Shock and Awe!  I Love It!
 
  I am an inveterate terrorist.  I simply love shock and awe.  I wake up at night dreaming of it.  And when I am awake I fantasize about it.

  The problem is that I love a perverted form of shock and awe. 

  Instead of shocking people into fear through intimidation, I enjoy shocking people into reversing all their thinking so they can open up to constructive and inspiring meanings they have never thought about or even dreamed of. 

  Four examples:

  1. Caliphate

  Rumsfeld defines “caliphate” as a synonym for totalitarian evil.  He thereby invokes atavistic fears of Hitler, Stalin, and Ghenghiz Khan.

  Ibn Taymiya and most Sufis have called for a caliphate but only to shock the political tyrants, namely, those hypocrites who use the term to invoke Allah as the protector of their tyranny.  The Sufis, like Ibn Taymiya and Shah Wali Allah of India, taught that the caliphate is a moral consensus among the wise knowers of Islam, the ‘arifun.  It is a spiritual ijma or consensus, based on the knowledge that every person is called into unity with the ultimate from which everyone came.  This ijma includes the knowledge of everyone who has been and ever will be, a timeless umma or community that includes all of humanity and even the trillions of souls who live perhaps in other galaxies, a manifestation of Allah’s power and love beyond space and time.

  This is truly shocking and may even inspire a bit of awe.

  2.  Zionist

  Most Muslims, and, in fact, most of the six billion people on earth equate Zionism with a political utopia based on hatred to be imposed through the oppression of others by a self-chosen people in revenge for being treated the same way themselves.

  The great mystics of Judaism have always defined Zionism not as the return in triumph to a piece of land but the return in loving awe to God.  I tell people that my goal is to be a Zionist.  This is shocking, because its apparent absurdity is awesome.

  3.  Hudna

  Most Orientalists, especially those whose profession is to pose as scholars of Arabic in order to pervert the classical meaning of Islamic terminology. define hudna as a diabolical strategy of deception inaugurated by the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, at Hudaybiya to hide his real commitment to murder and mayhem.

  Another definition of hudna, which Ahmed Yousef, the principal foreign policy adviser to Palestinian Prime Minister Isma’il Haniya, has been trying to explain to non-Muslims, is a strategy of peaceful engagement to turn enemies into friends.  This might even involve unilateral Palestinian recognition of the State of Israel in the middle of a war with the stated aim of transforming the relationship of friendship between Jews and Muslims into what it was historically over the centuries, namely, the most powerful civilizing force on earth.

  Even the thought of this hudna in the present circumstances is shocking and awesome beyond words.

  4. Justice

  President Bush has used the word “justice” exclusively as a synonym for revenge.  His enemies will experience the divine wrath (namely, his own) of justice.

  The greatest and most devastating example of shock and awe would be a statement by President Bush calling for peace, freedom, and self-determination through justice.  If he would follow this up with reinforcing policies to undo the century of political Zionism in order to save the peoples of the Holy Land from self-destruction, a shocked world would never recover from its joyful awe at the power of God.

  The world may be at a “tipping point” right now, whereby we cannot continue as we have in the past and must go one way or the other toward a point of no return, either downward in a process of istidraj or upward in a process of yusra.  By relying on ourselves we will inevitably go one way, but by relying on God the upward way will be rendered not only possible but easy.