LAST Thursday, on the day that a second attempt — fortunately unsuccessful — was made to bomb London’s transport network, The Guardian carried an article by Norman Geras, titled “There are apologists among us”, in which the University of Manchester professor attempted a wholesale condemnation of all those who had sought to link the terrorist attacks of July 7 with the war in Iraq.

The second string of bombings evidently failed because of some sort of disconnect between the detonators and the explosive charges. The same could be said about Geras’s fatuous diatribe, which sought to suggest that the war in Iraq could be cited as “an effective cause of the deaths in London” only if it could be established that Iraq was not just “one of a number of influencing causes, but that it was the specific, and a necessary, motivating cause for the London bombings”.

Such convoluted reasoning — which, incidentally, could only have seeped out of the ivory towers of academe — suggests a second meaning for the title of the professor’s intervention: perhaps it ought to be viewed as a confession rather than a charge.

After all, a minority of Britons do believe that Tony Blair’s decision to hitch his wagon to George W. Bush’s steed on the road to Baghdad was statesmanlike rather than stupid. At the same time, at least some of them refuse to accept that any unpalatable consequences could conceivably flow from that choice. They are happy to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to all the civilian deaths in Iraq, to the daily bloodshed in Baghdad and so many other towns and cities.

They cannot do the same when the carnage takes place in London, but they are then at pains to point out that it is the work of evil fanatics and therefore has nothing to do with Iraq.

They are unwilling to contemplate the probability — indeed the near-certainty — that while evil and fanaticism are part of the mix, so is Iraq. And to acknowledge as much is not by any stretch of the imagination tantamount to condoning or legitimizing the vile deeds in London or elsewhere.

The narrow-mindedness betrayed by Geras in advancing his feeble thesis is particularly disappointing because my previous encounter with his output, 20 or so years ago, involved a pair of slim but stimulating paperbacks: The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, and Marx and Human Nature. The latter argued, if memory serves, that it was fallacious to assume that Karl Marx perceived human nature in its entirety as immutable: in fact, he viewed a part of it as malleable.

I was reminded of this work a week before encountering Geras’s surreptitious (or perhaps unconscious) apologia for the occupation of Iraq, when it was reported in Britain that a BBC Radio 4 poll aimed at determining the greatest philosopher of all time had come up with a surprise winner: with nearly 28 per cent of the vote, Marx was more than 15 points ahead of David Hume, who was followed by Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Plato and Kant. In tenth place, with little more than four per cent of the vote, was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite theorist, Karl Popper.

No one could possibly pass this off as a representative British viewpoint. In fact, as Andrew Chitty, who teaches a course in Marxist philosophy at Sussex University, suggested to The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins, only half in jest: “It is possible he won because Marxists organized a mass vote — they’re much more organized than Hegelians, for instance.”

However, the greater likelihood, as Chitty acknowledges, is “that people understand that in this increasingly capitalist world Marx gives us the best vision with which to understand that world.”

Interestingly, a couple of weeks before the final votes were in, a report in The Times — still the British establishment’s newspaper of choice, despite shrinking into a tabloid — warned that Marx was well ahead of the pack, offering ample opportunity to those outraged by this manifestation of popular opinion to take remedial measures.

It didn’t happen, perhaps out of a lack of interest. After all, Marx isn’t supposed to be relevant anymore. Weren’t his ideas supposed to have finally been laid to rest under the debris of the Berlin Wall?

Apparently not. And whatever the truth behind the BBC poll, it certainly yielded an interesting result. Another conservative tabloid, the Daily Mail, was sufficiently alarmed to devote a two-page spread to “Marx the Monster”, whose “genocidal disciples”, it said, included “Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - and even Mugabe”.

It is highly improbable, of course, that Marx would have been willing to acknowledge any of these despots as his offspring. The Mail’s embittered outpourings have been countered, among others by Mark Seddon, a member of the British Labour Party’s national executive committee, who argues that, “now freed from his flawed (20th-century) pupils”, Marx “is as liberating as he was when he published The Communist Manifesto”.

Seddon quotes the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm as saying that the popular perception of Marx’s continued relevance is hardly surprising, given that The Communist Manifesto contains a stunning prediction of the nature and effects of globalization.”

Even a cursory perusal of that seminal pamphlet confirms this view. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,” write Marx and Friedrich Engels. “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

“The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country .... In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of different lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.”

