Blow to inter-faith ties

THERE is an unbearable sadness about the outbreak of an epidemic of cartoons considered deeply offensive by Muslims in some of the most prestigious European newspapers. The element of violence in the Muslim protests brings no joy either. It is sad because it is a virtual regression into the polemics of the age of crusades and the Spanish reconquista; it is sad because it wantonly undermines the project of better inter-faith understanding.

It is particularly distressing that the epicentre of the current upheaval lies in Nordic countries, arguably the most enlightened nations of Europe.

In November 2005, France was convulsed by the crisis of the banlieues, the city suburbs that had sunk into a quagmire of unemployment, poor housing and indifferent social services during the three decades of unprecedented economic growth in France. It was a violent expression of alienation and hostility crying out for adjustments in social and economic policy. As it foreshadowed similar turmoil in other European countries, it led to much concern about the decline of the idea of social democracy and the discontents of globalization.

A good part of the debate was, however, not conducted in terms of social policy. Instead, the marginalization of the suburban communities became a pretext to voice prejudices against immigration, race and religion. Identified as a revolt by immigrants from the Maghreb, their chronic disadvantage was traced to the cultural and Islamic factors inhibiting their integration — preferably assimilation — into the mainstream French life. Such situations always bring forth post-colonial stereotyping of minorities. What was strikingly new was the exceptional emphasis on the negative images of Islam. Across the Atlantic, the revolt of the banlieues was occasionally described as another “intifada”.

Jean-Marie Le Penn of the French National Front was found guilty of inciting racial hatred in April 2004. But it is now widely recognized that similar parties in Italy, Germany, Austria and Belgium are exerting increasing influence on state policies. What is not so readily conceded is that anti-immigration politics has increasingly cast Islam in an adversarial role. A strong impetus for this trend has come from the open-ended war against terrorism.

Muslim communities in Europe and North America cooperate wholeheartedly with states to counter terrorism. Nevertheless, an indiscriminate pursuit of what is projected as a global struggle against political Islam has made it easier to demonize Muslims and their faith. The invasion of Iraq was widely opposed by a clear majority of Europeans but opposition to it by the Muslim citizens of their states is ironically often used by Islamophobic quarters to stigmatize them as extremists. This tendency is particularly noticeable in the United States. A moderate Muslim thinker, Tariq Ramadan, was obliged to comment that “to be an American Muslim critical of American policy in the Middle East, you are treated as if you are not truly loyal to your country.”

Publication of blasphemous cartoons by Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, and their reproduction in as many as 22 countries, unmistakably point to forces that wish to confront and humiliate Islam. In September 2005, it was put out that a Danish publisher was finding it difficult to find some one to illustrate a children’s book on Islam. Jyllands-Posten took up the challenge and came up with cartoons that link up not with any contemporary pictorial art of illustrating Islam but with a well known mediaeval tradition of scurrilous caricatures of the Holy Prophet (PBUH). A thousand years ago, crusading bishops commissioned drawings of the Prophet as an embodiment of violence and sensuality. The same themes dominated the new satanic cartoons.

The newspaper defended the cartoons as an inviolable right of free media. When the Muslim ambassadors in Copenhagen wanted to see him, the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who incidentally needs the support of the racist Peoples’ Party, simply declined. As protests became global and violent, several European newspapers, including such exemplars of a judicious balance between freedom and responsibility as Germany’s Die Welt and France’s Le Monde and Liberation, jumped into the fray in a perverse demonstration of solidarity. The Economist weighed in too on the side of ‘freedom of speech’ with an editorial that took a muddle-headed issue with British foreign secretary’s characterization of cartoons as unnecessary, insensitive, disrespectful and wrong.

None of these newspapers would ever print an opinion, no matter how well- researched, questioning the nature and scale of the Holocaust. In fact, in seven European countries one will go to jail for disagreeing with the assertion that Nazis killed six million Jews. Those of us who have lived in the West know only too well the unconscionable pressures that western journalists have to contend with in exposing Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Consider also the denunciatory trend in the American reviews of Robert Fisk’s book, “The Great War for Civilization”.

