Islam’s true spirit

YES, it is time, indeed high time, to rediscover Islam. There is need for it because what is going round under the rubric of Islam is not only a poor imitation, but sometimes even a disfigured copy of the original. Islam is already under wild attack from various quarters and it is time we respond, arguing our case logically, persuasively and convincingly and demolish the charges.

Besides, some genuine questions that agitate minds of the believers need to be answered satisfactorily. “Put up or shut up,” won’t do. It is time we ourselves raise questions and seek their answers. The slogan that the Quran is a “complete code of human life” has become too worn out a cliche. People ask for evidence.

For example, an ordinary reader is baffled when he comes across the Divine assertion “Prayer restrains from shameful and unjust deeds.” (29:45). Looking round he observes that many of those who indulge in unjust and wicked deeds are also the ones who offer prayers regularly five times a day and in congregation, too. Again, it is said “Allah has revealed the most beautiful Message in the form of a Book ...repeating its teaching in various aspects. The skin of those who fear their Lord tremble there at ...and their hearts do soften.” (39:23). But do we experience any such feeling?

The question should be, “why?” Where does the fault lie? What has gone wrong where and whether the situation can be salvaged and how? The answer to the first question is quite simple. Divine assertion cannot be wrong or frivolous. Only if the seven verses of the first sura, al Fatiha, are properly understood and their spirit imbibed, it would prove the veracity of the statement.

Indeed, the opening verse, “Praise to Allah the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds,” should revolutionize one’s thinking. The very first attribute with which Allah introduces Himself is Rabb. The word is so comprehensive that translating it as “cherisher and sustainer” fails to capture its true sense. It includes the function of creation, protection, and the entire process of evolution from conception to birth and from cradle to grave.

This realization should principally instil a feeling of self-assurance in the “creature,” that it is Allah alone who gives him food, protects him from dangers and misfortunes, cures him from ailments and cares for him so he feels a frisson of freedom from all factors that tend to intrude between him and his Creator. At the same time it should promote love and kindness for all of His creatures and negate the concept of gong aggressiveness such as going about sword in hand asking every non-Muslim to “say kalmia or pay jizya or fight,” or to kill every “infidel.”

Here are two concrete examples, both culled from the New York Times, of how Islam can change people’s lives. One is of Dierdre Small. It was the daily expression of Islam and its emphasis on the “oneness of God,” the five daily prayers, the way sentences are capped with words like inshallah, “God willing.” That is what turned her to Islam, and since the age of 12 she has been wearing hijab.

The second is of Khalid Hakim, 57, a merchant mariner born as Charles Karolik in Milwaukee. By the early 1970s, he started reading the Quran. On his first reading, he found the Quran “boring,” he said. But after another try, he said, “I knew that this was filling the empty space that I had inside, ‘the spiritual longing.’”

If only one recites “Show us the straight path, — the way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, those whose (portion) is not wrath and who go not astray,” (1:6-7) with sincerity, it would prevent him from going astray.

The Quran is a book of precepts, injunctions, admonitions, commands, warnings and advice. It is not to provide shade to a bride leaving her home after her wedding. It is like a book of prescriptions. But the prescriptions will do no good if they are worn like a charm and not applied.

As a Book of Etiquette, it starts from the injunction to “speak fair to the people, (2:83) to conduct and manners, deportment and demeanour, relations with spouse and family, parents, friends and other people both Muslims and non-Muslims, treatment of the poor and the indigent, orphans, widows and slaves, commercial transactions, lending and borrowing, even the tone and tenor of speech, — the catalogue is practically limitless, as it does cover the whole gamut of human life.

The last named injunction is illustrated beautifully as, “Lower thy voice (while speaking) for the harshest of sounds is the braying of the ass.” (31:19) and as for the gait; “Walk not on the earth with insolence: for thou canst not rend the earth asunder nor reach the mountain in height” (17:37; 31. 18). These are only random samplings.