As Marx’s most recent biographer, Francis Wheen, points out, in recent years recognition of Marx’s primacy as a critic of capitalism has sometimes come from unexpected sources, ranging from the pages of the Financial Times to the billionaire George Soros, who notes that “the main reason why (Marx and Engels’s) dire predictions didn’t come true was because of countervailing political interventions in democratic countries.”

Those interventions have steadily been receding over the past couple of decades. An army of the unemployed exists in virtually every country. Although throughout the developed world most workers do now have something to lose other than their chains, the ongoing depletion of hard-won economic rights suggests the chains will soon begin to outweigh the minor privileges that have hitherto encouraged their acquiescence to an exploitative system.

Marx’s economic and philosophical theories offer the best available tools to understand this phenomenon. “His errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism,” says Wheen, “are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast.”

Back in 1997, he writes, The New Yorker’s business correspondent John Cassidy was told by an investment banker, “The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right.”

The conversation led Cassidy to read Marx for the first time, whereby he encountered “riveting passages about .... issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realizing that they are walking in Marx’s footsteps”. He even found an antecedent for Bill Clinton’s 1992 election slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid”: Marx, he says, called it the materialist conception of history, “and it is now so widely accepted that analysts of all political views use it .... without any attribution.”

“For all the anguished, uncomprehending howls from the right-wing press,” concludes Wheen, “Karl Marx could yet become the most influential thinker of the 21st century.”

In the light of the BBC poll alone, this may seem like wishful thinking. On the other hand, there can be little doubt that the contradictions of capitalism are clearer now than they were through a substantial part of the 20th century.

The failed socialist experiments of that period ought to serve as cautionary tales rather than as a deterrent. Among the grave errors that must not be repeated is the tendency to treat Marxist texts as irrefutable scriptures. That would be a profound insult to Marx, who viewed the criticism of religion as “the premise of all criticism” — although he recognized religion as both “the expression of real misery” and a “protest against real misery”.

There is no shortage of misery in the 21st century, but Marx’s status as a thinker for our times will not just depend on whether his analytical writings offer us the means to comprehend more completely the conditions we find ourselves compelled to exist in. As he himself famously noted, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

If Marxism can provide the theoretical means to transform those conditions, to transcend the deadly fanaticism of the terrorists as well as the market fundamentalism of their adversaries, then old Karl will indeed prove impossible to ignore.

E-mail: mahirali1@gmail.com

PRIME MINISTER Shaukat Aziz’s recent one-day visit to Kabul was timely. It put an end, at least temporarily, to the name calling that had characterized exchanges between the two sides in the past few weeks. It also served to highlight, at least in declaratory policy, the realization, as President Karzai put it, that “the two countries are like twins joined together, where anything that hurts one also hurts the other”.

Some important announcements were made during the visit. First, the prime minister said Pakistan would make every effort to prevent the disruption of the September parliamentary elections in Afghanistan and pointed out, in this context that Pakistan had raised the number of troops deployed along its border with Afghanistan from 70,000 to almost 80,000. Further, he announced an additional grant of $100 million for Afghan reconstruction to supplement the $100 million already promised and largely disbursed. Lastly, he talked of more “seamless cooperation”, be it in diplomacy, be it in security, or be it in economic matters.

To fully appreciate the significance of the prime minister’s visit — his first since taking office — one must look at the backdrop. Within Afghanistan the Taliban insurgency, far from petering out as was expected by the Americans, has gathered almost the same sort of momentum as the insurgency in Iraq. More than 700 people have died this year in insurgency-related, attacks and perhaps for the first time since the American assault on the Taliban in October 2001, the Taliban have succeeded in bringing down an American helicopter by ground fire and foiling thereby what was supposed to be a special forces operation designed, one assumes, to capture important Taliban leaders.

It is clear that the Afghans have problems at home largely flowing from flawed policies and weak leadership. But, as usually happens in such cases, external forces are held responsible, particularly when at least part of the problem is attributable to them. I have no doubt that at Gen Abidzaid’s recent meeting with President Musharraf, the effort required on Pakistan’s part to seal the borders and to effectively neutralize if not eliminate the Taliban leaders resident in Pakistan was almost certainly the main topic of discussion along with commendation for Pakistan’s anti-militancy campaign in Waziristan and perfunctory American apologies for the American military action against the Taliban on Pakistan soil earlier this month. President Musharraf probably pointed to the internal weaknesses of the Karzai government, the continued importance of the warlords and the lack of economic progress as the fundamental causes of the problem.

