A climate of fear in Britain

WHEN the Congress Party in 1937 refused to recognize Jinnah as leader of India’s Muslims, it contrived to create a Muslim mass contact movement to pick pliant leaders who, however, proved to have little sway over Muslim public opinion. Ultimately, as Dr. K.M. Ashraf and Dr. Z. Ahamad, two communist leaders who, at Nehru’s urging, launched the movement, told one of us decades later, the ploy failed.

Jinnah utterly routed his feeble rivals in the last election before independence. But, as result of this manoeuvre, all sides resorted to communalist appeals, with the unhappy legacy that the Muslim League became outwardly more religious. With their secular character as parties thus compromised, the Muslim League and Congress could not reach a settlement in the run-up to independence and the result was a blood-soaked partition. Nehru was blithely in denial that Jinnah represented a valid viewpoint that must be heeded.

One watches with an acute sense of deja vu UK Prime Minister Tony Blair demonstrating that he too exists in a dismaying state of denial as to how British Muslims feel about Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and, yes, local conditions. This conceited denial — likewise breeds bad consequences. There are projects afoot, for example, to analyze captured bombers so as to nab anyone remotely fitting their ‘profile’ — a terribly counterproductive ‘solution’, but one that commends itself to a government insistently blind to the domestic consequences of a foolish and dishonest intervention in Iraq.

Yet most British citizens are just not gullible. Polls after the July 7 bombings, and July 21 attempted bombings too, show that three of four Britons strongly suspect that the suicide attacks are related to the unjustified Iraq war. It was rare to hear anyone say, “Why us?”

Blair, declining to deal seriously with young Muslims, instead started his own anglicized version of a Muslim mass contact movement by summoning a group of eager-to-please imams who often do not even understand the language of their British-born brethren. So occupying a spot at the hearth in 10 Downing Street is the Muslim Council of Britain, led largely by those Blair either nominated to the House of Lords or knighted. From these obliging quarters Blair gets reports, in a perfectly circular way, containing only what he wants to hear. This shabby public relations gimmick swiftly will come to grief too.

Clerics fanned out across Britain to lecture that suicide bombs, and indeed any form of terrorism, violates religious principles.

Yet if suicide bombers are the “perpetrators of evil,” as the clerics justifiably say, then how does one label invader armies in the Middle East utilizing high tech weapons that kill and maim civilians in droves ? If the weapons are expensive and kill at a distance, does it make the soldiers or their political leaders morally superior to someone wrapping a band of home-made explosives around their waist? The clerics do not dare say that evil is fighting evil, that one form of destruction is as vile as the other, and that each form of violence drives the other on to greater horrors.

In Britain, a new climate of fear stems not only from suicide bombs but from an extremely edgy ‘shoot-to-kill’ government and from vengeful elements of the public (with personal assaults on Muslims up six-fold since 7/7). So clerics say whatever suits the government, which is hardly going to win them credibility in their communities. Indeed, a few stray into the realm of pure black humour.

Abu Khadeejah Abdul-Whaid, an Islamic scholar, according to The Guardian, deplored ‘the combination of human rights laws and constant media attention’ which allegedly gave exiled radicals a platform to ‘preach evil’ for over a decade. So we behold a stern Islamic scholar in a western democracy slamming human rights — not a rousing democratic message — although authoritarian leanings in this regard seem to please Blair.

It gets weirder as is always the case when religion mixes with politics. More than a 100 imams had been welcomed by the UK prison service into jails where they converted some inmates such as ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reed and at least one accused London bomber who soon decided they were more Islamic than the imams. (Former Tory minister Jonathan Aitken during his imprisonment claims that imams even tried to convert him.) Now nervous UK authorities, after sober second thoughts, are removing Muslim clerics from conversion work. Yet, the very same authorities consult the same clerics as to how to quell worrisome extremist tendencies among young Muslims at large. It’s a comical spectacle, were it not so sad.

