Or will he? What if he comes from Northern Virginia, like the five young men who were arrested in Pakistan on Dec. 8 and who have been accused of planning “terrorist activities,” according to Pakistani newspaper reports? The bottom line is that we can no longer assume that terrorists will come from any particular country or fit any particular profile. The more we learn about what makes people vulnerable to recruitment by terrorist organizations, the less any of the old generalizations hold up.

Most terrorists are spoiled rich kids

Many prominent jihadists are indeed well-off and well-educated. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the failed Christmas Day airline bombing, comes from one of the wealthiest families in Nigeria. After the 2001 attacks, much was made of the engineering backgrounds of some of the hijackers, and Osama bin Laden famously hails from a wealthy family with close ties to the Saudi royals.

But terrorists come from all socioeconomic backgrounds. For poor people in countries where economic prospects are bleak, jihad can be one of the few jobs available. Of the 25,000 insurgents and terrorism suspects detained by US forces in Iraq as of 2007, nearly all were previously underemployed, according to Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, the commander of detainee operations at the time.

Al Qaeda recruits come from the Middle East

Al Qaeda’s core organization, which was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, is now based in Pakistan, but terrorist organizations claiming to be its affiliates include Northern Africa’s Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia and al-Shabab, which is fighting in southern Somalia and has been recruiting Westerners.

The organization also has a more amorphous following of independent cells and individuals around the world. It is almost impossible to target or quantify this following because it isn’t centralized in any one location. Such self-made terrorists can be found anywhere, even in Fort Hood, Texas.

More broadly, there is no particular political system that reliably promotes or deters terrorism. And democracy is not the cure-all it is often assumed to be. There are many more terrorist incidents in democratic India, for example, than in non-democratic China or Saudi Arabia. (This may be because authoritarian regimes are good at controlling terrorism within their borders.) Failed and failing states, such as Yemen and Somalia, also make particularly fertile ground for terrorism.

Al Qaeda is made up of Islamic zealots

To the contrary, rank-and-file terrorists who claim to be motivated by religious ideology often turn out to be ignorant about Islam. The Saudi Interior Ministry has questioned thousands of terrorists in custody about why they turned to violence, and found that the majority did not have much formal religious instruction and had only a limited understanding of Islam. According to Saudi officials, one-quarter of the participants in a rehabilitation program for former jihadis had criminal histories, often for drug-related offenses, whereas only 5 percent had been prayer leaders or had other formal religious roles.

In the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, second- and third-generation Muslim youths are rebelling against what they see as the culturally contaminated Islam their parents practice and that is promoted in their local mosques, favoring instead the allegedly purer Islam that they discover online or via imams from the Middle East. But the form of Islam they turn to is often highly unorthodox. For example, the Hofstad group in the Netherlands — a network of radicalized young Muslims — practiced a sort of do-it-yourself Islam cobbled together from Web sites and the teachings of a self-taught Syrian imam who is also a former drug dealer.

Rather than Islam leading young recruits toward Al Qaeda, it may be an ignorance of Islam that renders youths vulnerable to Al Qaeda’s violent ideology.

Terrorists are driven by strong beliefs

Terrorist movements often arise in reaction to a perceived injustice, whether real or imagined. Yet ideology is not the only, or even the most important, factor in an individual’s decision to join. In my research and interviews with terrorists, many speak, in particular, about being motivated by a feeling of humiliation. A Kashmiri militant founded his group because, he said, “Muslims have been overpowered by the West. Our ego hurts … we are not able to live up to our own standards for ourselves.”

The reasons that some people become terrorists are as varied as the reasons that others choose conventional professions: market conditions, social networks, contact with recruiters, education and individual preferences.

Most terrorist groups disappear quickly; those that survive tend to have the sort of flexible ideology that can attract a diverse array of recruits and funders. Al Qaeda is among the most disciplined groups, but its goals and its list of enemies are constantly shifting. Documents analyzed by scholars at the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy reveal an astonishing lack of clarity about the group’s purpose, even among leaders of the organization. Abu’l-Walid, a leading strategic thinker for Al Qaeda, has complained about constantly shifting strategic goals, lamenting that “waging jihad like a rhinoceros is stupid and futile.”

Terrorist recruits are alienated loners

According to The Washington Post, Abdulmutallab, the alleged Christmas airplane attacker, wrote in an online Islamic forum: “I have no one … to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems.”