American generals in Afghanistan have been more objective about Pakistan’s role. The military operational commander in Afghanistan Gen Kamiya told a news agency that “the Taliban and Al Qaeda feel that this (disrupting the September parliamentary elections) is their final chance to impede Afghanistan’s progress”; that American attacks have caused heavy losses to the Taliban forcing them to resort to the recruitment of child soldiers and to forcing every family under their influence to contribute one son to the Taliban fighting force.

Contrary to claims by Afghan officials about Taliban recruits coming from Pakistani Madressahs the major part of fresh Taliban recruitment was from within Afghanistan; and that the Taliban no longer have an “organizational chain of command ... because we have succeeded thus far in disrupting their means to regroup and conduct a coordinated attack.”

Twenty-four bodies of the Taliban were recovered in Pakistan. The Taliban had been killed by American troops that had clearly engaged in “hot pursuit” and crossed into Pakistan. There was army action by Pakistan in which 17 militants were killed and subsequently identified as all being Kazakhs. Above all there was a crackdown on militant organizations and President Musharraf’s speech calling for an immediate implementation of previous orders on the misuse of mosques, the spreading of hate literature etc. and most importantly setting December this year as the deadline for madressah registration and, presumably, open their books to audit and their curricula to revision. All in all, it would seem a serious effort to prevent the destabilization of Afghanistan.

The majority of the people in Pakistan, it seemed to me, welcomed the crackdown on militant organizations and the compulsory registration of madressahs announced by President Musharraf in his July 21 address and felt that this was long overdue but there was concern that this had come about only because the London blasts had brought pressure to bear on Musharraf. Many shared the scepticism expressed by the international media, which recalled that previous such crackdowns had also petered out once the focus of media attention had shifted.

Should Shaukat Aziz’s promises to Karzai be viewed with the same measure of scepticism? There are a number of factors that one must look at before arriving at an answer. First, there appears to be a great measure of ambivalence in Pakistan’s security-related Afghan policy. Pragmatic policymakers would maintain that stability in Afghanistan, under whatever government, is clearly in Pakistan’s interest since without it there would no role for Pakistan as a bridge between South Asia and Central Asia and between the Gulf states and Central Asia, no exploitation of the Central Asian markets, no access to Central Asian energy resources and no optimum utilization of the grandiose port that we are constructing in Gwadar.

More cautious policymakers would suggest that stability under just any government would not be acceptable since any government in which the Pathans did not secure a plurality, if not dominance, would cause unrest among the Pakistani Pathans and sour relations to a point where these benefits would not be available.

Even these cautious planners would, however, accept that a government headed by Karzai in which most of the important portfolios are held by Pathans meets this requirement. They, like the rest of the world, may see flaws in the approval of candidates for the forthcoming parliamentary elections but none of these flaws, including the approval of candidates with private armies and abysmal records of corruption and human rights violations, impinge upon the level of Pathan representation which is or should be a question of principal interest to Pakistan.

We have, however, a third group of policymakers and for them it is not enough that there be stability in Afghanistan with Pathans adequately represented in the power structure. For them the Pathans must be those that are beholden to Pakistan or those that will follow Pakistan’s dictates because in the absence of such a “friendly” government Pakistan’s security will be at risk. The reasoning, a hangover from the cold war era, is that while Afghanistan on its own could not pose a military threat to Pakistan it could do so in the cold war period with Soviet assistance and now with Indian assistance. India, this group maintains, is already using its diplomatic and consular presence in Afghanistan to foment unrest in Pakistan.

It is the reasoning of this last group which lies behind a briefing provided to the BBC’s Karachi correspondent. Describing the three categories of militant organizations in Pakistan, he says the third category is that of Pakistani and Afghan militants currently battling the government of President Hamid Karzai and the US-led troops in Afghanistan. He goes on to say that there seems to be a near consensus in the Pakistani security apparatus that the Karzai government is bound to collapse.

Should that happen, Pakistani security analysts are certain that the US will turn to “moderate Taliban” to keep Afghanistan together and “by not extending their anti-terror campaign to the Taliban and their local supporters, Pakistan is hoping to revive its badly eroded influence in that country”. He, of course, points out the flaws in this argument particularly the difficulty of compartmentalizing the various militant factions but he seems to have no doubt that this is the thinking that prevails in some parts of our security establishment.

