Dreams & Realities

Dreams & Realities, por M. Zuhdi Jasser.

As many this week have said, this is not about cartoons. This all got me thinking about what drives people. I was born in America, raised a Muslim and a conservative. I have long struggled with what it is that makes my own reflexive passions, and my primary mission, so different from those of the mobs and even from so many of my Muslim neighbors in America. What is the fuse that, once ignited, turns normal people into a mob clamoring for Islam and often for blood?

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The Muslim mobs we see inflamed are not al-Qaeda, but they are enraged Islamists driven by a fear of losing the ideological world war to the West. They fear the West, which honors the individual first and the community second — put another way, America first, and the ummah second. They fear more than anything having to compete in a non-theological legislature by the legal merit of the logic of their principles, rather than from behind the corrupt cloak of their theological monopoly on sharia.

The next question flowing from all this is, "How can we create a new dream for people so driven towards rage?" Dreams are the product of our imagination. If we can visualize something, then we can imagine it becoming a reality.

And that is why I am so enthusiastic about the liberation of Iraq.

If I were to live in the Middle East, all I would see around me in government would be thugs, despots, oil monarchies, and radical theocrats ruling the people in a sea of corruption. How would I be able to imagine freedom where there is none to be found? That is what we are doing in Iraq. We are giving people in that region a sense of what could be. Without a reality in which liberty can thrive, the vacuum is filled by corruption. The reality is replaced by false dreams of a world in which no freedom-loving Jeffersonian Muslim would ever want to live.