It is ‘nine-eleven’ once again! A day pregnant with memories! Memories of violence and suffering; of hate and division. On the other hand, the day is also one of promise –of truth and non-violence; of justice and peace; of hope, for new beginnings, a new dawn! Our world today, is gripped with hate and violence; wars and conflicts; discrimination and division; prejudice and racism; corruption and communalism! One sees and witnesses this everywhere!

In neighbouring Nepal for one, it is a youth uprising against a corrupt regime; reminiscent of what happened in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh not too long ago! A warning for the corrupt and communal regime in India!

The plight of the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, continues for almost a year now. Despite condemnation from most parts of the world, the Israeli regime has not stopped its brutal, violent, inhuman attacks on a beleaguered and starving people; the Israeli Government, even bombed Qatar yesterday.

Violence from Ukraine to Manipur continues unabated. The military-industrial complex is having a hay-day profiteering on the blood of innocent victims. All this and more, happening today, on ‘nine-eleven!’

There are memories of ‘nine-eleven’, today!

On this day, in 1906, Mahatma Gandhi launched his non-violent resistance campaign at a historic mass meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was the birth of a new movement ‘Satyagraha’ – the relentless pursuit of truth and justice.  Gandhi believed that they were non-negotiables; two-sides of a coin. More than three thousand Indians (both Hindus and Muslims) and others, gathered to support the beginning of civil obedience. Later with ‘Ahimsa’ (non-violence), ‘Satyagraha’ would ultimately become Gandhi’s twin-doctrine in belief and in practise. He used it effectively in his struggle against British colonial rule in India. Several world civil rights leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, later embraced this twin doctrine.

Sadly, we still do not learn from the past; racism, xenophobia, jingoism, exclusiveness, pseudo-nationalism, discrimination and divisiveness seem to have a stranglehold on nations and peoples across the globe. The emergence of the ‘extreme-right’ ideology wedded to fascism and fundamentalism is a growing cause of concern. Some want to ‘build walls and fences’ to keep people out. ‘Satyagraha’ was a movement to make people realise that all humans have dignity and are created equal in the image and likeness of God! Our responsibility is to help build bridges and not walls!

There are memories of ‘nine-eleven’, today! In 1893, on this day, at the very first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Swami Vivekananda gave a powerful and passionate speech. He made a fervent plea to end every form of sectarianism, bigotry, fanaticism and violence from this earth, by fostering the values enshrined in every religion. He spoke emphatically, saying, “I fervently hope that the bell which tolled this morning in honour of this convention, may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons, wending their way to the same goal”. Ironically enough, his clarion call does not seem to evoke any positive response from ‘hindutva’ fundamentalists today. They continue with their fascist and fanatic agenda, demonizing and attacking the minorities (particularly Muslims, Christians and Sikhs) of the country, in a very meticulous manner. 

There are memories of ‘nine-eleven’, today! What happened in the United States on this day in 2001, will always be etched in human memory!  Any and every form of violence, is non-acceptable and needs to be strongly condemned. No violent act can be justified, whatever the provocation! That unprecedented violence in the US is remembered and defined today by a date “9/11.” The very utterance of it evokes all kinds of emotions: from undiluted hatred to a feeling of utter helplessness, in the face of rabid terror; from inconsolable grief at the loss of a loved one to heated debates on imponderables. A visit to ‘ground zero’ brings back painful memories of the almost three thousand lives, which were lost in just one place. One is also reminded of the millions of people who suffer every day in Palestine and Yemen, Syria and Iraq, DR Congo and Sudan, Myanmar and Afghanistan, Venezuela and El Salvador and so many other parts of the world. The world should also never forget the terror attacks that were unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam and Cambodia, Iraq and Iran and other parts of the world! We need to stop all war and violence just now; we must close down the military-industrial complex and all nations need to de-nuclearize immediately!  Do we, as citizens of the world who genuinely desire sustainable peace, have the courage to say ‘never again’ this 9/11?

There are memories of ‘nine-eleven’, today! The great Gandhian, Vinoba Bhave, was born on this day in 1895! He is widely regarded as the spiritual successor of Mahatma Gandhi; a strong advocate for nonviolence and human rights. He initiated the ‘Bhoodan Movement’, a nonviolent land gift campaign to redistribute land to the poor. He translated the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ into the Marathi language. He is regarded as the National Teacher of India. He died in November 1982 and was posthumously awarded the ‘Bharat Ratna’.

Swami Agnivesh, the well-known social reformer died on this day in 2020. He was known for his work against bonded labour through the ‘Bonded Labour Liberation Front’, which he founded in 1981.He was also a founder of the World Council of Arya Samaj. He championed freedom of religion and the rights of workers. He was an unwavering voice for the excluded and the exploited and for the victims of injustice! If he was alive today, he would have taken on the Rajasthan Government on their draconian anti-conversion law and also the Gujarat Government for increasing the working hours of factory workers to 12 hours a day. Both laws were passed yesterday.

Significantly, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, also died on this day in 1948. He was a barrister and politician. He served as the leader of the All-India Muslim League from 1913, until the inception of Pakistan on 14 August 1947.

There are memories of ‘nine-eleven’, today! So much happening all over. We are in the midst of the ‘Season of Creation’ – yet parts of Punjab and Pakistan have been devastated by floods. Recent earthquakes in Afghanistan and Greece taking a toll on lives and livelihood, mean nothing to many, the rich and the powerful continue to destroy mother earth.  A terrible reality grips the lives and destinies of many people because of incompetent, autocratic, biased, violent and insensitive leaders everywhere. Marketing and manipulations greatly contribute to the fact that they are in power. These people use every trick in the book to keep people divided. Today (9/11) is surely about commemorations: the sad, tragic ones: a day of mourning! Nevertheless, it is also about new beginnings: of healing, building bridges, hope and resilience. Becoming pilgrims of hope!

As if on cue, the Catholic Liturgy of today provides us with a direction. In his letter to the Colossians St. Paul writes, “put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.”  In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus exhorts us, “to you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” Are we listening? Will we act? Memories of ‘nine-eleven’ today, must help us to do so!

(The author is a human rights, reconciliation and peace activist/writer)

Related:

Sorry, Stan!