This is dangerous thinking indeed. Apart from the fact that the militants who are anti-Karzai today will be anti-Musharraf or anti-Pakistan tomorrow we should have no interest at all in maintaining a political influence of this nature in Afghanistan. Our influence in Afghanistan will flow from Afghan dependence on Pakistan for the most economical transit route for providing the most lucrative market for its products and for helping Afghanistan becoming the transit route for energy supplies from Central Asia for consumption in South Asia or further afield.

Our “Afghan” veterans have never disagreed with the oft used cliche that an “Afghan can be rented but cannot be bought”. They have not questioned the validity of the thesis that no ruler can survive in Afghanistan if she is seen to be bowing to foreign domination. They have not been able to establish that the unstinting support offered to the Taliban of Mulla Omar’s day enabled us to get back the “Pakistani terrorists” given shelter by that regime or earned us recognition of the Durand Line.

Afghanistan can never represent a threat to Pakistan. It will never have an entirely tension-free relationship with us no matter what the complexion of the government in Kabul. The Durand Line issue, the Pathan issue and the transit trade issue will all surface from time to time to create superficial tensions. We should live with this, comfortable in the knowledge that as economic ties grow and as transit routes are stabilized economic interdependence will ensure that this tension never goes beyond a superficial level.

One hopes, therefore, that even in the absence of foreign pressure — and that is bound to grow — our security establishment will be able to dismiss the woolly thinking that endorses continued support for the militancy of the Taliban from Pakistani soil.

Our real problem, however, is not related to security. We have influential vested interests that have much to gain from keeping Afghanistan unstable. The smugglers flourish today because of lax border controls. Opium grown in Afghanistan flows freely into our country feeding not only the consumers in the West as we would like to believe but the addicts we have in our own country. It is estimated for instance that of the 4,600 tons of opium only 700 tons (refined as 70 tons of heroin) would appear in European markets while the remainder would be consumed in Pakistan, Iran and the Central Asian states with a small portion going perhaps to Russia.

The value of goods smuggled into Pakistan every year amounts, according to a recent news item, to about Rs 6 billion or more. Admittedly much of this is dhow traffic on the coast but one estimate suggests that almost 35 per cent comes through Afghanistan.

Ultimately, it is this sort of crass monetary interest of the few that drives policy to the detriment of the many and above all to the interests of the country. This must change.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

NOWADAYS every country of the world strives to find an international market for its produce, whether the produce is industrial or agricultural or mineral. The intention is obvious. It is to earn both name and fame, and most importantly, valuable foreign exchange.

I am not a student of economics, but I do know that, for many countries, foreign exchange is the foundation of their economic and financial strength. In recent years another product has become a source of earning precious foreign exchange, and that is handicrafts, the products of cottage industry and articles produced painstakingly with human labour, and mostly women’s meticulous labour, even attractive needlework turned out without the aid of machines. As an example, and a very good example, I can cite the pashmina shawls woven on handlooms at home in Kashmir, especially Indian-occupied Kashmir, which bring in millions of dollars every year. It is said that Bangladesh’s sagging economy has been bolstered in the last two or three decades through the export of stitched garments.

In fact, in some cases, a cottage industry is such a big money-maker that unscrupulous people have been known to market cheap machine-made replicas and pass them off as handmade. People in the West are crazy about handicrafts coming from the East or from Africa and even from Latin America, though most of them are not able to tell the genuine from the fake.

Exporters in Pakistan too have now awoken to the potential in this field, and some of them have succeeded in finding profitable markets in Europe and America, but it is not a well-regulated national effort. The trouble with us is that unless an initiative is taken by some high-up in the government, nobody, even the private sector, shows any interest.

I have been wondering if the slogan “One product, one village” voiced by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz some time ago, will catch on or not. It is a very simple concept, perhaps too simple to attract the attention of the provincial governments and the population concerned who somehow react more enthusiastically to flamboyant proposals, unless the PM takes it up seriously as a mission.

It is said that Thailand is the home of the original idea and its government has cashed in on its international potential as a market-winner and is pursuing the programme extremely successfully, given the ever-increasing universal interest in handicrafts from Third World countries.

