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Diversity in Islam for Absolute Beginners

Paul | 18.10.2001 10:59

Roughly 1 in 5 of the world's population is
muslim - that's over a billion people. Yet for
all the talk about a global society with the
telecommunication revolution bringing knowledge
to the masses, what most westerners from
christian backgrounds know about Islam can be
written on the back of a small postage stamp.

Beyond the Undifferentiated Mass
Diversity in Islam for Absolute Beginners

Roughly 1 in 5 of the world's population is
muslim - that's over a billion people. Yet for
all the talk about a global society with the
telecommunication revolution bringing knowledge
to the masses, what most westerners from
christian backgrounds know about Islam can be
written on the back of a small postage stamp. So
here then is a crash course.

Fundamentalism?

Islam, like christianity is an expansionist
religion rather than the traditionalist beliefs
of a closed community. Conscious of itself as a
new initiative, it seeks to preach to and
convert pagan and unbeliever. However, whereas
christianity found itself growing within a pre-
existing state system (the Roman empire) and
made concessions to a separate political power,
Islam, starting as a means of filling a
political vacuum, was the creative force of a
new state.

As such the tension (and eventual division)
between church and state that marks christianity
does not occur within Islam. Hence the
"fundamentalist" label is misleading. In the
modern western tradition the tension between
church and state has come to be expressed as a
belief in a "novus ordo seclorum" where life is
separated into two spheres - a secular public
sphere of politics and a private sphere within
which the individual can divide his or her time
to the worship of god or mammon as they see fit.

The term "fundamentalism" originated in the US
from a political movement of anti-progressive
christians who wished to abolish the secular
independance of the state from christian
beliefs. It is misleading to apply the label of
"fundamentalist" in this sense, to muslims as it
is a formal part of their belief that no such
division between matters social, political and
religious should exist. That doesn't mean that
there aren't differences as to how this formal
unity between religion and politics should be
put into practice, but the label fundamentalist
only obscures the issue.

Religious or Cultural conservatism?

An important feature of the spread of Islam is
the way it has accomodated itself to the pre-
existing cultures it has come into contact with.
Where pre-existing cultural practices are not
explicitly in opposition to codified islamic
practices, they have been adopted into the newly
islamised culture. With the passage of time many
of these pre-islamic cultural practices have
retrospectively been labelled as sanctioned by
islam by conservative forces in society.

Consequently it is often the case that what is
claimed to be islamic practice is more often the
pre-existing cultural and social traditions of a
given ethnic society. Many of the declaredly
islamic traditions of the Pashtuns of Northern
Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example, have much
more to do with Pashtun cultural norms than
islamic law.

A Unified Ideology?

Like any ideology that emphasises unity as a
primary aim, Islam has in practice suffered any
number of splits. There is no room for a full
history in a piece like this but we must realise
that what exists today is the result of long
dialectic histories of orthodoxy, heresy,
struggle, repression and reform.

Sunni

The Sunni branch of Islam is the dominant one to
which 90% of muslims belong. Although the split
between the two branches that would become Sunni
and Shia was originally a matter of who should
succeed Muhammed, they later evolved more
substantial political and philosophical
differences. As Muhammed failed to produce a son
by any of his many marriages, the muslim
community was left with no clear successor after
his death.

The main body decided that the leadership (the
Caliphate) should pass to whoever from within
Muhammed's clan the muslim establishment best
felt represented continuity. The Shias, in
contrast, supported the claim of Ali, the
husband of the prophet's favourite daughter.
They insisted that the legitimacy of the
Caliphate came only from god, not the religious
establishment.

In time as those who had known the prophet and
remembered his sayings and acts began to die
off, this oral tradition of guidance
supplementary to the Koran (the sunnah) was
written down into several books, six of which
became recognised as authoritative sources of
guidance - the Hadith. For Sunnism then,
society's laws must be determined through
reference to the Koran and the Sunnah. For
Shi'ites, however, the true path can only be
found through the divinely appointed
intermediaries - the true Caliphs or Imams.

Kharawaj - too radical by far

As well as Sunni and Shia there was originally a
third force, since eradicated, whose negative
influence has profoundly shaped Sunni political
philosophy. These were the Kharawaji, radicals
who held that any sufficiently worthy muslim
could hold the position of Imam, whether a
descendant of Muhammed or a member of his
Quraysh tribe or not. They also held that people
were responsible for the good or evil of their
acts personally, and that anyone who did evil
was no longer a muslim, regardless of what they
or anybody else decreed. The effects of this
political philosophy was to challenge all
authority and encourage all, especially the poor
and dispossessed, to see the struggle against
injustice as being divinely sanctioned.