But for most terrorist recruits, the problem isn’t so much a lack of friends as having the wrong friends. This dynamic isn’t so different from the way gang recruiting works in the United States: Terrorists often join an armed struggle because they have a buddy who has done so. In a survey of 516 Guantanamo detainees, researchers at the Combating Terrorism Center found that knowing another member of Al Qaeda was a better predictor of who became a terrorist than was belief in the idea of jihad.

Ultimately, some individuals may join terrorist groups out of a misplaced desire to transform society. But over time, the social and psychological rewards of belonging can eclipse such motivations. Terrorists want to better their own circumstances at least as much as they want to change the world.

Jessica Stern, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, serves on the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law.

The Washington Post

This is a very good lecture from Hamza Yusuf from Zaytuna Institute. In this video series recorded in 1997, he explains about how the Qur’an was compiled. He talked about the oral culture and memorization by the Arab people in the time of the prophet Muhammad S.A.W. He also explains about why there are destroyed Qur’ans back in Sayyidna Uthman, Radi-Allahu anhu’s time. There is also a Q&A session at the end.

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and grew up in Northern California in a Greek Orthodox family. He is founder of the Zaytuna Institute. He embraced Islam in 1977 in Santa Barbara, California when he was only 17 and set off almost immediately to study Arabic, Islamic jurisprudence, philosophy, and spiritual psychology with masters in the Muslim world. More about Hamza Yusuf.

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“What we learned in the study is that US Muslim women are roughly equal to men and to women who are non-Muslims in America in their level of education, level of income, level of religiosity and mosque attendance,” Ahmed Younis, a senior analyst at the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, told reporters.

“The Achilles Heel that has always existed — that Muslims are ‘not like us’ because their women are oppressed — well, the data speak to the proposition that that is absolutely not true,” said Younis.

The report, based on data culled from 946 people who identified themselves as Muslims out of a sample of more than 319,000 interviewed across the United States last year, showed that Muslim American women and the religious group as a whole are second only to Jewish Americans in terms of educational attainment.

Forty percent of Muslims have a bachelor’s or graduate degree, compared with 61 percent of Jews and 29 percent of the US population as a whole.

US Muslim women stand out, both compared to their global counterparts and women from other religious groups in the United States, in that they are statistically as likely as their male counterparts to have earned a university degree or higher.

Forty-two percent of Muslim women had degrees compared with 39 percent of Muslim men in the United States.

Jewish women trailed Jewish men by six percentage points in the higher-education achievement realm, and for the US population as a whole, 29 percent of women and 30 percent of men had bachelor’s degrees or better.

The study also showed that Muslim American women tend to earn the same as men, both at the low and high ends of the income scale, giving the religious group the highest degree of economic gender parity.

Muslim women in the United States also frequent mosques as often as their male counterparts, “in sharp contrast to women in many majority Muslim countries who are generally less likely than men to report attending a religious service in the last week,” the report said.

And more Muslim women than men in the United States — 46 percent versus 38 percent — said they are “thriving”, or categorized themselves as being at the upper end of a scale measuring life satisfaction.

“The Muslim-American experience for a woman yields to her the opportunities and freedoms that America generally yields to women,” said Younis.

“There is a uniqueness of experience among Muslim-American women vis a vis Muslims globally,” he added.

Indeed, Muslims in the United States as a whole fare well compared with the Muslim populations in other Western societies.

While 41 percent of American Muslims said they are “thriving”, only 23 percent in France and a mere seven percent in Britain said the same, the report showed.

The authors of the report called for a “rethink” of Americans’ understanding of the US Muslim community.

“Muslims are the most negatively viewed religious community among Americans,” Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies told AFP.

“Only 45 percent of Americans consider Muslims in the country as loyal and 25 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t want to have Muslims as a neighbor,” she said.

A huge survey of the world’s Muslims released by Gallup last year showed that Muslims admire the West for its democracy, freedoms and technological prowess.

But when Americans were asked in the same study what they admired most about the Islamic world, “most replied ‘Nothing’,” said Mogahed.

The study was the first-ever conducted across the United States of a randomly selected sample of Muslim Americans.

Source: http://www.mywire.com/a/AFP/Report-Muslim-Americans-chips-away/9244203?page=2

Islam: The Next American Religion?

