THIS series of articles is on the rise of militant Islam and its espousal of terrorism as a way of combating the West and reducing the latter’s influence in and dominion over most of the Muslim world. I began the series last week by asking four sets of questions. How was the West reacting to terrorism? Why were some members of the Muslim diasporas scattered around the globe providing so many recruits for carrying out acts of terrorism? Why had Pakistan become such an inspiration for terrorist causes? What was the connection between extremist groups in Pakistan and those that were operating outside the countries, in particular in Britain?

Answers to these questions should provide some insights to the policymakers in Islamabad as they struggle to save the country from what appears to be a headlong move towards an abyss from which it may be difficult to climb out once the plunge is made. The discussion that the search for these answers entails should also provide readers some background material they could use for judging for themselves the consequences for Pakistan for remaining in the position in which the country finds itself today.

This project — an attempt to comprehensively understand the rise of Islamic militancy and associated terrorist activities — is a work in progress. As such, I have reflected on what I wrote last week and come to the conclusion that I should have asked not four but five sets of questions. The fifth question concerns the development of an ideology that draws its inspiration from Islam but cannot be said to represent the basic tenets of the religion. What led to the development of this ideology needs recounting since it was not conceived as a challenge to the West, as was repeatedly claimed by some leaders, in particular George W. Bush and Tony Blair. It was in fact meant to challenge regimes in the Muslim world. Its roots lie in the soil of the region that is now generally referred to as the Middle East.

This region was trampled upon by the colonial powers for decades. They divided it into mini-states in order to suit their convenience. Not only was the region balkanised under colonial rule, it also saw the emergence of an elite that was prepared to work for its own narrow interest rather than for that of the common citizenry. The ground was thus laid for the emergence of radical Islam. How did that happen and who were the principal players in this drama?

In the West’s growing and evolving understanding of what it calls Islamic ideology — or, when it is in a more belligerent mood, Islamic fascism — there are three main players, two Egyptians and one Saudi Arabian. The story, as it is being repeatedly told in books, pamphlets, journals and magazine articles, begins with Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who arrived in Greeley, Colorado in 1948 to attend college. He was 42 years old when he left Cairo for the United States.

According to Lawrence Wright, the author of the recently published book, The Looming Tower, Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, “It was November 1948. The new world over the horizon, appeared victorious, rich and free. Behind him was Egypt, in rags and tears. The traveller had never been out of his native country. Nor has he willingly left now... The ideas that would give birth to what would be called Islamic fundamentalism were not completely formed in his mind; indeed, he would often say that he was not even a very religious man before he began his journey, although he had memorised the Quran at the age of 10.”

A priggish intellectual, Qutb found the US to be racist and sexually promiscuous, an experience that left him with a lifelong contempt for the West. This story about the rise of militant Islam, with the opening chapter written by Sayyid Qutb has gained so much currency in the West that it has even entered serious fiction. “Have you ever in your studies, read the Egyptian poet and political philosopher Sayyid Qutb?” asks Ahmad, the hero of John Updike’s new novel Terrorist. The question is addressed to Jack Levy, the academic counsellor at Ahmad’s school and a non-practising Jew, as the young Egyptian-American is driving a truck laden with explosives towards the Lincoln Tunnel connecting Manhattan with New Jersey. Ahmad was to become a ‘martyr’ by blowing himself and his truck in the tunnel.

Getting back to Qutb, instead of becoming liberalised and picking up the values that President Bush and his neoconservative associates would like to spread, if necessarily by force, to the Muslim world, the Egyptian’s American experience radicalised him thoroughly. Back in Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928 by Hasan Al Banna, and was later arrested, tortured in jail, and executed in 1966.

While in jail, Qutb wrote his manifesto, Milestones. It was smuggled out of the prison to which he had been condemned and was published in 1964 two years before his execution. It would become the primer for jihadist movements around the Muslim world. It contained a passage that was to profoundly influence political Islam. “We need to initiate the movement of Islamic revival in some country. There should be a vanguard which sets out with this determination and then keeps walking the path”. He then went on to explain why he had written the book. “I have written Milestones for this vanguard, which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be materialised.”