These desperate government manoeuvres — together with police ‘profiling’ — antagonize, not sooth, fretful young Muslims. It is not that Home Office initiatives for better community relations are wrong, the problem is that they are incomplete and, worse, come across as insincere. The crystal clear message of the fatal shooting of an unlucky Brazilian by the police is that it is open season on anyone the authorities suspect. This is no way to tamp down community apprehensions or curb recruitment to extremism.

The many young Muslims who helped elect MP George Galloway in the East End in May will stay peacefully enough on the left, but there are others who are susceptible to extremists. Indeed, extremist Muslims opposed Galloway, a leader of the anti-war coalition and stout defender of minority rights, and they tried to cut into his support by claiming that Islam forbade voting, full stop.

The Blair government clings to a convenient notion that bombers are motivated solely by a psychopathic hatred of the West. This self-serving version of reality makes it easier to hide behind a hard-line stance and, as a bonus, to persist in a dirty and daft foreign intervention. Yet the British secret service MI 5 itself refuted Blair by stating that “Iraq is a dominant issue for a range of extremist groups and individuals in the UK and Europe.” Chatham House researchers issued a report that came to the same conclusion. Outside the Blair government, democracy in Britain, to Blair’s discomfort, still functions in some praiseworthy ways.

An internal threat certainly exists but the UK is not yet dealing with it in a wise way. One must cultivate a dialogue not only with hand-picked Muslims but with leaders of new groups, especially youth groups, and even more widely with anti-war groups, who happen to be a sizable section of the Labour Party itself. Dissident Labour MPs are nearly as ignored as are Muslim youths. Blair also ought to resist saying suicide bombers are all alike. It is not persuasive. Young people, who are horrified at bombings in London, often understand what drives Palestinians to the most desperate measures, given the odds they face.

Blairspeak, a rigid Orwellian rhetorical style, stems from a lazy establishment habit of treating terrorism as a category devoid of context and circumstance. Aren’t all suicide bombers crazy? Yet, in the 1950s movie Exodus, we can recall Paul Newman’s character saying proudly that Jewish refugees had a big advantage over opponents: they fought for a cause — a new state of Israel — for which they were prepared to die. Aren’t Palestinians also fighting for a cause?

There are extremists slinking around but one needs to recall that they are usually the products of Deobandi sect madressahs all over the Muslim world financed originally by the Saudis and western intelligence agencies to make cannon fodder for an anti-Soviet Afghan war.

Still, there is no shortage of sensible Brits who approach domestic matters with care and reason. London Mayor Ken Livingston invited the Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Yusif Qaradawi from Qatar, who condemned the London bombings but pointedly declined to criticize Middle East suicide bombs. Livingston stood by Qaradawi in the face of rabid tabloid rage. Swiss-born Professor Tariq Ramadan promotes liberal religious opinions but, as a grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was prevented by the state department from taking up an American academic appointment. Yet Scotland Yard helped finance a seminar recently where he spoke. These are personages who can talk to Muslims abroad, credibly and prudently. Ken Livingston and Scotland Yard realize this, but Blair and his inner circle just don’t get it.

Blair invokes “our values” tirelessly, but just what cherished values is he referring to? The values of bombing Iraq whenever it pleases certain western powers ? Is he celebrating the bedrock values of western democracy ? Then why are the Scandinavian, countries, Germany, or France not bombed? Might it perchance be because they are not implicated in Iraq?

Or is Blair talking about the defence of hard-won civil liberties ? If so, then Osama bin Laden is winning with ease as Blair, like Bush in the US, continues to throw away these liberties and bring his nation down to bin Laden’s level.

No militancy in Islam

THE impression in the West that Islam is a militant religion is, to a large extent, based on the fact that the Holy Prophet (pbuh), after his migration to Madina, had to engage in a long drawn-out armed conflict with the Quraish who had forced him to leave Makkah, his home-town.

Unfortunately, some of his biographies authored by half-baked historians highlight these wars, or Ghazawat, as they are called, which by sheer exigency of circumstances, the Prophet and his companions had to fight, valiantly and tenaciously, as the alternative was complete annihilation. The aspect that these were defensive wars and that the non-believers of Makkah, who had forced such wars on him, had to be overpowered and made to lie low was not brought out clearly and projected prominently in these biographies.

