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

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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.

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived here for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan — a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with landmines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban — by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people.

Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that’s Bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. At the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam. Osama Bin Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this entity and he’d be running it. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

(Courtesy: znet.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 6

The post ‘Think Taliban, think Nazis’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
The US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists

"Throughout the world … its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They’re doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America … (They are freedom fighters.)"

Is this a call to jihad taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the evil empire, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The evil empire was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities, the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6,000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11, bin Laden the freedom fighter is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a terrorist mastermind and an evil-doer.

Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.

The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

Mujahedin

In April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a crackdown against the party by that country’s repressive government.

The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also supported strengthening Afghanistan’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

Such policies enraged the wealthy semi–feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government’s progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.

Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government’s radical example) to its allies in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan Mujahedin, as the contra force was known.

Following an internal PDPA power struggle in December 1979 which toppled Afghanistan’s leader, thousands of Soviet troops entered the country to prevent the new government’s fall. This only galvanised the disparate fundamentalist factions. Their reactionary jihad now gained legitimacy as a national liberation struggle in the eyes of many Afghans.

The Soviet Union was eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the Mujahedin captured the capital, Kabul, in 1992.

Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the Mujahedin factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil–rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.

Washington’s policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski’s grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia–ul–Haq’s own ambitions to dominate the region. US–run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the Islamic revolution that toppled the pro–US Shah of Iran in 1979).

Washington’s favoured Mujahedin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West’s distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury freedom fighter. Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.

After the Mujahedin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar’s forces rained US–supplied missiles and rockets on that city killing at least 2,000 civilians until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.

Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the Mujahedin from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the Afghanistan–Pakistan border was the world’s single largest source of heroin, supplying 60 per cent of US drug users.

In 1995, the former director of the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the flow of drugs: Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets… There was a fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.

Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime

Made in the USA

According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1986, CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).

John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the Mujahedin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American black Muslims were taught sabotage skills.

The November 1, 1998, the British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained bin Laden’s operatives in 1989.

These operatives were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar’s forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army’s elite Green Berets.

The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called Operation Cyclone.

In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the Mujahedin factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services, MAK).

MAK was a front for Pakistan’s CIA, the Inter–Service Intelligence directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.

Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel–Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with the CIA’s approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was partly culpable for the 1993 World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.

Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in 1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non–Afghan mercenaries who joined the Mujahedin. The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and political ties to that country’s pro–US royal family.

Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia’s minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam’s holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world’s largest private construction company.

Osama bin Laden’s father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill–gotten business empire.

(Bin Laden junior’s oft–quoted personal fortune of US$200–300 million has been arrived at by the US State Department by dividing today’s value of the bin Laden family net worth estimated to be US$5 billion by the number of bin Laden senior’s sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama and took control of his share.)

Osama’s military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.

Milt Bearden, the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, "Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did… [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It’s an extra $200–$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did."

In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built training camps, some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.

These camps, now dubbed terrorist universities by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.

Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the Mujahedin told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, "The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism, car bombing and so on so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns…" Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.

Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden’s organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly–run capitalist holding company albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with legitimate business operations.

Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.

Bin Laden only became a terrorist in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden’s anger turned to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes such as Egypt in the Middle East were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.

He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of the Gulf states. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there were frozen.

After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services and thousands of his mercenaries to the Taliban, which took power that September.

Today, bin Laden’s private army of non–Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.

Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.

In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the Mujahedin, as saying he would make the same call again, even knowing what bin Laden would become.

"It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union."

Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation. Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano, described as a former CIA chief of counter-terrorism operations.

Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their work. He was in charge of the CIA–backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid to the Afghan Mujahedin for the US National Security Council.

The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: "What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" 

(This article has been put out by the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL).

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 7

The post CIA bin Laden appeared first on SabrangIndia.

KANPUR

Mohd Omar Malik
Anees Khatoon
Urmila Srivastava
Laxmidevi Sonkar
 

 All hell broke loose in Kanpur after the murder of ADM (city), CP Pathak on the evening of March 16, 2001. Riots erupted and seven police station precincts remained under curfew for several days.  About 15 people lost their lives, mostly in police firing. The Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), notorious for its anti-Muslim bias, was accused of fomenting violence, aiding and abetting loot and arson. 

