Those warlords u mentioned may have become irrelevent, but clan politics is more alive than ever, and the threat of clan wars constantly looms over the Somali peninsula. The authors central point remains true, and that is Somali problems will not magically disappear once Shabaab is defeated, and its foolishly naive to think otherwise.

^ U missed the crux of the authors argument. He's saying that warlords are still around, yet have been exhonerated of their crimes because all attention has been shifted to the menace that is al-Shabaab. Bush is no longer a player in American politics, but the same cannot be said of Somali warlords, who have reinvented themselves as 'honest' politicians with the blessings of the Somali population. Can u fathom Ina Godane getting the same chance at redemption like his predeccesors in crime? I think not.

Ur welcome inaadeer.

What is the difference? What makes one a crime and the other an utter monstrosity? The turban? The deplorable backwash of this line of reasoning is that Somalis are forgetting, and a bit too quickly for comfort, the genesis and progression of their malignant cancer. The core issues of the Somali misery are being deliberately obfuscated, and Al Shabaab is everyone’s doormat. It is as if these turbaned desperados brought down the pillars of statehood. As if their Talibanic intransigence perpetuated the ignominy of plunder and death for over 20 years. As if the Somali psyche would be cured of all its debilities once these monsters are obliterated. As if they are the sole reason millions of Somalis scrape through life, with unenviable measures of success, in the squalor of refugee camps. There is a pervading confluence of Somali, regional and international ‘scapegoating’ narrative. Blame all on the Islamists, and everything will be fine. One mortal Gorgon, two immortal ones! Al Shabaab, and the defunct Al Ittihad, have become something akin to Medusa of the Greek mythology. The Islamists are the Gorgon, whose head must be severed for mortal men to enjoy love and life. Now that Medusa has been identified, Perseus has to be invented, and a hodgepodge of rehabilitated warlords, bandits and war profiteers, backed by regional and global bullies, are our heroes to slay the evil, Medusa. Just like its mythological prototype, this contemporary gorgon will be slain. Al Shabaab will, sooner or later, be squeezed into oblivion. But there is unlikely to be a Cinderella story-end. Because, the Gorgons were three, and Medusa - being the only mortal one- was the easiest to kill. We will realize, sooner rather than later, that somewhere in the vastness of the Horn, dwell the other two immortal gorgons; Stheno and Euryale. And everything will not be fine until we find them. With our deluded fixation on the mortal Gorgon, something tells me we are looking the wrong way. Aden Sheikh Hassan Email : asturre@fastmail.fm