Fifty years later..another Emergency rules

The temporariness and unpredictability of life

The post Memories of ‘Nine Eleven’ today appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A section of the dominant media and many political commentators present all these acts as resulting from a common thread—boundary-less religious extremism related to Islam. However, this position ignores the deeper dynamics of these painful acts. Nothing can be further from the truth. While many terror acts and groups have in common an Islamic identity, the underlying reasons for terrorism are highly varied. The birth of Hamas lies in the injustices heaped upon Palestinians and the total violation of United Nations resolutions by Israel time and again. The issue of Kashmir has another political dynamic altogether. Al Qaeda and ISIS are products of United States-sponsored training camps in Pakistan. Therefore, rather than roots in Islam, the origins of terror acts lie in deeper political issues.

One major cause of acts of terrorism is the policies pursued by global superpowers trying to control oil wealth. The imperialists and their allies have their eyes fixed on appropriating global oil resources. In recent years, a central phenomenon that spurred the rise of terrorist groups has been the United States cultivating fundamentalist Islamist groups through the CIA in client states such as Pakistan.

The United States’ goal to dominate West Asia due to its “oil hunger” has been brought out very well by many commentators. Their research based on the CIA’s own documents has shown how the CIA funded the training of the Mujahideen, ultimately leading to the formation of Al Qaeda and later ISIS.

In his book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (Harmony, 2003), Mahmood Mamdani writes that funding these outfits cost around $8,000 million and 7,000 tons of armaments. On 19 May 2009, then-United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that her country “came in in the ’80s and helped build up the Mujahideen to take on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan….The Soviet Union fell in 1989, and we basically said, thank you very much…”

Many commentators and the mainstream media deliberately underplay how the United States funded madrasas in Pakistan to train Al Qaeda and its clones, who later became Frankenstein monsters for the country. What is also underplayed is how these terrorist outfits have hurt Muslims around the world.

The Kashmir imbroglio has different dynamics. When the autonomy promised to Kashmir in Article 370 was undermined in the 1950s and 1960s, the disgruntled youth resorted to violent means instigated by Pakistan’s ISI, which had the backing of the United States. This situation worsened after the entry of Al Qaeda clones in the 1990s, and the resistance in Kashmir, based on Kashmiriyat, or the synthesis of the region’s Buddhist, Vedantic and Sufi traditions, became a communal issue, and Kashmiri Pandits were targeted as a result. To restate: this terrorism had regional and local political undercurrents and expressed itself in the language of religion.

Hamas has a different mechanism as far as its roots and origins are concerned. The Zionists initially declared an intention to settle in Palestine but began to appropriate the land. Further, they blocked any democratic expressions of resistance of Palestinians. It kept expanding the areas under occupation to the extent that, through two major expansions, its existing hyper-representation in the land (55% of land for 30% Jews) expanded the occupation to nearly 90% of Palestine.

Zionists are occupiers who constantly try to extend their hold over the Palestinian lands. They resort to ancient holy books to claim that Palestine is their land and they are its chosen people. Their expansionism has reduced the Gaza Strip to an “open prison” and forced the West Bank Arabs to live with tremendous hardships.

These three phenomena—Palestine, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban—are propagated as being due to Islamic terrorism. Nothing could be more myopic than this deliberate propaganda about ‘Islamic terrorism’ that the United States media has expounded in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. This propaganda allowed the United States to invade Afghanistan, where it killed 60,000 people. Its oil hunger led it to attack Iraq on the pretext that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction”, which it did not have. They repeatedly claimed that Iraqis would welcome the invasion of their country and greet the invading army “with flowers and chocolates”. Instead, Iraqis resisted, and the Islamic State was eventually born.

The Mumbai terror attacks were also an outcome of sour Indo-Pak relations. As the army dominated Pakistan was influenced by the United States, it harboured terrorist groups like the Lashkar e Taiba, which the Pakistan Army used to drive a wedge between Pakistan and India. As Pakistan’s civil leadership initiated some peace manoeuvres, the generals, uncomfortable with peace efforts, would unleash trouble—as when Pervez Musharraf occupied Kargil and later came the 26/11 attack.

The 26/11 attack also led to the murder of Karkare, who was investigating terrorism cases from Malegaon to the Samjhauta Express, in which the likes of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Swami Aseemanand, and Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit were arrested. Sadhvi is still on bail in the Malegaon blast case and once said she had given a “shraap” or curse to Karkare.

While remembering the 26/11 tragedy of Mumbai and the killing of ordinary innocents and police personnel, it is crucial to distinguish cause from effect. To assign the cause as religion alone is  off the mark. To club all these geopolitical developments as ‘boundary-less religious extremism’ that is Islamic in nature serves the goals of imperialist nations and their allies who have wrought havoc in West Asia, particularly by training Al Qaeda.

The media must go deeper into these developments instead of taking recourse to propaganda or easy ‘answers’ in blaming Muslims and Islam. Terrorism is not a religious but a political phenomenon with a range of instances from the Irish Republican Army to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and innumerable others.

Related:

Hate watch: “Keep your knives sharp” says terror accused Pragya Thakur

Young Muslim boy in Rajasthan dies by suicide; teachers called him “terrorist”

India should be ashamed for letting down an honest police officer, who exposed Hindutva terror

The post Are the roots of terrorism in religion or politics? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
It is 9/11 today! Perhaps, there is no other day in recent memory, that has been so over-defined, by a date. The very mention of it evokes all kinds of emotions, from undiluted hatred to a feeling of utter helplessness, in the face of rabid terror; from inconsolable grief at the loss of a loved one to heated debates on imponderables. Yes, ‘nine eleven 2001’, will forever be etched in  human memory, even as the picture of clouds of fire spewing from the Twin Towers in New York, involuntarily take a prime- time seat in our sub-consciousness.

It is 9/11 today! As we revisit the year 1906, we are made aware that it saw the unfolding of another historic event! In a mass meeting in Johannesburg South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi kick-started his non-violent resistance campaign ‘Satyagraha’, the relentless pursuit of truth and justice. More than three thousand Indians (both Hindus and Muslims) and others, gathered to support this very significant dimension of civil obedience. ‘Satyagraha’ would ultimately become with ‘Ahimsa’ (non-violence) Gandhi’s twin-doctrine in belief and practise. He used it effectively in his struggle against British colonial rule in India. Over the years, several Civil Rights Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela have espoused Gandhi’s twin doctrine
 
It is 9/11 today! In Chicago in 1893, exactly 125 years ago, at the very first World Parliament of Religions, Swami Vivekananda gave an impassioned speech, to end sectarianism, bigotry, fanaticism and violence from this earth by fostering the values enshrined in every religion. He emphatically said, “I fervently hope that the bell which tolled this morning in honour of this convention, may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons, wending their way to the same goal”.