Since the time of the Kharawaj, the history of
the rise and fall of various dynasties of
Caliphs and different empires has lead the Sunni
tradition to view orthodoxy as something that
needs to be tempered with a pragmatism of
tolerating differences between muslims and not
being over hasty in determining who, of the
people who identify as muslims, is or is not a
muslim. This catholicity along with an emphasis
on the established majority opinion as the
source of religious authority has helped to
mitigate some of the destabilising effects of
radicalism while allowing economic prosperity to
be parallelled by a flowering of cultural,
scientific and philosophical diversity and
enquiry. However, even within the Sunni
mainstream, revivalist and puritan sects have
arisen both in the past and in more modern
times.

Sufi - It's not my Jihad if I can't dance to it

As well as the various sects of Sunnis and Shias
as Islam developed, some came to be more
interested in the personal spiritual aspect of
religion. The struggle to achieve some kind of
direct personal union with the divine. This
tradition shows the influence of contacts with
eastern traditions of the search for
enlightenment whether Hindu, Buddhist or Daoist.
The Sufi traditions, often seen as borderline
heretical by the centres of authoritarian
Islamic power, have historically prospered in
remote and mountainous regions. Especially
towards the east where similar mystical
traditions have been strong.

The introspective struggle of the Sufis is,
according to them, a form of Jihad (devout
struggle), one against the false, earthly self -
the Nafs. These strivings have produced some of
Islam's most loved poetry, but is also most
famously associated with ascetic disciplines
such as physical exertions including music and
wild dancing to induce visions and spiritual
breakthroughs - something which has always made
them unpopular with those who believe that
music, dancing and celebration in general is the
work of the devil.

Shia or Shi'ite

The original underdogs, the Shi'ites today make
up only 10% of the muslim world, they are a
minority in nearly all muslim countries, except
for Iran, where they are the state religion.
They have at times been linked to a desire by
non-arab muslims (e.g. Persians) to reject the
tendencies for arab domination over islam that
are sometimes expressed in the established sunni
tradition with its power centres in arab lands.
The Shia originated from a split amongst
Muhammed's followers after his death with no
male heir. The "traditionalist" Sunnis decided
to appoint a leader (the Caliph). The
"legitimist" Shias thought that Ali, the husband
of Muhammed's favorite daughter, was the
legitimate heir and Muhammed's privileged role,
not only as earthly leader but spiritual too
(the Imamate) was passed down this line. They
are divided into:

Ithna 'Ashariyah (Twelvers) or Imamis

Who believe that there were twelve legitimate
Imams after Muhammed and son-in-law Ali. They
believe the twelth Imam disappeared in 873 and
is thought to be alive and hiding and will not
reappear until judgement day. The Imamis became
the dominant Shi'ite form in the east,
particularly in Persia where it became the
official state religion in the 16th century. The
Iranian revolution of 1979 was taken over by the
Shia clergy and their followers who believed in
the Imamate of Khomeini. The fact that Shi'ism
is an oppressed minority in virtually all other
states in the muslim world helped to isolate the
Iranian Islamic Republic and limit their ability
to export their 'revolution'.

Isma'ilite

After the sixth Imam there was a dispute over
whether the legitimate successor was his elder
son Isma'il or his younger son Musa al-Kazim.
The majority supporting the young son went on to
be the mainstream leading to the Twelvers. Of
those who stuck with Isma'il they split into
those who decided he was the last Imam (the
Sab'iyah or Seveners) and those who believed the
Imamate carried on in that line. Of these
latter, various splits later left groups which
still follow people today they consider to be
the legitimate successor to Muhammed - the Aga
Khan is one such (via, obscurely, Hassan e Sabah
of Assasin fame). Other schisms led groups out
of Islam proper, such as the Druze (of Lebanon
fame) and the Baha'i.

We now move on to the two modern sects who have
most influence on the story we are today
interested in Afghanistan and related networks
throughout the world.