Somalia: Censoring Islamist, Sanitazing Warlords By Aden Sh. Hassan March 31 2012 In the contemporary global politics, where mendacity reigns supreme, the truth is easily reduced into a mere variable of falsehood. Misdiagnosis becomes the rule rather than the exception, bogeymen are invented left, right and center, and franchised meta-narratives are employed with reckless abandon to simplify complex socio-political phenomena. Political Islam is an all-season fall guy; a punching bag for all and sundry. It is the bane of Asia and the blight of Africa; the plague of the past and pestilence of the future. The hydra-headed monster, whose tentacles slither east and west with reptilian callousness. The menace that must be confronted with occidental asperity and oriental iciness. With the abundance of Salafist torpedoes across the Islamic world, tactless and bungling, political Islam is bound to raise a storm of negativity. A cocktail of anarchist-Takfiri entities like Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab and the plethora of Lashkars across the Indian subcontinent ensure wicked tags like ‘Islamo-fascism’ are over-consumed without anyone suffering bloat. To the hordes of Islam bashers, including many so-called liberal Muslims, there really is not much difference between Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Or the Somali Islaah and Al Shabaab. They are all political Islamists; toxic and singularly undesirable. And that is where the danger lies. We are deliberately misdiagnosing our problem. In terminally-ill Somalia, political Islam seems to have been burdened not only with its own hefty cross, but also the crosses of all the warlords, murderous tribal chieftains, rogue militias and meddling outsiders who instigated the Somali implosion and abetted its intractability. The lamentable advent of Al Shabaab and their predisposition to evoke public disgust seems to be inculcating an adverse distaste for political Islam. Suddenly, Somalis seem to be inching, rather subconsciously, towards the conviction that these ‘wadaaddo’ should remain in their dugsis and mosques, and should not dabble in the sophisticated, but decidedly secular, science (or art) of politics. Suddenly, as a result of Al Shabaab’s nefariousness, their Islamist predecessors in the Somali politics, like the Islamic Courts Union and Al Ittihad of the early 1990s, are roundly condemned as trailblazers of Islamized madness. Most of these criticisms are not about what wrongs those Islamic movements committed – and there is a lengthy catalog. Instead, there is an unnerving notion that Islam should never have been politicized; that those groups should never have ventured into politics in the first place; that it was primarily inappropriate for them to have sought the instruments of power and its facilities. In the span of just a few years, Somalia’s central problem seems to have been crystallized into Islamism. All the internecine clan chaos has been forgotten. The tribal deities, and the incendiary mentality that nurtured them, are being sugar-coated right before our eyes. We have somehow forgotten about the warlords, the vampires who have been sucking Somali blood for all those years. The blame-game has now reached a fever pitch crescendo, and the Islamists represent evil - its alpha and omega. All that went wrong in Somalia is recklessly being attributed to Islamic radicalism. The centrality of tribal warlordism is being mendaciously ‘sexed-up’, and Al Shabaab, who only appeared the other day, are seen as the metaphor of evil. The former have their misdeeds sanitized, some even branded ‘patriots’ who meant well but erred a little, while the latter are portrayed as the epitome of evil, the ultimate threat to nationhood. But that is not the point. Political Islam is not inherently wrong The point is that there is this pervasive notion of presenting this band of fanatics as the true representation of Political Islam, culminating in the logical progression that Islamized politics is somehow perverted. It is imperative that we combat this Eurocentric subterfuge that political Islam is, per se, wrong because religion is incompatible with governance. Islam, as a colossal ideological edifice, is a reference point for a wide range of political, economic and social schools of thought. Just like every other ideology, it has its lunatic fringe and its moderate cultures, each with its own continuum of shades, flavors and varieties. Therefore, it is unconscionable that political Islam gets demonized simply because of its lunatic fringe like Shabaab or Taliban. If it is right for racists, clan warlords and ethnic chauvinists to exercise their political aspirations under liberal or socialist banners, why is it wrong for a Salafist or an Ikhwani to do so under an Islamic philosophy? We need to be very careful, lest we swallow wholesale the deceptive and hypocritical nostrum that religion cannot be politicized. If someone’s religion cannot breed political theory and practice, ours can and no one should tell us otherwise. Of course the violent radicalism espoused by Al Shabaab is a potent threat, but we must fight it our own way, without getting ensnared in some alien booby-trap. Channeling the blame And, anyway, even if –for argument’s sake- we take it for granted that AL Shabaab is the only representation of political Islam in Somalia, is it the nation’s only problem? Somalia has been pulverized and plundered by tribal warmongers, with neither religion nor ideology; a class of Mephistophelean profiteers who viewed the world through the nozzle of the rusty bazookas in the hands of their wiry, drug-addicted ********. For two decades, with unlimited help from their obsequious clans, they bludgeoned the Somali spirit into utter submission. They raped its women, starved its children, burnt its trees and auctioned off its seas. They killed without compunction, with stray and straight bullets and bombs. They mined the farmland and bombed the refugee shelters. For generations, Somali clans and sub-clans were no more than a conveyor belt that produced one savage killing machine after another. No sooner had one been neutralized by the elements than the tribal academy brought forth a brand new criminal, as base as his predecessor, but probably more agile and adept at engineering atrocities. These are the demons that defiled Somalia’s dignity, with the connivance of regional governments, especially Ethiopia which continues to view Somalia as its chessboard. Many of the same quislings are now seen as saviors. So senseless is the Somali conflict that, to this moment, it is difficult to discern exactly what the fuelling issues are. No one knows why clans continue to wage war against each other. War has become an end in itself, a self-perpetuating reality where everyone fights for anything and nothing at the same time. Once proud, dignified and even a little vain, a nation was reduced to an eyesore; a garbage dump where unscrupulous international operatives excrete their yellow maize and nuclear waste in equal measures. Somali children, rendered hopeless waifs and wastrels by their own, flood refugee camps in the region. The question, ‘who did that?’ may sound superfluous, even a little annoying. But it must be posed, because it seems Somalis have a propensity to develop short memory, especially when it is the truth that is the price to pay. It is the clan and its warlords. But that is not what Somalis think nowadays. Listening to any Somali discourse today, one would be forgiven for assuming the only problem in Somalia, from 1991 to date, is Al Shabaab. It is not debatable that Al Shabaab, despite all their viciousness, have had the will to enforce peace wherever they went. Apart from their embarrassing public floggings, there were no gun-toting bandits, no stray bombs and no Isbaaro. In spite of everything, it is a fact that Al Shabaab are simply one worm in that huge can of ghastly worms cultured by clan demons. Their modus operandi might be obnoxious, and even atrocious, but their crimes are no crueler than those perpetrated by the clan militias. The objective of this article is not necessarily to compare and contrast one set of bestial criminality with another. The objective is, in fact, to prevent exactly that. Double-Standards Muslims around the world complain endlessly about the West’s duplicitous employment of terms like terrorism, and the sub-human treatment its alleged perpetrators are subjected to. Yet, it is the same logic we are seeing Somalis apply on their own mess. All the atrocities committed by the warlords and clan chiefs are being hastily forgotten. Even though they have killed more people and caused more misery than Al Shabaab have, the warlords’ savagery is being depicted as simple criminality. They are, after all, little demons whose madness we can live with. But when something similarly distasteful is carried out by, or attributed to Al Shabaab, an air of extreme depravity is woven around it. Their threat to the fabric of Somalia (not that there is much of that commodity left, anyway), and regional stability is exaggerated. If a luckless biyoole is killed by a militiaman’s bullet, it is just a crime. If the killer has a turban, it is an existential threat to an entire region.

