WHAT Islam means, or is made to mean, to the Muslims around the world, is one of the great issues of our times, unsurpassed in the interest that it evokes, the intensity of the feelings that it generates, and in its unforeseeable future ramifications for the world at large.

Since the meaning and purpose of Islam has been politicized by both the Muslims and the non-Muslims, the debate has quietly shifted from the domain of religious and spiritual discourse to that of the political. It is, like any other political debate, being conducted through the media, rather than the academia, where the audience is to be counted in millions rather than hundreds or thousands, and where truth is less interesting than the sensational, the bizarre, and the scandalous.

No wonder, then, that the debate is becoming more and more acrimonious, and Islam is now beginning to be seen as the cause of a powerful divide between the Muslims and non-Muslims, and even amongst the Muslims themselves. There is need, therefore, to understand what Islam means to the Muslims, and whether it is, in fact, a divisive and inhumane ideology that breeds fanatics with morbid obsession for the extermination of the non-believers, and mutilation of the malefactors.

In the contemporary context there are five different kinds of claimants to the Islamic ideology: one, the jihadis, such as the Al Qaeda, who would like to wage war against those whom they perceive as the enemies of Islam; two, the sectarians, such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba, who wish to dominate the religious domain to the exclusion, even elimination, of other sects that in their view are misguided; three, the relegio-political activists, such as the Taliban, who would like to get hold of the state apparatus, peacefully or otherwise, to establish an Islamic state, though invariably of a narrow sectarian dispensation; four, the proselytizers, such as the Tablighi Jamaat, who would like to convert non-Muslims to the Islamic faith, and the Muslims to their version of Islam; and five, the reformers, such as Allama Iqbal and Ali Shariati, who would like to reconstruct the Islamic thought to evolve a worldview consistent with the spirit of Islam and also with the imperatives of the present stage of the evolution of human society.

The last two, the proselytizers and the reformers, are of great religious significance but do not occupy much space on the mental screen of the Muslim or non-Muslim observers of the Muslim societies. The proselytizers are so far peaceful and non-political, and since they have their focus on the individual rather than the community they are not a party to any national or international conflict or even discourse. The reformers, for the present, are leaderless, scattered, and least able or prepared to participate in the on-going struggle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim masses. They are of least consequence, and their worldview of no practical relevance.

In the minds of the people everywhere Islam is, therefore, represented today by the jihadis, the sectarians, and the religio-political activists. Each one of these three groups has made its own peculiar contribution to the present image of Islam that confuses the scholars, worries a vast majority of Muslims, and pleases the detractors of religion generally and of Islam particularly. Their contribution can be summed up easily.

The jihadis have, by their word and deed, shown that direct targeting of innocent people (not merely as ‘collateral damage’) is justified in Islam as, according to them, there are no innocent people on the other side of the ideological divide. In fact, persons involved in such acts of indiscriminate violence expect to be rewarded in life hereafter. The sectarians, on their part, have shown that Muslims cannot tolerate even internal theological differences, and are prone to deal with such differences by violent means. The religio-political activists have shown that an Islamic political order is excessively authoritarian in its mode of governance, and is far from being humane in the administration of justice. This is true of Afghanistan under the Taliban, and also of other states that claim to have enforced Islamic mode of governance.

It is true that what the jihadis and the activists stand for is a minority view, and that it has been conditioned by the excesses committed against the Muslim communities in many parts of the world. It is also true that critical and even scandalous views of Islam and the Muslims (V.S.Naipaul, Salman Rushdie) have been encouraged in the West at the highest level, with insensitive disregard for the feelings of the Muslims. But we should also recognize the truth that the Muslim societies are out of sync with the modern world inasmuch as they continue to hold on to a culture that is intolerant and anti-democratic.

We need to recognize the truth that those who have so far tried to create an Islamic state have been obsessed more with punishments, thought control, and social regimentation (from dress to the length of beards) than with the welfare and intellectual flowering of their people. They have acted as vengeful enforcers of what they insist is Islam, not as humble servants of the ‘most gracious, most merciful’ God, for such are His first attributes, repeated twice, in the very first and very short Sura (al Fateha) that has been called the Essence of the Book. A good Muslim is required to recite this Sura repeatedly (at least 20 times a day) in his daily prayers. The enforcers of Islam, thus, lost sight of nothing but the essence.