It is 9/11 today! Many unanswered questions and serious issues emerge, that we need to come to grips with! Among them: are nations serious in implementing the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which is meant to mitigate global warming? Do we have the political will to address homegrown terror, supported by Governments of the day, in several countries across the globe? Do we have the courage to address bigotry and violence and deal systemically with the dastardly murders of Gauri Lankesh, Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and other journalists, human rights defenders, RTI activists, intellectual and others who have dared to take on the fascist forces in India? Can we, like Mahatma Gandhi objectively and strongly expose the lies, half-truths, myths, ‘fekuisms’ and false promises that we are ‘pulverised’ with day-in and day out?
 
It is 9/11 today!  Many lessons to be learnt of today’s situation and from 2001, 1906 and 1893!Much to reflect upon; lots more to pray about; but above all, greater determination to act now – before the reality starts becoming even worse!

*(Fr. Cedric Prakash sj is a human rights activist. Contact: cedricprakash@gmail.com)

The post The 9/11 of 2017 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Thousands of people have visited the memorial site, conspiracy theories continue to proliferate and for many the sense of loss is still visceral. After 15 years, the terrorist attack that destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York continues to capture the imagination.

Over these 15 years, a diverse range of artistic and cultural responses have attempted to understand and give meaning to the events now known as 9/11. One medium that has had substantial critical attention has been the novel. And we can learn much from this attention. The ways in which these novels were anticipated, criticised and frequently linked to debates about the wider role of fiction in society evoke compelling questions about how we now see the attacks.

In some ways, the high profile critical debates that surrounded these novels and placed so much importance on them, actually reinforced George W Bush’s assertion that “on September 11 night fell on a new world”. And in doing so, some argue that they undercut the complex prehistories and aftermaths of 9/11, giving it inflated importance in the world narrative.

Writing terror

Even before there were such novels, the apparent need for literary interpretations of the attacks reflected just how incomprehensible they felt for many. And perhaps because 9/11 was such a visual spectacle, newspapers and magazines sought literary authors – experts at exploring the human condition through the written word – to interpret or narrate the trauma.

Early essays by Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis and John Updike spoke to other popular non-fiction responses, like the New York Times’ sombre Portraits of Grief profiles that appeared throughout the autumn of 2001. These literary authors also reflected on the difficulty of writing fiction about “unimaginable” events. This, of course, stoked anticipation for the inevitable 9/11 fiction to come: how would authors attempt to represent the “incomprehensible”?

Twin tower to twin couple.

When novels from DeLillo, Claire Messud, Jay McInerney and Ken Kalfus arrived, critics were quick to note striking similarities. These novels, all of which appeared between 2006 and 2007, focused on the ways privileged white New Yorkers dealt with trauma. And all of them did so through marriage or relationship narratives.

Discussing these novels in an article titled The End of Innocence, Pankaj Mishra asked with incredulity: “Are we meant to think of marital discord as a metaphor for post-9/11 America?” For Mishra, it was particularly galling that DeLillo – who has been so insightful about terrorism – was “retreating like McInerney and Kalfus into the domestic”.

Scholarly articles by Richard Gray and Michael Rothberg followed, similarly criticising those same novels for their “failure” to engage with otherness and the geopolitics of 9/11. Gray was trenchant: “The crisis is in every sense of the word, domesticated.”

Mishra, Gray and Rothberg all felt that fiction should be doing things that the mainstream media and US government responses were not – offering nuanced articulations of the geopolitics of the war on terror and the rise of fear and xenophobia in the US and the West.

But this position was challenged by scholars such as John Duvall and Robert P Marzec, who pointed to canonical novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), which registered the traumas of World War I precisely in this way – through domestic settings. Perhaps the strongest response came from Catherine Morley, who criticised the Mishra, Rothberg and Gray perspective that “fiction is no more than a political tool”.

Clearly, the debate about the 9/11 novel evoked larger ideas about what fiction is for and how it should deal with crisis or catastrophe in the 21st century.

A defining moment?

However polarised the debate became, both sides ascribed great importance to the 9/11 novel – and in doing so they also reinforced the idea of 9/11 as a defining moment. In 2008, this was pointed out by Zadie Smith. Discussing a new novel by Joseph O’Neill, Smith sardonically criticised the disproportionate interest in the 9/11 novel:

It’s the post–September 11 novel we hoped for. (Were there calls, in 1915, for the Lusitania novel? In 1985, was the Bhopal novel keenly anticipated?) It’s as if, by an act of collective prayer, we have willed it into existence.

The reference here to the Lusitania sinking and the Bhopal chemical disaster in India, which took the lives of many more people than 9/11 did, is pointed. Smith is clearly voicing a suspicion that the intense attention attached to the 9/11 novel is linked to an American exceptionalism that shrouds other moments, events and perspectives in contemporary history.

Recent books like Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, O’Neill’s Netherland and Amy Waldman’s The Submission have answered the calls of Mishra, Gray and Rothberg in their more politically engaged or international narratives.

In many ways, they have also retained aspects of the earlier texts and we can certainly now see the 9/11 novel as a genre. Marriages and relationships are at the centre of all of these novels and they also continue to explore the way privileged Americans absorb and respond to trauma.

Perhaps the book that most clearly aligns with Zadie Smith’s position, though, is Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Bleeding Edge goes the furthest in challenging the singular importance attached to 9/11 in its intertwined historical narrative, weaving in the significance of the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and a history of the internet’s transition from an anarchic to a completely corporate space.

It is certainly the case that the reception and debates around the 9/11 novel have been as informative as the novels themselves. The genre continues to provide food for thought on how we remember the attacks.

(Arin Keeble is Lecturer in English Literature, Nottingham Trent University)

This article was first published on The Conversation

The post Why the 9/11 Novel has been such a Contested and Troubled Genre appeared first on SabrangIndia.

For much of the world, it was the indescribable savagery of seeing jet-loads of innocent human beings piloted into buildings filled with other innocent human beings. It was the sheer horror of watching people jump from the 80th floor of the collapsing World Trade Centre rather than be consumed by the inferno inside. Yes, it is true that many Muslims also saw it exactly this way, and felt the searing agony no less sharply. The heads of state of Muslim countries, Saddam Hussein excepted, condemned the attacks. Leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, Britain, Europe, and Australia have made impassioned denunciations and pleaded for the need to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and extremists.
 

But the pretence that reality goes no further must be abandoned because this merely obfuscates facts and slows down the search for solutions. One would like to dismiss televised images showing Palestinian expressions of joy as unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass political immaturity of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking.
 