Jacpher did it really? If it has then i'll trade in the tricolour for the sky blue.

Abu-Salman;819878 wrote: One of the SOLer brother wrote about some idea we commonly hold: Indeed, such things were often not a "big deal" and it was more common to hear music among Somalis, with people well versed into the artists and their alluring lyrics, than Quran. This isnt true brother, Somalis have always studiesd the Quran for hundreds of years, whether they lived in cities or the miyi/baadiye, regardless of their interest and indulgence in the arts/songs. Yet, one precisely need to regularly read or connect with the Quran more often than ever in this age of endless distractions and distorted thinking; is that even possible when constantly getting enticed by music, something that has strong influence on human minds and promote very different messages? This also isnt true. This whole notion that the Quran and all types of music are psychologically and spiritually mutually exclusive, where only one can take a place within the persons psyche, is a false dichotomy. I agree with you that the vast majority of music, especially western music, is filthy and haraam. But we shouldnt throw out the baby with the bath water. I find many Somali songs to be full of wisdom and life lessons, and i dont feel any further from the deen or the Quran after listening to them. On another note, I was just shocked to hear the other night that households spending on tobacco surpassed those on health or educations in many developing countries while experts confirm that the now chic shisha is even extremely worse health-wise (all those young Somalis adding shisha to the mix when already severly deficient in non-manufactured, natural food, clean air, Vitamin D etc). Also, addictive substances such as cigarettes and whisky are now heavily advertised in places such as Africa. I dont disagree with this. But here is my point. Y do wadaads treat tobacco and khat as imorral, akin to drinking and gambling. The appraoch to qat and smkoing should be similar to our appraoch to fast food, which has just as much adverse health affects if not more. Lets take out the issue of morality when it comes to this and ill be the first one to condemn it. Or else we're being unjust to many upright men, who just happen to smoke or chew. Actually, countless countries are now facing public health disasters caused by chronic disorders (diabete, heart disease or cancer) even before their "easier" infectious diseases burden have not been eliminated. This is true, but lack of exercise and poor eating habits contributes to this equally or more than qat or smoking. Yet i dont see wadaads making fatwas that fast food is haraam. Y the inconsistency. And we are not even talking here about greed related international issues such as environmental catastrophes or usury (poorest countries forced to repay many times over their mismanaged national debt or countless enslaved households in the West). So could we not say that indeed, qat, smoking, drinking and mixing are some of the worst disasters, precisely for those and many other reasons (economic, social or familial)? Yes we can, but moral judgements about piety/and the lack there of should be left out. Maybe all of us must regularly read alcohol activists newsletters and public health or criminality and poverty academic papers to realise the full extent of the ravages created by "small things" such as drinks, qat, smoking or sexual indulgence (more children born out of wedlock than in marriages among many communities such as Black Americans). I didnt consider sexual indulgence to be a small thing, dont get y u added that. lol. From the absent or abusive father to the mother focused on social events, saving money for villas and other relatives marrying again while not providing adequately for their existent children and then harassing for more money to waste youngsters already struggling abroad, it's very clear that much of our suffering is self-inflicted (economic and other forms of oppression aside). This is true. Thus, not everyone will agree that "neglect of the prophet's sunnah is the source of all problems" as summarized by a scholar but we can readily observe in our communities or extended families that most if not all avoidable suffering comes from substances including Qat concomitantly with consumerism as well as lack of patience and self-restraint... True to an extent. PS: groups or parts of a group with unwise methods is not enough to blind someone from the truth (eg, some here were misinformed about Islam long before Al Shabab); does the atrocities of Maoists or Stalinists signify that economic redistribution is evil and not actually one of the very most civilised human endeavor? For many it has become enough, and thats the sad reality bro. The merits of socialism vs capitalism, and which would fit better within an Islamic paradigm requires an entirely different debate.

