Posted on Aug 14, 2013
Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated
five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of
impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in
the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that
life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of
destitute Muslims from despair. The fundamentalist ideology that rises
from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world
into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is
bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists, along with
gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very
bottom of society a final refuge and hope. The massacres of hundreds of
believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a
religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of
Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and
other poor regions of the globe into a caldron of blood and suffering.
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