Al Zawahiri Trying To Find Opportunity For Spreading His Jihadi Ideology In India Through Hijab And Women's Issues
Al
Zawahiri Is Trying To Cash In On His Cultural Roots In Pakistan
Main
Points:
1. Al
Zawahiri's mother Umyma Azzam did not wear hijab.
2. Egyptian
leader Gamal Abdul Nasser had laughed at the idea of women wearing headscarf.
3. Al
Zawahiri's grandfather Abdullah Azzam was Egypt's ambassador to Pakistan.
4. Pak Prime
Minister Liaqat Ali Khan was close to exiled Muslim Brotherhood leader Said
Ramadan.
5. Syed Qutb
discovered the work of Maududi through Said Ramadan.
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New Age Islam Staff Writer introducing Praveen Swami's article on the subject
12 April
2022
Ayman al-Zawahiri
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Praveen
Swami delves deep into the cultural and ideological roots of Al Qaida and its
jihadi ideology in the Indian sub-continent. Al Zawahiri, it seems, was more
instrumental forming Al Qaida's ideology than Osama bin Laden. It was not only
the Arabian and the Egyptian Islamists who shaped Bin Laden's ideology but
Jama'at Islami ideologue and Indian Islamic scholar Abul Ala Maududi also
played a significant role in forming and spreading the jihadi ideology.
When
Zawahiri came to Peshawar in India as the head of a thousand- strong team of
jihadists who were to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in1980, he met
his friend Said Ramadan, the exiled Muslim Brotherhood leader in Karachi. Said
Ramadan had developed close relationships with the then Prime Minister of
Pakistan Liaqat Ali Khan. Under the ideological influence of Ramadan, Liaqat
Ali Khan wanted to Islamise Pakistan. And through Said Ramadan, Egyptian
hardline Islamic scholar Syed Qutb was introduced to the works and ideology of
Islamic scholar Abul Ala Maududi.
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Also Read: We Indian Muslims Need No Sermons From The Al-Qaeda Chief Ayman
Al-Zawahiri
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Maududi had held the view that the power of
the state should be seized through force to establish the rule of God and that
democracy was a new religion that promoted atheism. Therefore, the ideas of
Maududi, Syed Qutb, Sayid Ramadan and Deedat together formed the jihadist
ideology which Al Qaida follows. These Ulema propagated conservative ideas
about hijab and education of women and gender segregation which got wide
acceptance only after the 80s. Aiman al Zawahiri who has been trained within
this ideological framework holds the same views as Maududi, Syed Qutb and
others. Therefore, Pakistan has been a hotbed of radical and extremist ideology
of Al Qaida since as far back as the 60s. Peshawar and Karachi were the centres
of extremism. Al Qaida 's South Asia chief Sanaul Haque who belonged to Sambhal
in India, initially studied at Darul Uloom Deoband and later shifted to the
jihadi seminary Jamia Ulema-e-Islamia in Karachi.
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After
losing its ground in the Middle East, Zawahiri has pinned his hopes of
establishing Al Qaida's base in the Indian sub-continent. For that purpose, he
espouses the causes of the Muslims and tries to invoke a culture war between
the polytheists and the 'chaste' Muslims of India. The current hijab row in
India has provided him with the opportunity to garner the support of the Indian
Muslims. He has sympathised with the girls fighting a legal battle for their
religious right to wear hijab, and particularly Muskan Khan who has become the face
of the hijab movement.
But
interestingly, hijab was something unknown among the Muslims of Egypt in the
50s and even Zawahiri 's mother Umyma Azzam did not wear hijab. The Egyptian
leader Gamal Abdul Nasser had once laughed at the idea of Muslim women wearing
headscarves. Zawahiri is espousing the cause of hijab because he wants to
intensify the cultural and civilisational war in India because as an
organisation believing in violence and civil war, its agenda can only be
forwarded when there is strife in the society. They do not believe in peaceful
co-existence but believe in the clash of civilisations and in the establishing
the law of God by force and through bloodshed.
To rebuff
the devilish designs of terrorists and mischief makers like Zawahiri, Indian
Muslims should find the solutions of their religious and cultural problems
peacefully and democratically. They should learn a lesson from the fate of the
Muslims of the Middle East and African countries who simply wanted some changes
in the system but the Al Qaida and the ISIS infiltrated the peaceful protests
and turned the movement into a civil war. Subsequently, the entire region was
destroyed in the violence that ensued and the Muslims of the region had to flee
and live as refugees in alien countries. If Indian Muslims fall in the trap of
Al Zawahiri and Al Qaida, they may meet the same fate.