Some years ago I used to write a weekly column on various aspects of culture in an English daily, and, at that time, my involvement with the subject of handicrafts too was at its most intense. I was fascinated by some of the village produce from the provinces which probably had no match in any other country of the world. Offhand, I may mention the black rustic furniture from Swat, the ralli and ajrak of Sindh, the mirror-work embroidery of Balochistan and carved walnut decoration items from Azad Kashmir. Punjab is not famous for any one thing, but its craftsmen produce innumerable pieces of diverse kinds, all very neatly and handsomely done.

This reminds me of an incident from the early days of PTV programmes. In a short piece by Ashfaq Ahmed, a city dweller is showing his villager friend around his house. As they come across a wicker chhabba (used extensively as a receptacle for bread) pinned to the wall, the villager asks what the chhabba is doing there. The house-owner replies, “it is not a chhabba at the moment. In the city we call it culture.” And everyone of you must have seen items from rural life displayed in posh urban drawing rooms — a hookah, a spinning wheel, a milk-curdling contraption, hatchets, ek-tara the village guitar, and even a pair of fancy shoes, khussas. Which shows that there is appreciation for rural handicrafts but limited by urban admirers to things that serve as decoration pieces.

As if my wish had been granted, I found that the Prime Minister had followed up the idea of “One product, one village” (OPOV) by taking it up from its beginning. A few days ago he organized at his residence in Islamabad a gathering of craftsmen and traditional designers from across the country and explained the concept to them and the Thai source of the idea. His stress was on investing village products with polish and finesse and thereby making them more attractive for world markets.

He said his government had decided to provide the best possible training facilities to artisans and help traditional craftsmen under an OPOV programme that he was setting into motion. It would involve the setting up of training institutions at various places to promote quality in ancient craftsmanship. Naturally, the aim also was to bring about prosperity in the villages, specially among women who are directly involved in the process. This would provide fresh job opportunities and help turn out new craftsmen.

Mr Shaukat Aziz was all praise for the skills and talent of traditional artisans. What their produce needed was an improvement of quality through expert training, because with the old and monotonous designs still prevalent in the villages new markets could not be found for them. The Small & Medium Enterprises Development Agency and leading art institutes like the National College of Arts, Lahore, and the Indus School of Arts in Karachi would integrate training and further beautify the designs of ancient articles. Needles to say, this report left me very excited.

However, if this idea of OPOV is to yield meaningful results the whole nation will have to join the hunt for outstanding craftsmen in the rural areas. Obviously the prime minister cannot do it alone. The provinces in particular will have to wake up, and for once divert their attention from cities to villages and small towns and give recognition to artisans who have been working silently for decades, in some cases from father to son for centuries.

If expertly handled, and the latest marketing techniques applied to ancient arts and crafts, OPOV can be a great new source of foreign exchange earnings, and add a fresh distinction to Pakistan as an exporter. More than anything else, it will mean imparting economic strength to the concerned villages and their populations, usually.

SUICIDE bombers have attacked London twice in the past month. Baghdad is the scene of such attacks on practically a daily basis. Yet not much is known about suicide bombers. It is only now that scholars have begun exploring this subject. This is a positive development because, on the basis of their research, these scholars are exploding many myths. Hopefully, they will succeed in educating and informing not only the people better about them but also the governments in the West.

The latest book on the subject to hit the market is Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape, assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Pape has collected a storehouse of information on the 462 suicide bombers who made headlines by their successful missions from 1980 to 2004. By analyzing demographic data, the psychology of the terrorists and their ideological and political motives, Pape has drawn interesting and valid conclusions.

The most important point stressed by Pape is that “Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think.” For that matter, no faith is the driving force behind the young bombers who kill themselves in an attempt to inflict damage on those they perceive to be their enemies. Pape reminds us that the first suicide bombings in the late 20th century were carried out by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

They could hardly be described as having religion as the underlying cause of their daring, and to most people, senseless acts. The Tamils were mainly Hindus but the Tigers were secular and Marxist.

Here one may add that if one goes back into history, one would recall that suicide as a strategic weapon was first used in Europe in the Crusades by the Knights Templar in the 12th century and in the Belgian revolution by the Dutch in 1830. More recently, the Japanese kamikaze pilots employed suicidal tactics in the Second World War to attack American naval ships.

Hence it is wrong to describe suicidal bombings as having been invented by the Palestinians or the Islamist terrorists or the Iraqis. Others had already shown the way.

The second point Pape emphasizes is, “Suicide terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland — from Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank.” According to him, the more troops America stations abroad, the higher will be the incidence of suicide bombings against the US and its allies.