The adversary had to be defeated at all costs for fulfilment of the main task — establishment of a new social order based on morality, God-consciousness and justice (adl) tempered with kindness (ihsan). This was the Divinely-inspired assignment and no impediment in the way of its implementation was insurmountable.

Of these ghazawat, in which the Prophet himself took part, the last one — the conquest of Makkah — was undertaken not for vengeance but to eliminate idol worship from the very place where Prophet Abraham had raised foundations of the Kaaba, consecrated for the worship of One and Only God.

Thus, all wars preceding the conquest of Makkah were naked aggression by the Quraish, and the credit goes to the Prophet’s followers that despite handicaps, barring one battle (Uhad), all the battles ended in their favour — perhaps, because of the Almighty’s assistance.

So, this is how fighting for the cause of the faith has come to acquire in Islam’s history a glorified place which the less learned clerics and preachers describe with rhetorical hyperbole, overlooking the fact that victory in these fights was not the Prophet’s primary objective. His role in history was not that of a military leader. He was a prophet — nay the last of the prophets — which is not a tall claim of Muslims but a historical fact, as no prophet of world stature (except a few claimants of prophethood who have a small following) has appeared after the Prophet (pbuh).

He had to migrate from his native city, Makkah, as his co- citizens, with a few exceptions, had not only refused to listen to his call, but had, in spite of his pleadings and preachings, made it physically impossible for him to stay on any longer. He had to take refuge in another city where people were inclined to give up idolatry and embrace monotheism, as preached by him. They, the Madinites, converted to Islam, almost en masse in short span of time.

The Quraish of Makkah took it as a slap on their face and vowed to destroy the fledgling faith in its new habitat. There was no incitement and absolutely no instigation from the Prophet’s side. In fact, there was no dialogue and no contact with the polytheists of Makkah after the migration.

It is an irrefutable fact that the stubborn foes of Makkah marched towards Madina — the sanctuary of Muslim immigrants — a number of times during the Prophet’s 10-year stay in his adopted home which was destined to be the first model city with a new system of administration based on Divine guidance. The idolators and non-believers wanted to destroy the system as well as its founder. They failed in both aims.

No public leader of any persuasion would have given the enemy a walk-over just to avoid violence and bloodshed, or would have sued for peace on the enemy’s terms when the enemy was not his personal enemy but that of the system he had introduced. Therefore, the Prophet had no choice but to fight back, though the odds were heavily against him. How he succeeded in turning the aggressors back and, finally, taking the city of Makkah in one hour’s engagement on one day (hardly a dozen persons were killed) is not less than a miracle. But the Prophet and his dedicated companions did not consider this military miracle as the achievement of the main objective, nor the be-all and end-all of Islam’s mission.

These ware were forced on the early adherents of the faith and were impediments which had to be overcome through inevitable blood-letting, confined to the battlefield away from civilian limits and public places. The question of ‘collateral damage’, the apologetic term for civilian deaths and devastation, invented by modern democracies, did not arise.

So, for the militants of today, whoever they are, who may be doing whatever they are alleged to be doing, there is no apostolic tradition or Divine sanction to justify their actions.

It is hard to understand why the Muslim clerics do not give importance to the Prophet’s exemplary patience and peaceful conduct at Makkah where he spent more than half of his apostolic life, preaching and proselytizing in a hostile environment enduring all affronts, indignities and vexatious treatment.

This aspect needs further elucidation: First, the Prophet was averse to rude behaviour and impoliteness, not to speak of violence and conflict. The Quran informs us that “it was an act of Divine mercy that the Prophet was lenient with people, because if he had been stern and fierce of heart they would have dispersed from around him” (3: 159). The fact that people, not attached to him by tribal bond, the Madinites, rallied round him and supported him at great expense to themselves is the testimony of the Prophet’s nobility of character and peaceful conduct of affairs.

Second, the Islamic way of public relations and public dealing should follow the Divine guideline. According to the Quran, a Muslim has “to speak that which is kindlier, or not offensive to others” (17:53). In other words, a Muslim should be humble in speech and should convey one’s thoughts and ideas with humility and modesty as was the apostolic tradition, confirmed by the Scripture.