It may be recalled that Muslim youth under the aegis of the Student’s Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) had taken out a procession after Friday prayers, to protest the alleged burning of the Holy Quran in New Delhi, in retaliation for the carnage unleashed by the Taliban in Bamiyan. And so the tale of mindless violence, revenge and one-upmanship would have continued unabated. Can anybody cap a volcano in full flow and fury?

In this desert of violence, animosity, suspicion and hatred, there are oases of peace, where the milk of human kindness continues to flow. Meet Mohd Omar Malik (63), resident of 44/4 Chaubey Gola, Kanpur. Malik’s house is scarcely 100 yards from where the ADM was shot. It is also adjacent to the spot where 70 years ago, during the worst Hindu–Muslim riots in 1931, Ganesh Shankar Vidhyarthi was martyred when trying to restore communal amity. 

Outside Malik’s door there are four temples, one of which has an image of Vidhyarthi.  Though these are four old temples, there are hardly any Hindus in this Muslim dominated enclave. It bore the brunt of mob fury on the 16th.  The temple with Vidhyarthi’s icon was almost destroyed. Behind the temple was the tenement of a vegetable vendor, Rakesh Sahu (50), his wife Shaila (45), and their five daughters. Their hutment was torched to the ground.

That is when the human compassion doused the flames of hatred. Malik and his family immediately brought the Sahu family into their home, and sheltered and fed them throughout the curfew. Though five months have passed, the Sahu family still spend the night in Malik’s home, as their house is still in the process of being reconstructed.

Malik who owns a shop selling rexine, is unfazed about what he has done.  He says it is his duty. Somebody proposed a reward of rupees one lakh for his actions, but Malik scoffed at it, saying that he was not working for any reward.  Monica (20) is the eldest of the Sahu girls. The second is Sarika (18).  Their eyes grow wide with wonder and gratitude when they talk of Malik, whom they affectionately refer to as “Abbu”. 

Even though other Hindu houses in the area were looted, Monica and Sarika, both of whom are in college, say that they are not afraid to live where they are and have no intention of moving out. They said that even from evil there comes forth good. They were living adjacent to the Maliks for years, but it was only in the hour of crisis that they discovered who their true neighbour was. “Love thy neighbour” in action.

Helping those in need, even perceived enemies, is nothing new for Malik.  During the post Babri Masjid demolition riots in 1992, a posse of PAC was posted at the temple in front of their house. Being stationed at the temple the PAC jawans were hungry. Nobody was prepared to open their doors for them.  But Malik did, and gave them food and water. “After all, they are human too”, says Malik.

Razia Naqvi, wife of advocate Saeed Naqvi, related the story of Anees Khatoon, (55), a resident of Yatimkhana, where the riot first turned violent on 16th March. One of the targets was a paint shop owned by Ganesh Dube.  There are just a handful of Hindus in that hata.  Anees Khatoon sheltered the Dubes, and several other Hindu families. 

In contrast, Shastrinagar is a Hindu dominated area, with just a sprinkling of Muslims. Here it was the turn of the good samaritans from among the Hindus, who protected the Muslims. At 9 pm on March 18 there were some bomb blasts.  Urmila Srivastava (52), a social worker, rushed out of her home and arranged with other Hindu families to shelter Fareeda Bano, Shanaz, Shamim Begum and their families. Smt Srivastava said there were many young girls among them, and they would have been ravished if they had not taken immediate steps to protect them.

Other than individuals, people’s power and unity was also manifest in Kanpur’s hour of darkness. There was light at both ends of the tunnel.  Laxmidevi Sonkar (40) is the municipal corporator of ward No 10 (Colonelganj reserved constituency). When trouble started brewing on the March 16, she, her husband Om Prakash Sonkar (48) and advocate Saeed Naqvi called a mohalla meeting.  They had earlier formed such committees in different areas. They requested the people to be calm and not get provoked.  They exchanged phone numbers in order to keep in touch, and informed the police officials that they would guard and protect their own area.