What a loser this guy is

^ But theres no evidence disproving its claims either, so y not remain ambivalent about its divine status instead of rejecting it outright? This is what he means i believe. To him, there is a technical distinction between uncertainty and rejection.

^ ur experieince demonstrates my point exactly. Thats what i meant by the de emphasis on certain fundamental aspects of the religion. It seems like nowadays if u grow a beard, wear a khamis (which isnt even Islamic lol) and go to the mosque and learn a few arabic terms like jazaakallau khair, akhi/ukhti etc uve reached the epitome of piety. our wadaads r doing Islam a huge diservice by stripping it down to donning certain garbs and catch phrases and abstaining from certain things deemed haraam (some of which can be debated). Anyway, Insha'Allah this whole Shabaab debacle will wake Somalis up and make them yearn for a more wholistic approach to our beautiful deen based on wisdom and context. But i fear that many of have been so turned off by al-shabaab that their slowly turning away from Islam all together, and we have many of those type right here on SOL.

^ Naxar, that has to do with interpretation. Just 20 years ago Music, khat, cigarrettes, mixed weddings etc etc werent seen as a big deal amongst Somalis. But the Shaykhs we had returning from Saudi Arabia brought with them the Salafi/Wahabi interpretation of the deen. All of a sudden a man who sits down for khat once a week after a hard days work is a major sinner, akin to someone who drinks. And attending the wedding of a family member is unthinkable because of the music. Im not condoning the things i listed above, but i think our shaykhs sumtimes overly condemn some relatively benign things and overlook others that are quite serious in their effects.

^ true

^ agreed. Never thought id use that word addressing u. lol.

lol @ dinasour bones. But watever happened to the oil. Havent heard any updates in a while. Any news guys?

Garnaqsi, is using grammatical sentences (ur use of the word coherent was out of context btw) a prerequisite to engaging in debate? Get off ur high horse man.

my apologies Mukulaalow, and i agree with u.

AUN, thanks for the reminder. But no need to be mean, just cuz i checked one of the tolka.

Mukulaalow wats wit the double standards? Y u acting like only the Landers do this, when we both know that some of the Sol'ers from Puntland r notorious in wat ur accusing the Xaaji of. Either condemn it across the board or leave it be.

^ very good point.

^ si fiican baad yeeshay. Laakiin, quraan quriga kuuma yaalo miyaa? lol

Such dumb ppl those poster makes are, who know nuthing about human psychology. A direct translation of the Shahaada is an ineffective way to give dacwa, infact its counter productive. Firstly, non Muslims dont know this just a translation of the shahaada, but will instead think its a declaration being made by the poster maker. Secondly, it comes off as confrontational, aggressive and in your face to a non-Muslim. Hence, y many ppl complained. Y not just leave it at 'please visit our booth to learn about Islam in over 85 languages'. That wouldve been enough, and im sure no one, except filthy Islamophobes, would have complained.

Fearing a move to Somalia in the near future because of the prevailing security situation or the economic feasibility of such a grand undertaking (esp with a spouse/children like Chimera) is perfectly understandable and legitimate. But the rest of u who brought up trivial and superifcial reasons not to return, such as a dislike for insects or lack of paved roads, truely disgust me. Such ppl arent patriotic Somalis at all and should just stop discussing Somali affairs all together. Sounds harsh right? Well Good, cuz its the truth. U West worshipping, self indulgent, vain brats need a serious reality check. Get overselves seriously, and know that Somalia doesnt need u.

Che -Guevara;816446 wrote: .you have insecurity issues or overcompendating. The sister didn't say anything about the other team. I was replying to Somalia's nonsense, so ud understand my comment if u read it in context. Me insecure? lol. Laughable proposiiton.

Thanks everyone for ur advice. Abu-Salman i think u misunderstood what i meant by dating. Ur assuming im using the word in the same context as its used within the Western framework of relationships between unmarried men and women, when in fact i was talking about just meeting someone to see whether i was attracted to them. I dont see how thats blameworthy or even unislamic for that matter, as long as we arent alone, and ive never seen an empty starbucks before. Lets not kid ourselves, attraction is central and is a prerequisite for taking things further, so dont expect me to approach her family when i have no clue about her looks, mannerisms or personality. As for ur question about whether good women date, i'd say it depends on what we mean by dating like i said above, and wat the intentions of these 'dates' are. So yes good women do date, so dont be so quick to judge or disqualify.

^ lol exactly.