But, of vital importance are the exhortations to reflect and ponder. For example, in the creation of night and day, of land with gardens of vines and fields sown with corn and palm trees, mountains, rivers, and fruit of every kind — date palm, olives, grapes, are signs for those who “listen, give thought, understand.” (10:67, 12:3-4, 16:11). Even the Night and the Day have been made subject to mankind, and the sun and the moon and the stars are in subjection by His Command, in which are signs “for those who are wise.” (16:12). And these injunctions are repeated a number of times in the Book.

But do we ponder? Do we think how to put our “subjects” to use? The West is already acting on these admonitions though the “Code of Life” is with us. They have harnessed solar energy, for instance. If we gave the issue any serious thought the answer would be as plain as day, namely, that we have to have knowledge so as to harness the elements and the spheres.

The importance of knowledge can be gauged from the fact that this was the basic factor that raised a “handful of Clay” to a station above Fire and even Light. (jinns and angels). For direct evidence reference to the glorious feats of Muslim scientists in the past — Al Kindi, Abu Sina, Ibn-i- Rushd, Farabi, Al-Khwarazmi, et al — would suffice. They literally searched for knowledge from everywhere, including Greek and Sanskrit.

When Muslims gave up practical Islam, and turned it into a set of rituals, body without soul, decadence and degeneracy became their destiny. This is why prayer seems unable to prevent us from “unjust and wicked deeds.”

No sensible substitute for peace

A DINNER without speeches is not necessarily a speechless dinner. One of the paradoxes of official life in a capital city like Delhi is that the more speeches there are the more silence there is during the rest of the meal. There were no official speeches on the agenda at the dinner that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hosted for President Pervez Musharraf on April 16 since the President had not come on an official visit, he had come to watch cricket.

(The British had no idea what they were leaving behind; without English and cricket, where would our subcontinent be?) But at about five in the evening that Saturday the Pakistani delegation was informed that Prime Minister Singh would like to make a few remarks. When Dr Manmohan Singh brought out a printed speech during dinner, the hearts of Pakistani officials accompanying President Musharraf began to flutter. No equivalent speech had been prepared in response.

On the rising scale of gaffes, this was in the penthouse apartment. High commissioners have been known to lose their jobs for less. But President Musharraf lost neither his temper nor his composure. After Dr Singh finished an emotional and stirring paean to peace between India and Pakistan, President Musharraf offered an unscripted, impromptu response that his delegation now characterizes as one of his finest. At least they were left speechless.

Our first image of President Musharraf, seen on television after the coup against Nawaz Sharif, was of a general playing with a silver gun. Our most recent image is that of a peacemaker with a silver tongue. How did the change come about? Surprise winners of the power lottery have one significant advantage over elected leaders: they have nowhere to go but up. They begin from a base of such low expectations that they have to be particularly silly to sink further in the public esteem.

It is not as if this cannot happen. Very little was expected for instance of President Yahya Khan of Pakistan, who replaced the long-serving Ayub Khan. His main responsibility was to bridge the time difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. He bungled it so badly that the country split.

An elected leader has quite a different problem. A newly-elected leader has the opposite problem. His or her peak moment comes with victory. The voter has delivered a decision and the more unexpected it is, the stronger the need for emotional (through speeches) and practical (through policies) recompense.

It is hard for the most accomplished leader to deliver: witness the problems Mrs Indira Gandhi had after her astonishing victory in 1971 and her even more astonishing recovery in 1980. The Janata simply withered under the weight of great expectations between 1977 and 1979.

If life had followed the predictable arc for President Musharraf, he would possibly have been running a think-tank NGO on strategic warfare by now. Instead, he is making the running for history. Dr Manmohan Singh is not the kind of man who would have ever fantasized about being prime minister. But he has grasped the opportunity with consummate ease and a beguiling confidence. The two leaders are agreed on two things: that there is no sensible substitute for peace, and peace will come only when India and Pakistan melt the rigidity that has created confrontation and sparked off war.

Who would have expected an Indian prime minister to cauterize the hardliners of his own bureaucracy and stretch out a hand of welcome that was transparently honest, and which was trusted by yesterday’s foe? Who would have thought that a Pakistani president, and one in uniform at that, would have said on Indian soil that there could be no military solution to the Kashmir problem, or that the peace process was now “irreversible”? He was not being unrealistic.

