Azerbaijan entering caliphate?
By Gayane Movsesian
Yerkir/arm
11 Feb 05
A number of websites linked to â~@~Hasb Ut-Tahrirâ~@~] and other
radical organizations have posted the â~@~new world mapâ~@~], which
has a caliphate in the center of the superpower. From 1517 to 1924,
â~@~caliphateâ~@~] stood for the Ottoman Empire. Presently it
involves 49 states. And later on, the ideologists of caliphate believe
it will include the empire of the whole world.
The article â~@~Basics of Caliphateâ~@~] says that the countries,
considered by the Islamic fundamentalists as their part, are called the
core and the dubious states are suburbs. There is data that indicates
that the potential caliphate today includes 49 countries and 4 lands
that are in Central Asia, Africa, and South-Eastern Asia.
The core of the caliphate includes: Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan,
Brunei, Cameroon, Chad, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Guinea, Iran, Iraq,
Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Oman, Pakistan,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somali, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Togo, Tunisia,
Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan (31 states in total).
The suburbs of the caliphate are: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso,
Comorian isles, Djibouti, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Indonesia,
Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Yemen
(18 in total).
And now the actual caliphate also comes to include Chechnya,
Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, territories controlled by Palestinians
(4 in total).
According to approximate calculations, over 10 per cent of the world
population lives in the core caliphate as of 2005, while the suburbs
have 10.5 per cent of the world population.
Note for a comparison that USA have 10 per cent of the world population
and China â~@~S 20 per cent. In addition, some of the territories
are currently controlled by the caliphate ideologists. They have a
number of illegal armed groups. And there are also great deals of
people who support the caliphate ideology. The article also says
that most of them are not linked to terrorism. They live in the free
world states and promote the caliphate ideology via information items.
The Echo daily of Baku reports that the inclusion of Azerbaijan in that
list is conditioned by the presence of a number of fundamentalist
ideologists and relevant organizations in this country some of
which were consistently shut down by the government in them past
years, namely: â~@~Hasb Ut-Tahrir,â~@~] Islamic brothers and
others. However, â~@~Hasb Ut-Tahrirâ~@~] still reports on its
website that has a functioning cell in Azerbaijanâ~@¦
Baku believes this kind of network tries to diverge Azerbaijan from the
secular direction. On the other hand, certain analysts in Baku report
that the role of Islam in the life of the countryâ~@~Ys society grows.
As the Azerbaijani historian Arif Yunosov believes, it is first of
all related to the â~@~heating around the Karabakh issue, where
it was attempted to label the Azerbaijanis as fundamentalists.â~@~]
By the way, Yunosovâ~@~Ys book â~@~Islam in Azerbaijan is to come
out soon. We shall touch on this in our next edition.
–Boundary_(ID_X+Is8eZEo2UzDevS7jagEg)–