Laxmidevi’s ward adjoins Sisamau ward, where the family of slain ADM Pathak resided. Some fanatical elements in Sisamau instigated a mob to advance towards Bashirganj, a Muslim enclave in Colonelganj ward. They were armed with country made pistols, bombs and sticks. However, Laxmidevi, her husband, and several other fellow-Khatiks from the area made a human wall to prevent the mob from entering in. The Khatiks were unarmed, but seeing their solidarity and resolve, the threatening mob retreated, and no untoward incident took place. It was a powerful manifestation of human solidarity.

Later during the curfew, the administration sought to post the PAC in the area. This time another group of Hindus, the Lodhis, resisted the move. They said that the entry of the PAC would vitiate the atmosphere, and prevailed upon the administration to reverse their decision. Hemraj Lodhi, Baba Lodhi and others were instrumental in this.

We need many more Abbu Maliks, Anees Khatoons, Urmila Srivastavas and Laxmidevi Sonkars, if we are to change the brown sands of hatred into green oases, flowing with the milk of human kindness.

Archived from Communalism Combat, September 2001, Anniversary Issue (8th) Year 8  No. 71, Cover Story 1

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DELHI

Sophie James Josephees 

 Sophie James Joseph died at St Stephen’s Hospital in Delhi two years ago of asthma. She had herself been a nurse in a Delhi hospital, and knew that asthma could kill. She had lived for the years of her retirement with her ailment, her racking cough often keeping her awake late into the night. You cannot dream, nor have nightmares, lying awake in bed on the third floor of a DDA flat in Lawrence Road in the highly industrialised West Delhi. But you can occasionally have total recall. She would sometimes tell me of her memories. Of the more recent ones I myself was a part.

Sophie, daughter of South Indian parents who worked in the Railways had lived in Delhi since the late thirties. She was my aunt. The deepest memories were, of course, of the Partition. If you were a Christian and did not roam about the streets too often, you had a ring side and comparatively safe view of the Partition from your terrace in your small house near the Delhi University, where Jawahar Nagar now stands as a middle class slum. 

This area was designed for major tragedy. It population was a mix of poor and rich Muslims and arrogant and strong rustics of the north, not fanatics or Hindutvawadis as we would now use terms, but extremely clannish, thinking and acting not as individual persons, but as a single organism with a single mind thinking for all of them, identical adrenaline flowing through their collective veins. Not too far away were three Railway stations — the Old Delhi Main, famous for its red British Castle battlements, another called Subzi Mandi and the third at Kishan Gunj. 

In the days before meter gauge and the population explosion in the now posh South Delhi, these stations were almost the only entry points to the national capital, particularly for people coming in from the East, the North, and the West. This is where the trains passed through from Lucknow and Allahabad and Bihar Sharief, full of Muslims fleeing the divided India. This is where the trains came in from Lahore, filled sometimes with decapitated and mutilated bodies of Hindus, and sometimes with greater pathos, women wailing in pain from their ravaged bodies, gang raped and stabbed as they were caught on some wayside station. 

These were the saltpetre and the tinder which set fire to this benign part of Old Delhi. Within hours, Sophie remembers, of the first news of carnage, the area itself had erupted in massive explosion of violence, of terror the likes of which she had never heard even in a city whose collective memory goes back to the sacking of the town by Ghaznavi. What she could not see from her balconies, she heard from her brother–in–law, part of a contingent of a southern regiment rushed to the capital as a neutral force to quell the violence. 

Men like her brother–in–law, and the man from the same army formation who would later wed her, hardened soldiers barely out of the Second World War, would come home with tears in their eyes at the sight they had seen. Men slaughtered on the run, young boys turned butchers. Of children snatched from their brother and thrown up into the air, only to be impaled on swords and ballams, the rural lances, that many kept in their homes. 

