Libya: Salafists Imposing Strict Sharia Spreading Throughout Country…
Didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out this would happen, Libya was already a conservative Muslim country with a large and repressed Salafi movement when Gaddafi was in power. When Islamists began dominating the rebel ranks and NATO decided to intervene the country’s fate was sealed.
In Libya, a Fundamentalist War against Moderate Islam Takes Shape — TIME
The Libyan revolution has not been kind to Mahmud al-Arabi. Last March, forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ransacked his grocery store in Zuwara after he fled to Tunisia, stealing about $6,000 worth of supplies. When he returned in September, facing mounting debts, al-Arabi turned to selling beer and liquor — an illegal enterprise in a country where alcohol has been banned for four decades. His new business drew the attention of Islamist rebels who helped to overthrow Gaddafi. After they threatened the store’s landlord, they blew up Arabi’s shop. Out of money and out of work, Arabi spends his days in his trailer home lamenting the turn his country has taken. Says he, “I got nothing but suffering from this revolution.”
Throughout this country, Libyans are discovering that their hard fought battle to win freedoms is at risk. Puritanical Muslims known as Salafis are applying a rigid form of Islam in more and more communities. They have clamped down on the sale of alcohol and demolished the tombs of saints where many local people worship. The small town of Zuwara near the Tunisian border, dominated by a heterodox Muslim sect despised by the Salafis, is quickly becoming the battlefield for competing visions of Libya’s future.
It is not only Arabi who has faced the Salafis’ wrath. The estimated 200-to-400 members of the local Salafi movement have demolished shrines belonging to adherents of the Ibadi sect, long considered heretics by orthodox Sunni Muslims. In the town’s cemetery, large blocks of stone surround what was once a mausoleum. The large conical shaped structure that once adorned it now lies collapsed in the debris. Salafists are intolerant of other strands of Islam and have physically attacked Muslim minorities in other parts of the Arab world such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Many Muslims frequent the shrines of saints, believing they have powers of intercession with the divine. Salafis, however, believe these are pagan rites that must be obliterated from Islam. “The situation has gotten much worse lately,” says Ibadi Sheikh Walid Darder. “We may have not had political rights under Gaddafi, but we did not live in fear of going to the mosque.”
Throughout Libya, Gaddafi’s fall has emboldened Salafis, who were persecuted and imprisoned under the now deceased leader. They have increased their public presence, taken over mosques, and even hoisted the flag of al-Qaeda over the courthouse in Benghazi where the revolution began eleven months ago. In the capital of Tripoli, Salafis have destroyed more than six shrines. In one incident, dozens swarmed mausoleums belonging to two Muslim mystics and dug up their bodies so that worshippers could no longer visit their tombs. They also burned the relics around the shrines.
Posted by ZIP on Wednesday, January 18, 2012, at 5:05 pm | 
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Barry’s dream of a North African Caliphate becomes a reality.
No one even knows how big the weapons cache they captured is, but you can bet that it will end up in the hands of jihadists, alQaeda, insano-Muslims, etc.
The civilized world has not yet seen how bad the effects of this are going to be.
obama caused this and more in the middle east..
when i seen this—Obama bowing to King Abdullah
i wondered who bank rolled obama,now i know
Let’s hear it for tyrant strongmen. Mussolini kept a lid on the Mafia.
Obama bows down to Saudi King Abdullah
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBKdPQstQAM
Old Biblical advice to muzzies, reap what you sow.
Are these people not aware that O-hole gave a speech in Cairo??
Many Muslims frequent the shrines of saints, believing they have powers of intercession with the divine.
===========================
no form of islam has “saints”…
they are Arabs… either worshiping other pagan gods … or the jinn
like they have done for centuries
Hey, my church has an AR-15 on the altar, too!
I guess we are more alike than I thought.
Things are only going to get worse than ugly it this fabulous, newly liberated, modern, open democracy. Now the Libyans get to lead the way for the rest of the Muslim world. The race is on to determine which one of the Arab Spring countries is going to reach the bottom of the shithole first. When this is over, it is going to be really obvious that these countries need a military strongman to keep the religious fanatics in their place. Ever wonder why the Shah of Iran needed such a strong, mean bunch of thugs to keep his savages in line? All of these countries are ungrateful volcanoes, just waiting to return to the Seventh Century. And, Obama and Clinton think things are going to be just fine once these countries hold elections.
I’ll take that Romy G AK in the pic…
It is quite amazing to watch a culture committing suicide, as the West is doing.
The universities and schools teach our children that Western culture and Christianity are evil, and the students go on to act out these ideas in their professions, including the military.
That the West is now busy installing Islamic regimes committed to our destruction should come as no surprise.
Who would have thunk this would happen—ah us!!!
I don’t give a damn what they do in Libya, or any other raghead country. It’s their land to do whatever evil shit they want.
Predictable consequences.
scizzorbill: these evil bastards control our oil supply.
If islam is the reliegion of peace then i,ll fly to the moon until april
Leave it to TIME to slander our heroic NATO airmen with anecdotal evidence.
Meanwhile, in an alternate universe, the Greatest Generation backbites General Patton’s men for posing alongside Marxist-terrorists lynching Mussolini.
Sarkozy’s Libyan-Contras are a LONG overdue triumph for the Reagan Doctrine.
Post-Bush/Blair, it took EU conservatives (Cameron, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Merkel) to successfully revive the Reagan Doctrine by arming and supporting Libyan-Contras.
American conservatives should focus on congratulating our heroic NATO airmen (and our new Libyan allies) for a job well done– and ignore the predictably impotent handwringing of the nattering naybobs of negativity (like Reagan-hating TIME).
God bless Ronald Reagan and our heroic NATO airmen.