The sacrilegious repetitions of the cartoons reminded one of the zeal of a movement of Spanish martyrs who, in a long forgotten era, excelled at hurling abuse at the Holy Prophet and his faith. These “martyrs” would invade every available public space, the mosques, and even the sultan’s court to “insult the religion of the Muslims and blaspheme their Prophet, with the deliberate intention of incurring the penalty of death”. Contemporary chronicles state that very often the Muslim rulers were reluctant to punish them and would try to ignore the offence by arguing that the “friars were unbalanced in mind because of poverty and fasting”. The zealots, however, insisted on repeating their blasphemies till attainment of martyrdom.

If the present-day insensitivity to Muslim feeling recalls the Middle Ages, it also connects with a contemporary canon often disguised as sophisticated scholarship. Western sources point out that a major determinant of the attitude of Dick Cheney and Richard Perle towards Islam and the Middle East was the life-long work of Bernard Lewis. The Wall Street Journal once observed that, in effect, the “Lewis doctrine has become the US policy”. Incidentally, he, and not Samuel Huntington, coined the phrase “clash of civilizations”. His prolific writing is all constructed on a struggle between Islam and Judeo-Christian systems that has already lasted 14 centuries. The cartoons that have inflamed Muslim passions belong to an era dominated by Orientalists like him and their neoconservative disciples.

A clearly atavistic European Islamophobia emanates partly from the endless harping by these so-called experts on the fact that Islam is now the second largest religion in Europe. They usually fail to mention that Muslims are no more than two per cent of the European population. What they truly hold against Muslims is that they are not empty vessels into which they can pour their own beliefs and lifestyle. Muslims are particularly noteworthy for bringing, in the words of Professor Stefano Allievi of Padova University, the immigrants’ baggage of “visions of the world, traditions, histories, faiths, practices, values, moral systems, images and symbols”. This shared heritage does invest Muslim communities with a certain transnational quality, a sense of belonging to a global religion.

As Tariq Ramadan has repeatedly argued, this quality is perfectly compatible with their obligations to particular host nations. Leaders of Muslim communities are working hard to ensure that this distinctive trait does not become a divisive factor. Their task has been made difficult by the fallacious thinking that Muslim transnationalism makes them prone to the generic entity called Al Qaeda. In reality, this common heritage can be a bulwark against violence of all kinds if the West learns to respect it.

Considering that there are forces afoot to take the world back to a mediaeval clash of civilizations, the Muslims should have the forbearance, creativity and enterprise to pre-empt and defeat them. The rise of Muslim extremism since the 1980s has been a boon to neo-conservatives, many of whom bring the exclusionary passions of Jewish and Catholic upbringing to their belligerent reconstruction of western thought. Isaiah Berlin once said that the rejection of the post-Renaissance world by Leo Strauss, the leading light of conservative America, as “hopelessly corrupted by positivism and empiricism” bordered on the absurd.

In his remarkable “conversations” with the Iranian philosopher, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Berlin explained why he could not accept Strauss’ belief in “eternal, immutable, absolute values, true for all men everywhere at all times.” Strauss and his disciples, he said, “appear to me to believe in absolute good and evil, right and wrong, directly perceived by means of a kind of a priori vision, a metaphysical eye.” It is this metaphysical eye that blurs the distinction between the war on terrorism and the war on Islam. It also defines the current predicament of Muslim rulers who assist President Bush in his global war fighting, the oxygen and adrenalin of his presidency.

Muslims must realize that by expending their energies in violent demonstrations they are only playing into the hands of their enemies. They have to intensify and deepen an introspective revaluation of their own modern history. Much of our struggle is internal and has to focus on the democratization of our political order, the adoption of people-friendly economic systems, and the creation of law-based societies.

Those who have a doctrinaire compulsion to destroy Islam will not engage in an equitable dialectic of ideas with us. We have to reach out to others in the West who want to make the world safer through a dialogue of civilizations. The neo-conservatives who drive the American policy cannot afford it as it would take away their casus belli. Europe is dotted — from Malaga to Zagreb — with centres devoted to the study of Islam.