Sophie did not tell me stories of the women. She could not bear to. The kindest thing that could happen to Muslim women in Delhi — and perhaps to their counterparts across the border, too — was to be abducted by some young or middle aged man who had the physical strength and courage to keep her safe from others, and the financial wherewithal to keep her as his woman, eventually his wife in the common–law marriages that then took place as convenience and succour. Sophie would also tell stories of heroism, and greed. 

Many Hindus saved lives, in return for all the cash they could carry, or for rights over the house that would soon be vacated. Others saved their neighbours out of love. Many lived to cross the borders not because the army men protected them, but because the neighbours risked their lives to save them from other marauding neighbours. 

Sophie, then in her teens, remembered all this. She was no heroine and her lower middle class family was not the stuff of which role models are made, but they were happy they connived in the saving of lives. That lives could be saved if there was courage of conviction was a lesson she learnt. Her lesson would come in handy almost thirty five years later, save many more lives of other neighbours. 

She was now living in the DDA colony at Lawrence, recently re-christened Kesavapuram. She was the only Christian in her block, A–1. Ironically, almost all her neighbours were refugees from Pakistan, who had come into the city in 1947 and 1948, shattered, their souls wounded, and had rebuild comfortable lives for themselves. For years, Sophie thought she was the only member of a minority community in the block. Her neighbours also thought she was the only minority member. Exotic, as a matter of fact. 

When she decorated her home for Christmas, children from other blocks would come to see the nativity tableau. One day the block woke up to the realisation that there was another minority community living amongst them. On 31 October 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot dead. Within hours, Delhi was on fire; or rather Sikh shops were on fire. In another hour, 3,500 Sikhs, young men and old but mostly men, were dragged down from buses, pushed off their motorcycles, cycles and scooters, doused. In Lawrence road, the frenzy was as much. Rumours flew as thick as the smoke from the burning, living bodies.

In Block A–1, tiny Bobby was unaware of the momentous event, that a Big Tree Had Fallen and Shaken the Ground. As he played in the house of Sophie, noises were heard outside the Block. There was a mob from another block, from nearby A–2 or from the slums of Trinagar, also close by. They were looking for Sikh families, to burn. These were the days before they built the steel barricades in colonies. 

The mob was already inside A–1 when HS Chaddha, Bobby’s father realised he was the only Sikh in the block, and the crowds were after him. Chaddha, too, had a corner flat on the third floor. It was a coveted flat, with extra space which the DDA brochure called a Lucky House. HS Chaddha had paid a little more than Sophie had for his house, but he was suddenly glad he was on the same floor, just across the landing of the staircase from the Christian house. 

Sophie came out and called Bobby’s mother. Come in, she said. The Chaddha clan trooped in, in tears and afraid, mumbling their prayers. Sophie calmed them down, and took them to her own bedroom. They were safe, she said. Her husband was a former army officer. Her nephew knew all the big shots in Delhi, particularly the police commissioner. They were safe, Mother Sophie said. She would guard them with her life. She did. She chided the neighbours, tried to din some courage into them. She scolded them, and she remained extremely quite on who were inside her house. Chaddha and other similar families from the neighbourhood. Safe from the mobs as long as Sophie lived. 

The crowds looked at her, and turned away. Not daring her any further, not daring to test if she meant what she said. Not entering her house. Her courage infused a sense of community in the block. They were bound to a conspiracy of silence at least. A section of police jawans came to her block a day later, and stood guard, on and off. It was days before Bobby and his parents went back to their home. No thanks were needed. No formal thanks were said. The eyes said it all. 

Years later, Bobby was a young handsome Sikh, with a curly beard. He was in tears at a prayer meeting held on the roof top terrace of Block A–1 for someone who had died the previous day, and had been buried that evening. As the prayers hummed low, someone spoke of Sophie, witness to 1947, a small heroine of 1984. That is how they remembered the old nurse. As Mother Courage. 

Archived from Communalism Combat, September 2001,  Anniversary Issue (8th) Year 8  No. 71, Cover Story 2

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KOVAI

Suspicions bordering on hate, impelling persons to the edges of irrationality, have marked all the violence carried out in the name of faith, defined as communalism in the South Asian context. Irrational and partisan behaviour has been observed in not just the man and woman on the street but have, since the early eighties (especially) permeated and affected, the conduct of men in uniform — the Indian policeman. 

