Akram's Razor
Sickening news from Gaza. A volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) appears to have been murdered by a rogue Palestinian faction. God rest his soul and reward him for his work for justice.
Vale Vittorio Arrigoni, 'hero of Palestine' | Pennie Quinton | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Hearing of the murder of Vittorio Arrigoni, a committed peace activist who for the last 10 years campaigned for recognition of Palestinian human rights under Israeli occupation, has left me shaking and crying with rage at the sheer cruelty and stupidity of those who would carry out such an act. According to news reports, Arrigoni was murdered by the Tawheed and Jihad group, which operates in the Gaza Strip in opposition to the Hamas government.
This is off-topic, but I have to say that it's a sad commentary on the state of "Islamist" movements that the presence of "Tawhid" (i.e., the Islamic term for true monotheism, in contrast to the idolatry or shirk that permeates the world; Tawhid is the most important and sacred principle of Islam) in an Islamic organization's name regularly seems to correlate with ignorance, intolerance and extremism. (For those that don't know, Wahhabis and Salafis often fancy themselves the sole proponents of Tawhid. Indeed, the willingness to excommunicate other, less obscurantist Muslims as "idolaters" based on narrow doctrinal differences and the extreme Manichean view of the world that that belief entails were probably Muhammad Abdal-Wahhab's most enduring contribution to Islamic tradition.)
I'm reminded of the way dictatorships invariably describe themselves as democracies. Sometimes, it seems to be an iron law of contemporary Islamic intellectual life that those preaching most loudly about Tawhid are, when you scratch the surface, purveyors of some form of Shirk. It's downright Orwellian.
Am I alone in perceiving this perverse pattern?
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