Radical Islam conflicts with tradition;  Media focuses on militant groups, but neglects peace-loving faithful
Geoffrey Smith; THE WASHINGTON TIMES    

Radical Islam has been called by many in the West one of the gravest  threats facing the world. Experts at a recent Washington conference,  however, said that most of the precepts espoused by radical Islam conflict  with that faith's ancient teachings.
    For years now, news reports documenting the terrors of extreme, militant  Islam have been a mainstay of U.S. and Western media. This has focused  attention on one subgroup of the faithful, often to the neglect of the  thousands of peace-loving, tolerant Muslims who abide by the true teachings  of their faith, said Sheik Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme  Council of America, an organization of moderate Muslims.
    The conference, sponsored by the Supreme Council and Johns Hopkins  University's School for Advanced International Studies, featured scholars,  anthropologists, diplomats and Muslim leaders.
    Participants analyzed the nature of modern-day radical Islamic movements,  from their origins in Iran and Afghanistan to their more recent infiltration  of Central Asian regions such as Dagestan and Chechnya.   

ISLAM MISUNDERSTOOD IN WEST
    Mr. Kabbani, who acts as the khalifa, or deputy, for the North American  branch of Sheik Nazim, spoke from the first word about what he called  misperceptions in the West about the true nature of Islam.
    Sheik Nazim heads the worldwide Naqshbandi-Hakkani Sufi order. The  Naqshbadiyya was founded in Central Asia and has been the dominant Sufi  order in Central Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, North Cyprus, Turkey  and the North Caucasus for the past 100 years.
    The radical Islam of the late 20th century is not really Islam, Mr. Kabbani  contends. "There is no radical Islam," he said. "Radical Islam is something  that is created. Islam is not created."
    Mr. Kabbani opened his remarks by quoting Islam's holiest scripture, the  Koran: " 'To each among you we have prescribed a law and an open way. If God  had willed, he would have made you all a single people,' " he read.
    The politicization of Islam is the primary factor in the development of  radical factions of the faith, experts at the conference said.    The powerful forces of modernization and globalization have caused the  proliferation of extremist strains of the religion, Mr. Kabbani said.
    "With the growth of Islam, we see the birth of different schools of thought  within Islam," he explained. "As previously isolated races and nations  converge through the process of globalization and technical advancement,  there are more opportunities for differences to arise."

CORE TEACHING IS UNCHANGED
    For Mr. Kabbani, however, despite what he acknowledged to be the natural  process of a growth of interpretation, the core Islamic teaching is  essentially unchanged since the days of the Prophet Mohammed.
    "As we consider traditional Islam versus radical Islam - in Central Asia or  anywhere else - we see that the difference between them lies not in the  basic beliefs of the religion, such as the oneness of God, the message of  the Prophet . . . the differences arise from love of authority and  misguidance by people who don't fully understand the religion," he said.
    The early Muslims developed a democracy of their own, he said. In the early  days of the religion, the Prophet Mohammed left the leaders to decide  amongst themselves who should take over the religion.    "Sultans and kings appoint their elder sons as their successors, but the  Prophet didn't appoint anyone, and left it for the Muslims to decide," Mr.  Kabbani said.
    Much of the discussion centered around the Wahhabi movement founded by  Mohammed ibn Abd al Wahhab (1703-92) - which is dominant in Saudi Arabia and  was historically influential in India and Indonesia - a strict sect often  criticized in other Islamic countries as un-Islamic and backward.    

U.S. BACKED MUJAHIDEEN
    Saudi Arabia and the United States were main sources of financing, training  and arms of the mujahideen, Islamic holy warriors who fought to expel the  Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1970s and '80s with arms shipped  through Pakistan and volunteers from throughout the Islamic world.
    Figures like Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile who has called for a holy war  against the United States and has been linked to the August 1988 bombings of  American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, were mainly shaped by the Afghan  war and had little study of the basic religious teachings. People like this  interpret Islamic teachings to justify violence, which the United States now  brands terrorism.
    Trained primarily in religious schools in Pakistan refugee camps, and now in  Afghanistan, these militants receive very little formal education and get a  very distorted view of Islam, said Julie Sirrs, a former Defense  Intelligence Agency analyst of Afghanistan who has made several trips there.
    Many of the those fighting there have been trained to believe that any  Muslim who is not affiliated with the Taleban movement - the fundamentalist  group that runs most of Afghanistan - poses a threat to Islam.
    "Often times, training schools seem to be a funnel for jihad movements," she  said. A jihad is a holy war fought in the name of Islam.    

