Herd of Muslim Youths are drawn to extremism unbridled

There is a growing tribe among the armed-chair liberals who practice to appease only one side. In turn such a subjective approach boomerangs, turning the other side too swayed by passions. The approach of this tribe is ‘Look, how fair we are’. God save us from such aesthetic yardsticks! At the same time, the alarming development among the Muslim youth is that young men and women are falling prey to the increasing tide of Islamic extremism. More the Islamophobia afflicts the West, more Muslim youth will be drawn towards the Mullaism. Moreover, the media has contributed handsomely towards the attraction of unemployed, steeped in abject poverty Muslim youth to the extremism. The glamour of extremism too. The Time magazine has already published a story on which a liberal student turned mullahs after taking admission to an university. Now The New York Times has published a similar story. It says: ‘The Melahy tribe of northern Sinai (Egypt)is the poorest in the region, its members herding other people’s cattle, farming other people’s land, its very name used as a slur among local Bedouins. And so Nasser Khamis al-Melahy held great promise for his family when he left his sun-baked home here for law school in the Nile Delta. ‘But he never did practice law. Instead, he returned to this city on the banks of the Mediterranean and, the authorities say, helped set up an Islamist terrorist cell that has staged five suicide attacks in the Sinai, including a triple bombing in the resort town of Dahab last month. ‘Melahy’s turn to terrorism is one aspect of the strong undercurrent of anger and tension roiling the Middle East, where disillusionment and hostility toward national governments move many young people to adopt Islam as an identity, supplanting nationality or ethnicity. It also underscores a challenge facing many Arab countries where local customs and heritage are being abandoned by young people who instead adopt the dress, customs and behavior of conservative Islam. ‘In these ways, this northeast corner of the Sinai serves as a microcosm of the forces pulling at the strings of authoritarian governments all over the region, which have maintained power by relying primarily on security services. From Syria to Jordan, from Morocco to Algeria, officials have struggled to manage these trends by simultaneously trying to appease and control the rise in religious feelings. ‘Friends of Melahy said that while he was growing up he was observant but not fanatical. He listened to music, a sign that he was not extremist, and went off to law school in Zagazig in the Nile Delta. ‘But when he returned, he had grown a long beard. He started yelling at his friends, telling them not to smoke or listen to music, and he gave up law, because he said the only law was God’s law. Instead of opening a legal practice, he started working as a farmer, struggling to grow tomatoes and cantaloupe in a patch of sand with salty well water. ‘The police now say that is when he and a group of other local young men began to form their terrorist cell. The cell, Tawhid and Jehad, was heavily influenced by men like Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and by Wahhabism, an austere sect of radical Islam whose roots lie in the Arabian Peninsula. ‘Melahy disappeared from his home a few days before the Taba attacks and, his family said, has not been seen since. The police say he is alive and believed to be hiding in the mountains to the south.’