He also warned that if no solution was found, he could not vouch for what might happen in five or 10 years.

Two questions, possibly asked with a bemused look. How did we arrive here? And where do we go next? Indo-Pak relations are not propelled by a single fact or factor. A number of atoms keep whirling within the reactor for a long while until they develop critical mass. Here is a quick list. Peace can only be built on a foundation of confidence. Confidence is not a flash of revelatory lightning on the road of Damascus; it takes time and the variations of experience, for the brick and mortar of confidence is realism.

Seven years ago, India and Pakistan went nuclear, and with that began the last phase of the war that started in 1947. It was a war of brinkmanship that tested nerves to the limit; that included a hot phase in Kargil, insurrection, the near-demolition of Parliament in New Delhi and a moment when America ordered its non-essential staff out of the subcontinent because it felt that a nuclear fallout was imminent.

Nothing, they say, clears your mind faster than the prospect of a hanging. Minds began to clear at that point. Nuclear power is the strength of a closed fist; God forbid that anyone should reveal what lies in that fist. The key to its utility is paradoxical. Since a nuclear war assures mutual destruction, it prevents war. Nuclear power has served to eliminate a street-dread in Pakistan that India can destroy the country because of its anger against partition. Visible evidence came when both sides retreated from war during their eight-month-long eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.

9/11 helped: after that momentous day in America, as President Musharraf pointed out, the world changed and a military solution was no longer possible. But that by itself was not enough. America influences the world, as any superpower would, but it does not control the seminal fluid of historic passions that give birth to war. Fundamental to the new spirit is the popular support in both countries for peace.

It was cricket that once again permitted the two peoples to rediscover each other, and they began to wonder why they had been tricked into hatred when there was such obvious and natural fraternity.

There is also a strong belief, particularly among the young, that elites have turned into an alibi for economic stagnation or at least insufficient progress. People are simply not ready to accept poor governance and poverty any longer, and governments — whether dictatorial or democratic — have to measure the cost of disaffection.

If Dr Singh is at the start of his first term in office, then president Musharraf is, in a sense, at the start of his second. Both need momentum. Both know that in the present climate a peace dividend can sustain their governments as well their own place at the top. They are also surely aware of the risks of failure. The president has to deal with hardliners who will wave that slightly stale label of appeasement, and he has faced assassination attempts from the war lobby already.

Dr Singh could be outflanked as well, if not now a little later. While the senior leadership of the BJP is committed to the peace process thanks to Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee’s crucial role in it, the BJP is in flux. There is Narendra Modi waiting to win votes by blaming “Mian Musharraf” for a dozen crimes.

Can India and Pakistan continue their forward movement if there is no forward movement on Jammu and Kashmir? No. The formula for hope rests on three legs. Peace must have a real meaning for the people of Kashmir, on either side of the divide.

This much is now understood by Delhi as well as Islamabad, which is why there is a bilateral commitment to soft borders. It is axiomatic that if the line melts in the Himalayas, then it will thaw even faster in Punjab and the plains.

The next step is engagement with Kashmiri leaders of all hues. There has been significant change in this respect as well. While Delhi is ready to meet the Hurriyat (if Dr Singh’s offer had not been foolishly turned down, the talks could have already begun), President Musharraf has publicly accepted that there are other voices apart from the Hurriyat in the valley. Delhi and Islamabad have also realized that any “final solution” has to be both acceptable and sustainable, and this cannot happen without agreement between the two.

The promise of peace must not be confused with peace. The optimism has come from the change in dialectic, but all the hard work remains to be done. There is still a walk through a swamp ahead, with leaves as markers. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Musharraf will have to tread lightly at every step, occasionally helping each other out. This is going to need huge investment in trust. They will have to find it along the way, for the one missing from the Indo-Pak vault is trust.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.

A common future is possible

After a continent-wide round of commemorations to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe, it’s clear that the peoples of Europe have a shared past, but not a common one. Sixty years on, the memory of war in Warsaw is still irreconcilable with that in Moscow. But it’s also utterly different from London’s low-key festival of “We’ll meet again” nostalgia. Only in the recollections of former inmates of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps does British memory approach the horrors of daily degradation that are the stuff of everyday Polish or Russian memory.

