Rekindling the Jihad

chooling, the 600,000 German Alevis are a bulwark against Islamist radicalism in their country of adoption or, in many cases, of their birth.

Some young Alevis I interviewed in Cologne said they would gladly go to Macedonia to clean out the Wahhabis if encouraged to do so. But all over Europe, moderate Muslims expect their governments to act. They seem destined to be disappointed. European states are frozen in a posture of accommodation, willful oblivion, ignorance, and simple denial of the reality: The enemy will not be beaten so long as he finds places to rekindle his jihad.

I’m not sure how convincing this tale of moderate Muslims “ready to act” really is. If a religion is based on submission to the word, revealed 1400 years ago, then there’s little defence against the kind of reactionary extremism of the Wahhabis and the like, who can claim to be reverting to the purity of the original revelation.

Here’s another take:

Although the majority of Bosnian Muslims are secular in orientation, there have always been fundamentalist currents with political influence among the Bosnian intelligentsia. Alija Izetbegovic, the first Bosnian President following the 1992 declaration of Bosnian independence, is a case in point. Izetbegovic openly expressed sympathy for Islamist doctrine, even if he did not adopt it as the basis for his policies. He brought thousands of Arab Mujahideen to Bosnia to reinforce his troops, many of them veterans of the war in Afghanistan. “We enjoyed great privileges among both the political and the military leadership in Sarajevo,” Ali Hamad, a former Mujahideen commander from Bahrain, recently told the German weekly Der Spiegel.

The fact that Bosnia has become such a fertile source of new recruits for the Wahhabi sectarians is a legacy of this alliance. Having obtained Bosnian passports, several hundred Mujahideen remained in Bosnia after the war. With the generous financial support of Saudi Arabia, they built up a network of organizations that they are using to attract the next generation of Islamists.