Similarly, Pakistan Television, operating under strict control of the government, is attempting to portray a nation united in condemnation of the attack. Here too, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students at my university here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in the streets, and from the Urdu press. A friend tells me that crowds gathered around public TV sets at Islamabad airport had cheered as the WTC came crashing down. It makes one feel sick from inside.
 

A bizarre new world awaits us, where old rules of social and political behaviour have broken down and new ones are yet to be defined. Catapulted into a situation of darkness and horror by the extraordinary force of events, as rational human beings we must urgently formulate a response that is moral, and not based upon considerations of power and practicality. This requires beginning with a clearly defined moral supposition — the fundamental equality of all human beings. It also requires that we must proceed according to a definite sequence of steps, the order of which is not interchangeable.
 

Before all else, Black Tuesday’s mass murder must be condemned in the harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it, and without regard for the national identity of the victims or the perpetrators. The demented, suicidal, fury of the attackers led to heinous acts of indiscriminate and wholesale murder that have changed the world for the worse. A moral position must begin with unequivocal condemnation, the absence of which could eliminate even the language by which people can communicate.
 

Analysis comes second, but it is just as essential. No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to be found. Therefore, surely the attackers, and their supporters, who were all presumably born normal, were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that?

Before all else, Black Tuesday’s mass murder must be condemned in the harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it.

Tragically, CNN and the US media have so far made little attempt to understand this affliction. The cost for this omission, if it is to stay this way, cannot be anything but terrible. What we have seen is probably the first of similar tragedies that may come to define the 21st century as the century of terror. There is much claptrap about "fighting terrorism" and billions are likely to be poured into surveillance, fortifications, and emergency plans, not to mention the ridiculous idea of missile defence systems.
 

But, as a handful of suicide bombers armed with no more than knives and box–cutters have shown with such devastating effectiveness, all this means precisely nothing. Modern nations are far too vulnerable to be protected — a suitcase nuclear device could flatten not just a building or two, but all of Manhattan. Therefore, the simple logic of survival says that the chances of survival are best if one goes to the roots of terror.
 

Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere. Instead, their breeding grounds are in refugee camps and in other rubbish dumps of humanity, abandoned by civilization and left to rot. A global superpower, indifferent to their plight, and manifestly on the side of their tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for its policies. In supreme arrogance, indifferent to world opinion, the US openly sanctions daily dispossession and torture of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. The deafening silence over the massacres in Qana, Sabra, and Shatila refugee camps, and the video-gamed slaughter by the Pentagon of 70,000 people in Iraq, has brought out the worst that humans are capable of. In the words of Robert Fisk, "those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people".
 

It is stupid and cruel to derive satisfaction from such revenge, or from the indisputable fact that Osama and his kind are the blowback of the CIA’s misadventures in Afghanistan. Instead, the real question is: where do we, the inhabitants of this planet, go from here? What is the lesson to be learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre?
 

If the lesson is that America needs to assert its military might, then the future will be as grim as can be. Indeed, secretary Colin Powell has promised "more than a single reprisal raid". But against whom? And to what end? No one doubts that it is ridiculously easy for the US to unleash carnage. But the bodies of a few thousand dead Afghans will not bring peace, or reduce by one bit the chances of a still worse terrorist attack.
 

This is not an argument for inaction: Osama and his gang, as well as other such gangs, if they can be found, must be brought to justice. But indiscriminate slaughter can do nothing except add fuel to existing hatreds. Today, the US is the victim but the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan will cause it to squander the huge swell of sympathy in its favour the world over. Instead, it will create nothing but revulsion and promote never–ending tit–for–tat killings.
 

Ultimately, the security of the United States lies in its re-engaging with the people of the world, especially with those that it has grievously harmed. As a great country, possessing an admirable constitution that protects the life and liberty of its citizens, it must extend its definition of humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It must respect international treaties such as those on greenhouse gases and biological weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War by pushing through NMD, pay its UN dues, and cease the aggrandizement of wealth in the name of globalisation.
 

But it is not only the US that needs to learn new modes of behaviour. There are important lessons for Muslims too, particularly those living in the US, Canada, and Europe. Last year I heard the arch–conservative head of Pakistan’s Jamaat–i–Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, begin his lecture before an American audience in Washington with high praise for a "pluralist society where I can wear the clothes I like, pray at a mosque, and preach my religion". Certainly, such freedoms do not exist for religious minorities in Pakistan, or in most Muslim countries.
 

One hopes that the misplaced anger against innocent Muslims dissipates soon and such freedoms are not curtailed significantly. Nevertheless, there is a serious question as to whether this pluralism can persist forever, and if it does not, whose responsibility it will be. The problem is that immigrant Muslim communities have, by and large, chosen isolation over integration. In the long run this is a fundamentally unhealthy situation because it creates suspicion and friction, and makes living together ever so much harder. It also raises serious ethical questions about drawing upon the resources of what is perceived to be another society, for which one has hostile feelings.
 

This is not an argument for doing away with one’s Muslim identity. But, without closer interaction with the mainstream, pluralism will be threatened. Above all, survival of the community depends upon strongly emphasizing the difference between extremists and ordinary Muslims, and on purging from within jihadist elements committed to violence. Any member of the Muslim community who thinks that ordinary people in the US are fair game because of bad US government policies has no business being there.
 

To echo George W. Bush, "let there be no mistake". But here the mistake will be to let the heart rule the head in the aftermath of utter horror, to bomb a helpless Afghan people into an even earlier period of the Stone Age, or to take similar actions that originate from the spine. Instead, in deference to a billion years of patient evolution, we need to hand over charge to the cerebellum. Else, survival of this particular species is far from guaranteed.

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 1

The post Islam : Moment of truth appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Illustration: Amili Setalvad
 
The magnitude of the terrorist attack on America has forced Muslims to take a critical look at themselves. Why have we repeatedly turned a blind eye to the evil within our societies? Why have we allowed the sacred terms of Islam, such as fatwa and jihad, to be hijacked by obscurantist, fanatic extremists?
 

Muslims are quick to note the double standards of America — its support for despotic regimes, its partiality towards Israel, and the covert operations that have undermined democratic movements in the Muslim world. But we seldom question our own double standards. For example, Muslims are proud that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the West. Evangelical Muslims, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, happily spread their constricted interpretations of Islam. But Christian missionaries in Muslim countries are another matter. They have to be banned or imprisoned. Those who burn effigies of President Bush will be first in the queue for an American visa.
 