Wahhabi - the only good innovator is a dead one

The peninsula of Arabia has since before
Muhammed's time held two contrasting societies
together. On the Red Sea coast trade routes from
the south from Africa carrying gold, ivory,
slaves and valuable crops meet routes from the
east carrying spices and silks. Rich merchant
settlements in Mecca and Medina have profited
from the riches brought by these trade routes,
travellers and pilgrims to holy relics such as
the mysterious black rock of the Kaaba in Mecca.
In the arabian interior harsh deserts and barren
uplands have dictated a meagre semi-nomadic
herding existence to the tribal peoples that
inhabit the region.

A nomadic herding economy, with its main animal
wealth being so easily carried off, lends itself
to continual strife between tribes based around
livestock rustling and struggles over access to
grazing land and limited watering holes. This
existence has formed a population where
impoverishment sits together with a high degree
of mobility and martial experience. Throughout
history those people who have been able to unite
the warring tribes against an external enemy
have been able to mobilise a highly effective
military force for conquest of the outside
world. This was Muhammed's achievement, in
getting the merchants of the trading cities of
Mecca and Medina to pay taxes (zakat) to buy off
the raiding tribes and lead them in a campaign
of conquest accross the middle east and North
Africa. Although a great and wealthy empire
eventually resulted, by the beginning of the
20th century conditions in the Arabian interior
remained pretty much as impoverished and
undevelopped as they had in Muhammed's time.

On January 15 1902 a tribesman from the interior
in his twenties, accompanied by 15 hand-picked
men, scaled the walls of the city of Riyadh in
the dead of night. Taking the garrison of the
regional governor of the Ottoman empire
completely by surprise, this daring band of
Bedouin warriors, overwhelmed the garrison and
their leader, who the world would come to know
simply as Ibn Saud, was proclaimed ruler by the
townsfolk. Ibn Saud went on to unite the tribal
leaders of the interior and lead them in the
conquest of the rich cities and holy centres of
Medina and Mecca. He did so not only in the name
of the House of Saud, but in the name of a new
puritan brand of Sunni Islam - Wahhabism.

Wahhabism is named after the religious reformer
Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab who teamed up with
the founder of the house of Saud for a plan of
conquest back in the 18th century. This double
act had managed to cause the ruling Ottoman
empire serious grief beforehand and had been
almost wiped out several times previously. Now
with Ibn Saud the old plan would finally be put
into action again. By 1911 Saud was putting into
plan an ambitious scheme to forge the disparate
and eternally warring Bedouin tribes of the
interior into a united and ideologically
committed force.

With the tribesmen having no common national
identity beyond their tribe, the zeal of
Wahhabism would act as the unifying glue that
held the new state together in place of
nationalism. In 1912 he founded the first Ikhwan
(Brethren) colony with Bedouin from all tribes
in new model settlements where they would
undergo education and indoctrination by Wahhabi
clerics along with military training. In time
this would forge an unstoppable new military
force that would sweep accross Arabia and
conquer the holy cities. By 1921 this process
was complete. However Saud now faced the usual
problem of those who mobilise new radical forces
to conquer political power - how to demobilise
them before they started to destroy the very
bases of political power itself.

The problems had already become apparent when
the Ikhwan had taken Mecca. On hearing some
unfortunate who had decided a welcoming blast on
a trumpet should great the conquerors, the
Wahhabis, for whom music is anti-islamic, rioted
and mass destruction and slaughter ensued.
Convinced that any innovation since Muhammed's
time was anathema, they tore down minarets
(developed, like much mosque architecture since
Muhammed's time) and, believing that any worship
of relics, saints, or tombs of holy men was an
affront to the doctrine that only god can be
worshipped, they went round smashing up many
such pilgrimmage sites, much to the distress of
those who made their living of the pilgrims that
came to visit them. The wahhabi religious police
(mutawa) led a reign of terror in the cities,
crashing into people's homes and, if so much as
sniffing the scent of tobacco, would thrash the
unfortunates senseless.

More importantly for Ibn Saud, the Ikhwan wanted
to continue military expansion, attacking the
areas to the north occupied by the British and
French since the end of WW1 and the collapse of
the Ottoman empire. Saud wanted to avoid war
with the British, both to keep what he had
gained and also because he was rapidly running
out of money for the payments to the tribal
chiefs he needed to keep them in his grand
coalition. The possibility of selling an
exploration concession to western explorers
interested in looking for oil in Saudi Arabia
was too interesting to pass up.