Time has come for the Muslim communities around the world to undertake that long overdue ‘reconstruction of religious thought’ to produce a blueprint for a tolerant, democratic and humane society, at peace with itself, with the rest of the world, and with the pristine spirit of Islam. The task of reconstruction should have two basic objectives: first, formulation of a legal structure to bring about harmony between the internal constituents, and with the external entities; second, harmonizing the sectarian elements within Muslim communities. The task, as we shall presently see, is not beyond the realm of ideological feasibility.

First, the legal structure. This task is not as arduous as it may appear to be, for its foundations have already been laid. Most, if not all, of the Muslim states are signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that contains a universally accepted guideline for a legal structure that encourages and ensures the growth of a tolerant and democratic culture. Since practically all the Muslim states are signatories to the Declaration one assumes that there are no insurmountable ideological barriers to harmonizing any of the 30 articles of the Declaration with the requirements of an Islamic state.

There can be some problem about a few severe forms of punishment like stoning to death and amputation of hand, often used to discredit the entire Islamic legal code, but these are controversial matters even among the Islamic jurists. According to one view, the punishment of stoning to death, for example, can be reviewed as it is not mandated by the Holy Quran. It was, in fact, sanctified by the Torah. Similarly, there is a view, on the authority of the Fourth Caliph, that the requirement of amputation of hand can be met by amputing a finger. There is, thus, good reason to believe that a legal order that is tolerant, democratic, humane, and in harmony with the universally accepted norms, as codified in the Declaration, is quite consistent with the spirit of Islam.

Next, the task of harmonizing the sectarian elements of the Muslim societies. This is an important task as the sectarian differences are not merely of academic and theological interest, but have been a cause of much bloodshed in the past and in recent times. Since an effort to bring about a merger between two or more sects can only succeed in creating yet another sect, the aim should be only to remove mutual hostility, rather than a massive revision of beliefs to eliminate the sects.

That a major review of sectarian beliefs of secondary importance is possible was demonstrated by Imam Khomeini when he wrote (‘Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations by Imam Khomeini’ p.155) that the first three caliphs did follow in the footsteps of the Holy Prophet in their personal lives. In the sectarian context even this is nothing short of a revolutionary shift, and should be used as a starting point for a dialogue between the two major sects: Sunni and Shia. If ever there was need for such a dialogue it is now.

Finally, some of us do not feel much enthused over the effort to create a tolerant, democratic, and humane society as the purpose, it is assumed, is to please the West. I see no reason why the West shouldn’t feel pleased about it but, surely, the purpose is not to please the West so much as to reconstruct our own society. The reason is simple. A tolerant, democratic and humane society is located at a higher level of socio-political evolution than a society dedicated to the proposition that individual freedom is immoral, knowledge dangerous, and tolerance fatal. And a society that does not evolve must, in time, decay and crumble, as many have in the past. The choice before the Muslim societies is obvious: Move up the ladder of evolution, or slide down into the dustbin of history. For the present the latter seems more likely. This too may please the West. e-mail:tvo@isb.comsats.net.pk

WITH this budget session of the parliament beginning on February 28, the National Democratic Alliance government (NDA) will complete three of its five-year term. The president will outline the future programme at the joint session. But the speech will have the cabinet’s approval. Perforce, it has to be laudatory. Yet this is the time to discern national trends.

India is not a failed state. But it is a failing state, with pervasive poverty, inequitable distribution of income and assets, stunted growth rate and numerous scams at the government level. There is no meaningful difference in the lives of the majority of the people. But there are great disparities among the states. Also, some people are growing so rich and insecure that they do not want to accept even awards for high tax return.

Four states are doing well: Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra. They have attracted 75 per cent of foreign investment. Bihar and UP, with one-fourth of India’s one billion population, have hardly any outside investment. They have had a zero growth in the last two decades.