In the book Qutb developed the concept of tafkir, the process of declaring other Muslims to be apostates. Much of the open hostility shown later by the senior leaders of Al Qaeda towards countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, was based on this concept. What was revolutionary and path-breaking about Qutb’s teachings was his insistence that Islam’s enemies included Muslim governments that did not implement Sharia law. He wanted secular Middle Eastern governments excommunicated from the Muslim community.

Qutb’s stance brought him into direct conflict with President Gamal Abdel Nasser who had escaped an attempt on his life by the members of the Muslim Brotherhood. That attempt led to a complete break between the Brotherhood and the military that, under Nasser, had expelled the British from Egypt in July 1952 and sought to work initially with the Islamic group. In fact, Nasser had appointed Qutb to a number of senior positions in his cabinet which the latter did not occupy for very long.

The vanguard Qutb was looking for to spread his word appeared first in his own country, Egypt. According to Peter Bergen, a British-born American expert on Islamic terrorism, “there would be no more eager student of Qutb’s writings than a cerebral, prickly Egyptian doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who founded his first jihadist cell when he was 15 and would go on to become the number two in Al Qaeda. In 1981 Zawahiri was imprisoned and tortured by Egyptian authorities just as Qutb had been, an experience that further radicalised him.”

While Zawahiri was serving his sentence in the Egyptian jail, the call for jihad went out from a number of seminaries in Pakistan against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The call, raised with the help of the United States that wanted the jihadists to fight its proxy war against the Soviet Union, was heard, among others, by the Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden. He volunteered to join the battle and gradually established himself as one of the leaders of the Arab legion fighting in Afghanistan.

For the next several years, he remained a marginal player in this evolving drama. That changed in 1986 when Zawahiri, recently released from jail, joined him in Peshawar. According to Lawrence Wright, “each man filled a need in the other. Zawahiri wanted money and contacts... Bin Laden, an idealist given to causes, sought direction; Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it.”

Zawahiri’s influence over bin Laden fed the latter’s growing contempt for several Muslim regimes in the Middle East, including that of his own country, Saudi Arabia. The reason why jihad could be directed at the Muslim rulers in many parts of the Muslim world had already been developed by Qutb as tafkir in Milestones. The doctrine needed more than a vanguard, it required an organisation that could be used to spread it. That was founded in 1988 as Al Qaeda by bin Laden, Al Zawahiri and a number of other Egyptians. ‘Qaeda’ is an Arabic word meaning base or primer.

Al Qaeda’s appeal increased as it became progressively militant. The use of violence as an instrument for spreading the word and gaining control came from Zawahiri. He also persuaded bin Laden to turn his attention towards the United States as the “far enemy”, the only power that stood in the way of the ideology’s domination of the Muslim world. This point is worth underscoring since Al Qaeda’s original target was not the United States but a number of regimes in the Muslim world, in particular those in the Middle East.

However, the organisation and its leadership had come to believe that they would not succeed in bringing about the regime changes they sought without loosening the grip in which the United States held much of the Muslim world.

Al Qaeda was made to leave Peshawar after the Soviet Union’s troops exited Afghanistan in 1989. Reestablished in Sudan, it became slowly operational, focusing on the United States targets in the Middle East. In early 1992, Al Qaeda issued a fatwa calling for jihad against the western occupation of the Islamic lands. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, that investigated in considerable detail the circumstances that led to the terrorist attack on America, “specifically signalling out US forces for attack, the language resembled that which would appear in Bin Laden’s public fatwa in August 1996. In the ensuing weeks, Bin Laden delivered an often repeated lecture on the need to cut off the head of the snake.”

Bin Laden was now prepared to openly fight the United States. Back in Afghanistan after the Americans had persuaded the Sudanese to expel him from their country, Al Qaeda sent fighters to Somalia to fight the Americans. In 1998, it attacked the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Its most audacious assault on American assets outside the borders of the United States came in October 2000 when its operatives bombed the USS Cole in Yemen, killing eleven sailors.

Less than a year later, Al Qaeda struck the US on its own soil. Nineteen young men, mostly from Saudi Arabia, guided three planes into prominent American landmarks, two into New York’s World Trade Centre’s twin towers and the third into the Pentagon near Washington. The fourth plane was en route to Washington when it was forced to crash by its passengers into a field in Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people died in these operations.