The Book that instructs the believers to be polite and cordial while interacting with others or articulating their point of view, will certainly not countenance militancy of the kind which is under discussion.

Worldwide wonder

THE 10th birthday of the internet as a mass phenomenon is rightly being celebrated this week to mark a decade since the explosive stock market debut of Netscape, which triggered the dot.com boom and unleashed a friendly browser to navigate the web.

To understand the extraordinary revolution that swept the world so quickly, existing users need simply to imagine what life would now be like without email (on which corporate life depends), search engines such as Google, web companies such as Amazon, eBay and Yahoo, the ongoing explosion of online commerce, not to mention the burgeoning world of personal journals (blogs), downloaded music and films, free newspapers, web cameras, internet telephony (now the hottest thing on the web) and the growing convergence of the net and mobile phones.

Already the internet has become a virtual library of Alexandria, a repository for practically everything one could want to inquire about — as long as the motivation is there. Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power”.

These days we would say knowledge is empowerment, and for the first time whatever you want to know about is out there somewhere, and mainly for free. In theory, the billion or so users in the world can link up with each other to share interests or join forces to counteract the global power the web has bestowed on international corporations.

There are, of course, downsides, from the hurricane of spam emails that hurtles across the web to the channels opened for terrorists, criminals and paedophiles. It has undoubtedly created a growing gulf between those with access to the web’s treasure trove of knowledge and the excluded digitariat who have to add a digital divide to all the others they have to endure.

But at least the new technology, as it becomes ever cheaper and more powerful, offers the prospect of bridging the divide and, by using services — such as free internet telephony, satellites and wireless connections — could leapfrog over existing obstacles. Parts of Africa will experience a technological revolution even before the industrial revolution has reached them. Overall, the web has proved itself to be a huge liberating and enabling force, even though it is still only in its infancy.

Although, contrary to the instincts of its early protagonists, the web has long since been colonised by commerce, it still nurtures its founding community spirit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the startling success of the open source movement which enables enthusiasts and professionals all over the world to work together from remote locations to produce services that are freely available for anyone with a computer linked to the internet.

The thousands of products so far released include the Linux operating system (a free alternative to Microsoft’s pervasive Windows), OpenOffice (an alternative to Microsoft’s Word and Excel) and Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, with well over a million entries written entirely by its readers.

Most recently, the open source movement has launched its own browser, the widely acclaimed Firefox, which is taking serious market share from Microsoft. There is an element of natural justice in this because it was Microsoft’s move to incorporate its own browser into its Windows operating system - which sits in 95% of all personal computers - that snuffed out Netscape’s early success in the 1990s.

—The Guardian, London

For Muslims, time for introspection

RECENTLY, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, despite possessing a valid visa, was detained and deported from Dubai. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, the Pakistani information minister, characteristically rushed out to issue a confused statement on the incident.

On his arrival in Pakistan, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, however, maintained a stolid silence in the interests of the larger Islamic brotherhood and future financial contributions. As this episode does not constitute an isolated incident, the Dubai fiasco points to an ominous trend in fundamentalist Islam-West interactions.

In April last year Maulana Samiul Haq was also barred from entering Brussels and the UK as a member of the Pakistani parliamentary delegation. These incidents have been condemned by some sections of society who have asked the government to lodge protests with the relevant authorities. But what is required of us, perhaps, is to study the two episodes more closely and uncover some of the underlying trends in international politics that they reveal. Ultimately, further probing into the connections between the military and mullahs and the consequences of using Islam as an instrument of foreign policy by our uniformed bosses may shed light on the situation.

Since the end of the cold war, there has been growing recognition, within the western-policymaking community, of the problem of Muslim minorities living in the West. Until recently the established policy of multiculturalism provided autonomous space for the Muslim faith to grow in the West. This went relatively unnoticed until jihadi-infused faith — fostered in the crucible of Afghanistan and Kashmir — began to make headway among some elements of the Muslim community living in the West.

