Some years back, I wrote an article on Margo Kingston's webdiary in which I referred to political Islam as "Islamic Zionism". That really set the cat among the pidgeons, with some claiming that the similarities between political Islam and Zionism were only superficial.
Now Ed Husain, the author of The Islamist, has taken up that theme in a column for The Guardian. Here's his argument in a nutshell ...
... are Islamists and Zionists really all that different, despite their blatant enmity? I think not.This is an area that needs to be explored further. Political Islam is dangerous because it is a perversion. Yet more and more Jews are beginning to realise that political Judaism can be just as dangerous.
Zionism and Islamism are both political perversions of ancient Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Islam. They were both born out of protest and anger: Zionism in response to tsarist pogroms and Islamism as a retort to colonialism. The heavy political content of both ideologies came from men who had no theological training in the centuries-old traditional understanding of the Torah or the Koran.
Words © 2007 Irfan Yusuf
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