Punjab may become another Bihar if nothing is done to extract it from the present crop pattern of wheat and rice in which it is stuck, with Rs 54,000 crore of rural indebtedness. The north-east cannot claim to have had even a single private project of five crore rupees in the last many years.

Villages, where 70 per cent of the population lives, have a slice of only 24 per cent of the country’s growth. Urban poverty is becoming more glaring. And only 10 per cent of our students go beyond the sixth class, although the country’s literacy rate is 62 per cent.

The unemployment problem is acute. Its yearly growth of 2.5 per cent has shrunk to 1.3 per cent. In the countryside, where the incidence of unemployment is the highest, the poor are getting increasingly marginalized. In the cities, a clerk’s post gets 200 applications. There are schemes to alleviate poverty or give doles for relief or other works.

But no government, either at the centre or in the states, has any scheme to create jobs. In fact, they are retiring employees compulsorily. Trade unions are understandably up in arms.

Once I told Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that Lal Bahadur Shastri insisted on the planning commission’s spelling out projects in jobs, not allocations. Vajpayee saw the point but said that the trend in the world was to have more and more sophisticated machines and less and less of hands. He expected other opportunities to come up. True, the service sector is expanding but industrial growth is falling. It has come down to 2.3 per cent from 9 per cent in the last few years. But without the solid ground of industry, the service sector will be hanging in the air.

Those who are beating the drum of globalization should realize that the growth rate in the last decade, after the introduction of economic reforms, has been half of what was in the earlier years. The IMF, World Bank and WTO were constituted to maintain financial stability and promote development and trade. For some time they did that when they built the capacity of the state. But the trend has changed to reduce the role of the state to go towards liberalization and privatization and to benefit the multinationals and the developed states.

Selling hotels or bread outfits makes sense. So does the disposal of loss-making public sector undertakings. But New Delhi’s policy of disinvestment at any cost does not. At the recent disinvestment orgy, the government has made one public sector undertaking buy shares in another public sector undertaking at enhanced price so as to keep out private hands. This was no sale; it was mere book adjustment, money going from one pocket of the government to another.

By dismantling partially or wholly what was laboriously built in the last four or five decades, the government is playing with the country’s future. The countries that are advanced today were economically better off in terms of per capita income before their industrialization began. We have to do our own thinking, profiting by the example of others but essentially trying to strike a path for ourselves suited to our own conditions. Fiats by Washington, which still wants us to pay Enron, an outright fraud, are not in our interest.

The political scene is more depressing. State elections in UP, Punjab, Uttaranchal and Manipur have shown how parochialism and patronage, in the name of caste, religion or region, has come to enthuse people. Leaders have only played upon the differences to get vote. Narrow thinking is deepening. It happens when idealism loses its elan. In such an environment, the seedy elements come to the fore. With mediocre political leadership and inefficient corrupt bureaucracy, it is difficult to improve governance, particularly when to stay in power has become the end in itself.

The BJP-led government has devised its own way of governance: to instil fear. It is arming itself, weapon-wise and law-wise. No other administration has bought so many weapons in such a short time as this one has. New Delhi does seem to realize that the more strength it acquires in conventional arms, the bigger becomes the danger of nuclear warfare in the subcontinent. The whole strategy is faulty.

I remember the remark which Abdul Qadir Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, made during an interview with me: “If you ever drive us to the wall, as you did during the 1971 war, we will use the bomb.” However suicidal, Islamabad may reach for the bomb if and when it meets reverses in any future confrontation.

Law-wise also, the BJP-led government exudes arrogance of authority. The Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO) is an example. All the powers which the Vajpayee government wants to prevent terrorism or to meet it are available in the six acts which are already in force: the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, 1971, the National Security Act (1980), the Essential Services Maintenance Act, 1981, and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1987.

The hard posturing by the BJP-led government has led to its being dictated by the fundamentalists. The RSS parivar, particularly the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), is sabre-rattling on the construction of the temple on the site where the Babri masjid had stood before it was demolished.

