An inconvenient truth

One beautiful September morning when the sky was unbelievably blue, the sunlight eerily ethereal and the air mystically magic, two silver jetliners flew straight into the Twin Towers killing everyone in them and destroying America’s most prized edifice. Hellfire followed. It took weeks, nay months to recover. The words ‘Taliban’ and ‘Al-Qaeda’ were introduced overnight in American diction. The world at large too discovered the term Al-Qaeda which before 9/11 was little known...

Nine years have gone by since 9/11, but the fires of hate, hostility and distrust among Muslims, Jews and Christians remain. They simmer at times; rage at others, but never go out. When one out of five Americans today firmly believes that President Barack Obama is a Muslim and not a Christian because he’s never seen attending church or carrying a Bible ala his predecessors Bill Clinton and George Bush, what is one to say?...

Fox News tells Americans that the Saudi prince is funding Islamic radicalism; it doesn’t want Americans to know that the same ‘guy’ is also funding Fox News! That’s the inconvenient truth. -- Anjum Niaz

Huge billboards, advertising ‘Arab Pardha’ in English and Arabic, now jostle for space along with those advertising jewellery, new apartment blocks and investment schemes. The ‘Arab Pardha’ billboards are illustrated with larger than life images of women clad in head-to-toe burqas: They look shapeless and formless, their identity smothered by black fabric and their eyes barely visible through slits. “Arab Pardha”, declares one billboard, “All pious women should wear it.” The copywriter has it all wrong; it should have read, “All pious women should disappear behind it.” For, that’s what the burqa is meant for — to make women disappear, make them invisible, deny them the right to exist as individuals. Any argument to the contrary is spurious and any religious edict cited in support of this grotesque suppression of individual liberty is specious.

But this is not only about the denial of an individual’s liberty, nor is it about the suppression of human rights in the name of faith. It is about the in-your-face declaration of Islamists that they can have their way without so much as lifting their little finger. It is a laughable sight to watch Malayalees trying to navigate crowded streets in Kochi wearing white Arab gelabayas, the loose kaftan like dress that along with the kafeyah — or ‘Arab rumal’ — has become a symbol of trans-national radical Islam, their ‘Arab Pardha’ clad wives and daughters in tow. But it is not a laughable matter.

Increasingly, we are witnessing a shifting of loyalties from Malabar to Manipur. Faith in India is being transplanted by belief in Arabia. This should alarm those who believe in the Indian nation as a secular entity. – Kanchan Gupta

Khaled Ahmed: The state of Pakistan has deployed its non-state actor terrorists in Punjab. Because of the unclear charter of power of the state agencies linked to the army, parts of Punjab are succumbing to the power of the terrorists. South Punjab is vulnerable to three terrorist organisations. The Punjab government is now paying crores of rupees supporting ‘charities' of one of them that it has ‘nationalised'. A new perspective of the Seraiki Movement is gradually coming to the fore, reflecting the political dominance of Sipah-e-Sahaba and its offshoot, the Jaish. No one from among the backers of the Movement – known traditionally to be secular – is willing to even speak of the presence of the jihadi-terrorist organisations. One reason is that most of them want to lean on them to win the elections; the other may be the simple fact of intimidation and the subliminal acknowledgement of state patronage to the terrorists. A Seraiki Province in the coming days will be exclusively the domain of Sipah-e-Sahaba and its friends. It will be for the first time that terrorists posing as Islamic warriors against India and against the Shias of Pakistan will possess an entire province and its resources under the new constitutional dispensation of real autonomy.

Khaled Ahmed: This is pure Muslim doublespeak and it is universal, so one can call it collective insanity. Muslims no longer do ‘amal'; they simply do ‘radd-e-amal' and end up killing themselves. And ‘amal' is all from America. This gives rise to the absurd ‘radd-e-amal' of killing Muslims in Pakistan because America is supporting Israel in its enterprise of killing Muslims. The term self-denial is wrongly applied. It is simply denial. The non-Muslim world must remain strong against this lethal trend; otherwise it will succumb to the suicidal dogma and lose its freedom. Meanwhile, non-Muslims and apostatised and ‘apostatisable' Muslims like Shias and Ismailis living in Pakistan are under direct threat because the state is too weak and too involved in its own extremist transformation to protect them.