As has been repeatedly asserted, 9/11 changed the world. It brought the West into an open conflict with some elements in the Muslim world variously called the “radicals,” the “extremists,” the “terrorists” and now even “fascists.” How will this conflict develop and how will it affect Pakistan is a question I will attempt to answer over the next several weeks.

YEARS ago, I was intrigued by a caption in a development report: ‘The missing women of South Asia’. It was not a report of abducted women, which is what I thought it was at first sight, but of women not born. It seems that nature has maintained a balance between the sexes but, under normal circumstances, the number of women is slightly more than that of men.

In South Asia, on the other hand, the balance is tilted in the wrong direction. It seems that women are fewer in number. The reasons for this given in the report were that baby girls were under-nourished; they were not given medical treatment when they needed it; older women died in childbirth after an early marriage and, again, hard work and under-nourishment. In short, our South Asian construction of gender was fatal for women.

A few years later, I read another version of the same phenomenon. It was a report from Indian Punjab. Here it was stated that parents find out the sex of the unborn child and get the female foetus aborted. The statistics were pretty grim with more than three per cent female children not being allowed to be born at all. I am sure the problem cannot be confined to Indian Punjab, or to India, alone, but I do not know the figures for other places.

What is alarming is that our mental attitude not only colours but also shapes our social realities in a profound way. As long as we were weak as a species we could only resort to crude methods of constructing our social reality such as female infanticide. Now we can do the same in another way without feeling as bad about it as we would in the case of actual murder.

But, extend the phenomenon of wishing away people and we would end up with a nightmarish list. Joseph Conrad’s character Mr Kurtz would “exterminate the brutes” i.e. all native Africans; Hitler would do the same for the Jews (the final solution); the Israelis would probably want the Palestinians to vanish and vice versa. Indeed, many colonial conquerors wished away the people before they became realities. The Americas and Australia were not virgin lands when the whites set out to colonise them. They were populated by human beings who had a healthy relationship with the ecosystem. These human beings were killed and driven away before the land was colonised.

Similarly, Palestine was not an empty wasteland. It was an Arab land with people living in it when the first Jewish farmers arrived. Later, they drove the Arabs out of their lands. Nowadays, these missing people — the original inhabitants of colonised lands — are discussed by serious historians but for many years they were not even mentioned. Thus many children grew up believing that their wonderful ancestors had claimed uninhabited lands and made it productive.

Missing people are generally those whose property or labour raises the edifices of what we call civilisation. Greek civilisation, for instance, owed much to slave labour. The slaves took care of the daily, energy-sapping, boring routine labour, thus allowing the rich citizens time to discuss governance, literature and law. Behind the books of Aristotle and Plato, there are the hands of slaves whose names are unknown and whose very existence is unacknowledged.

Our South Asian family norms — hospitality, mutual support, interaction and stability — come from the missing women, servants and others who are never acknowledged. As the quest for jobs, mobility and individualism make women less prone to patiently accepting abuse, neglect and exploitation, we, too, will witness the breakup of the family. It will be traumatic for children and for the elderly. We never appreciate the missing persons who contribute to our emotional well-being when they are putting up with drudgery and worse.

In any case, change is inevitable and it comes in packages. The empowerment of women and increase in education will come at the cost of less stability. The choice will be between freedom and stability.

All the above cases are of people who are missed out against their will. There are also people who are powerful enough always to be counted but, for some reason, prefer to be missed out. There are the Punjabis of Pakistan. In the census of 1980, the proportion of Punjabi-speakers was 48.17 per cent; in 1998 it was 44.15 per cent. Why was there a reduction of 4.02 per cent in these years? It was not because Seraiki and Hindko were not included under Punjabi in 1998 because they were also counted separately in 1980. It was also not because the rate of growth of the population of Punjab was negative; it was not. So what was it?

