Islamists vs. Islam

In Sudan, videos have emerged of unspeakable atrocities — villages burned, civilians executed, bodies left in the streets. The violence is being carried out largely by Islamist militias and paramilitaries against ordinary Sudanese civilians — most of whom are themselves Muslim.

Muslims killing Muslims.

The Western Left barely blinks — there are no Jews to blame, no capitalism to indict, no America to condemn.

The Western Right notices the carnage but pins it on Islam itself, ignoring that the victims pray to the same God as their killers.

The reality is more complex. Roughly a quarter of humanity now lives within the long cultural reach of Islam, yet “Muslim” describes not a single civilization but thousands of them. The Islam of Darfur — rooted in local African traditions — is utterly different from the Shi’a Islam of Persian Iran, or the gentle, Sufi-infused Islam of Indonesia. Each inherits far more from its pre-Islamic culture than from any universal Islamic template.

But Islamists — the militants devoted to political Islam — are another matter. Despite their varied languages, ethnicities, and histories, they share one thing: an ideology that turns religion into statecraft. Wherever they gain power, the result is the same — repression, slaughter, and the erasure of whoever stands in their way, Muslim or not.