74%), Morocco (71%), and Egypt (67%). Indonesia was the exception: only 49 percent agreed that Islamic countries should be united into a caliphate.

It is worth noting that, except for Indonesia, the percentage of people who believed that restoring the Caliphate is or should be an objective of Islam is higher than the percentage of muslims who felt that restoring the Caliphate was a goal of AQ.