The psychotic young men, members of such extremist organisations as Al-Muhajiroun and ‘Supporters of Sharia’, shouting fascist obscenities outside the Pakistan embassy, are enjoying the fruits of Western freedom of expression. Their declared aim is to establish ‘Islamic states’. But in any self–proclaimed Islamic state, they would be ruthlessly silenced.
 

This is not the first time concerned Muslims have raised such questions. But we have been forced to ignore them for two main reasons. In a world where it is always open season for prejudice and discrimination against Muslims and Islam, our main task has seemed to be to defend Islam.
 

The other reason concerns ummah, the global Muslim community. We have to highlight, the argument goes, the despair and suffering of the Muslim people — their poverty and plight as refugees and the horror of war–torn societies.
 

So, all good and concerned Muslims are implicated in the unchecked rise of fanaticism in Muslim societies. We have given free reign to fascism within our midst, and failed to denounce fanatics who distort the most sacred concepts of our faith. We have been silent as they proclaim themselves martyrs, mangling beyond recognition the most sacred meaning of what it is to be a Muslim.
 

But the events of September 11 have freed us from any further obligation to this misapplied conscience. The insistence by the Muslim Council of Britain that the Islamic cause is best served by the Taliban handing over Osama bin Laden, is indicative of this shift.
 

The devotion with which so many Muslims, young and old, in Europe and America, are organising meetings and conferences to discuss how to unleash the best intentions, the essential values of Islam, from the rhetoric of jihad, hatred and insularity, is another.
 

But we have to go further. Muslims are in the best position to take the lead in the common cause against terrorism. The terrorists are among us, the Muslim communities of the world. They are part of our body politic. And it is our duty to stand up against them.

The psychotic young men, members of such extremist organisations as Al-Muhajiroun and ‘Supporters of Sharia’, shouting fascist obscenities outside the Pakistan embassy, are enjoying the fruits of Western freedom of expression. Their declared aim is to establish ‘Islamic states’.

We must also reclaim a more balanced view of Islamic terms like fatwa. A fatwa is simply a legal opinion based on religious reasoning. It is the opinion of one individual and is binding on only the person who gives it. But, since the Rushdie affair, it has come to be associated in the West solely with a death sentence. Now that Islam has become beset with the fatwa culture, it becomes necessary for moderate voices to issue their own fatwas.
 

So, let me take the first step. To Muslims everywhere I issue this fatwa: any Muslim involved in the planning, financing, training, recruiting, support or harbouring of those who commit acts of indiscriminate violence against persons or the apparatus or infrastructure of states is guilty of terror and no part of the ummah. It is the duty of every Muslim to spare no effort in hunting down, apprehending and bringing such criminals to justice.
 

If you see something reprehensible, said the Prophet Muhammad, then change it with your hand; if you are not capable of that then use your tongue (speak out against it); and if you are not capable of that then detest it in your heart.
 

The silent Muslim majority must now become vocal. The rest of the world could help by adopting a more balanced tone. The rhetoric that paints America as a personification of innocence and goodness, a god–like power that can do no wrong, not only undermines the new shift but threatens to foreclose all our futures. 

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 2

The post My fatwa on the fanatics appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Tuesday’s terrorist attacks have saddened and maddened millions — and raised questions for many about Islam. Speculation abounds that the hijackers were inspired by terrorists like Osama bin Laden, who teach that violent acts can pave the way to paradise. But what does Islam really say about such matters? About jihad and martyrdom?

We asked Hamza Yusuf, an Islamic scholar in the East Bay, who said the attackers were "enemies of Islam.’’ Not martyrs, but "mass murderers, pure and simple.’’

Yusuf, whose articles about Islam are published internationally, talked about the attacks, the hysteria that he fears could grip the United States, and the role that Muslims and others must play in opposing violence. "We’ve got to get to some deeper core values that are commonly shared," he said.

Why would anyone do what the hijackers did?

Religious zealots of any creed are defeated people who lash out in desperation, and they often do horrific things. And if these people indeed are Arabs, Muslims, they’re obviously very sick people and I can’t even look at it in religious terms. It’s politics, tragic politics. There’s no Islamic justification for any of it. It’s like some misguided Irish using Catholicism as an excuse for blowing up English people.

They’re not martyrs, it’s as simple as that.

Because?

You can’t kill innocent people. There’s no Islamic declaration of war against the United States. I think every Muslim country except Afghanistan has an embassy in this country. And in Islam, a country where you have embassies is not considered a belligerent country.

In Islam, the only wars that are permitted are between armies and they should engage on battlefields and engage nobly. The Prophet Muhammad said, "Do not kill women or children or non–combatants and do not kill old people or religious people," and he mentioned priests, nuns and rabbis. And he said, "Do not cut down fruit–bearing trees and do not poison the wells of your enemies." The Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, say that no one can punish with fire except the Lord of fire. It’s prohibited to burn anyone in Islam as a punishment. No one can grant these attackers any legitimacy. It was evil.

What role should American Muslims have in opposing this brand of violent Islam?

I think that the Muslims — and I really feel this strongly — have to reject the discourse of anger. Because there is a lot of anger in the Muslim communities around the world about the oppressive conditions that many Muslims find themselves in. But we have to reject the discourse of anger and we have to move to a higher moral ground, recognizing that the desire to blame others leads to anger and eventually to wrath, neither of which are rungs on a spiritual ladder to God. It’s times like these that we really need to become introspective.

The fact that there are any Muslims — no matter how statistically insignificant their numbers — who consider these acts to be religious acts is in and of itself shocking. And therefore we as Muslims have to ask the question, "How is it that our religious leadership has failed to reach these people with the true message of Islam?" Because the acts of these criminals have indicted an entire religion in the hearts and minds of millions. Ultimately, this is a result of the bankruptcy of these type of people who claim to be adherents to the Islamic religion. These people are so bankrupt that all they have to offer is destruction.

If there are any martyrs in this affair it would certainly be those brave firefighters and police that went in there to save human lives and in that process lost their own.

Why do some people regard the hijackers as martyrs?

That’s an abomination. These are mass murderers, pure and simple. It’s like Christians in this country who blow up abortion clinics or kill abortion doctors. I don’t think anyone in the Christian community, except a very extreme fringe, would condone that as an acceptable Christian response. In the same way, there’s no Muslim who understands his religion at all who would condone this. One of the worst crimes in Islam is brigandry — highway robbery, or today we’d say armed robbery — because it disrupts the sense of well-being and security among civilians.