EDUCATION SEEN AS SOLUTION
    Brenda Shaffer, a postdoctoral fellow in the International Security Program  at Harvard, said many of the Muslims who join jihad movements are young and  relatively rootless, and do so because the watered down, universalist  message is easy for them to understand and accept.
    Many Islamic leaders and mainstream scholars say education is the surest way  to reduce violence in the name of Islam. As with other social ills, they  argue, ignorance is at the root.
    Vitaly Naumkin, president of the International Center for Strategic and  Political Studies in Moscow, said traditional Muslim leaders see education  as the antidote to the separatist tendencies of many of these radical wings.  Dagestan, the former seat of Islamic power in Russia, is a good example of  this, he said. In Dagestan, Muslim leaders suggested education as a way to  confront extremists.
    Wahhabism often makes inroads into a country because of environmental  conditions, said Mr. Kabbani, whose Sufism has historically been at odds  with Wahhabism. The latter arose as a return to strict monotheism; one of  its main tenets is that prayers contain no names but God's. Sufis, on the  other hand, invoke many saints.
    "Nations and societies which have succeeded best at preventing Wahhabi  infiltration and insurgency are those which provide basic freedoms to their  populace and which establish a strong economic base, thereby eliminating the  causes of dissent and conflict," Mr. Kabbani said.    

ILLEGAL DRUGS RAISE CASH
    Historian Sherzod Abdullayev, formerly of Ferghana State University in  Uzbekistan, said much of the recent funding for violent radical movements  has come from the sale of illegal drugs.
    "Terrorism has become a very profitable business," said Mr. Abdullayev, who  was speaking Russian, through an interpreter.
    Mr. Abdullayev said that international terrorism and radical Islam are  closely tied and that together they pose a serious global threat. He cited  the recent seizure of radioactive material in Uzbekistan as evidence of a  terrorist threat.
    Early reports of the incident - said to involve 10 containers of radioactive  material on an Iranian truck with an Iranian driver bound for Pakistan -  appear to have been exaggerated.
    Russian news agency Interfax reported from Tashkent last week that nuclear  scientists in Uzbekistan had found that the radioactive shipment, impounded  March 30 at a customs post on the border with Kazakhstan about 12 miles  north of Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, was not weapons-grade material.
    This week Interfax reported from Astana that the Kazakh foreign minister  "regretted" the seizure of the shipment by Uzbekistan without seeking more  information. He said the shipment consisted of scrap metal, some of it from  uranium-mine machinery.
    Interfax quoted a panel of Kazakh nuclear physicists and secret service  personnel as saying the main source of radiation was not the shipment but  salt deposits in the truck's exhaust pipe.    

INSTABILITY DRAWS RADICALS
    Mr. Abdullayev said that radical Islam can be tempered and maybe even  stopped through forces of political and social stability. In Afghanistan in  particular, he said, stability is the key. Much of the drug trade originates  in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and is then transported by highway to Europe,  infecting much of Central Asia.
    "The primary objective of Wahhabi movements is to create an 'Islamic' state,  with the expectation that eventually it would stretch from Afghanistan to  North Africa, and from Turkey south to Yemen and the Sudan," Mr. Kabbani  said.
    In Chechnya, the rise of Islamic radicalism was swift. Before the first war  for Chechen independence, Chechnya was home to moderate and mainstream  strains of Islam. After the war, Mr. Kabbani said, radicalism invaded  Chechnya. Radical foreign Islamists were attracted to Chechnya because of  its instability and vulnerability. The radicals wanted to create "an  independent military movement based where no government could interfere with  it," he said.
    CIA Director George J. Tenet warned recently that Chechnya is set to become  a magnet for Islamic terrorists    Radical Islamists believe that violence is the only way to solve their  problems and they use selected parts of the Muslim teachings as their  justification, Mr. Kabbani said.    The tone of radical movements is to a large extent dictatorial and  authoritarian, Mr. Abdullayev said. In Afghanistan, he said, an Islamic  leader killed 17 of his own fighters who doubted the legitimacy of the  Islamic leadership.