Faraaz Ayaaz Hossain has been honoured with the Mother Teresa Memorial International Award for Social Justice 2016 on Sunday by Harmony Foundation at JW Marriott, Sahar, Mumbai.

 

Faraaz was recognised by the foundation for his heroic end during the Holey Artisan attack on July 1 this year– when he refused to leave his friends behind and was slain along with them by terrorists.

His friends were Abinta Kabir, a Bangladesh-born US citizen and a student at Emory University, and Tarishi Jain, an Indian student at the University of California, Berkeley.

The award was handed to Faraaz’s mother, Simeen Hossain and his older brother, Zaraif Ayaat Hossain by the former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Mother Teresa’s Disciple Sister Priscilla.

This is the first time any foreign recipient had received an award posthumously by the foundation.

Harmony Foundation President Abraham Mathai, former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Farooq Abdullah and filmaker Mahesh Bhatt were also present during the ceremony.

Faraaz was a student at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in the US. He was the son of Simeen and Muhammad Waquer Bin Hossain and grandson of Transcom Group Chairman Latifur Rahman and Shahnaz Rahman.

This article was first published on Dhaka Tribune

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Let’s grant even the venom-spewing their freedoms. Agreed, freedom of speech is meaningless if there is no space for the offending word. No democracy can survive in the absence of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience,agreed. But should there be no Laxman Rekha that even in a democracy none must cross? If not instigation to hatred, could incitement to violence perhaps mark the boundaries of individual freedom?

So, let’s grant our home-grown televangelist, Dr Zakir Naik his freedoms. His freedom to hurt national sentiments: “If you (Americans) eat pigs you behave (wife-swap) like pigs”. His freedom to hurt religious sentiments: “Jews and pagans are the worst eternal enemies of Islam”. His freedom to outrage those who care about gender justice: “women who get raped are asking for it” (dumb woman,didn’t Islam tell you to expose nothing more than your face and wrists?). His freedom to condemn sexual minorities: “death for homosexuals”. His freedom to send fellow Muslims to the gallows: “apostasy is a one-way street”. His freedom to grant special privilege to the male gender: “Man is more polygamous by nature as compared to a woman “.

What about his statements on terrorism? “Every Muslim should be a terrorist… to selective people, i.e., anti-social elements;” “If he (Osama bin Laden) is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him… If he is terrorising America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, he’s following Islam.”

How does one “read” such statements? It all depends on who is reading them. In his self-defence after the [UK] visa ban, Dr Naik offers two clarifications: one,“Due to the fact that he (Osama Bin Laden) has not been convicted in respect of 9/11 and as Dr Zakir Naik cannot verify the claims against him, he "neither considers him a saint nor a terrorist”; two,“the quote is from a lecture he delivered in 1996, almost five years before 9/11”.

But the clarifications only raise further questions:

Dr Naik cannot decide about Osama because the latter has not been convicted for 9/11 and because he (Naik) cannot independently verify the claims against Osama since,“I’m not in touch with him. I don’t know him personally. I (only) read the newspaper.” Interesting. On what basis then did he arrive at his “America-the-greatest-terrorist” conclusion: newspaper reports, personal acquaintance with ex-President Bush,or a non-existent verdict of the International Criminal Court?

If the relevant quote is from a 1996 lecture, what stopped Dr Naik from coming clean a few months ago when in an NDTV programme,anchor Barkha Dutt threw that very statement at him? Why did his response so agitate Maulana Mehmood Madni of the Jamiat-ul-ulema-e-Hind?

Is lip service enough to condemn terrorism in the name of Islam? In these terror-torn times,would Dr Naik care to inform us how much time and attention was paid to this malady of current-day Islam during his 10-day long “Islam Peace Conference-2009” in Mumbai? How frequently does the terror scourge figure in discussions or debates on his Peace TV channel?

What about his statements on terrorism? “Every Muslim should be a terrorist… to selective people, i.e., anti-social elements;” “If he (Osama bin Laden) is fighting the enemies of Islam,I am for him… If he is terrorising America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, he’s following Islam.” 

Above all,as a devout Wahhabi, Dr Naik insists on a literal reading of the Quranic verses torn out of the socio-cultural realities of a primitive Arab society over 1,400 years ago. Which is why, like all literalist readers of Holy Scriptures, he is incapable of extracting the normative, universal ethico-moral principles embedded in the context-specific passages of the text. Which is why what he peddles as Islam is nothing but out-of-date, petro-dollar sponsored Wahhabism that is repugnant to modern sensibilities. The digression apart, where is the guarantee that some Muslims with fevered imaginations would not “read” Dr Naik’s utterances selectively and literally just as he himself reads the Quran and the Hadith?

Consider this: Dr Naik is reportedly a big hero for Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-American arrested last year for plotting to bomb the New York subway, Dr Kafeel Ahmed of Bangalore origin who tried to storm Glasgow airport in an explosives-packed car and Mumbai’s Rahil Sheikh accused in the 7/11 train blasts.

