A Different Drummer

I just read an interesting interview in Canada's National Post with Dr Tawfik Hamid, an ex-member of Al Gamaa Islamiya ("The Islamic Group"), one of the nastiest (and largest) violent Islamist movements in Egypt. They renounced violence in the late nineties, after a hectic and bloody decade where they basically turned parts of Upper Egypt into a no-go civil war zone, killed a couple of thousand people, including plenty of tourists, and generally behaved badly. Their spiritual leader is Omar Abdel Rahmann, who is serving a life sentence in the US for organising the 1993 World Trade Centre Bombings.

I am generally suspicious of those people who used to believe in and/or do stupid horrible things, now see the errors of their ways, and spend their days preaching the evils of their former comrades who are still doing the stupid things.

When I think of the classics - the former pack-a-day smoker turned obnoxious anti smoking guy, the former leftie/communist turned right wing commie hunter, and the former cocaine snorting orgy lover turned born-again Christian - its not the conversion that I have a problem with, its the righteous shout-it-out-loud advocacy of the truth of your newfound cause. Hey idiot - maybe you're just as wrong now as you were last time? Ever considered it?

I guess if I suddenly realised that everything I believed in until now was wrong, dangerously, horribly wrong, the first thing I would do is enter a fairly lengthy period of shutting the hell up, and thinking long and hard about how it was I managed to get things so mixed up. If your first reaction to acknowledging past mistake is to start loudly condemning everyone else who made that mistake with you, you probably are on track to being a screw-up again in the future.

Anyhow, the point being, I generally don't like these "I've seen the light, and now everyone else who hasn't yet seen it must realise the error of their ways" kind of people. Especially when your past error was something big and nasty, like say, being part of a club that enjoys using machine guns, beheadings and disembowellings to kill tourists trapped in a temple.

In the case of Tawfik Hamid, I'll go for a benefit of the doubt kind of deal, because he has some interesting things to say, and from what I can find out about him, he wasnt a Gamaa Islamiya member for very long. Plus, he likes to trash talk the Saudi's, which will always earn you some credit with me:

"His analysis is fascinating. Muslim fundamentalists believe, he insists, that Saudi Arabia's petroleum-based wealth is a divine gift, and that Saudi influence is sanctioned by Allah. Thus the extreme brand of Sunni Islam that spread from the Kingdom to the rest of the Islamic world is regarded not merely as one interpretation of the religion but the only genuine interpretation. The expansion of violent and regressive Islam, he continues, began in the late 1970s, and can be traced precisely to the growing financial clout of Saudi Arabia.

"We're not talking about a fringe cult here," he tells me. "Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed and Jews called pigs and monkeys."

The whole interview is worth checking out, if you can turn a blind eye to the right wing National Post's stupid tabloid headline - "Hot for Martyrdom"