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Peter1469
03-09-2017, 07:28 AM
The coming Islamic culture war (http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/gartenstein-ross-daveed-the-coming-islamic-culture-war/)

I am not as optimistic as the authors. They argue that liberal forces will overtake the Islamists and the Muslims that support them to one degree or another. It is certainly something that needs to happen before Islam truly enters the 21st Century.


Western observers are often blind to social currents within the Muslim world. During the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/anthologies/2016-02-29/arab-spring-five), outside analysts confidently predicted that the uprisings would marginalize the jihadist movement (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/world/middleeast/28qaeda.html) in favor of more moderate and democratic reformers (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/tunisia/2016-06-08/political-islam-muslim-democracy). In fact, the opposite happened—an unprecedented jihadist mobilization (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/isis-revolutionary-state) that has inspired legions of fighters from around the world and fragmented or threatened more than half a dozen countries. In large part, this was because the collapse of the old regimes, which had suppressed Islamism domestically, created new spaces for jihadists. These spaces included both literal ungoverned territory (http://pragati.nationalinterest.in/2015/04/the-losing-war-against-ungoverned-spaces/) and discursive spaces, where radicals were newly able to engage in dawa (https://www.icct.nl/download/file/Gartenstein-Ross-Ansar-al-Sharia-Tunisia's-Long-Game-May-2013.pdf), or proselytism.

Today, a new type of discursive space—one that will foster a very different set of ideas—is opening up in the Muslim world. In April 2011, Bahraini human rights activists created one such space when they launched the website Ahwaa (https://ahwaa.org/), the first online forum for the LGBT community in the Middle East and North Africa (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2016-08-22/americas-misguided-lgbt-policy) (MENA) region. Esra’a al-Shafei, one of the website’s founders, was modest about the site’s ambitions (http://designobserver.com/feature/a-voice-for-lgbtq-in-the-middle-east/27518), explaining that Ahwaa was intended “as a support network” for the “LGBTQ community” as well as a resource for those “who want to learn more by interacting with [LGBT] people.”


Although little-noticed at the time, Ahwaa’s seemingly innocuous project was in fact revolutionary. Homosexuality in the MENA region is not only stigmatized but generally criminalized and banished from the public sphere (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1993-03-01/challenge-radical-islam). The creation of an online platform where LGBT people could candidly discuss the issues affecting their lives, such as romantic relationships or the tensions between Islam and gay rights, was thus a direct challenge to deeply inscribed cultural and religious norms. Indeed, Ahwaa heralds a wave of challenging ideas that, fueled by rapidly rising Internet penetration, will soon inundate Muslim-majority countries.


Online communications, by their nature, give marginalized social and political groups a space to organize, mobilize, and ultimately challenge the status quo. In the MENA region, online spaces like Awhaa will give sexual minorities the ability to assert their identity, rights, and place in society. So too will the Internet amplify discourses critical of the Islamic faith, or of religion in general, and solidify the identities of secularists, atheists, and even apostates. The rise of these religion-critical discourses will in turn trigger a backlash (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/digital-counterinsurgency) from conservative forces who fear an uprooting of traditional beliefs and identities. The coming social tsunami should be visible to anyone who knows what signs to look for.



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