No one accuses Dr Naik of being part of any terror network. But should a self-proclaimed champion of peace be so reckless in his use/misuse of inflammable words? Or are we dealing here with calculated ambiguity, a deliberate playing with fire? Until the televangelist learns to mind his language, I go with the British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD) and the British Muslims Forum (BMF) in supporting the visa ban.

P.S.: On second thoughts,the ban should perhaps be revoked on condition that while in the UK, Dr Naik agrees to a discussion with Dr Taj Hargey on ‘The Status of Women in Islam’ and with Inayat Banglawala on ‘Rights of Gay Muslims’. A trustee of BMSD, Dr Hargey is also chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford and an imam at its mosque. Dr Hargey has an open invitation to women scholars to his mosque to lead mixed-gender Friday congregational prayers. But he might not shock our own doctor so much as Banglawala, media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB),a large nationwide,mainstream Muslim organisation that even today is considered by many to be a hybrid of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood. Horror of horrors, through a recent article in the Guardian, UK,Banglawala has appealed to MCB to include a gay Muslim support group as an affiliate!

No one accuses Dr Naik of being part of any terror network. But should a self-proclaimed champion of peace be so reckless in his use/misuse of inflammable words? Or are we dealing here with calculated ambiguity, a deliberate playing with fire?

Imagine the 150 million viewers of Peace TV being treated to such a rich discourse on diversity in Islam.

This article was published in The Indian Express on July 1, 2010, fast on the heels of the UK Visa ban to the Islamic preacher

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We need to address the real problem before more shots are fired  

After months — probably years — of denial and self-deception about the existence of militant radicals tied to foreign groups, our government woke up to the reality that everybody had been warning us about all along.

This raid and hostage situation in the Gulshan cafe may be unprecedented in Bangladesh’s history, but in the annals of  recent terror history, this is just one more incident.

Could this horror have been avoided? Perhaps yes, perhaps not. What is undeniable, however, is that this is a terror act that was waiting in the wings for a long time, and it finally happened. Sad that it took two young police officers’ lives and made victims of innocent national and foreign citizens, many of whom were working in Dhaka for a living.

More than two dozen lives were in great danger. We hoped that somehow a total blowout would be averted, but knowing that the militants who were occupying the cafe had yet to make any statement regarding their objectives, there were only speculations about the outcome, none of which was pretty.

Various claims have been made regarding the affiliation or sponsorship of these terrorists, ranging from the Islamic State to al-Qaeda to local home-grown groups — the usual suspects. Foreign media has, in the meanwhile, made Dhaka a centrepiece of the latest terror attacks, and are attributing the attack to either of the two infamous international militant groups.

Additionally, the foreign media is also pointing out our government’s failure to listen to the signals that the country has been receiving from the wave of individuals, foreigners, bloggers, and religious minorities being killed. In fact, this incident has stirred up critics to come out full force to blame the government for the failure to reign in budding militants in the country.

Coming in the wake of Istanbul attack, we could not fully rule out the presence of foreign elements among these attackers.

But what is certain to happen is that this will bring, in its wake, more deaths, and it has turned the city into a gloomy and melancholy place at a time when everyone is about to celebrate the end of a holy month with festivity. The blood that has already been shed has cast a pall of gloom. This was only darkened further with the ensuing losses.

We will probably be splitting hairs for days to come trying to figure out how it happened, and there will be more blame games going around. But if there is one lesson to be learned from this tragedy, it is that surveillance alone cannot stop such acts of terror. We may have hundreds of guards and policemen keeping eyes on the people trying to prevent the rogues from attacking.

But it takes only one determined group of people to outwit and outsmart these guards through their ability to network and amass enough firepower to launch such a blitz.

Terror acts of the kind that just happened do not happen all of a sudden. These take days and months of planning, preparation, and assembly. I have written before, and I reiterate it now, that radical extremism of the kind that is now on display globally does not crop up suddenly in a country without a nexus of ideas that run across.

The terrorists who took over the Gulshan cafe, and carried out their nefarious acts, were all our own citizens, but they drew their inspiration from a bigger cadre of militants with a mission that threatens all countries of the world, irrespective of cast, creed, or religious belief.

It is sad that our government, despite its commitment to fight and contain global terrorism, has failed to recognise the enemy within.

By putting blame on the opposition parties and their putative agenda to embarrass the government in the past, we have allowed our law enforcement agencies to lose focus on the real danger lurking in the country and getting bolder by day.

There has been much evidence of the growth and strength of these elements in the past, but for strange reasons, our authorities continue to ignore them.

The cost of political blame gaming is heavy as we can see from this incident. Neither rhetoric nor political blame game can replace real action to contain the cancer of radical militancy.

I am not suggesting that terrorism of the kind that is threatening the world today can be prevented easily, but at least our energy can be better spent and resources better used to fight the cancer of militancy, if our politicians agree to put aside their differences and fight together.

I am praying and hoping that there is no more bloodshed. But what I am hoping most is that there will be transparency in police action, and we will get to know who the perpetrators were. Let there be no murkiness to explain this to the nation. We deserve the truth. 

Courtesy: Dhaka Tribune

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