It is this absence of neutrality, witnessed as irrational bias, that violates basic tenets of rigorous training and also the oath of allegiance to the secular Indian Constitution that every public servant is bound to swear. Such behaviour, unfortunately, guided the actions of some sections of the Coimbatore (now renamed Kovai) police in November 1997. These actions resulted in unpardonable misdemeanours against sections of the Muslim minority. (See CC, February 1998).

The actions of the Kovai police had been severely condemned in February 1994, too. In a detailed investigation report, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) had named two senior officers, Thiru Ganesan, the then commissioner of police, Kovai and the then ACP, Thiru Masanamuthu, for “brutal and unlawful attacks on Muslims”. 

In November 1997, aggressive behaviour of the city’s police against some young Muslims was enough to heighten tensions to a fever pitch. The news of one police constable being attacked and killed, allegedly by members of a fanatical outfit, Al Ummah, was enough for the police to go on a revenge rampage. They not only arrested the leader of the group, SA Basha, but also vent their fury against innocent and ordinary members of the Muslim community living in Coimbatore. Three days of hell followed, with the police actively conniving with members of the Hindu fanatical outfit, Hindu Munnani and the RSS.

After police highhandedness came the large scale, and indiscriminate arrests of many innocent ordinary members of the Muslim community. An independent fact–finding team subsequently found that the police was also guilty of ill–treatment, torture and abuse of the victims, leading to further alienation among the minority section of the population.

This is when Abu Backer, a citizen of this town, known hitherto for it’s flourishing textile industry and significant working class population, got involved with the issue of police brutality and partisan behaviour that is so critically linked to myths and stereotypes labelled on to the minority community. He did this through the local unit of the PUCL, of which he was an executive committee member since 1993. 
He, along with a few others, strove hard at a time when suspicions between people had severed deep connections to keep the communication links between ordinary members of the two major communities open, to press for dialogue. Backer, working in a highly polarised environment had a one point agenda – to isolate the politicised elements of both these communities and reach out through constant efforts to touch, to shake and even to shame ordinary Hindus and Muslims from falling for the political trap of hatred and division.

Here follows the account of Abu Backer in his own words:
It was not easy at the time to remind people of our abiding, everyday links because two partisan groups on both sides were bent on articulating difference. But today despite those schisms, Coimbatore is close to normal once again.’

It is surprising and shocking even, but the sad fact is that many of our fellow citizens actually believe that Muslims are outsiders, they are foreigners. It is a measure of the success of motivated propaganda, of course. But it therefore becomes necessary to systematically and painstakingly disabuse ordinary people of these notions. This is actually what we did! We showed how all of us were converts of a few generations, born of this soil, the only difference between us being that we had chosen an alternate faith. I was surprised how shocked people were when they were told the truth.

Another misconception that is widespread is the Indian Muslim’s cursed and alleged link to Pakistan. We constantly hear refrains of, “Go back to Pakistan”, especially during communal aggression or violence. These are, I think the two main crosses that we have to bear. 

In November 1997, the murder of a police constable by some Muslim youth escalated into a full-scale riot in Coimbatore. The violence, interestingly, was not between Hindus and Muslims. It was between two distinct groups trying to project themselves as the sole spokespersons of their respective communities – Hindus and Muslims. They are the Hindu Munnani that has it’s ideological moorings in the RSS and has been ominously visible in Tamil Nadu since 1981 (especially after the nation–wide hue and cry following the Meenakshipuram conversions) and the Al Ummah. 

Unfortunately, large sections of the media, too, projected it as a communal riot. We formed an investigation team and published a report. Mr Masanamuthu, the then DCP of Coimbatore, was found to be guilty of articulating rabidly anti–Muslim sentiments and actually acting on these. This man has had a history of partisan behaviour (documented in 1994, too). Yet, he continues to wear and flout his uniform.
Inevitably almost, what followed the callous police–Muslim violence of November 1997 were the bomb blasts that ripped the city on February 14, 1998. The blasts heightened the division between ordinary Hindus and Muslims.