By 1927 the Ikhwan were denouncing Ibn Saud for
selling out the cause and eventually rose in
rebellion against him. The ensuing struggle was
bloody, one ultra-zealous band nearly managing
to destroy the tomb of the Prophet himself, but
the radicals were eventually put down. Their
leaders fled to Kuwait, only to be handed back
over to Saud by the eager to please British.
Thus ended the first phase of the Wahhabi's
jihad.

Although the Ikhwan's military campaign was
halted, the Wahhabis continued to export their
religious revolution. The most successful first
stop was across the Red Sea in Egypt, where they
supported the formation of Hassan al Banna's
Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun). The
Brotherhood was formed to combat Egypt's secular
constitution of 1923. After the defeat of Egypt
and other Arabs trying to stop the creation of
Israel in 1948, they rose against the government
and were part of the revolution that brought the
secular pan-arab nationalist Nasser to power.
Nasser's programme was for an anti-imperialist
struggle against the western powers (he
nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956) combined
with 'socialist' industrial development and
modernisation.

This latter part was heatedly opposed by the
Brotherhood and the ensuing failed assasination
attempt brought about their suppression by
Nasser and the undying opposition between
militant Islamism and pan-arab nationalism ever
since. Nasser's "socialist" rhetoric and
friendliness towards the Soviet union, panicked
the western powers, particularly the US who were
holding the ring for western imperialism since
the British bowed out of the region after the
1956 Suez fiasco. The US involvement with the
militant Islamists as a bulwark against Soviet
influence in the Middle East dates from this
period.

Deobandis - back to basics

The Taleban, although a modern puritan Sunni
sect, are not Wahhabis. They are part of a
separate school that has its origin in the 19th
century in India under British Imperial rule.
After the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, which the British
blamed primarily on muslims, muslims found
themselves excluded from all institutions,
including schools, of imperial society. Being
excluded from official schooling meant exclusion
from any role in the civil service which ran the
country. In other ways too the mutiny forced a
rethink on Indian muslim society.

In many ways the rising had been the last
attempt to go back to the pre-colonial social
order of India under the Mughal empire. The
traditional leaders and ruling class had
demonstrated incompetence or even refused to
back the soldier-led mutiny at all. If Indian
society was to escape from British clutches it
would have to find a new way forward, rather
than simply looking back.

Amongst muslims two main directions emerged. The
first, intent on adopting some of the western
methods, created new secularised schools where a
similar education to the civil service schools
could be provided to young muslims, so they
would eventually be able to re-enter the
administration of the country. The second
approach was to create a revivalist islamic
education that would return the power of their
faith to young muslims and make them strong to
reject the corrupting force of westernisation in
preparation for throwing out the British
oppressor. This second school took its name from
the Indian town of Deoband where its leading
religious juridical council (ulemma) was based.

Like the Wahhabis, the Deobandi's faith is a
severe puritan one which bans music, dancing,
worship of saints or holy relics and sees an
external, physical Jihad (Jihad bis Saif) as a
central pillar of the faith. They took part in
the struggle for independance from the British
and for the partition of Indian to create
Pakistan. The Deobandis are one of the main
Sunni communities in Pakistan and have been
constantly in struggle both against the Shi'ite
minority in Pakistan and the other main Sunni
community the Brelvis.

These latter are more influenced by Sufi
traditions that have long persisted in the harsh
mountains of the Hindu Kush that dominate
Kashmir and Afghanistan as well as in the
mountainous Caucasus regions including Chechnya.
Although the Sufi muslims of Chechnya and
Afghanistan have certainly shown that the
"inner" jihad for enlightenment (Jihad bin Nafs)
is no contradiction to the external jihad of the
AK47, in Pakistan the "Jihadis" that have fought
the Indians in Kashmir and the Russians in
Afghanistan, are almost exclusively drawn from
the Deobandis. It was their religious schools
(madrassas) set up on the frontier that took in
the orphans of the Afghan war, that no one else
would feed, and turned them into Taliban
soldiers. Since the end of the war in 1989
hostility between Deobandis and Brelvis and both
against Shi'ites, has resulted in a rising
number of bomb and riot attacks on rival mosques
and assasinations in Pakistan.