Sources say it was one of the PFI's Taliban-style 'courts' in Erattupettah in Kottayam district that decided Joseph's fate. There are 13 more across Kerala, discreetly exhorting members of the community to stay away from regular courts which are deemed "un-Islamic". The state police is now taking a fresh look at three murders in Kannur, including that of a police constable. There is some suspicion the killings were ordered by Taliban-style courts.

The policemen who seized the CDs from PFI offices later reported disgust and disbelief at videos showing brutal punishment – such as the severing of limbs – inflicted on "enemies of faith". Some shots had activists slaughtering animals, apparently to harden them. Kerala's descent to terror is not recent nor is it without political backing. For decades, both Congress and the Left have been soft on the more radical sections of the Muslim community leaving the moderates at the mercy of the extremists. -- Ananthakrishnan G

According to a research study, in 1988, 40 percent of doctors and 60 percent of teachers consisted of women in Afghanistan. In the same year, 440,000 female students were enrolled in educational institutions. These reforms, however, were not seen as a positive change but as an ‘atheistic agenda’ by a large number of conservative groups in Afghanistan and the rest of the Muslim world who started to organise militants against the socialist government. In 1979, the newly formed government repeatedly requested the neighbouring socialist Soviet Union to help them. It was supposed to be a peaceful involvement of the Soviets with a mere intention to provide security to the newly formed democratic state and to help them build socialism, but something else had been scripted by the imperialist powers and their Islamist puppets. Their direct involvement and support to religious militants created unrest, bloodshed and civil war for many years — and it still continues.

The US exploited the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan to give the Cold War a climax. The CIA started a programme, known as Operation Cyclone, to arm the mujahideen in every possible way. Here comes the most interesting and tragic part. Pakistan, under Zia’s regime, played the role of a protagonist in making that mission successful and started accepting aid in millions of dollars. The ISI continuously served imperialist powers and trained the militants and supplied them the weapons and funds. This imperialist-Islamist alliance led to countless deaths and destruction in Afghanistan. Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser of former US President Jimmy Carter, said in an interview: “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap. The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War’.”  —Ammar Aziz

Pakistan's government can start by following up on the review of the 'blasphemy laws' promised last year. We wilfully embrace insanity if we provide impunity for persecution of our minorities, if we pamper militancy on the one hand, and denounce it on the other. If the provincial budget of the Punjab government grants money to banned terrorist outfits, even if it is to their charitable wings, then we are truly embracing insanity. Because this is no political leader using extremist votes to buy power. This is institutionalised support to the same outfits we have banned. -- Sherry Rehman 

The rather naïve report from the Washington-based Brookings Institute think tank that madressahs that promote militancy are limited in number and as such not a “main problem” ignores the fact that even the institutes that do not preach violence encourage a mindset that builds support for the Taliban and other groups. Such views have permeated mainstream education too and seeped into many other places, changing quite markedly the nature of society. -- Kamila Hyat

Britain’s decision to bar an influential Muslim cleric from entering the country underscores the failure of Indian secularism…. The good doctor’s views run the gamut from nutty to vile, so it’s hard to pinpoint which of them has landed him in trouble. For instance, though Dr. Naik has condemned terrorism, at times he also appears to condone it. “If he [Osama bin Laden] is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him,” he said in a widely watched 2007 YouTube diatribe. “If he is terrorizing the terrorists, if he is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, I am with him. Every Muslim should be a terrorist.”

…unlike Hindu bigots, such as the World Hindu Council’s Praveen Togadia, whose fiercest critics tend to be fellow Hindus, radical Muslims go largely unchallenged. The vast majority of Indian Muslims remain moderate, but their leaders are often fundamentalists and the community has done a poor job of policing its own ranks. Moreover, most of India’s purportedly secular intelligentsia remains loath to criticize Islam, even in its most radical form, lest this be interpreted as sympathy for Hindu nationalism. Unless this changes, unless Indians find the ability to criticize a radical Islamic preacher such as Dr. Naik as robustly as they would his Hindu equivalent, the idea of Indian secularism will remain deeply flawed. -- Sadanad Dhume