But are we ready to engage with them in a substantive manner? Where are the institutions in our midst that would sustain this effort? For that matter, where are the governments that would persuade the West, as Israel does so successfully for the Jewish people, to enact legislation to curb crude manifestations of the current Islamophobia. The editorial in the Economist did not find the cartoons in good taste but argued that they were “lawful”. The Muslims have to negotiate written laws and unwritten conventions that enable followers of all faiths and ideologies to co-exist and cooperate in the larger interest of mankind. For this, they will have to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

If it’s OK with them, it’s fine by me

(Art Buchwald is recuperating from surgery. In his absence, here’s a substitute column by Garrison Keillor.)

IF the National Security Administration is monitoring my phone calls for quality assurance (and why shouldn’t they be?) they’re no doubt puzzled over conversations that go like this:

ME: Hi. Just me.

HER: Where are you?

ME: On my way home.

HER: You’re calling from the car?

ME: Right.

HER: You coming straight home?

ME: Be there in five minutes.

HER: Okay. Bye now.

ME: Bye now.

“Bye now” is a common sign-off in Minnesota, short for “Goodbye for now,” but to an intelligence officer, it might sound like “Final,” the code name of the Al Qaeda operative in Upper Hotdogistan, which might be enough to get me stuffed into an unmarked plane to Syria, where men with pantyhose over their heads will take turns bouncing on me until I tell what I know about Project Cantaloupe, which is nothing, nada, zero. And three years later I’d return home, unable to remember my own Social Security number or the lineup of the 1987 Minnesota Twins.

But I am not going to worry about this now. Conservatives are supposed to worry about government running roughshod over individuals. That’s their job. If conservatives don’t give a rip about warrantless wiretaps or torture or imprisonment without trial, then why should you or I?

Fear of the NSA isn’t inhibiting anybody, that’s for sure. I got on a plane in Indianapolis last Sunday and half the passengers had little silver phones stuck to their ears, checking in with headquarters, reporting their position and ETA. There were two or three seamy conversations about money, and one man breathing hard into his phone, but harmlessly, I’m sure.

To me, young people, the cellphone is an innovation out of the funny papers, Dick Tracy’s wrist radio now in everyone’s pocket. Everyone except my stepdaughter, who believes it causes brain cancer. I saw a homeless man camped in a sleeping bag on the steps of a church, his shopping cart parked nearby, and he was mumbling into a cell phone.

Which is perfectly reasonable, homeless people having no way to hook up a regular phone, but what about Trappist monks? What about cowpokes and deckhands and poets and all the classic lonely guys? The hobo highballing through Utah: Does he sit in his boxcar and talk to his mom in Peoria? Is Holden Caulfield sending text messages to Phoebe from Central Park? Maybe the little kids running through the rye toward the cliff need a catcher even more if they’re yakking on phones.

I remember, young people, a time in our nation’s history when people walked down the street quietly thinking their own thoughts. They didn’t stop at every corner to put a quarter in a pay phone and let HQ know which way the wind was blowing. Persons of that era — an era that produced Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” J.F. Powers’ “Morte D’Urban,” and “Searchin”’ by Leiber & Stoller and recorded by the Coasters — were able to live in their own heads a good deal of the time.

I don’t say that’s a good thing necessarily. I’m not saying that men with those weird bat-wing devices clipped onto their ears are not decent, hard-working people. If I have stared at you as I might stare at a gibbon grooming his hindquarters, gentlemen, I apologize. I only raise a question.

Soon we’ll have 14-digit telephone numbers, and then 20- and 25-digit. You can’t remember 25 digits, so if you lose your cellphone on the plane, you’ll be in big trouble. You’ll need to locate a surviving pay phone, perhaps in a dusty alcove under the stairs, and get some coins by breaking a twenty at Starbucks, purchasing the venti latte with 2 per cent and a shot of rhubarb flavouring.

You dial Information. You get an operator with a Bengali accent and you ask for a number in Minnesota and she asks you to spell it. And then an electronic lady’s voice spiels out the 25 digits as you balance the latte in the arm that your laptop bag is slung over and you write seven digits on the palm of your left hand before the ballpoint runs out of ink and a big hand clamps on your shoulder.

