Part 6
Abu Umair al-Afghani
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the confrontation between the Cross and Islam began once again. Once again, as it had centuries before, the Crescent and the Cross stood face to face. Once again, Islamism and capitalism confronted one another. Faith collided with tanks, and terms such as “Allahu Akbar,” ghazwa, jihad, martyrdom, istishhad, and kufr became common.
Yes, this time it was jihad and Islamic thought that were challenging Western ideologies. It must be said that even secularists who opposed America’s material interests had reached the conclusion that the West would ultimately be defeated by jihad and the mujahideen. In Iraq, for example, Saddam Hussein raised the slogan of jihad again during the final days of his rule. This time the West launched a direct crusading invasion and brought both Afghanistan and Iraq under attack with all its power. The Western powers occupied both countries. Although Afghanistan and Iraq possessed little in material terms, the ideas of jihad, Islamic rule, and the Caliphate were still alive within them.
What was strange was that even in a country like Iraq, where communist ideas had once prevailed, resistance under the banner of jihad emerged again. If we look through history, secular systems have never defended Muslims during times of occupation. Secular youth have never even offered a prayer against occupiers. On the contrary, in most cases they have sided with them.
America was defeated in Iraq by Islamists under the slogan of “Allahu Akbar” and in the name of jihad. The war became far longer than America had expected. At the same time, the ideas of jihad, the Caliphate, and Islamic government continued to spread among Muslims throughout the world. Eventually, thousands of people in the heart of the West itself embraced these ideas.
The West employed hundreds of thousands of people through audio, print, and visual media to fight against jihad, Islamic thought, and Islamic government. It established countless institutions and NGOs to undermine Islamic thinking. Under the banner of “behavior change,” it worked skillfully to alter Islamic values and morals.
Day and night, they tried to portray Islam, jihad, and Islamic government as terrorism. Through certain secular voices, they promoted abandoning weapons and redefining jihad altogether. If a careful study is made, millions of dollars were spent simply to change the meaning of jihad from armed struggle to nothing more than “effort” or “striving.” At the same time, weapons and military preparedness were portrayed in Muslim minds as causes of misery, humiliation, and backwardness.
To the point that they gave rise to groups among Muslims who consider Jihad to be merely an effort and regard Qital as abrogated. Yet despite all this, Western propaganda that described jihad as terrorism, brutality, and the killing of innocent people, and portrayed the Islamic Caliphate as a system of tyranny, oppression, and hostility to progress, failed to produce any significant result.
For twelve years, while the West was engaged in direct warfare against supporters of jihad, the Caliphate, and Islamic government in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia, it was simultaneously spending billions of dollars trying to portray Islamic rule and the Caliphate as sources of terrorism and misery, while presenting Western democracy, human rights, and secularism as the path to progress and prosperity. Even so, it was moving toward failure.
The Western powers received a major shock when, in Egypt, a country that had been secularized for decades and shared a border with Israel, the majority of the people demanded Islamic rule and elected Mohamed Morsi. In Turkey as well, Islamic thinking was once again rapidly gaining ground among Muslim youth. At the same time, the ranks of Hamas Mujahideen in Palestine, beside Israel itself, were growing stronger day by day.
In Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and many African countries, hundreds of thousands of young people were engaged in active struggle for Islamic rule. Despite all its efforts, the West was moving closer to failure rather than success with each passing day.
At that point, Western powers reached the conclusion that all their efforts against the ideas of the Caliphate, Islamic system, and jihad had failed. They returned to the same strategy that had worked for them centuries earlier: not destroying the Muslim, but destroying the idea itself.
A project had to be launched in the name of the Caliphate, one through which Muslims would see with their own eyes that jihad meant brutality, the killing of innocent people, and that the Caliphate meant tyranny and oppression. It had to be presented in such a way that the Caliphate appeared not only as a threat to the West, but as a disaster for Muslims themselves. Islamic government had to be portrayed as something unworkable in the modern age.
But who would carry out such a project?
The Orientalists?
No. Muslim youth had become aware of them.
The puppet rulers and servants who governed Muslim lands on behalf of the West?
No. It had become clear to every Muslim that they belonged to the West.
So the project had to move forward under the banner of the Caliphate itself. At the top would be hidden agents, while at the lower levels would be ignorant Muslim youth who had heard only the slogans of the Caliphate, Islamic government, and jihad, and were ready to sacrifice themselves for those slogans.
Western intelligence agencies gave this project the name “ISIS.” To deceive the people, they called it the “Islamic State.” In practice, its activities began in Iraq in 2014.