The Afghan War 1979 - 1989

The current situation is above all the result of
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the
subsequent US proxy war fought there. This was
fought both through Afghan factions and an
international network of ideologically committed
islamists ready to fight the Soviet forces in
the name of Islam. The US State Department, wary
of Iran's Shi'ite Islamic revolution, were more
than happy to find their Saudi allies were able
to mobilise, through Wahhabi networks, militant
islamists who were as hostile to Iran as they
were to the Russians. This would allow them, to
fund the creation of a fighting force that would
be strong enough to take on the Russians, yet
were not in any danger of spreading the Iranian
model, especially given the seeming loyalty many
of the young radicals showed to the royal
families of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

In this way the US and Britain helped build up a
veritable International Brigade of Islamist
fighters, funded by the proceeds of Gulf oil,
sheltered and trained by the Pakistani
intelligence services of General Zia ul Haq's
regime and Western special forces. It was this
network that brought together Wahhabis and
Deobandis to create an international Jihadi
movement of which Al Qaeda and its brother
organisations like Egyptian Jihad (formed from
the Muslim Brotherhood mentioned above). So what
motivates this network?

The Al Qa'eda Programme

Al Qa'eda's activities may be illegal, immoral
and indefensible but they are neither motiveless
nor mindless. They have a programme and this is
it:

The demands are:

1. Troops Out Now - that is, US troops out of
Saudi Arabia

2. End Israeli oppression of Palestinians

3. End sanctions against Iraq

4. End western support for corrupt regimes in
muslim/arab countries - control of oil wealth

(5. Anti-Communism and Statism)

The fifth demand is not stated but it is the
foundation of the campaign against the Russians
in Afghanistan that gave the movement its birth.

The defence of private property is part of the
sayings of the Prophet and the subsequent
Caliphs. Anti-communism is a matter of doctrine
for orthodox islamists. Secondly, the creation
of a state to enforce islamic law - Sharia - is
the defining demand of modern islamism and has,
as we saw at the very beginning, always been
central to islam as a whole.

It follows then, that despite the seeming
radicalism of the demand to stop western powers
propping up corrupt despotic regimes in the
muslim world (or more particularly, the arab
world, because for all its islamic
internationalism this particular network remains
very much in the tradition of arab-centric sunni
thought), this network has no agenda for the
destruction of capitalism and the extraction of
profit. Indeed of all the demands number 4 is
most suspect. Osama bin Laden was friendly with
his family's traditional patrons, the Saudi
royal family, right up until they invited the US
forces into Saudi during the Gulf war.

These demands are framed as a religious struggle
to "free the holy places of islam", pretty much
the same slogan that Ibn Saud used to rally the
original Wahhabi Ikhwan fighters for the
conquest of Arabia. However, much as bin Laden
would no doubt like to refer back to such
historical precedents, we must not let the
surface similarities blind us to the significant
differences. The original Ikhwan, coming from a
world which had, not only religiously but
technologically remained almost unchanged since
the time of Muhammed, were fighting against
modern technology and industry. Ibn Saud's
allowing telephones into the country was one of
the grievances for their revolt.

Bin Laden, by contrast has his own satellite
phones, a modern education in civil engineering
and no aversion to setting up modern factories,
construction businesses or making millions on
the international financial markets. Of course
these modern means are all justified by the ends
of jihad. But whichever way you look at it, bin
Laden is a member of the local industrialist
bourgeoisie chafeing at the bit to build up
commodity production in the Middle East, not
knock it down.

For all the pre-modern language of his movement,
the content is for more technological and
industrial development, not less. The military
airbases and command posts that the US troops
moved into in 1990 were built by bin Laden for
the Saudis to use to build an independant
military force against the threat of Saddam's
Iraq (for much as the current Al Qa'eda demands
include the dropping of sanctions against Iraq,
we must remember that bin Laden was warning
against Hussain's aggressive intentions from the
late 80s onwards). Bin Laden wishes to see an
independantly powerful islamic Middle East, and
if that requires technological and economic
development then he is all for it.

Beyond Al Qa'eda and Osama bin Laden's clothing
of a industrialising developmental agenda in
pre-modern clothing, we need to look at the
social recruiting base and background of the
footsoldiers of today's militant movements. In
the time of Ibn Saud they were desert nomads
from an essentially pre-capitalist existence. No
more.

