Young Iraqis are losing their faith in religion

"After almost five years of war, many young Iraqis, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.
In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.
"I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us," said Sara Sami, a high school student in Basra. "Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don't deserve to be rulers."

[...]

"In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics, they trusted them," said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. "It's painful to admit, but it's changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this."
"When they behead someone, they say 'Allah Akbar,' they read Koranic verse," said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad. "The young people, they think that is Islam. So Islam is a failure, not only in the students' minds, but also in the community."
A professor at Baghdad University's School of Law, who would identify herself only as Bushra, said of her students: "They have changed their views about religion. They started to hate religious men. They make jokes about them because they feel disgusted by them.""

International Herald Tribune, March 3, 2008

Hopefully this leads somewhere.

Why religion is the cause of religious terrorism

"[According to former CIA officer Marc Sageman. ] the first wave of Al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is now down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in Al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less have the power to provoke a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, who were well-educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for action.

"It's more about hero worship than about religion," Sageman said in a presentation of his research last week at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank in Washington. Many of this third wave don't speak Arabic or read the Koran. Very few (13 percent of Sageman's samples) have attended radical religious schools. Nearly all join the movement because they know or are related to someone who's already in it. Those detained on terrorism charges are getting younger: In Sageman's 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. They are disaffected, homicidal kids - closer to urban gang members than to motivated Muslim fanatics."

David Ignatius, Daily Star (Lebanon), February 28, 2008

Ever since 9. September 2001, there has been people from all sorts of backgrounds who have tried to state again and again and again that religion has nothing to do with terror. For a large part, this is pure revisionism based upon unwillingness to face the truth that religions carry a lot of unhealthy ideas.

With the same logic, WW2 didn't happen because of Nazi ideology, but because of the Versailles treaty. No-one would doubt that the Versailles treaty had an effect, but you would have to be retarded to say that National-Socialism had nothing to do with it. But let's move from WW2 to present day neo-nazism. It is of course a bleak shadow of the heyday of NS-DAP. Hitler is their hero, and that's about it. A lot of the racist attacks on immigrants etc. happen because the racist is an uneducated, unemployed drunkard. But he is also a fan of Hitler, and Nazi ideology offer the framework where attacking immigrants on the street is OK. The SA would have done it like they do, and the SS would have been more thorough.

That's what the afore mentioned revisionists don't see, that while the jihadi theology may be a poor excuse, it is still a theology. They have simply distilled certain values from traditional Islam. (And if Islam was a really peaceful religion, as is often claimed, then this would be impossible.) The fact that the majority of Muslims may have a different view doesn't matter, because the majority of Christians had a different view than Martin Luther when he begun his work too. All religious reformers start off at the fringes.

I think Marc Sageman is onto something when using three categories of terrorists, like above. The London bombings was a copycat crime by fans. No doubt about that. And they're probably not very well edumecated in Islam either. But their faith provided a framework for the act, and Islam provided a framework for jihadi interpretation.

Understanding Islam

"[Professor John Kelsay who teaches at Florida State University] explained there are three types of Muslims.
Militants, like al-Qaida members, want to restore God’s law. Because they believe all human beings are born Muslim, they think their actions are for the good of mankind, Kelsay said.
The second group, which is the vast majority of Muslims, supports an Islamic state but objects to how groups like al-Qaida try to establish it. They believe the problems that plague the West are based on too much freedom and a lack of a moral compass; the fruit of not having a religious establishment, Kelsay said.
The third group, which is the smallest, is Muslim democrats."

Nwfdailynews.com, February 27th, 2008

Of course, the problem here is that the so-called moderates (i.e. the middle group) still seem to long for a caliphate of sorts. As of now, they seem to be fence-sitters, but they need to realize that there are many more problems plaguing the East than the West and that it is they who should fix their own dysfunctional moral compasses. Incidentally, if they do so, I think the West will have less problems too.
The Muslim democrats need all the support they can get, of course.

Here's a video of the professor speaking too:

Artists too frightened to tackle radical Islam

"Britain’s contemporary artists are fêted around the world for their willingness to shock but fear is preventing them from tackling Islamic fundamentalism. [...]

“I’ve censored myself,” [Grayson] Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

[...]

Across Europe there is growing evidence that freedom of expression has been curtailed by fear of religious fundamentalism. Robert Redeker, a French philosophy teacher, is in hiding after calling the Koran a “book of extraordinary violence” in Le Figaro in 2006; Spanish villages near Valencia have abandoned a centuries-old tradition of burning effigies of Muhammad to mark the reconquest of Spain, against the Moors; and an opera house in Berlin banned a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo because it depicted the beheading of Muhammad (as well as Jesus and other spiritual leaders)."

The Times, November 19, 2007