Suicide bombers have cited a Qoranic verse that says, "Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord."

That is meant for people who are legitimately defending the lands of Islam or fighting under legitimate state authority against a tyrannical leader. There is no vigilantism in Islam. Muslims believe in the authority of government.

Imam Malik, an early Islamic legal authority, said that 60 years of oppression under an unjust ruler is better than one hour of anarchy.

Then why is there such strong support in parts of the world for the attacks?

Because we’re dealing in an age of ignorance and an age of anomie, the loss of social order. And people are very confused and they’re impoverished. What Americans are feeling now, this has been business as usual for Lebanese people, Palestinian people, Bosnian people.

What about Israeli people?

Certainly the fear element is there for Israeli people — that’s true, and the terror that they’ve felt. And there are still a lot of Jewish people alive who remember the fear and terror of what happened in Europe, so that’s not far from people’s memories.

It seems at some point, the cycles of violence have to stop. It’s a type of insanity, especially when we’re dealing with nuclear power. People are saying that this was an attack on civilization and that is exactly the point. And I think the question we all have to ask is whether indiscriminate retaliation is going to help preserve civilization.

The perpetrators of this and, really, all acts of terror are people who hate too much. There’s a verse in the Koran that says do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Being just is closer to piety. The evil of wrath is that justice and mercy are lost.

How do you explain Palestinians and others celebrating the attacks in the streets?

When you see ignorant people in the streets, rejoicing — the Prophet condemned it. It’s rejoicing at the calamities of your enemies, and Islam prohibits that. They do have a lot of anger toward America, because America produces much of Israel’s military hardware and so many American tax dollars go to support Israel. You have a lot of animosity in the Arab world. But the vast majority of Arabs are horrified by what’s happened. There’s animosity in the Muslim world toward American foreign policy. This is the unfortunate price of power and its exercise in the world, that you incur the resentment and animosity of a lot of people. But the majority of Muslims who I know don’t have anger toward individuals or the American people.

The concept of jihad has been widely used to justify violence.

Jihad means struggle. The Prophet said the greatest jihad is the struggle of a man against his own evil influences. It also refers to what Christians call a "just war," which is fought against tyranny or oppression — but under a legitimate state authority.

What is the Arabic word for martyr?

Shaheed. It means witness. The martyr is the one who witnesses the truth and gives his life for it. There are people in this country like Martin Luther King who would be considered a martyr for his cause. Also, if your home, your family, your property or your land or religion is threatened, then you may defend it with your life. That person is a martyr. But so is anybody who dies of terminal illness; it’s a martyr’s death. Because it’s such a purification that whatever wrongs they once did, they’re now in a state of purity.

And the greatest martyr in the eyes of God is the one who stands in the presence of a tyrant and speaks the truth and is killed for it. He is martyred for his tongue.

What does Islam say about suicide?

Suicide is haraam in Islam. It’s prohibited, like a mortal sin. And murder is haram. And to kill civilians is murder.

What is a martyr’s reward?

The Prophet said that a martyr who dies doesn’t have a reckoning on the Day of Judgment. It’s an act through which he is forgiven. But the Prophet also said that there are people who kill in the name of Islam and go to hell. And when he was asked why, he said, "Because they weren’t fighting truly for the sake of God."

If there are any martyrs in this affair it would certainly be those brave firefighters and police that went in there to save human lives and in that process lost their own. 

(Imam Hamza’s interview by the San Jose Mercury News was posted on the latter’s website, http://ww.mercurycenter.com/local/center/isl0916.htm on Sept. 15, 2001)

(Hamza Yusuf, 42, started life as Mark Hanson, son of two US academics, only converting at 17. Thirty years ago, he seemed destined not for Islamic scholarship, but for the Greek Orthodox priesthood. Then, a near-death experience in a car accident and reading the Koran diverted him towards Mecca).

Islam and the enlightenment tradition

"I came out of the enlightenment tradition and I still believe in the best of the enlightenment tradition and I think that Islam confirms and enhances
that tradition and really doesn’t detract from it".

"In some ways the Muslim world is undergoing a protestant reformation right now and unfortunately because people don’t know about colonialism, about the shutting down of traditional Muslim universities all over the Muslim world with rare exception, and the fact that Islam has very few scholars at very high levels. Most of the brilliant students in the Middle East now go into medicine and engineering, they go into other things, they don’t go into philosophy. One of the interesting things you should think about, almost every one of these terrorists that are identified — and I will guarantee you that you will not find amongst them anyone who did his degree in philosophy, in literature, in the humanities, in theology — you’ll find that almost all are technically trained. And one of the tragedies in the Muslim world is that technical schools now, from an early age they identify students that are very brilliant in mathematics and they direct them towards only studying the physical sciences to the neglect of what makes us human, which is humanity, is poetry, it’s literature, as well as philosophy and theology, so these things are absent now".

(From transcript of CBC interview with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf aired on September 23, 2001)

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 3

The post ‘Muslims have to reject the discourse of anger’ — Hamza Yusuf appeared first on SabrangIndia.

( Hamza Yusuf, during his interview to the Guardian, London):

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 4

The post ‘If you hate the West, emigrate to a Muslim country’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate
someone recently in formed me that half the terrorist organizations officially listed on some or another "terrorist watch website," were Muslim. Though Islamic law does not countenance terrorism or suicide of any sort, and I know these organizations represent an extreme splinter of an extreme splinter of Islam, I did not find the statistic particularly shocking.
 

Rather, if in the last fifty years world governments like the United States and Britain have somehow convinced themselves that it is morally acceptable to kill, starve, and maim civilians of other countries in order to persuade their governments to do something, it would be surprising if this conviction did not somehow percolate down to the dispossessed, the hopeless, the aggrieved, and the powerless of every religion and ethnic group in the world. It looks as if it has.
 

We Americans are not bombing people, young and old, whose lives, when they survive, are brutally interrupted by the loss of an arm or a leg, or a father, or a son, or a mother, or a house that the family saved for years to build. We are too civilized for that. Rather, we bomb Iraq. We bomb Sudan. We bomb Southern Lebanon. We bomb "Palestinian positions." We don’t cause the tens of thousands of birth defective and mentally retarded babies with the chemical mayhem and ten–year famine we are currently paying for in Iraq: We are "imposing sanctions."

We don’t kill actual human beings with all the explosives we are dumping on these countries. We are killing generic Iraqis, generic Sudanis, generic Palestinians. It sounds like we may now have to kill some generic Afghanis. And now the shock of all shocks, the devastation of all devastations: some crazy people this past month decided to kill a lot of generic Americans. What on earth made them think it was morally acceptable to kill people who hadn’t committed any crime, who were not combatants, and were not killed in self–defence?