The ‘non-Muslim’ status of the Ahmedis and the laws that criminalise any reference to their using Muslim religious symbols leads the media in Pakistan to steer clear of controversy. Everyone in public routinely refers to their places of worship as ‘mosque’ or their prayers as ‘namaz’. Failure to do so could earn you three years rigorous imprisonment or a mob lynching. In this age of 24/7 television, I felt almost apologetic confessing that I wasn’t watching the drama unfold on live TV. I was out and about, started getting the news much later. Just as well. Dr Haroon Ahmed, the well known psychiatrist, says he wanted to throw up, watching the gory scenes on TV. That’s another issue – the violence brought into our homes through blow-by-blow accounts on TV and the “oxygen of publicity” (as Bharat Bhushan, editor of Mail Today put it) it gives these murderers. -- Beena Sarwar

Faisal Shahzad’s e-mail to the “peaceful ummah” as published in the New York Times (http://documents.nytimes.com/e-mail-from-faisal-shahzad#text/p1) leaves no doubt about Shahzad’s state of mind. It was his association with Islamic organisations in the West that transformed him into a global jihadist in the classical Qutbian mould. His language, his denunciation of the West and of hypocritical governments in Pakistan, his appeal to “Khilafah” had all the fingerprints of a campus or a local Islamic body, possibly one infiltrated by the Hizb ut-Tahrir and/or global activists of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). -- Yasser Latif Hamdani

While much has been written about Shahzad picking up bomb-making skills in Waziristan, he apparently left Pakistan with no bigger aspiration than to make it good in life. From the bits and pieces that were put together by the media before his face with stubble was identified with terrorism, Shahzad was a weights-pumping, pub-hopping youngster. The constant reminders he faced of his Pakistani origin saw him turning to religion and developing hostility towards all things American...

In the words of Rik Coolsaet, the Belgian academic and editor of the Ashgate publication Jihadi Terrorism and the Radicalisation of Europe, the ‘global phenomenon' is “a cloak patched from different sources of local discontent, stitched together by a puritanical and radical interpretation of Islam, and thriving on a global phenomenon”...

It is in ‘Sunday' schools — ironically, a Christian import — attached to mosques and Islamic centres that the ABCD generation learns about Islam as parents find they are ill-equipped to teach their children how to read Arabic and the Koran. Many of these schools, according to Dr. Hussain, do not teach the “kinder and gentler” version of Islam. Though the Muslim-Americans — especially of Pakistani origin — are trying to take back their mosques and the Sunday schools, “petro-dollar Islam” is too well-funded to be fought. “The U.S. government will have to do that, but as long as the U.S. depends on Mid-East oil, it is difficult for them to come down too hard on it”...

That the U.S. administration ought to do something to undercut radicalisation is a view also held by Richard A. Clark, national coordinator for security and counter-terrorism in the Clinton White House. Writing in The Washington Post after Shahzad was picked up, he said President Barack Obama should propose greater outreach to the Muslim community to deal with “wannabe terrorists” like Shahzad and ‘Jihad Jane’...

“In the raw aftermath of a successful attack, it will be very hard for an American President to shift the debate in a more productive and honest direction.” The near-miss, Mr. Clark argues, should be turned into an opportunity to refine tactics of countering terrorism, one of which is the “time-consuming and less glamorous work of defeating radical Islamist ideology in the battle of ideas.”-- Anita Joshua

Just as the sudden rise of certain crackpots (via TV) in Pakistan was keenly followed and supported by a chunk of young, urban Pakistanis, various cranks are happily catering to the already confused religious and ideological bearings of Muslim Pakistanis living abroad. Much has been written about men in Pakistan who cleverly represent (and glorify) the increasingly chauvinistic mindset of the current generation of young, urban Pakistanis. The situation is equally distressing in the West.

A recent book on Muslim scholar Farhat Hashmi’s organisation, Al-Huda, (written by Sadaf Ahmad, a Pakistani woman), accuses her of spreading hatred against Christians, Hindus and Jews among Pakistani women living in Canada. Recently, in the wake of the Faisal Shahzad episode in New York, the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), a group of liberal Muslims living in Canada, accused American Islamic organisations of refusing to distance themselves from the doctrine of armed jihad.

The MCC goes on to state that many young Pakistanis living in the US and Canada regard Pakistan as a safe haven for their preparation and training for waging wars against the West. Organisations like the MCC have also come down hard on outfits such as Al-Huda, ridiculing their claim that they are on a mission to convert Westerners to Islam.