For Russians, the war began in 1941; for Poles and Brits, it began in 1939. For Vladimir Putin, May 9, 1945 marked the end of the Great Patriotic War, when the Red Army almost single-handedly liberated — yes, liberated — most of Europe from fascism. For most Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, it marked the transition from one totalitarian occupation to another, Nazi to Soviet.

Really, we should talk about second world wars, not the second world war. The plural applies inside as well as between countries. I am staying at a place, not far from where the Warsaw ghetto used to be. The wartime memories of a Polish Jew and a non-Jewish Pole can still be bitterly contrasting. So can German memories. Last weekend there was a small neo-Nazi demonstration in Berlin.

The former leftwing terrorist Horst Mahler, now an extremist at the other end of the spectrum, said the moment of German surrender in 1945 marked “the day of the death of Europe”. But Tuesday’s opening of the Holocaust memorial in the very heart of Berlin spoke for the great majority of today’s Germans.

They are struggling to find a just balance between a sense of collective historical responsibility for nazism and a proper respect for the sufferings of their own compatriots, including those who died as a result of Anglo-American bombing or were expelled from their homes by Russians and Poles.

Only by a great effort of collective myth-making have the French combined the memories of the resistance France of Charles de Gaulle and the collaborating France of Marshal Pitain. Step across the Mediterranean for a moment, and you find the Algerians marking May 8, 1945 as the anniversary of the Sitif massacre, when a VE Day demonstration turned into a manifestation for Algerian independence, which rapidly descended into bloodshed and a brutal crackdown by French security forces.

A common past? Forget it! The memory wars began the day the second world war ended. They have continued ever since. With the entry of central and east European states into the European Union and Nato, they are being played out in a new way. Central and east Europeans are now articulating their versions of the past through the main organs of what we used to call “the west”.

In making Putin’s Red Square victory parade a mere stopover between Latvia, the Netherlands and Georgia, George Bush has signed up to their reading of history rather than Putin’s. Even the usually timid European commission issued a statement saying, among sentiments more comfortable to the Russian leader: “We remember ... the many millions for whom the end of the second world war was not the end of dictatorship, and for whom true freedom was only to come with the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

On these warring accounts of the past, futures are built. “Who controls the past controls the future” was the Orwellian formula for a totalitarian regime. In Europe, we no longer live in totalitarian times — even in an increasingly undemocratic Russia and the grim dictatorship of Belarus. So today’s milder version is “Who shapes our view of the past can influence the future”.

What is to be done? First, we should recognise that it will always be so — even when every last survivor is dead. So long as there are historical memories, they will be contested memories. Second, we must insist that there are historical facts. When any body politic starts denying or suppressing historical facts, that is a warning sign, like the spots indicating measles. The Soviet Union had historiographical measles for all its life. Russia after 1991 got better.

Many Russian schoolchildren had access to a history textbook that taught them, as is only right, about the extraordinary sacrifices of Red Army soldiers and the civilians of cities such as Stalingrad, where, 60 years on, they are still digging up the skeletons. But it also mentioned Stalin’s occupation of the Baltic states, his wartime deportations of Balts and others and the contribution made by US lend-lease equipment to the Soviet victory. Now that schoolbook has been withdrawn.

That every citizen of Europe should have full access to the facts about our barbarous past is a precondition for the political health of this continent. The interpretation of those facts is then free.

Historians such as Richard Overy and Norman Davies have argued persuasively that the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Hitler has been consistently underrated in most Anglo-American treatments of the subject. But Russia does not help its own case by trying to suppress uncomfortable facts.

Thirdly, while we will never agree on a single version of the historical truth about these events, we can agree on a lesson from them. This lesson for 2005 is the promise of 1945: Never again! In order to keep that promise to ourselves, we need to shape not a common past but a common future. A Polish student from the town of Oswiecim — that is, Auschwitz — explained on German television the other day, in excellent German, that his Polish-German-Jewish bridge-building work was aimed not at the old-fashioned goal of “reconciliation”, but at building a “common future”. Exactly so. And that’s what we are doing, with the spread of freedom and the enlargement of the European Union.