Non-original post, taken from http://www.beliefnet.com/story/69/story_6982.html

The U.S. began as a haven for Christian outcasts. But what religion fits our current zeitgeist? The answer may be Islam.

by Michael Wolfe

Americans tend to think of their country as, at the very least, a nominally Christian nation. Didn’t the Pilgrims come here for freedom to practice their Christian religion? Don’t Christian values of righteousness under God, and freedom, reinforce America’s democratic, capitalist ideals?

True enough. But there’s a new religion on the block now, one that fits the current zeitgeist nicely. It’s Islam.

Islam is the third-largest and fastest growing religious community in the United States. This is not just because of immigration. More than 50% of America’s six million Muslims were born here. Statistics like these imply some basic agreement between core American values and the beliefs that Muslims hold. Americans who make the effort to look beyond popular stereotypes to learn the truth of Islam are surprised to find themselves on familiar ground.

Is America a Muslim nation? Here are seven reasons the answer may be yes.

Islam is monotheistic.

Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. They also revere the same prophets as Judaism and Christianity, from Abraham, the first monotheist, to Moses, the law giver and messenger of God, to Jesus – not leaving out Noah, Job, or Isaiah along the way. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition only came to the fore in the 1940s in America. Now, as a nation, we may be transcending it, turning to a more inclusive “Abrahamic” view.

In January, President Bush grouped mosques with churches and synagogues in his inaugural address. A few days later, when he posed for photographers at a meeting of several dozen religious figures, the Shi’ite imam Muhammad Qazwini, of Orange County, Calif., stood directly behind Bush’s chair like a presiding angel, dressed in the robes and turban of his south Iraqi youth.

Islam is democratic in spirit.

Islam advocates the right to vote and educate yourself and pursue a profession. The Qur’an, on which Islamic law is based, enjoins Muslims to govern themselves by discussion and consensus. In mosques, there is no particular priestly hierarchy. With Islam, each individual is responsible for the condition of her or his own soul. Everyone stands equal before God.

Americans, who mostly associate Islamic government with a handful of tyrants, may find this independent spirit surprising, supposing that Muslims are somehow predisposed to passive submission. Nothing could be further from the truth. The dictators reigning today in the Middle East are not the result of Islamic principles. They are more a result of global economics and the aftermath of European colonialism. Meanwhile, like everyone else, average Muslims the world over want a larger say in what goes on in the countries where they live. Those in America may actually succeed in it. In this way, America is closer in spirit to Islam than many Arab countries.

Islam contains an attractive mystical tradition.

Mysticism is grounded in the individual search for God. Where better to do that than in America, land of individualists and spiritual seekers? And who might better benefit than Americans from the centuries-long tradition of teachers and students that characterize Islam. Surprising as it may seem, America’s best-selling poet du jour is a Muslim mystic named Rumi, the 800-year-old Persian bard and founder of the Mevlevi Path, known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes. Even book packagers are now rushing him into print to meet and profit from mainstream demand for this visionary. Translators as various as Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, and Kabir and Camille Helminski have produced dozens of books of Rumi’s verse and have only begun to bring his enormous output before the English-speaking world. This is a concrete poetry of ecstasy, where physical reality and the longing for God are joined by flashes of metaphor and insight that continue to speak across the centuries.

Islam is egalitarian.

From New York to California, the only houses of worship that are routinely integrated today are the approximately 4,000 Muslim mosques. That is because Islam is predicated on a level playing field, especially when it comes to standing before God. The Pledge of Allegiance (one nation, “under God”) and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (all people are “created equal”) express themes that are also basic to Islam.

Islam is often viewed as an aggressive faith because of the concept of jihad, but this is actually a misunderstood term. Because Muslims believe that God wants a just world, they tend to be activists, and they emphasize that people are equal before God. These are two reasons why African Americans have been drawn in such large numbers to Islam. They now comprise about one-third of all Muslims in America.

Meanwhile, this egalitarian streak also plays itself out in relations between the sexes. Muhammad (P.B.U.H), Islam’s prophet, actually was a reformer in his day. Following the Qur’an, he limited the number of wives a man could have and strongly recommended against polygamy. The Qur’an laid out a set of marriage laws that guarantees married women their family names, their own possessions and capital, the right to agree upon whom they will marry, and the right to initiate divorce. In Islam’s early period, women were professionals and property owners, as increasingly they are today. None of this may seem obvious to most Americans because of cultural overlays that at times make Islam appear to be a repressive faith toward women – but if you look more closely, you can see the egalitarian streak preserved in the Qur’an finding expression in contemporary terms. In today’s Iran, for example, more women than men attend university, and in recent local elections there, 5,000 women ran for public office.