The answer, I apprehend, is not to be found in Islam, or in any religion or morality, but in the fact that there are fashions in atrocities and in the rhetoric used to dress them up. Unfortunately these begin to look increasingly like our own fashions and sound increasingly like our own rhetoric, reheated and served up to us. The terrorists themselves, in their own minds, were doubtless not killing secretaries, janitors, and firemen. That would be too obscene. Rather, they were "attacking America."

The attack has been condemned, as President Bush has noted, by "Muslim scholars and clerics" across the board, and indeed by all people of decency around the world. I have read Islamic law with scholars, and know that it does not condone either suicide or killing non–combatants. But what to do about the crime itself?

The solution being proposed seems to be a technological one. We will highlight these people on our screens, and press delete. If we cannot find the precise people, we will delete others like them, until everyone else gets the message. We’ve done it lots of times. The problem with this is that it is morally wrong, and will send a clear confirmation — if more is needed beyond the shoot-em-ups abroad of the last decades that show our more or less complete disdain for both non–white human life and international law — that there is no law between us and other nations besides the law of the jungle.

People like these attackers, willing to kill themselves to devastate others, are not ordinary people. They are desperate people. What has made them so is not lunacy, or religion, but the perception that there is no effective legal recourse to stop crimes against the civilian peoples they identify with. Our own and our clients’ killing, mutilating, and starving civilians are termed "strikes," "pre-emptive attacks," "raiding the frontiers," and "sanctions" — because we have a standing army, print our own currency, and have a press establishment and other trappings of modern statehood. Without them, our actions would be pure "terrorism."

“If in the last 50 world governments like the US and Britain have somehow convinced themselves that it is morally acceptable to kill, starve, and maim civilians of other countries in order to persuade their governments to do something, it would be surprising if this conviction did not somehow percolate down to the dispossessed, the hopeless, the aggrieved, and the powerless of every religion and ethnic group in the world. It looks as if it has”.

Two wrongs do not make a right. They only make two wrongs. I think the whole moral discourse has been derailed by our own rhetoric in recent decades. Terrorism must be repudiated by America not only by words but by actions, beginning with its own. As ‘Abd al–Hakim Winter asks, "Are the architects of policy sane in their certainty that America can enrage large numbers of people, but contain that rage forever through satellite technology and intrepid double agents?" I think we have to get back to basics and start acting as if we knew that killing civilians is wrong.

As it is, we seem to have convinced a lot of other people that it is right, among them some of the more extreme elements of the contemporary Wahhabi sect of Muslims, including the members of the Bin Laden network, whom the security agencies seem to be pointing their finger at for this crime. The Wahhabi sect, which has not been around for more than two and a half centuries, has never been part of traditional Sunni Islam, which rejects it and which it rejects.

Orthodox Sunnis, who make up the vast majority of Muslims, are neither Wahhabis nor terrorists, for the traditional law they follow forbids killing civilian non–combatants to make any kind of point, political or otherwise. Those who have travelled through North Africa, Turkey, Egypt, or the Levant know what traditional Muslims are like in their own lands. Travellers find them decent, helpful, and hospitable people, and feel safer in Muslim lands than in many places, such as Central America, for example, or for that matter, Central Park.

On the other hand, there will always be publicists who hate Muslims, and who for ideological or religious reasons want others to do so. Where there is an ill–will, there is a way. A fifth of humanity are Muslims, and if to err is human, we may reasonably expect Muslims to err also, and it is certainly possible to stir up hatred by publicizing bad examples. But if experience is any indication, the only people convinced by media pieces about the inherent fanaticism of Muslims will be those who don’t know any.

Muslims have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to hide, and should simply tell people what their scholars and religious leaders have always said: first, that the Wahhabi sect has nothing to do with orthodox Islam, for its lack of tolerance is a perversion of traditional values; and second, that killing civilians is wrong and immoral.

And we Americans should take the necessary measures to get the ship of state back on a course that is credible, fair, and at bottom at least moral in our dealings with the other peoples of the world. For if our ideas of how to get along with other nations do not exceed the morality of action–thriller destruction movies, we may well get more action than we paid for.

(Excerpted from an article by the writer accessible on www.masud.co.uk/)

Nuh Ha Mim Keller's English translation of ‘Umdat al–Salik [The Reliance of the Traveller] (1250 pp., Sunna Books, 1991) is the first Islamic legal work in a European language to receive the certification of al-Azhar, the Muslim world’s oldest institution of higher learning. He also possesses ijazas or "certificates of authorisation" in Islamic jurisprudence from sheikhs in Syria and Jordan.

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 5

The post Fashions in atrocities appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
The objection to the selective ban on SIMI may be valid. But Muslim religious and political leaders cannot run away from the question why never in the nearly 25-year-old history of SIMI, have they spoken out publicly against an organisation that is a declared enemy of ‘democracy, socialism, nationalism and polytheism’.

Most Muslim religious and political leaders from India have condemned the September 11 terrorist attack on the US as "un–Islamic" but there is a widely held perception among non-Muslims that the public pronouncements notwithstanding, Osama bin Laden is a "hero" for a very large number of Muslims, whether globally or in India. The near universal protest of Muslim religious and political leaders against the September 26 decision of the government of India to ban the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), has, if anything, reinforced that feeling even among many secular non–Muslims.

On the face of it, this seems really unfair to India’s Muslims. For, after all, hasn’t their objection — if SIMI is banned, why not the Bajrang Dal, a Hindutva outfit all too ‘similar’ to the former in its aims, objectives and activity — also been voiced by Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party, communist parties and, lately, even Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party, apart from any number of human rights groups.

But the moulvi sahibs and the siyasi netas among Muslims cannot wish away the problem.

The politicians’ objection to the ban against SIMI has largely to do with politics (both Mulayam and Mayawati have their eyes on Muslim voters in the coming UP elections, just as the BJP–led government’s selective ban on SIMI has more to do with its wanting a communal polarisation on poll eve than with SIMI’s alleged link with international terrorist outfits). Human rights groups protest has primarily to do with their objection, in principle, to the banning of any organisation so long as it does not cross constitutional bounds. Besides, there is the additional and legitimate concern over the implications of this singling out of SIMI (as against a simultaneous ban on the Bajrang Dal) for a religious minority that is already feeling battered and bruised. (See the accompanying piece by Teesta Setalvad).