This is to resume the same old religious frenzy which had triggered the worst type of communal riots in 1992-93. The Muslims, though extremely concerned, are generally quiet. But they see in the VHP move another instance of the ‘might is right’ dictum. The extremist fringe among the Muslims may retaliate if the temple is sought to be built without a mutual settlement or a judicial verdict. The Sangh parivar does not seem to realize the harm it is causing to the polity which draws its strength from its faith in secularism. Hatred is threatening to tear Indian society apart.

My fear is that Vajpayee might resign if the VHP tries to build the temple without any settlement on March 15, the date announced by the VHP. Such a development is bound to heat up the cauldron of politics to a point where it can boil over. It is difficult to imagine the repercussions. But one thing is sure: economic problems, which already get less attention, may be pushed further into the background. In any case, national interest demands that pressure be put on the government to tackle the VHP so that things do not go out of hand later. It happened when the Babri masjid was demolished. It may happen again.

The writer is a free-lance columnist based in New Delhi.

WHO owns the government of the United States? The answer should be simple: the people do. After all, the root of ‘democracy’ is ‘demos,’ the Greek for common people. As America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, said on a momentous occasion, the nation had a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

But in the United States today, the answer to that question is not so simple. Money, more than ideas or ideology, determines elections in America. Most of the money in American politics comes from wealthy donors and large corporations, who make large ‘contributions’ to candidates of both major political parties and to the parties themselves. When these people pay for something, they expect something back. What they get is something called ‘access.’

Since the start of Mr George W. Bush’s career in politics, the largest donor to his electoral campaigns has been a man named Kenneth Lay. “Kenny Boy” is how Mr Bush often referred to his friend, indicating the warm and intimate relation between the two. Recently, though, Mr Bush does not return Kenny Boy’s phone calls. In fact, he would rather not acknowledge that he knows Mr Lay. The reason? The company of which Mr Lay was president, Enron, has just crashed in the largest and most spectacular bankruptcy in American history.

News about the collapse of Enron dominates the American media. It sometimes seems as if Enron is a centipede with a multitude of legs: every day another shoe or two drops, dominating the evening news. Here is a summary of the major events.

Until last summer, Enron was a high-flying corporation, generating cash and new business at every turn. Originally a gas pipeline company, it metamorphosed into the world’s largest trader in gas, electricity, water, and all sorts of post-modern commodities such as bandwidth. But when in October Enron was forced to disclose that, well, its bookkeeping had been too creative, its soaring profits were suddenly wiped out by losses and charges it had failed to record properly. Investors began to have second thoughts about Enron, whose stock, having reached a high of 98 dollars a share, plummeted.

Suddenly Enron found itself in a huge credit crunch, and the corporation imploded. It turned out that many Enron executives had sold tens of millions of dollars of their stock while the public went on buying shares in the company, assured by these same executives that all was well. Worse, Enron executives had authorized a change in the company’s pension plan that froze workers’ retirement funds in Enron stock as the price nose-dived. While executives sold their stock, the workers woke up to find that their pension plan was worthless.

Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Anderson Inc., had difficulty explaining how it gave a clean bill of health to a company that later revealed it had all sorts of hidden losses. In a stunning development, it was revealed that after the civil investigation of the accounting process was announced, Anderson had shredded documents and erased computer files about the accounting at Enron.

Meanwhile, Mrs Wendy Gramm, the woman who, as a former chief government regulator of the energy business, deregulated electrical power so that Enron could speculate in electricity, turned out to have joined the corporate board of Enron shortly after she resigned her government position. Her husband, Mr Phil Gramm, was an enormously influential Republican senator. He received $97,000 in campaign donations from Enron in the past dozen years.

The Republican Party, which had the responsibility in the recent past of passing legislation that would ease Enron’s path into the shady side of business, received $1.2 million in the 2000 election. The Democratic Party, which under President Clinton had supervised the laws and policies that Enron often wanted changed so that it could flourish, received $500,000. Mr Bush received $113,800 from Enron.

It is quite clear that there were three levels of failure in the American system: corporate, fiscal, and political.

The corporate level involves the sudden and spectacular failure of a deeply corrupt Enron. Enron’s undoing can partially be attributed to its continued hunger for expansion into new areas. It strove to become the world’s largest trading market for every sort of commodity, and it outreached itself. Many of the markets it established did not work. But the greatest contributors to the demise of Enron were its corrupt practices.

