Where Does This Fanaticism Come From?
By Khurshid Anwar
(Translated from Hindi by Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam)
When religious fundamentalism transgresses all its limits, it makes the women folk its first target and begins to suppress them and use them as their tools. Things that have never ever been recorded in Vedas can be easily seen in the fabricated collections of Manusmiriti and every newly-compiled religious discourse. Surprisingly enough, they have a lot of things in common.
For instance, just as there are some Hindu superstitions for women during their menstruation, similarly many things are forbidden for them in Islam too.
But instead of hyping it, we have to see the extreme degree of mindlessness that religious fundamentalism can reach. Now, let us take a glimpse of what Wahhabism is doing in our country.
On April 8, 1994, UNO submitted a report related to the Human Rights with a detailed account of the Afghan Taliban’s restrictions on women. Some of them were such as: complete ban on visiting the male doctors, strict imposition of the veil covering the full body from head to toe, complete ban on working outdoor, ban on buying goods from male shoppers, severe punishment by lashes on the women with bare ankles, publicly humiliating and flogging of them if they do not adopt the dress code defined by the Taliban, stoning of them to death if they are found in relationship with men other than their husbands, ban on their laughing out loudly, ban on their presence in a television or radio show or at any public event, panting of all the windows in homes so that women cannot see out etc. The list is very much long, so I would conclude to say that there were so many stern impositions on women that only purported to turn them into a dead body.
Two important points are worth mentioning here. First, most of these laws were implemented in Afghanistan during the era of Rabbani Masood whose government was seen as the advocate of women empowerment. I will cite some of the related instances in the following. Second, Taliban’s restrictions on women such as these are based on the Wahabi doctrines deeply embedded in the curriculums of schools in Saudi Arabia.
If you want to get an idea about how harshly women were treated by Talibani tyrannical laws, you should recall the year of 1978 when Masood waged a war against Soviet Union. It was then that Masood welcomed Saudi Arabia’s support for the Islamic Council to spread Wahabi ideology in Afghanistan. Afterwards, a series of anti-woman laws based on Wahabi ideology reared their ugly head in Afghanistan. According to the documents presented in the United Nations, Masood government played a big part in creating the pathetic plight of women in Afghanistan. In 1979, the rate of women education had increased to 90 percent. But after the imposition of Taliban’s restrictions on women, it declined to 30 percent.
Women were so oppressed by their husbands that only in Herat, 90 of them committed suicide, unable to bear the cruelty of their husbands (as per the United Nations document).
See how these Jihadists use women as their tools to achieve their goals! A Taliban leader Qari Zia Rahman, who runs training camps for woman suicide bombers in the areas of Kunar and Nuristan (Afghanistan) as well as Bajaur and Mohammed (Pakistan), has, so far, used many women in suicide attacks. Ironically, Pakistani government has been informed about it by the two girls who escaped, but as usual, it took no action against the training camps.
Shortly after June 21, 2010, a female suicide attack occurred in Kanar. Qari Ziaur Rahman expressed immense pleasure and acknowledged his role behind the attack. Later in June 24, 2010, the next female suicide bombing took place in Bajaur, killing four civilians. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, 39 such incidents of suicide bombing happened only in the year of 2010.
In 2011, there began a trend of “Burqa bombing”. Taliban call this faction of terrorists “Mujahida Sisters”. Often, men come in this new terrorist disguise, but women take responsibility of all such suicide bombings. When a female suicide attack was carried out in Kanar (Afghanistan) on June 4, 2011, Taliban took its responsibility and proudly stated: “it was carried out by the “Mujahida Sisters”. In the same year, another such attack occurred in Dera Ismail Khan. Female suicide bombing has not yet come to a halt.
Lo and behold! This is the very Wahhabism that had strictly banned women from laughing out loudly, participating in any television or radio show or any public event, driving car, motor cycle or a cycle, and standing against the window to see outside. Where do all these restrictions and conditions go when it comes to suicide bombing? Of course, it is an outcome of a grossly deceitful and double-standard doctrine propounded by the Wahhabi ideologues. On the one hand, the Saudi government and its Wahhabi outfits impose on women such restrictions that reduce them into a creature lower in status than animal, while on the other, the same creature is branded as “Mujahida”. It shows that Wahhabis use women just as a tool in hand, while they loudly claim to be the adherents of puritan Islam. The question arises: was their Quran revealed in the 18th century after the emergence of Mohammad Ibn-e-Abdul Wahhab, the pioneer of Wahhabism? As for the Quran that was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), it does not contain any such thing. In fact, this is the true face of political Islam that has no substantial evidence to justify itself in the holy Quran or Hadiths (the sayings of the Prophet PBUH).
Can any Alim (classical Islamic scholar) tell me which text in the Quran or Hadith allows them to train the young and innocent children to become suicide bombers? This is, actually, permitted in their Islam. They lure the gullible youths and innocent children with poor family background, give their parents some money and indoctrinate them into believing that suicide bombing will accord them a special place in Jannah (heaven). Al-Qaida, Taliban and other terror outfits are globally notorious for such pernicious acts that make them a stigma for the entire humanity.
According to a Guantanamo Be intelligence report, Taliban takes advantage of the naivety of these children who are in their impressionable age and cannot apply their reasoning properly, thus, they easily get ready to become martyrs. They are completely brainwashed into committing mindless crimes. Even the Afghan government admitted that those children are made to watch videos of Muslim men, women and children being killed and oppressed with a view to arouse their anger and passion for retaliation.
The Afghan government also admitted, in a public statement, that these children are bought at a price of seven thousand to fourteen thousand dollars. Their parents are given not only huge amounts of money, but are also assured of their religious martyrdom and straight entry to paradise.
The extreme extent that Al-Qaida and Taliban reach in their malevolence can be gauged by a ritual incident. In Kanar and Nooristan, when a child gets fully prepared and well-equipped to become a suicide bomber, he is decorated like a groom on a horse’s back and is rotated in the entire village. Then, people of the village, either due to their fear from the Taliban or because of their support for this rite, come and congratulate the child’s parents. According to the Afghanistan government, the number of these young children ranges from 5000 to 7000.
Going by a statement issued by the Pakistan's Ministry of Home Affairs, 2488 incidents of terror attacks occurred during the past two years, in which nearly four thousand people were killed. Surprisingly, most of those attacks were carried out by the young children. Taliban is running three training camps named “Fidayeen-e-Islam” in Waziristan, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, in which thousands of children are being trained and prepared to fight. Such grievous examples of fanaticism and vandalism cannot be found throughout the entire history of terrorism.
This is the true face of Wahabis. How can it be termed as an Islamic face? Their Islam does not teach them to feed the poor, eliminate the poverty or reduce the illiteracy rate from the country. Rather, their religion teaches them to take advantage of such poor conditions of people and use them in their obnoxious acts of taking innocent lives. This is a new and alien Islam. Its roots are deeply embedded in politics rather than spirituality. And when religion and politics are merged with each other, this merger causes great damage to the whole humanity. Wahabism and its terror outfits are trying to establish political Islam in the name of religion. If we do not put an end to this now, we will surely see a new face of Fascism.
URL for Hindi article: http://www.newageislam.com/hindi-section/khurshid-anwar-खुर्शीद-अनवर/where-this-cruelty-comes-from-ये-क्रूरता-कहां-से-आती-है/d/14201
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/where-this-fanaticism-come/d/14209