(snip)...That ideology is Islamism, a fanatical fundamentalist revivalist movement seeking to establish a theocratic Islamic Nation over all Moslems, one nation at a time. The first was Iran in 1979, when an Islamic fundamentalist religious revolt toppled the pro-western Shah in reaction to his "White Revolution" which allowed women to vote and hold jobs, built large cities, and created a more secular society with Western freedoms, much as Kemal Attaturk had done in Turkey beginning in the 1920's. After the Shah, an Islamic Republic under the Ayatollah was created; he promptly called the US "The Great Satan", and Western-type freedoms disappeared. Shortly thereafter, mobs seized the US embassy and its staff, holding them hostage for two years. In 1996, Afghanistan followed a similar repressive path under the Taliban. The goal is to eventually unite all Muslim states into one Islamic Nation, ruled as an Islamic anti-democratic and totalitarian theocracy. This ideology finds expression through many organizations whose names have become all too familiar -- Islamic Jihad, Al-Quaeda, Hizbollah, Hamas, Moslem Brotherhood, Abu Sayyaf , Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya -- and a host of others less well known but with similar objectives in every Moslem country. Their enemy is secular society, secular governments, and Western civilization, which they see as corruptive and destructive of Islamic values. They scorn "moderate" or secular Moslem governments such as Turkey and Egypt and even Saudi Arabia; there are active terrorist movements in all such countries seeking overthrow of the governments They are committed Moslems, praised in mosques across the world for their devotion to Islam and to the concept of the Khilafah, a term referring to restoration of the Caliphate abolished by Attaturk in 1924 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and which has been defined as the total rulership of Muslims all over the world in a centralized unitary state that implements the Islamic Shariah (Koranic law) and carries Islam to all people as a global ideology.
