Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Anonymous, in Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, (Washington, D.C.: Brassey's Inc., 2004, p. 82) points out that the World Wide Web, for those who would look, provides an:

"Internet library of war (that) lets Muslims groups and individuals and groups unaffiliated with al Qaeda or its allies train at their leisure at home and then conduct the attacks they concoct, operations that are planned and executed with almost no chance of being detected or interdicted. Obviously, at-home training also greatly reduces the need for would-be mujahideen to travel, thereby partially neutralizing the ability of governments to capture fighters via the traditional methods of watch-listing names, examining travel documents, and matching photos, fingerprints, or eye patterns. In short, the Internet’s jihad library facilitates the kind of unstoppable attacks that are the stuff of bin Laden’s dreams while degrading the ability of governments to use immigration, customs, and police services to apprehend traveling militants."

And alarmingly, Anonymous notes, the dispersal of desktop Internet publishing power, rather than allowing dissension to blossom -- as moveable type did by allowing individuals to own and read and interpret their own Bibles for themselves -- is allowing violent Islamic thought to coalesce and gain power, strength and influence.

Anonymous writes, "The Internet sites also play an important instructional role in regard to the world diffusion of religious studies supporting bin Laden’s call for defensive jihad. It has been particularly important for disseminating tracts by Sunni Islam’s Salafi sect, which is the most martial and fastest-growing Sunni sect. The Internet has served the jihadists’ cause, Sa’d al-Faqih’s Al-Islah website explained, by facilitating access to legal religious texts."

Anonymous quotes the site:

"A youth can now push a button and obtain information, which was until recently exclusive to the scholars of al-Hadith. Therefore, it is a paradox that information has served the growth of Salafist thought and that the challenges of globalization are now at the service of a project to return to legal religious texts and their hegemony over Islamic thought."

That ain't what the West might've hoped for, obviously. Ol' ER read awhile back that the problem with Islamism is that it had never gone through its own version of the Reformation.

But maybe it is. If the Catholic Church had succeeded in putting down the reform movements, its "success" would have cast Europe backward, back into its Dark Ages. Perhaps Islam is in the early stages of a reformation of sorts -- one that is failing.

--ER