A bullet-headed man in a black jumpsuit takes you away in an SUV. Those seven digits correspond to Arabic letters that spell “Tuesday,” and for the next three days interrogators sit on you and ask what heinous things you’re cooking up.

I’d rather not go there, young people. You go. I’ll stay here.—Dawn/ Tribune Media Services

Lib-Dems: crisis of leadership

ENVELOPES containing leadership election ballot papers are being dropped on the doormats of Britain’s Liberal Democrat party members. Let us hope that the act of opening them will supply a sharp collective dose of much-needed political care and thought to the shell-shocked party.

If ever there was a moment when Lib Dems needed to raise themselves above the accumulated debris of their recent follies, this is it. Three weeks from now, the Lib Dems will have a new leader. Which of the three candidates - Menzies Campbell, Simon Hughes or Chris Huhne - should the party choose?

The smart and slippery, but nonetheless relevant, answer to that question is: none of the above. The best leader for the Liberal Democrats at this stage of this parliament would have been Charles Kennedy.

Mr Kennedy should have stepped aside midway through the parliament. That would have given the party time to complete its post-election policy reviews, to adjust to the emergence of David Cameron and to launch Mr Kennedy’s successor on a wave that led clearly to the next election. It would also have given time for the talented new generation of MPs from the 2005 intake to make more of a mark, perhaps as credible leadership candidates. In the event, none of these things has happened. The daftest circumstances for the Lib Dems to be changing leader are those with which they are now saddled.

The premature circumstances count against the audacious candidacy of Mr Huhne. Mr Huhne is an unknown quantity to many in his party and to most in the country. There is, of course, a case for that, precisely because, like Mr Cameron, he is a fresh face. Mr Huhne has run a creative campaign and it is no small achievement to have come from rank outsider to serious contender.

But Mr Huhne’s campaign, in contrast to Mr Cameron’s in the Tory contest, has drifted rather too easily into the party’s comfort zone, stressing issues like localism and Iraq troop withdrawal while avoiding harder questions. He can be very patronising to people he needs to rely on. Like his fellow 2005 MP Nick Clegg, Mr Huhne is a political Theo Walcott, a man for the future not for today. His main task right now is to prove he can retain his marginal seat.

The real chance is between the two thoroughbreds that the party and the country knows. Mr Hughes is a genuine liberal who appeals to many in his party. His political instincts are theirs — but that was true of Michael Foot and Iain Duncan Smith in their parties.

He is a street fighter and an instinctive radical who is happy in a scrap with Labour. But his appeal is not as wide as his supporters like to think, especially among Lib Dem-Tory switchers attracted to Mr Cameron. Nor was he as successful a candidate for the London mayor’s job as he expected.

He is also, in the wake of his admissions about his private life, very vulnerable to the charge that his word cannot be trusted. Mr Hughes would be a better leader than his enemies pretend, but there is no denying that he is a risk.

That leaves Sir Menzies. The acting leader is a deep-dyed liberal too, much more so than many people realise. But he combines it with a palpable good sense and judgment that is currently in short supply in the party. Sir Menzies is also articulate and gets most things right. He will not force the party sharply to either the right or the left. He is a more determined figure than his urbane appearance implies.

As a result he is respected by all in the party, has few enemies and would not be a divisive choice. This will be an exceptionally demanding period for the Liberal Democrats. Nothing will be easy for the party. But the Lib Dems do not need a shot in the dark.

They need a period of solid professionalism. That is why Sir Menzies Campbell is the best man to lead them out of their present confusions and into the searching challenges of the next election.

—The Guardian, London

Making travel easier

ON a cool February morning at one of Karachi’s large, colonial style houses, Mr Jaswant Singh, India’s former foreign and defence minister and now leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha, told a coffee gathering of how for 18 frustrating months he had tried to seek permission for travelling in Sindh.

“When nothing was achieved, I finally contacted your president. His reply and action were swift. Arrangements and documentations for travel along with my 80 other colleagues from Rajasthan, (including musicians) were completed within 10 days.”