All answers can only be speculative. My guess is that many middle-class Punjabis gave either Urdu or some other language as their mother tongue. There are cases in history of people choosing a high-status category for themselves during census returns. For instance, many people in India would choose the gentlemanly categories of ‘Syed’ or ‘Sheikh’ rather than working-class occupational categories (e.g. ‘nai’ or barber, ‘julaha’ or weaver). Moreover, Punjabi Muslims sometimes gave their mother tongue as Urdu just before 1947 because the Hindi-Urdu controversy was going on and Urdu had become a symbol of Muslim identity. But the Punjabis are a self-confident majority strongly entrenched in the powerful army and the bureaucracy. They also control most other institutions of the state and have a big share in education, media, commerce and entertainment. Was it that the Punjabi middle class, which was so successful, owned English and Urdu as their cultural capital? Did they use these languages because they were so ashamed of their mother tongue that they disowned it? This could be an answer and if it is, one is saddened by it. The next question, then, would be whether anything can be done to give the Punjabis some legitimate pride in their mother tongue.

STRANGE that a British government that wants to make choice the watchword of its social policy should doubt the desirability of ethnic minorities choosing to be different. Stranger still that the minister chosen to express the doubts about social diversity should be a passionate advocate of faith schools, a major divisive influence in the areas where they flourish.

The fear must be that the contradictions are less the result of intellectual confusion than a willingness to pander to the prejudices of the people who, according to Ruth Kelly, “do not feel comfortable” with the changes that have transformed their neighbourhoods.

Kelly is right to say that stories abound about the benefits enjoyed by immigrants — a term still often applied to the black and Asian British — which are not available to their homegrown neighbours. The only way to deal with that often calculated libel is to meet it head on and dismiss it for the malicious invention it usually is. My father was taught at the English College in Rome that “it is not by running away from evil that we overcome it, but by going to meet it”.

Nobody should be surprised that some people have developed the “resentment and sense of grievance” to which the secretary of state for communities referred. Nobody in authority ever tells them that their anger is unjustified.

Newspapers, reporting Kelly’s speech, have related it to the present cause of encouraged concern — the admission of workers from the new member states of the EU. Questions about cultural diversity do not apply to them. They come here, work for a few remunerative years and then return — just as the builders in Auf Wiedersehen Pet came back to Britain after a stint in continental Europe.

Cultural diversity raises questions that apply to settled communities. In the interests of the honest debate for which Kelly called, let us agree that the complaints about the voluntary isolation of some ethnic groups usually add up to the demand that British Muslims stop behaving like Muslims.

Muslims, the argument runs, neither speak our language nor worship our God. The further indictment that they eat strange food used to be added to the list of complaints. Then we experienced something that might be called reverse assimilation. The “host community” discovered that it liked what the newcomers ate. But the taste for balti did not dispel all the crude superstitions and vulgar errors.

In an age when women were, at last, achieving their proper place in society, the greatest mistake was the confusion of arranged and forced marriages. Even people who made the proper distinction committed the unforgivable sin of thinking that because they would not like the arrangement for themselves, nobody else should choose to be betrothed in that way.

Marriage customs, brought here from Pakistan and Kashmir — another error is the assumption that all Muslims behave in the same way — are mostly a matter of custom. Much of the behaviour that makes Muslims different is a question of conscience. Islam is an all-purpose religion. The Qur’an answers every question. That is why alienated Muslim youths increasingly argue that the political parties — by which they feel rejected — are superfluous.

It is immensely inconvenient for believers to insist on praying at set hours during Ramadan. But it is an article of faith. Attempts to make believers change their ways is an assault upon their religion and inconsistent with the rules of a free society.

Most young Muslims agree that to enjoy the full benefits of British society they have to accept most of its conventions and adopt its mores. Since they were born in this country, they have little difficulty in behaving as British by birth and upbringing. It was their grandfathers who were often reluctant and their grandmothers who sometimes refused to read and write (or even speak) English. For the new generation, it is as much their mother tongue as Urdu.

But that generation wants to make its own decisions about how to mix and match the two parts of their lives. The more they are told to drop Islam in favour of Britain, the more alienated they will feel. Islam is essential to their identity and self-respect. They want to be integrated but they are not prepared to be absorbed. And assimilation — which is absorption by a fancy name — is what most of the critics of multiculturalism really want. —Dawn/Guardian Service