Islam shares America’s new interest in food purity and diet.

Muslims conduct a monthlong fast during the holy month of Ramadan, a practice that many Americans admire and even seek to emulate. I happened to spend quite a bit of time with a non-Muslim friend during Ramadan this year. After a month of being exposed to a practice that brings some annual control to human consumption, my friend let me know, in January, that he was “doing a little Ramadan” of his own. I asked what he meant. “Well, I’m not drinking anything or smoking anything for at least a month, and I’m going off coffee.” Given this friend’s normal intake of coffee, I could not believe my ears.

Muslims also observe dietary laws that restrict the kind of meat they can eat. These laws require that the permitted, or halal, meat is prepared in a manner that emphasizes cleanliness and a humane treatment of animals. These laws ride on the same trends that have made organic foods so popular.

Islam is tolerant of other faiths.

Like America, Islam has a history of respecting other religions. In Muhammad’s (P.B.U.H) day, Christians, Sabeans, and Jews in Muslim lands retained their own courts and enjoyed considerable autonomy. As Islam spread east toward India and China, it came to view Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism as valid paths to salvation. As Islam spread north and west, Judaism especially benefited. The return of the Jews to Jerusalem, after centuries as outcasts, only came about after Muslims took the city in 638. The first thing the Muslims did there was to rescue the Temple Mount, which by then had been turned into a garbage heap.

Today, of course, the long discord between Israel and Palestine has acquired harsh religious overtones. Yet the fact remains that this is a battle for real estate, not a war between two faiths. Islam and Judaism revere the same prophetic lineage, back to Abraham, and no amount of bullets or barbed wire can change that. As The New York Times recently reported, while Muslim/Jewish tensions sometimes flare on university campuses, lately these same students have found ways to forge common links. For one thing, the two religions share similar dietary laws, including ritual slaughter and a prohibition on pork. Joining forces at Dartmouth this fall, the first kosher/halal dining hall is scheduled to open its doors this autumn. That isn’t all: They’re already planning a joint Thanksgiving dinner, with birds dressed at a nearby farm by a rabbi and an imam. If the American Pilgrims were watching now, they’d be rubbing their eyes with amazement. And, because they came here fleeing religious persecution, they might also understand.

Islam encourages the pursuit of religious freedom.

The Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is not the world’s first story of religious emigration. Muhammad and his little band of 100 followers fled religious persecution, too, from Mecca in the year 622. They only survived by going to Madinah, an oasis a few hundred miles north, where they established a new community based on a religion they could only practice secretly back home. No wonder then that, in our own day, many Muslims have come here as pilgrims from oppression, leaving places like Kashmir, Bosnia, and Kosovo, where being a Muslim may radically shorten your life span. When the 20th century’s list of emigrant exiles is added up, it will prove to be heavy with Muslims, that’s for sure.

All in all, there seems to be a deep resonance between Islam and the United States. Although one is a world religion and the other is a sovereign nation, both are traditionally very strong on individual responsibility. Like New Hampshire’s motto, “Live Free or Die,” America is wedded to individual liberty and an ethic based on right action. For a Muslim, spiritual salvation depends on these. This is best expressed in a popular saying: Even when you think God isn’t watching you, act as if he is.

Who knows? Perhaps it won’t be long now before words like salat (Muslim prayer) and Ramadan join karma and Nirvana in Webster’s Dictionary, and Muslims take their place in America’s mainstream.

Michael Abdul Majeed Wolfe is the author of books of poetry, fiction, travel, and history. His most recent works are a pair of books from Grove Press on the pilgrimage to Mecca: “The Hajj” (1993), a first-person travel account, and “One Thousand Roads to Mecca” (1997), an anthology of 10 centuries of travelers writing about the Muslim pilgrimage. In April 1997, he hosted a televised account of the Hajj from Mecca for Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” on ABC. He is currently at work on a four-hour television documentary on the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H.).

Extracted 12/09/2005 from http://www.beliefnet.com/story/69/story_6982.html
Found on http://www.easyislam.com/blog/