A group of Sindh’s politicians, businessmen, professionals and intellectuals shared their views with Mr Singh. There was total agreement with Mr Jaswant Singh that present contacts between India and Pakistan should not be confined to a few border regions and provinces. Sindh, too, was a point which could see the amount of trade and number of visitors to India double or even treble.

Although the Khokrapar-Munabao rail link is in the offing, there is possibility of opening up other points. Sindh has very peaceful borders with two Indian states — Rajasthan and Gujarat. The latter is closer to Karachi and is barely 150 km away by land.

Last August, during a visit to New Delhi, I met members of the Indian business and media community and others who themselves, or their parents and grandparents, had been residents of Karachi and interior Sindh at one time. They were curious about Karachi, Hyderabad, Shikarpur; and half a dozen other Sindh cities. “We were given visas for Islamabad, Lahore and several Punjab cities quite easily; but it seems that for Karachi and other Sindh towns there is an unseen ban,” a young industrialist told me. Before partition, his grandfather had a big oil business in Karachi. There were similar sentiments among visiting media members from India when I met them in Islamabad during some seminars on Indo-Pak relations.

However, the arrival of Mr Jaswant Singh in Sindh and his visit to the temple of Hinglaj Mata in Balochistan has underlined the contacts between Pakistan’s south and India’s east central. There is also a need of a visit to Sindh by Gujarat’s political leadership.

The reopening of the Khokrapar-Munabao railway link has been a long-standing demand in urban Sindh and also of the Hindu community living in the border areas of Sindh and whose relatives live across in Rajasthan.

This southern link with India was closed for 40 long years. But even now, when there is public pressure to restore the link, new ways are being tried to delay the project. Those living in Sindh’s Umerkot, hardly 35 km away from the Indian town of Bhuj, have first to travel to Islamabad for a visa. After acquiring a visa, they must travel from Karachi or interior Sindh to Lahore, then to Amritsar, then Ludhiana, followed by Delhi, Jaipur and Ajmer to either Jodhpur or Udaipur and then onwards to their destination. The entire distance traversed is thousands of kilometres.

What about Indian Muslims meeting their blood relations in Pakistan? We never think of them although our institutions and religious parties always raise their voices for the cause of Muslims whether in Asia or in Europe or in Africa or even in North America.

Indian Muslims travel to Delhi from all parts of India covering a distance of thousands of kilometres. They stay sometimes for weeks on Delhi’s footpaths, waiting for the visas. We have complicated the situation by delaying the opening of consulates in Mumbai and Karachi.

After giving up all hope of acquiring the Quaid’s residence, our foreign officials found a place in the heart of Mumbai’s business centre. The reaction of the business community in Mumbai was natural. It would be the same here if the Indians requested a visa office on Karachi’s I.I. Chundrigar Road.

Bhindi Bazaar is a prominent Muslim-populated area in Mumbai, and has been so since well before partition. Ample space could be available here, provided our foreign mission in India look earnestly for a premises.

The Karachi visa office has already been prepared by the Indians. Before its closure, the Karachi office was issuing more than 1,000 visas a day.

The Mumbai office when opened will issue an identical number. The number of visas provided each month would be instrumental in chalking out the operations of the Thar Express from Karachi to Khokrapar and beyond.

Indian embassy officials say they have applied for a temporary visa camp office in Karachi. The ball is in our foreign office’s court and they should make sure there is no further delay.

Definitely Khokrapar will be another big milestone in Indo-Pak ties. The serious words of Mr Jaswant Singh still ring in my ears. During his short, but thought-provoking, speech he said:

“We should now stop living in the shadows of history...time is moving away, well beyond the government’s limit...(while) politicians only look for a new election, statesmen visualize a new generation.”

It is the time for our politicians to fully educate our emotive masses on both sides of borders about the real fruit of liberal borders and good neighbourly relations. We need more routes — sea, air, road and rail links — as this would benefit our people. National interest should take on a new dimension in our part of the world and be more people-specific while facing up to new economic realities. We should no longer harbour a formless, archaic, self-protective and confrontational mindset.