By Abdul Masih —
Between sarcasm and facetiousness, UK reporter Mayhar Tousi calls Islamists “beardy weirdies” as he tries to explain to Westerners the incomprehensible news emanating from the Middle East. He is originally from Iran.
The latest head-scratcher is the war that erupted between Pakistan and Afghanistan, former allies. He calls it Abdul against Ahmed.
What the heck is happening? The answer lies in the religion of Islam, which never embraced the nation-state political structure foisted upon Islam out of World War 2. Islam doesn’t haven any foundational understanding of nation states. Instead, there is to be the Caliphate, a unification of Islam believers everywhere under one strongman.
Islamic radical believers want to return to the pristine teachings of Islam; this means, the restoration of the Caliphate. This is what ISIS tried to do when it erupted on scene in 2014 when it seized much of Iraq and parts of Syria. Their plan? To steamroll militarily the unification of all Muslims states under their rule — subsequently to conquer the whole world in the name of Islam.
ISIS got swatted down. So too did Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator who invaded Kuwait in 1990. This is what Iran has sought to do by spreading terror to Hamas, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
And this is the reason why the ISIS-K, a splinter group of the old ISIS state, in Afghanistan is attacking parts of Pakistan that are their same tribe irrespective of arbitrarily drawn nation state lines after WW2. These lines were so arbitrary that people groups were cut in half, and some people groups, like the Kurds, got no piece of the pie.
And so it is. The Pakistanis are getting revenge on the Taliban, supposedly harboring ISIS K, who claimed responsibility for detonating a bomb at a Shi’ite Mosque in Islamabad Feb. 6, killing 32 and injuring 170. ISIS K is Sunni Islam, but so is Pakistan (with Shia as a minority group). (Sunnis and Shia see each other as heretics and often resort to violence to “purify” Islam.)
Pakistan is playing the nation-state game, not the Caliphate game. Afghanistan wants to restore the Caliphate under its rule.
(The last time the Caliphate was seen was the Ottoman Empire based in Turkey, which was crushed by British colonizers.)
All of this confusing muddle causes Tousi to cackle. As a sufferer under stringent and militant Islam in iran, he emigrated to the United Kingdom, embraced freedom and Christianity. He gives unique and knowledgeable insights into the region. He has no respect for the fanatics who carry out mayhem worldwide, so he calls them Beardy Weirdies.
Sources: Tousi TV, Al Jazeera, BBC, AP, others.