The objection to the selective ban on SIMI may be valid. But Muslims religious and political leaders cannot run away from the question why never in the nearly 25–year–old history of SIMI, have they spoken out publicly against an organisation that is a declared enemy of ‘democracy, secularism, nationalism and polytheism’.

For at least 10 years now, SIMI has been pasting stickers in large numbers in Muslim shops and homes, a thick red ‘NO’ splashed across the words, DEMOCRACY, NATIONALISM, SECULARISM, POLYTHEISM’. ‘ONLY ALLAH!’ exclaims SIMI’s punch line on the same sticker. The sticker leaves no doubt that for SIMI, any one who subscribes to the principles of democracy, secularism and nationalism, or believes in peaceful co–existence with polytheists, is not a Muslim, a follower of Islam.

You only have to visit SIMI’s website, to be greeted by the following message on its homepage: ‘Jihad our path’, Shahadat our desire.’ This is followed by the stern message for Muslims who are comfortable ‘Living under an un-Islamic order’ and a surah (Al-Nisa: 97) is quoted from the Quran: ‘Such men (read Muslims) will find their abode in Hell. What an evil refuge’.

The commentary on the above surah that follows reads: "Those people who had willingly submitted to living under an un-Islamic order would be called to account by God and would be asked: If a certain territory was under the dominance of rebels against God, so that it had become impossible to follow His Law, why did you continue to live there? Why did you not migrate to a land where it was possible to follow the law of God?"

In other words, an organisation that has had an impressive growth among India’s Muslims (see box) is teaching its youth that any idea of living in peace with Hindus and other non–Muslims in a secular–democratic India (‘un–Islamic order’) is a sure passport to Allah’s hell!

Very many Muslims in India and elsewhere will quote the saying of Prophet Mohammed that the ‘struggle against self for self-improvement’ is the highest form of jihad. But you have to be a fool to imagine that that is what jihad means for SIMI. Bear in mind that for this outfit, Osama bin Laden is "not a terrorist" and Kashmir is not an "integral part of India" and the picture is as clear as should be.

Around December 6, 2000 (the eighth anniversary of the demolition of Babri Masjid), SIMI plastered coloured posters in Muslim pockets throughout the country, praying to Allah to send another Mahmud Ghazni down to India. Whatever historians might think of Ghazni, SIMI is without any shred of doubt praying for a new destroyer of temples to be dropped over India!

While announcing its ban on SIMI, the Union government has claimed, among other things, that SIMI is linked to extremists and terrorists who are enemies of India. Given Hindutva’s dubious agenda, Union home minister LK Advani’s motives in the selective ban on SIMI are understandably suspect. But what about the fact that the Congress governments of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra had asked the Centre to ban SIMI and Bajrang Dal simultaneously?

But Advani’s motives and evidence before the government apart, should anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the origin, worldview and activities of SIMI be in the least surprised if it turns out that SIMI has strong links with Islamic extremists?

Whatever historians might think of Ghazni, SIMI is without any shred of doubt praying for a new destroyer of temples to be dropped over India!

As Sajid Rashid, editor of the Hindi eveninger Hamara Mahanagar published from Mumbai, pointed out in a recent searching and scorching column, SIMI was created by Jamaat–e–Islami (Hind) to carry out its work among students and youth. What does the Jamaat–e–Islami stand for? Sajid Rashid: "the core belief of the organization revolves around the proposition that Muslims should propagate Islam throughout the world and struggle to establish the Kingdom of Allah globally. The Pakistani and the Kashmiri wings of the Jamaat–e–Islami are fully committed to conduct such a jihad to meet their objective".

What about the Indian wing of the Jamaat? "The Jamaat–e–Islami (Hind) is non–committal on the jihad question, and claims to be against violence," writes Rashid. How is it that Jamaat India resembles its Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi counterparts in every respect except on the jihad imperative? One view says that the circumstances of India compel the Jamaat wing here to adopt a different tactical position.

Interestingly, those convinced of the Indian Jamaat’s bonafide distaste for extremist tendencies, point out that it is for this reason that over 10 years ago it snapped its relations with SIMI and created a new outfit – Students of Islamic Organisation (SIO). But the opponents of the Jamaat among Muslims claim ask why the Jamaat is content keeping the SIO as purely a paper organisation and point to the surprisingly cordial and fraternal equation that obtains between the rivals (SIMI and SIO) at the ground level. The Jamaat in Pakistan, as is well known is the ideological parent of all kinds of Islamic terrorist outfits in Pakistan, including the Taliban. The detractors of the Jamaat (Hind) claim that having given birth to SIMI, whose perspectives and programmes increasingly resemble that of Muslim extremist outfits in Pakistan, the public posture of "ideological difference" between the Jamaat and SIMI is merely meant to hoodwink the Indian state and public.

Within India and globally, too, an as yet small group of Muslims have started going backwards tracing the lineage of the Jamaat–e–Islami to the Deoband school (in India) that is rooted in the not more than 250–years–old rigid, and orthodox Wahhabi sect, and forward to claim that today’s ‘Islamic terrorists’ are nothing but the most extreme version of Wahabbism.

Within days of the attack on America, the British Muslim, Hamza Yusuf (see his interview earlier in this issue) had declared, from the lawns of the White House soon after a meeting with President Bush: "Islam was hijacked on that September 11 2001, on that plane as an innocent victim". But, others like the American Muslim Nuh Ha Mim Keller are arguing that in fact Islam got hijacked nearly 250 years ago. To recall Keller’s piece (see earlier in this issue): "Muslims have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to hide, and should simply tell people what their scholars and religious leaders have always said: first, that the Wahhabi sect has nothing to do with orthodox Islam, for its lack of tolerance is a perversion of traditional values; and second, that killing civilians is wrong and immoral".

Every culture, every religion, every society has its lunatic fringe. Indian Muslims can no more be blamed for the SIMI types in their midst than Hindus held responsible for the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena. But as Ziauddin Sardar puts it in his piece (see earlier in this issue): "All good and concerned Muslims are implicated in the unchecked rise of fanaticism in Muslim societies. We have given free reign to fascism within our midst, and failed to denounce fanatics who distort the most sacred concepts of our faith".

It will not do for Indian Muslims to speak out against the ban on SIMI. Fairly or otherwise, the entire community will get implicated if Muslims fail to denounce the fanatics and the ‘fascism’ in our midst.’ 

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 8

The post Why be shy about SIMI? appeared first on SabrangIndia.