Suddenly all Muslims were being held responsible for the actions of two small, fanatical groups, the Al Ummah and Al Jehad. Between the two, they had only 185 members, but the whole community was dubbed terrorists!  More than 40 innocent people from Karunanidhinagar were illegally detained. Another 100 persons were detained ostensibly under another preventive detention provision. 

Each one of these persons was subsequently acquitted. Who pays the price for this gross violation of rights and slur on their character? There was not a single case of conviction from among those indiscriminately arrested. Imagine the deep hurt that was meted out to sections of the Muslim population.

Especially after the bomb blasts, we organised ourselves under the banner of the Federation of All Muslim Jamaat. We represented the victims in the Gokulakrishnan Commission investigating the communal violence and the blasts. Even today, the harassment of the minority community by the police and administration has not entirely stopped. Many persons remain charge-sheeted though they are innocent.

The irony is that a significant section of the Muslim community is being victimised for the actions of a few. The unfair victimisation is due to the prevalence of a widespread anti–Muslim bias. The ultimate irony is that we still need to constantly speak up and disassociate ourselves from acts of vandalism and terrorism carried out by a few in the name of our faith!

When the blasts took place, it was through the Federation of All Muslim Jamaat that we organised an ‘Anti–terrorism Week’. We put out slogans and posters on the streets, including some created by Communalism Combat, to show that we are part of the national, social fabric, that we are Indians. It was ordinary Muslim shop keepers, small traders on the streets of Kovai who sponsored large hoardings carrying these messages that claimed rationality and reminded people of the communal harmony that was being sorely tested and tried. 

We printed posters and organised relief for the victims of the bomb blasts, many of whom were Hindus. We even collected Rs 50,000 from the Muslim community for the family of constable Selvaraj who had been so unfortunately killed, but the money was unfortunately refused.

Today, Coimbatore is quite calm. There are no provocative speeches from either side. The Hindu Munnani, which had become active here after the Meenakshipuram conversions in 1982, has also been restrained due to strict vigilance by the police.

It was the conversions in 1982 that brought these forces to Coimbatore and Tamil Nadu. After the Meenakshipuram conversions, the Munnani leader, Thiru Ramagopalan organised a convention in Coimbatore. Ironically, the only language that was commandeered to oppose conversions was the hurling of abuse against Muslims and the Prophet of Islam! 

This was successfully used by Basha to counterpose Muslim fanaticism and narrow–mindedness and the Al Ummah was born. There could not be a clearer link between the two brands of fanaticism. We have lived and seen through the clear nexus, we have witnessed how ordinary Hindus and Muslims of Kovai have been victimised by both the different brands of fanaticism.

Our work was concerned with re-establishing confidence and trust between the two communities. The rift is never between ordinary people. Yet we fall victim to the engineered suspicion and hatred. The bomb blasts in Coimbatore succeeded in causing a huge rift between ordinary people of different faiths. This is a painful reality to live with, a bitter pill to swallow.

It is this reality that jostles us into continued work in the social sphere even now. It is important for more and more Muslims to be visibly involved in the public and social sphere. In Tamil Nadu at least, I feel there are not enough of us. If we were present in sufficient number, committed and involved in human rights, development, labour or gender issues that concern all communities, our interventions when suspicions run high and hatred reigns can be more effective and more meaningful.

Today, apart from a consistent crusade for rational dialogue and harmony between communities, one of my other priorities is working with an educational society for Muslims — the Tamil Kalvi Sehvai Maiyyam. There is a lot of illiteracy among young Muslims, youngsters have no formal degrees, and the number of school dropouts is very high. Such a situation is ripe for fanatical outfits to benefit from. 

Through whatever else that one does in the social sphere, to work for communal harmony, rationality and dialogue in today’s India is a must. This is necessary because when something flares up between two fundamentalist/fanatical groups, we must be visible and present, prepared to show that the flare–up is only between two small and marginalised sections, not between all Hindus and Muslims.

It is important for ordinary people with conviction to stand up and speak out. How else will the rifts that are being so cynically created, be healed? 

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