A few weeks ago I got an email from a reader about a Pakistani in the US who (on Facebook) accused me of being a “Zionist-backed agent of secularism”. When someone asked the gentleman that, if he hated the US so much why was he living there, he conveniently (and without any hint of irony) claimed that his mission was to convert as many Christians and Jews in the US as possible. Imagine what might have happened to a Christian in Pakistan if his/her “mission” was to convert Muslims to Christianity...

Saying that such young people are wilfully delusional and dangerously hypocritical would be an understatement. -- Nadeem F. Paracha

In his book Al-Jihad fil-Islam (Jihad in Islam) he (Maulana Mawdudi) explains his interpretation of Jihad: “It must now be obvious that the objective of the “Islamic jihad” is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system, and establish in its place an Islamic system of state rule. Islam does not intend to confine his rule to a single state or a handful of countries. The aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution. Although in the initial stages, it is incumbent upon members of the party of Islam to carry out a revolution in the state system of the countries to which they belong; their ultimate objective is none other than world revolution. (Jihad Fi Sabillilah: Jihad in Islam by Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi “– Chapter 3, Pg 10)

In another book he says: Human relations are so integrated that no state can have complete freedom of action under its principles unless the same principles are not in force in a neighbouring country. Therefore, a, ‘Muslim Party’ will not be content with the establishment of Islam in just one area alone –both for its own safety and for general reform. It should try and expand in all directions. On one hand it will spread its ideology; on the other it will invite people of all nations to accept its creed, for salvation lies only therein. If this Islamic state has power and resources it will fight and destroy non-Islamic governments and establish Islamic states in their place. (Maulana Mawdudi, Haqiqat-i-Jihad, Pg 64, Taj Company Ltd, Lahore, Pakistan 1964) -- Raziq

The Pakistani state and its ruling elites are unfortunately anchored in “political” and “ ideological” Islam from the day the Objectives Resolution was constitutionalised in the 1980s. This state has been characterised by a civil- military imbalance that has fed upon the country by spawning non- state Islamic “ warriors”. These monsters have now turned upon their creators.

But the state doesn’t know if it is a Pakistani state (a national concept) or an Islamic state (a global concept) and how to deal with them. This identity confusion and global rage has bottled up in the minds and breasts of at least three generations of young brainwashed Pakistanis regardless of class. That is why, all other things being equal, a young Pakistani at home or abroad is more likely to be seduced by “ global Islamist” outrage against imperialist and “ state- terrorist” America than a young Muslim originating from India or Africa or South East Asia.--Najam Sethi

Madrassas are jealously guarded by Pakistan's countless politico-religious extremists.

Government edicts on curriculum reform are ignored with impunity. Free meals and an "education" are the principal attraction for the overwhelming majority of Muslim Pakistan's 175 million people, who subsist on $2 or $3 a day. The government cannot afford a modern public school system for the poor as the military absorbs most of the budget. And Pakistan cannot return to the ranks of strong, peace-loving nations until madrassas are replaced by normal high schools. Those are still a decade or two away.

The miserable conditions under which a majority of Pakistan's poor eke out subsistence living (electricity frequently is unavailable for 12 hours a day, shutting down fans and naked bulbs in 100-degree heat) are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The game-changer is the Pakistani army, whose volunteers came principally from the ranks of the poor. But the officers, if not the rank and file, now understand that religious extremists are no longer their allies.

With 3,500 killed by terrorists in a year and more than 10,000 injured and many small businesses closed, coupled with the government's neglect of their plight for lack of funds, and U.S. aid spread thin over a multitude of unrelated projects, those who cherry-pick suicide targets to make matters worse are faced with an embarrassment of riches. -- Arnaud de Borchgrave

The so-called Indian Mujahedeen have used in their notorious e-mails certain Quranic verses to justify killing of innocent civilians. These are the same verses that enemies of Islam’s pacific and humane philosophy have been traditionally using for centuries to demonise Islam. Muslims who go berserk and want to simply smite all and sundry in their crazy stupor also routinely use these verses to justify their fanaticism and probably also to brainwash the still-not-so-crazy to their cause.

New Age Islam  urges Indian Ulema to come out with explicit, unequivocal statements that the Quranic verses like the following - “Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks"- are now obsolete: they were meant for a specific situation during the Prophet’s life and do no apply today.

