A Crisis in Islam

Frank Gaffney had a very interesting guest on Secure Freedom Radio last week. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad represented the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the United Nations.

Khalilzad was born in Afghanistan to a secular Muslim family and came to the United States as a teenager and ended up working with President Reagan as well as both Bushes.

Gaffney asked Khalilzad to offer his assessment of what’s happening in Afghanistan and other parts of the Islamic world:

“There is a crisis going on in the Islamic world or Islamic civilization, or Muslim majority countries and that is that the perception, the belief of many Muslims has been that, Islam used to be doing very well even dominant and then it has declined and a debate has started for a couple of hundred years now that to describe what went wrong and then to offer a way forward and Muslims have been very divided. They have not found a way out and a consensus on a way out. And part of the response has been and extremist response which is, the reason for the decline has been that Muslims have moved away from true Islam, abandoned the Sharia and do not live as they believe Islam was at the beginning of Islam.”

He continued:

“That has involved also, terrorists as part of the extremist wing but there have been others who have been secularists who believe the way to achieve greatness and success is to follow or imitate those who have achieved greatness and success, separated the religion from politics, who have embraced science and facts and who have been open to ideas. Criticizing what has not worked and being pragmatic and finding solutions and there are schools of thought in between.”

Khalilzad went on to describe the Taliban as a fundamentalist form of Islam and described the challenging process of uniting different ethnicities in Afghanistan against them once they aligned themselves with al Qaeda.

His analysis of the present seems to suggest that the Islamic world is not as united as Muslim extremists might hope.