These are significant observations. They present a persuasive argument for the Bush administration to withdraw its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and its bases in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. Pape reassures the US that all will be well after that and he gives the example of Lebanon which experienced 41 suicide terrorist attacks in 1982- 86. They virtually ceased when the US and France withdrew their troops and Israel pulled back its forces to a narrow strip in southern Lebanon.

Pape is not wholly correct. Where suicide bombings have only a strategic motive with Islam being used to glorify the act of violence, suicide attacks will cease once the strategic goals are achieved. For instance, one can expect the Palestinian bombers to seek peace once Israel pulls out of the occupied territories. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Avishai Marqalit states that even though the language used by the Palestinian bombers is always distinctly Islamic, their motives are more complex, with revenge, anger and a sense of injustice being the driving force.

Thus Mahmoud Ahmad Marmash, a 21-year-old suicide bomber who blew himself up in Netanya in 2001, recorded his message before he undertook his mission. He said, “I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians, especially the blood of the women, of the elderly, and of the children, and in particular the blood of the baby girl Iman Hejjo, whose death shook me to the core.” In a letter to his family he wrote, “God’s justice will prevail only in jihad and in blood and in corpses.”

But would this hold true in every case? Some suicide bombers have avowedly ideological aims because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they actually believe in jihad as a duty to kill others, especially Muslims, who they feel have “digressed from the straight path”. But we dismiss the perpetration of these acts by arguing that people who kill other Muslims are not Muslims. Fatwas have been issued by scholars and ulema as well as muftis from across the Islamic world denouncing suicide bombings as the product of a fanatical interpretation of Islam and stating that extremism has no relevance to the religion.

Even public opinion in many Muslim countries does not approve of suicide bombings. Washington’s Pew Centre gives data on the public support for suicide bombings in Muslim countries. This has visibly decreased in many societies — in Pakistan it is down from 30 per cent in 2003 to 20 per cent in 2005 — even though confidence in Osama bin Laden has gone up from 40 to 50 per cent in the same period. The Osama factor could be explained by the rise in anti-American sentiments in the country. However, Robert Pape’s thesis hardly applies to the suicide bombings in Pakistan.

The suicide bombers who have exploded themselves along with their devices in the various Shia mosques and imambargahs are hardly attempting to get foreign occupation vacated. Moreover, many of the terrorists recruited by various Islamist groups, as reported by Amir Mir in his book The True Face of Jihadis, speak of being inspired by visions of paradise in their jihad. Adopting a monolithic fundamentalist view, they consider other sects in the Islamic fold as apostates.

This phenomenon is explained by Ziauddin Sardar’s thesis. The author of Desperately Seeking Paradise, he writes in an article in the New Statesman, the general reaction to the terrorist attacks is that they are the acts of pathologically mad people and Islam has nothing to do with it as it does not preach violence.

But Sardar insists that “Islam has everything to do with it... It is true that a vast majority of Muslims abhor violence and terrorism, and that the Quran and various schools of Islamic law forbid the killing of innocent civilians. It is true, as the vast majority of Muslims believe, that the main message of Islam is peace.

Nevertheless, it is false to assume that the Quran and Islamic law cannot be used to justify barbaric acts. The terrorists are the product of a specific mindset that has deep roots in Islamic history. They are nourished by an Islamic tradition that is intrinsically inhuman and violent in its rhetoric, thought and practice.

“They are provided solace and spiritual comfort by scholars who use the Quran and Islamic law to justify their actions and fan the hatred.”

This thought-provoking observation gives rise to the key question, how is this extremism, which, according to scholars, is an offshoot of the Kharijite school of thought, to be stemmed? One cannot deny the existence of Muslims who are intolerant and prone to resort to violence, since they claim that the Quran and the Shariah confirm their beliefs. It is up to the mainstream Muslims themselves to prove that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance.

What we have before us is “a struggle for Islam’s soul” (again quoting Sardar) and in this struggle the common man in Muslim countries have a role to play. He must come forward to marginalize the extremists by boycotting their organizations, their sermons and their way of thinking. The moderates and the enlightened sections will have to stand up and be counted.

There are many who are speaking out against the extremists but they are secular in approach and do not confront the militants on their own turf. As for the government, which calls itself enlightened, and whose duty it is to provide protection to the rational section of society, it turns the other way and allows the extremists to have the upper hand because that suits those at the helm.