Also, they must clarify that the Muslim perception and belief that they alone are worthy of going to Heaven is total bunkum, according to Muslim precepts. Muslims are no better or worse than any other community. Islam has as much failed to create a New Man or for that matter a New Woman as any other reformist religion or philosophy.

Six thousand Muslim clerics are set to gather in Hyderabad on November 8 to issue the “biggest ever fatwa” against terrorism. Organised by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the country’s largest Islamic body, the meet will have muftis from all states condemning the propaganda that “regards terrorism as synonymous with jihad”. The Jamiat, along with the Dar-ul Uloom Deoband, India’s oldest Islamic seminary, had issued a similar fatwa on May 31, the first of its kind in the country. “The first fatwa was signed by only three muftis. This one will be signed by 6,000 muftis, which means the impact of this will be much larger and deeper,” Jamiat leader Maulana Mahmood Madani told reporters.

 NewAgeIslam.com had welcomed the previous fatwa against terror, asked for introspection and suggested the need for going beyond statements and looking into deeper issues that inhibit Indian Muslims’ full integration into the Indian society.  

Can Ulema save Muslims from Radical Islamism?

By Sultan Shahin

http://newageislam.com/newageislamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=15

We hope the request has been heeded and the present meet will lead to some genuine introspection. The ulema must come forward with visionary guidance for the Muslim community that will help them deal with their own inadequacies and enable them to lead the country on a path of harmony and prosperity rather than remain a community of whiners and grievance-mongers as our leaders have turned us into. It is this whining and constant grievance mongering and spinning of conspiracy theories that is also leading our youth on the path of terrorism. Let us recognise that and act to stem the tide. Blaming others is easy, but let us choose the difficult path of setting our own house in order and setting an example before the country.

Profiting from the sale of Maulana Maudoodi’s books, preaching the sovereignty of God on earth, spreading the poison of khilafat politics, brainwashing our educated youth with dreams of establishing Islamic Sharia rule in India and the world and at the same time seeking to help establish the rule of godless communists through Muslim vote-bank politics does not behove the biggest repositories of the highest truth. A little honesty might help. .. It must disown the heavy baggage of its past and openly recognise that the late Maulana Maududi's ideology has no raison d'être in this country or anywhere else in the world. It is this ideology that has created the now dreaded organisations like SIMI and its offshoot Indian Mujahdeen. As I have said before, a little honesty might help even the biggest repositories of the highest truth. â 

I could not help being inspired by Ameer-e-Jamaat Maulana Syed Jalaluddin Umri’s rousing words addressing the Muslim gathering: “Stand up to fight for the right of other sections of humanity, not just to beg for justice for yourself. " … Tall orders? Shouldn’t be! These are just starting points. After all fight for justice like charity should begin from home. Let us, Maulana Umri, set our houses in order. This will give us the moral strength and moral stature required to fight for justice for all the oppressed of humanity, that indeed, as you very rightly said, is the objective of Islam.

An analysis by Sultan Shahin, editor, New Age Islam

In a front-page editorial in Urdu Daily Sahafat, Delhi, Nov. 1, 2008 Aman Abbas has rightly directed Muslims’ attention to the reprehensible practice of popular Ahl-e-Hadees preacher Dr. Zakir Naik referring to Yazeed, the dastardly killer of the Prophet’s family members, as Rahmatullah Alaih, thus seeking God’s blessings on this evil character. If it is also true, as the article claims, though it sounds incredible, that Dr Naik seeks to justify Osama bin Laden’s reprehensible activity and criminal terrorist philosophy of Jihadism, by saying in his speeches in English that are freely available as CDs in Islamic bookshops: “If Osama is terrorizing America, we are with him; all Muslims should be terrorists,” then NewAgeIslam.com has no hesitation in joining Sahafat in condemning the sentiment unequivocally as inhuman, un-Islamic, dangerous as well as fatal for Muslims interests and image. Some excerpts and summary of the article are being presented below. We welcome Sahafat’s call for introspection. Incidentally, we ourselves called for introspection in articles available at:

http://newageislam.com/NewageislamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=854

and

http://newageislam.com/newageislamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=727

Editor, NewAgeIslam.com