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Al-Zawahiri
Invoking Culture War In South Asia. Al-Qaeda Sees Opportunity In Hijab Row
By Praveen
Swami
10 April,
2022
Eblis, the
accursed angel who rebelled against god, raises his citadel in Hollywood. From
his cavern deep below the north Atlantic, the devil calls out to his armies,
using gravitational pulses. The subliminal code embedded in the Coca-Cola logo
tells the faithful that there is no Mecca, nor Muhammad. Plagues caused by
vaccines, climate manipulation, alien flying saucers: The doomsday is creeping
towards us—its signs concealed until they are illuminated by the light of
Islam.
Late one
autumn night in 2019, at a farm near the war-torn Afghan town of Musa Qala, a
United States military raid ended the life of the author of these apocalyptic
fantasies. To friends he’d played
cricket with in the lanes of Sambhal, in Uttar Pradesh, the slain man had been
‘Sannu.’ The men he died with knew him by the pseudonym Asim Umar, al-Qaeda
chief Ayman al-Zawahiri’s choice to lead the terror outfit in South Asia.
Al-Zawahiri’s
speech assailing anti-Hijab rules in Karnataka, the first by any al-Qaeda
leader focussed on India, underlines the threat country faces. Today, the
global jihadist movement controls more territory than when the so-called War on
Terror began after 9/11. The rebirth of the Taliban’s Emirate has given
al-Qaeda a physical sanctuary.
These
aren’t, however, the biggest dangers. In his speech, al-Zawahiri invokes a
civilisational war between the “chaste Muslim nation and the degenerate and
depraved polytheist and atheist enemies that it confronts.” For decades,
al-Qaeda has fought not just on battlefields, but in culture wars: conflicts
about democracy, the rights of women, and religious identity. India’s charged
debates on Islam — and Muslim fears for the future — mean opportunity for
al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda’s
Deep South Asia Roots
Al-Zawahiri’s
arrival in Peshawar in 1980, as part of the thousands-strong cohort of Arab
jihadists who had come to wage war against the Soviet Union, was something of a
homecoming. Abdul-Wahab Azzam, al-Zawahiri’s grandfather, had served as Egypt’s
ambassador to Pakistan in 1954. Among
other things, Azzam had translated the works of poet Mohammad Iqbal, into
Arabic. His friends in Karachi had included the exiled Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood leader, Sa’id Ramadan.
Pakistan’s
Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, had met Ramadan in 1948, when he visited
Karachi to attend a conference. The relationship flowered through the early
1950s, as Khan sought to Islamise the new Islamic Republic. The Muslim
Brotherhood leader had his own radio show; the prime minister even wrote a
preface to one of his books.
The
relationships that grew in Karachi led to intense engagement between Islamists
in Pakistan and West Asia. Through Ramadan, the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid
Ibrahim Qutb discovered the work of the Jamaat-e-Islami ideologue, Abul’ Ala
Maududi.
In
Maududi’s view, it was imperative for Muslims to “seize the authority of State,
for an evil system takes root and flourishes under the patronage of an evil
government and a pious cultural order can never be established until the
authority of government is wrested from the wicked.” Islam itself, he claimed,
was “a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the
entire world and rebuild it.”
Through
Qutb’s work, al-Zawahiri — other al-Qaeda leaders like Osama Bin Laden and
Abdullah Azzam, the co-founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba — engaged with Maududi’s
ideas.
In one
essay, al-Zawahiri approvingly cited Maududi to argue that “democracy was a new
religion, based on making the people into gods, and giving them God’s
attributes.” “This is tantamount to associating idols with God and falling into
unbelief,” he asserted.
For
al-Zawahiri, as it had been for Qutb and Maududi, the answer lay in war: jihad
would lead to a caliphate, and to the imposition of God’s will on earth.
Al-Qaeda’s
Indian Spokesman
In the
summer of 2013, the new jihadist magazine Azaan carried the first of several
articles calling for Indian Muslims to join the jihadist movement, noting that
“their ancestors always raised the banner of jihad against the enemies of
Islam.” “The Red Fort in front of the mosque cries tears of blood at your
slavery and mass killing at the hands of the Hindus,” the article went on.