Material Foundations

Most of the islamic societies across North
Africa and the Middle East were subjected to
European colonialism or Ottoman rule at some
stage from the 19th to the 20th centuries.
Socially these regions, although containing some
of histories great urban centres of
civilisation, remained primarily subsistence
economies for the majority of the inhabitants,
whether settled farmers or nomadic herders.
While colonial rule started the process of
forcing the population off the land, this social
transformation really got into gear under the
rule of the post-colonial regimes after WW1 and,
even more so after WW2.

The new post colonial regimes modelled
themselves on their erstwhile colonizers,
introducing a secular state and institutions,
and often promoting western dress and culture.
But many of the trappings of the new states,
whether transport infrastructure, motor cars,
telephones, etc. had to be bought from overseas.
In the gulf states this could all be paid for by
oil wealth without any need for the development
of local industry or production. In the oil-less
states the balance of payments pressure produced
a need to go into commodity production in
return, in order to pay for the imported
materiel. But starting from a level of
industrial development unable to compete with
the west, the only industry ready for conversion
to commodity production was agriculture.
Combined with strong tariff barriers protecting
western food crop production, the "balance of
payments" cash crop has played the major role in
throwing the peasantry off the land.

This mass of newly landless peasants, drifting
towards the shanty towns surrounding the urban
centres, looking for wage work, is the sleeping
giant of politics in the Islamic world. Any
rising by this new proletariat would be an
earthquake strong enough to shake the
foundations of all the established powers,
mostly despotic as they are, in the region. It
is amongst this multitude that the islamists
have worked hard to establish a base.

They have done so by setting up a religious
based welfare system. Most of the post colonial
states are too concerned about paying their
debts to western banks and the IMF to spend any
of their meagre tax revenues on social welfare.
Further the standard IMF "structural adjustment"
terms prohibit any such social spending, even
were any of the regimes farsighted enough to
consider them. Islam has a redistributive
"social democratic" taxation system built into
its foundations as zakat, one of the five
obligations of the religion. Islamists are able
to lean on the benificiaries of trade with the
west, or oil rights, for money. In return they
promise to keep a lid on popular revolt,
particularly any socialistic or class war
elements.

The current regimes, mostly being founded by
people who themselves dallied with socialistic
or national liberation politics in their
struggle to depose colonial power, are all to
aware of the destabilising potential of such
politics, not too mention the interests of the
local capitalists. So they are happy for the
islamists to hold ideological sway over the
urban proletariat, so long as their anger is
diverted to handy external scapegoats, such as
Israel or America.

This welfare system though is dependant upon
attending the mosque and being integrated into
the whole islamist system of ideological
formation. The system provides not only material
aid, but also meeting places, places to hear
news from co-religionists from afar and abroad.
In a sense the islamist mission amongst the
urban poor corresponds to the institutions that
workers across the world have built for
themselves (friendly societies, meeting houses,
public speaking and international
correspondance, etc.), except that in this
instance these institutions and spaces are not
the autonomous products of workers activity.
Rather they are funded by the bosses and the
rich and controlled by a power that mediates
between the two, usually antagonist classes and
the state. This state of affairs is not due to
some innate failing of political consciousness
amongst the urban proletariat, rather it is a
product of the economic enviroment of mass
unemployment and regime of accumulation that has
not yet reached the stage of accumulating
through relative surplus value, but remains
founded on the absolute exploitation of those in
work. The mass of the urban proletariat in many
islamic countries does not have enough spare
cash to set up their own autonomous spaces and
aid projects, compared to the resources the
islamists can access, especially for
comparitively expensive services like modern
health care.

But the creation of autonomous spaces in the
islamic world is what is desparately needed by
local workers and radicals. It is in this area
that international solidarity can play the most
important role in the future. Solidarity can
help build up the spaces for the proletariat of
North Africa and the Middle East to find a
libertory path between the devil of rotten
despotic regimes and the deep blue sea of
militant islamic capitalism.

The writer Paul Bowman is an internationalist,
anti-fascist, anarchist and libertarian
communist active for over 15 years in Yorkshire,
Northern England.

----
This article was one of several written for
Against War and Terrorism, a PDF booklet on the
war.

Read the articles on the web at
 http://struggle.ws/issues/war/pamOCT01.html

Print out the PDF file of the booklet from
 http://struggle.ws/pdf/war/warterrorpam.html

Paul
- e-mail: strugglefeedback@yahoogroups.com
- Homepage: http://struggle.ws/stopthewar.html

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24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
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Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
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