Al-Qaeda in Yemen

Understanding Al-Qaeda in Yemen is alot more difficult than say, understanding Al-Qaeda in Egypt or Lebanon.  The simple reason is that its alot easier to get around in these relatively open countries.  And due to strong scholarly interest over the years, far more has been written about these countries, thus its fairly easy to get a pretty good grasp of “what’s going on.”   Much harder to gain a similar level of comprehension of Yemen, due to its isolation and conservatism and I haven’t seen a lot of great literature on its Jihadist or Al-Qaeda movements.  However, in the last week IslamOnline has published two very good pieces.  Here’s the   first which was published shortly after last week’s Embassy attack.  I highly recommend the second (9/27) by Yusuf Al-Dini  which looks at  conflict and tension between the old generation (those who fought in Afghanistan)  and new (those who fought in Iraq) .

The Qaradawi Case: Mr Egypt Looks at Why?

I highly recommend readers check out Mr Egypt’s post  on Qaradawi.  I write an introduction here because we have major copy and paste issues with Mr Egypt’s computer and I didn’t want to risk making  it worse. 

One of the things I wanted more of when reading about the Qaradawi case was the Islamic background and motives, meaning serious religious context from someone who is a Sunni Muslim.    I saw very little of this in the English or Arabic press,  So MediaShack turns to Mr. Egypt for some explanation.  Mark my words, in a decade or so, Mr Egypt will be as well known to MediaShack readers as Fahmy Huwedi or Dia Rashwan.   The coverage in the Arabic press focused on whether Qaradawi should have made these comments or whether they will create disunity between Shias and Sunnis.  Noone seemed interested in explaining “why did he do it?” The second to last paragraph is the best analysis of what is driving  Qaradawi’s comments that I’ve seen written in English or Arabic.