Instead of fighting back, young Muslims were “wasting their time in
marketplaces, parks and sports fields.”
From the
late-1980s, waves of communal violence had led a growth in jihadist recruitment
in India. More important, though, the violence had led the growing physical and
intellectual sundering of Muslims. Inside these besieged communities, the
questioning of secular-democratic politics grew.
Educated at
the Hindi Inter College in Sambhal, the man who would become al-Qaeda’s south
Asia chief was the youngest of five siblings. Sana-ul-Haq dropped out of school
in the eighth grade, and was sent to the Dar-ul-Ulum seminary in Deoband. The
violence of 1992-1993 appears to have led him towards jihadism. Late in 1998,
after dropping out of Deoband, Sana-ul-Haq travelled to Pakistan on a forged
passport, and gained admission to the pro-jihadist Jamia Ulum-e-Islamia in
Karachi.
Following
his studies, Sana-ul-Haq is believed to have joined the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen,
serving as a religious-studies teacher at its training camps for Kashmir
jihadists.
The Indian
jihadist’s biggest contribution to the movement, though, was as a propagandist.
He carried al-Qaeda’s message to the conservative lower middle-class, panicked
by the cultural strains of modernity, and disillusioned with democracy.
Al-Qaeda positioned its moral certitude as all that stood between the pious and
perdition.
In one
book, The Bermuda Triangle and the Devil, he wrote, “the tragedy of all Islamic
societies is that they grow watching devilish Christian, Jewish and Hindu
media.” “The so-called modern class,” he
went on, are dancing to the tunes of prostitutes, and calling themselves
broad-minded—but in reality, their minds have been auctioned off in the markets
of Hollywood.”
Gender was
a leitmotif in his books. “Muslim women have been persuaded that their
community cannot prosper unless they leave the home,” he argues, “but in fact,
they are walking into a trap. By weakening the faith of Muslim women, the Devil
succeeds in destroying their men.”
Pop-Islamists
like Sana-ul-Haq proliferated in the 1990s. Fugitive televangelist Zakir Naik
claimed that “we Muslims would prefer that in India the Islamic Criminal Law be
implemented on all the Indians, since, chopping the hands of a thief will
surely reduce the rate of robbery.”
Ahmed
Deedat, Naik’s mentor, argued for polygamy, saying it would resolve the problem
of what he called “surplus women.” “Ninety-eight per cent of its prison
population is male,” Deedat claimed of the United Staes. “Then, they have 25
million sodomites.”
The Apocalypse
Ahead
Even in
1979, as al-Zawahiri fought the Soviets, these ideas did not have a large
audience. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser erupted in laughter in 1959, along
with his audience, at the thought that women might be compelled to wear
headscarves. Al-Zawahiri’s wedding to Azza Nowari in 1978—where genders were
segregated and musicians were kept away—marked him out as an eccentric.
Al-Zawahiri’s own mother Oamyma Azzam, did not wear a veil, one obituary
records.
Maryam
Jameelah, a New York resident who lived in Maududi’s home after converting to
Islam, railed in a 1969 pamphlet for the Hijab, against Western values she
alleged had unleashed an “epidemic of crime, lawlessness and universal
indulgence in illicit sex.” She was largely ignored.
General
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s regime began institutionalising Islamist demands and
practices—but the blossoming of religious chauvinism across the region needs a
deeper understanding.
For
millions, in India and Pakistan, the State is a God that’s failed: justice,
development and security remain elusive. Al-Qaeda isn’t the only violent
identity movement to have flowered in this toxic political landscape. The
apocalypse Sana-ul-Haq prophesied, and fought to realise, might not be as far
away as we imagine.
“Well,” the
unicorn told Alice in Lewis Carroll’s masterwork, “now that we have seen each
other, if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.” The real success of
al-Qaeda, has been to take millions onto the other side of the looking glass.
Finding the way back from that place of madness might prove impossible.
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Praveen
Swami is National Security Editor, ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by
Anurag Chaubey)
Source: Al-Zawahiri
Invoking Culture War In South Asia. Al-Qaeda Sees Opportunity In Hijab Row
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/al-zawahiri-jihadi-ideology-india-hijab-/d/126779
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