Cycles

David Meir-Levi (Hamas Uber-Alles, FrontPageMagazine.com, February 23, 2006) writes about Hamas and gives a brief summary of Islamic history explaining how Hamas fits into the historic and spiritual cycles of Islam.

Descended from the Brotherhood, Haraqat al Muqawama al-Islamiyyah, Hamas, shares much of its DNA. Whatever its representatives may have said in the recently completed campaign, this is an Islamic fundamentalist terror group whose sole purpose is the destruction of Israel and an apocalyptic future in which all Jews are either dead or Muslim, all remaining Christians are Dhimmi, and the stage is set for the resurrection of the dead and the redemption of the world into “dar es-Salaam” (the realm of world peace that will prevail once Islam is the only religion on earth, or at least the ruling religion).

Hamas is part of Muslim history, which is typified by waves of what we today might refer to as “Islamic fundamentalists” or “extremists.” This has been the case since the original zeal of the 7th century propelled the newly converted Moslems out of Arabia and in less than one hundred years helped them conquer four civilizations, destroying the languages and cultures of scores of nations, replacing those with Arabic and Islam, killing tens of millions along the way.
Out of Arabia, and westward, they surged into Syria and Israel, across Egypt and North Africa, in to Spain and France, stopped at the gates of Paris in 736 by Charles Martel. Eastward they conquered the Byzantine and Sassanian empires in what is today Iraq and Iran, and launching wave after wave of attackers into western India, Kashmir, Gujarat, and Punjab. Gradually, the momentum of this wave ebbed, and Islam from Spain to India, Yemen to what is today Pakistan, settled in to a ruling, rather than a conquering, mode.
But such stability was always undermined by new waves of radical fundamentalism surging out of the “Umma” (the trans-national Moslem religious population). In the 12the century it was the Almohades, who wrecked havoc in North Africa and Spain; bringing an end to the Golden Age and re-instituting the harsh, oppressive religious apartheid of Moslem supremacy and the humiliating inferior status of Jews and Christians as dhimmi. Later, this pattern again emerges with the ascendancy of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and its conquests of what is today Greece, Cyprus, Crete, Albania, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary, a development that brought genocidal destruction and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Christians.
Over the next few centuries, Turkish rule became less harsh and, indeed by modern times Turkey became a model of Islamic tolerance and progressiveness. Meanwhile, however, another wave of Muslim extremism occurred in Arabia, with the birth of the Wahhabi movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries– an extreme regression to Islam at its most stringent and oppressive. Part of this pattern was the resurgence of the Moslem Brotherhood, and its Palestinian branch, Hamas. When normative Islam grows too tolerant of other cultures, too secular, too eclectic, the fundamentalists stage a purifying resurgence of violence, terrorism, assassinations, war, and mass murder to recapture the true identity of Islam.

David Meir-Levi has described a cycle similar to what has been repeated throughout the histories of Judaism and Christianity and at various times in the spiritual life of each believer.

The interesting contrast of Islam and Christianity is that when Islam goes through a less devout period and "falls away," it becomes more tolerant. As the fundamentalists seek to draw the umma back to pure Islam, the religion becomes more oppressive.

The challenge for this generation is to break the cycle of destructive fundamentalism and to promote the reformation that Islam desperately needs.