Middle East expert warns of fragmentation in Iraq
Col. W. Patrick Lang was cleaning one of his guns the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, sitting by his gun safe, when he first heard the news.
“I watched the scene unfold on television, and then saw the other plane hit the second tower,” Lang said. “There was no doubt after that: We were under attack.”
Five years later, Lang, a retired senior officer with U.S. military intelligence and the U.S. Army Special Forces, and one of the military’s top specialists on the Middle East, said he doesn’t think the nation’s leaders have made much progress in understanding the nature of the Islamic world.
“The idea that you can send some well-meaning people around the world to convince Muslims to be more like people from Iowa, it’s a little absurd,” Lang told a crowd at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs on Monday. “That’s just not how it works over there.”
Lang was the first professor to teach Arabic at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and has extensively studied Islamic history and philosophy. He said the nature of Islamic practice is somewhat fragmented, with no clear religious authorities as there are in, say, the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, Muslims coalesce around particular scholars or clerics and form a consensus about what is valid Islamic practice.
Read the rest at the Daily Progress
“I watched the scene unfold on television, and then saw the other plane hit the second tower,” Lang said. “There was no doubt after that: We were under attack.”
Five years later, Lang, a retired senior officer with U.S. military intelligence and the U.S. Army Special Forces, and one of the military’s top specialists on the Middle East, said he doesn’t think the nation’s leaders have made much progress in understanding the nature of the Islamic world.
“The idea that you can send some well-meaning people around the world to convince Muslims to be more like people from Iowa, it’s a little absurd,” Lang told a crowd at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs on Monday. “That’s just not how it works over there.”
Lang was the first professor to teach Arabic at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and has extensively studied Islamic history and philosophy. He said the nature of Islamic practice is somewhat fragmented, with no clear religious authorities as there are in, say, the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, Muslims coalesce around particular scholars or clerics and form a consensus about what is valid Islamic practice.
Read the rest at the Daily Progress
posted by iraqnam at 10:51 PM
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