Its vaunted cash flow came from spurious accounting. It would sell a subsidiary that was losing money to another company — a shell company which Enron set up, owned and financed. That way, the losses were erased from Enron’s balance sheet, and in their place was a ‘cash inflow’ from the shell company Enron had created. (The balance sheets never indicated that Enron had lent this money to the shell company in the first place, that it was repaying itself and counting the repayment as income.)

Equally corrupt was Enron’s practice of booking the entirety of energy transactions as capitalization, rather than the amount of money Enron made from the sale. To understand the magnitude of its dishonesty, consider how outrageous it would be if a bank decided to book every deposit in its keeping as profit, rather than as a fiscal obligation to its depositors.

Why did Enron’s management engage in such dishonest and ultimately disastrous practices? Because a certain stratum of American culture is money-mad, and the stock market rewards companies whose revenue seems to grow rapidly. A corporate culture which values results and not ethics created the matrix in which Lay and his confreres could build up an elaborate Ponzi scheme and be admired for doing so.

(It is worth noting that Americans as a whole have significantly different values than the corporate managerial class. Although there are indeed ordinary citizens who want to get rich quick, the huge majority of Americans work enormously hard for their money. Americans, by a significant degree, labour longer hours with less vacation than workers in any other developed nation. They struggle to send their children to college, to pay their medical bills, to care for their aging parents.)

On a second level, the Enron affair is a fiscal failure. How could the accountants not see the fraud and corrupt management, which made Enron a house built of cards? That, after all, is the job of accounting firms: to make sure that management’s figures are accurate and trustworthy. But Anderson was making as much money from consulting for Enron as it was for auditing its books, for a total of $52 million in fees last year. So the consultants said, “Here is a tricky way in which you can make your balance sheet look better.”

There is now a quiet crisis on Wall Street. If one of the Big Five — the small group of five accounting firms who vet the books of all major American corporations — was so spectacularly obtuse and corrupt about Enron’s books, who knows what the true fiscal condition of any corporation might be? If the knowledge on which stock investments are made is hollow, then investors will take their money elsewhere: into commodities, real estate, and government bonds.

There are no direct links — yet — between the contributions and the course of Enron’s remarkable rise and equally remarkable fall. What we know is that Enron fed lots of money into the political system, and the political system responded by providing a lot of the things that Enron wanted. Electricity was deregulated, transmission lines reorganized, and supervision eliminated.

When Enron did not like the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that supervised much of its business, Mr Lay told him to change his views or he would lose his position. (Shortly after, when his term expired, he was not reappointed.) Thereafter, Mr Lay proposed a short list of members for the FERC to President Bush. Two of his choices for the FERC were appointed after Mr Lay recommended them to Vice-President Dick Cheney; one of them, Mr Pat Wood, is the current chairman of the commission.

Mr Clinton’s secretary of commerce, Mr Ron Brown, helped initiate the disastrous Dabhol power project, in which Enron saddled India’s Maharashtra state with unneeded electricity and usurious rates. Mr Cheney met secretly with Enron last spring, taking their private recommendations as a major shaping force in the nation’s energy policy and acceding to their request that he pressurize India to go forward with Dabhol. The American Congress has just brought suit against the vice-president, a signal event in American history, to compel him to reveal who was at those secret meetings and what was discussed in them.

Without bribery American-style, through political donations, many of the laws and regulations that helped Enron grow from a small natural gas pipeline company to an American behemoth might never have been passed. In 1992, Congress passed and the president signed the Energy Policy Act. That legislation opened electric utility companies’ wires to electricity traders such as Enron.

Campaign finance reform, stalled by the Republican House of Representatives and the Republican president, now has a chance of passage in the wake of the Enron fiasco. This reform will go a small way, though not nearly far enough, to get big money out of politics and to return the American government to the hands of the people.

In the interim, what America is undergoing is the largest political scandal in its history, a scandal which holds a mirror up to American society. In that mirror, the nation sees corporations gone berserk, dishonest fiscal procedures, and a government tainted by money and special interests.

The writer is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and a regular columnist.