The trouble is that we Europeans are leaving it to President Bush to tell this story for us. And he spoils it, both because of the crude Manichean tones of his rhetoric, and because his advocacy associates the great story of the spread of freedom in Europe too closely with the policies of a particular US administration. So why don’t we tell it for ourselves?

The Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili — leader of his country’s “rose revolution” in 2003 — has said we are witnessing a “second wave” of liberation, inside the former Soviet Union, starting with Georgia and Ukraine. Speaking on CNN the other day, he corrected himself, suggesting it was really a “third wave”. I make it the fourth. The first wave rolled over western and northern Europe in 1944-45; the second swept through southern Europe, starting in Portugal in 1974; the third liberated central Europe, starting in Poland in 1980 and reaching the Baltic states in 1991; now the fourth wave, if wave it is, may be building in eastern Europe.

I remember seeing in Berlin, the day after the Berlin Wall came down, a fresh graffito: “only today is the war really over”. Now we are waiting for the day when we read those same words scrawled on a Moscow wall, in a democratic Russia finally liberated from the weight of the past. That would be the ultimate VE Day.

—Dawn/Guardian Service

Darfur’s real death toll

THE BUSH administration’s challenge on Darfur is to persuade the world to wake up to the severity of the crisis. On his recent visit to Sudan, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick took a step in the opposite direction. He said that the State Department’s estimate of deaths in Darfur was 60,000 to 160,000, a range that dramatically understates the true scale of the killing. If Mr Zoellick wants to galvanize action on Darfur, he must take a fresh look at the numbers.

The lowest Darfur mortality number previously cited came from the World Health Organization. Last year it reported that 70,000 people had died, and many observers repeated this number without explaining it. WHO’s estimate referred only to deaths during a seven-month phase of a crisis that has now been going on for 26 months.

It referred only to deaths from malnutrition and disease, excluding deaths from violence. And it referred only to deaths in areas to which WHO had access, excluding deaths among refugees in Chad and deaths in remote rural areas.

In other words, the 70,000 estimate from WHO was a fraction of a fraction of the full picture. The 60,000 number that Mr. Zoellick cited as low-but-possible is actually low-and-impossible.

Other authorities suggest that mortality is likely to be closer to 400,000 — more than twice Mr. Zoellick’s high number. The component of this estimate involving deaths by violence is based on a survey by the Coalition for International Justice, a nongovernmental organization operating under contract with the US Agency for International Development, which asked 1,136 refugees on the Chad-Darfur border whether family members had died violently or gone missing.

These interviews yielded a death rate of 1.2 per 10,000 people per day. Extrapolating for all of Darfur’s displaced people, John Hagan of Northwestern University estimates that 140,000 people have died violently or gone missing since the start of the conflict.

It’s possible that the refugees in Chad experienced atypical rates of violence, making that extrapolation unfair. But a study of camps for displaced people within Darfur, published last October in the Lancet, a medical journal, found that more than 90 per cent of fugitives had fled their villages because of violent attacks, making the extrapolation appear justified. What of nonviolent deaths? According to the WHO’s misquoted survey, which is based on interviews with nearly 17,000 internally displaced people, the mortality rate from malnutrition and disease comes to 2.1 per 10,000 people per day. Again, extrapolating for all displaced people, Mr. Hagan estimates that 250,000 people have died from malnutrition and disease since the conflict began, so that the total of violent and nonviolent deaths comes to 390,000.

Mr Hagan suggests that this number is conservative, because it assumes that only displaced people are at risk. Many people who remain in their villages have been exposed to violence and food shortages.

Mr Hagan’s estimate is similar to that of Eric Reeves, an independent Sudan watcher, whose reading of the available surveys is that 380,000 people have died so far. Both Mr. Hagan and Mr. Reeves say that civilians continue to die at a rate of 15,000 per month in Darfur. —The Washington Post