In the aftermath of 9/11, alarms bells started ringing in the western corridors of power as to the danger of the presence of this fundamentalist strain of Islam within the Muslim communities in their midst. This has led to a flurry of policy initiatives directed at inoculating the West-living Muslims against foreign influences — these being seen, for the main part, as Saudi money and fundamentalist preachers from overseas.

In Britain, tough laws are now being contemplated that seek, quite rightly, to ban ill-educated overseas Muslim preachers from sermonizing anti-western rhetoric unrestrainedly from the pulpits of the West. Another strand of policy is directed at choking off the foreign finance that floods the cellars and garages of religious extremism. There is an overwhelming sense among western governments that they have lost control over the nature and direction of the Muslim religion within the West and there is a growing focus on fostering a new generation of Muslims who can reconcile their religiosity to the western way of life.

This view was recently summed up in a best-selling book whose French authors, Deloire and Dubois, say “French Islam” is a contradiction in terms and “a huge joke because, there is not a piece of it not under the control of a foreign power.” In another recent book, Nicholas Sarkozy, the rightwing presidential hopeful of the next French election, suggests the state funding of religious institutions to offset the dangers of foreign funding and its attendant Wahabi ideology.

Given the sensitivities about the role of fundamentalist clerics it is no surprise that the two maulanas intimately involved with our contracted-out, military-run jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir were barred, or deported. from the countries they intended to visit. Indeed, given the reflexive anti-West bigotry spouted by religious extremists more and more religiuos figures are going to be closely scrutinized and their entry into the West prohibited. The fact that this time round entry was refused by the UAE indicates how deep the tentacles of anti-fundamentalism policy run in the rest of the world. The episodes call for some soul-searching into the role of maulanas and their military handlers.

The crucial issue is the reformation of our religious institutions and the way religion is conducted by our clergy. The hardliners among them have an irrational opposition to everything modern and by extension the West, although whether modernity is entirely western in origin is contestable. During the cold war the anti-West rhetoric of our clerical class was ignored in the interests of fighting the larger battle against the infidel communists in which the Muslim clergy were willing accomplices. But times have changed and western policymakers can no longer ignore the anti-western strains of religious fundamentalism.

Instead of berating the West for being out to get Muslims, the situation provides Islam with a unique opportunity to re-examine itself and launch a reformist jihad as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan did more than a century ago. In order to exist meaningfully and productively in a radically changed world it is imperative that Muslims undertake ijtihad and reinvent their religious selves for the new world. For that to happen it is necessary to rein in the cold war conditioned verbal excesses of our maulanas by cleaning up our textbooks and placing extremists under control orders.

More importantly, the military-mullah nexus has to be dismantled in the larger interest of our nation. Religion should no longer be used as an instrument of our foreign policy. The consequences of this myopic policy operated by generals, even under notionally civilian governments, are plain for all of us to see. The solution lies in undiluted democratization and military hands off foreign and domestic policy. Only stable democracies can defeat terrorism in the end. Any western policy that does not include undiluted democratic rule in the near future is bound to fail in the long run.

The military-mullah alliance can only be sundered by secularizing the way the military is trained. When we train our military men using the ethos of jihad as a motivating force it has the effect of religionizing the secular and performance related function of national defence. Our misadventure and miscalculation in Kashmir are the direct result of the jihadi-mindset that informs our military the training. Only by training military on entirely secular lines where the defence of the realm is promoted as professional duty (funded out of increasingly enervating poverty of our fellow Pakistanis) that is judged on performance indicators, and not on jihadi zeal, can we eradicate this dangerous trend in the military and their religious satellites beyond the barracks. This change in attitude may also help our generals to accept the authority of popularly elected representative institutions and cure them of what the mercurial late Z.A. Bhutto called the bug of “coupgemony”.

By systematically undercutting civil society and representative institutions “the militariat” has elevated the institutions of jihadi mullahism to a position where it exercises its influence over all other institutions. The genie of the military-mullah jihad nexus has acquired a dangerous life of its own. The path of the majority of Pakistanis to the epiphany of “enlightened moderation” and democratic existence lies in untying the Gordian knot of the military-mullah alliance.