POLITICS, TERRORISM, AND THE SUNNI DIVIDE

POLITICS, TERRORISM, AND THE SUNNI DIVIDE

by Samuel Helfont

 

Samuel Helfont is the author of Yusuf al-Qaradawi: Islam and
Modernity. He  is a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow
in  Princeton   University's  Department   of  Near  Eastern
Studies, where  he is  pursuing a  Ph.D.  He is also an Iraq
war veteran  and  continues  to  serve  as  an  intelligence
officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve.

        POLITICS, TERRORISM, AND THE SUNNI DIVIDE

                    by Samuel Helfont

Wahhabism and  the Muslim Brotherhood are two distinct forms
of Sunni Islamism. They have separate histories and separate
worldviews. In  reality they  are not  even the same type of
movement.  Their   origins  were  largely  unrelated.  Their
historic missions  have been  completely different,  as  are
their current  goals and  means of  achieving  those  goals.
Unfortunately, these  differences too often are overshadowed
by a false Sunni-Shia dichotomy that tends to lump all Sunni
Islamists together.  But learning  the  differences  between
Sunni Islamists  is critical  to understanding  politics and
terrorism in the Arab Middle East. One could even argue that
the most  important division  shaping Arab  politics is  not
between Sunnis  and Shias  but between  the Wahhabis and the
Brotherhood. Before delving into current issues, however, it
is first  necessary to  define differences between Wahhabism
and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Wahhabism stems  from the  theological teachings of Muhammad
ibn abd  al-Wahhab, the eighteenth century reformer. Abd al-
Wahhab was  one of  several "revivalist"  thinkers to emerge
from that  century. The  mission of these revivalists was to
purify and thereby revitalize Islam. They carried the banner
of reform  but  unlike  modern  reformers,  they  wanted  to
transform Islam  on traditionally  Islamic grounds. They did
not attempt  to  adapt  it  to  other  systems  of  thought,
politics,  or   culture.  Their   goals  did   not   include
modernizing Islam  to meet  the demands of a changing world.
In this  sense they  were pre-modern.  Wahhabism is thus, at
its heart,  a pre-modern theological movement and Wahhabists
continue to  make mostly  theological  arguments  about  the
oneness of God and proper forms of worship. Their historical
mission has  been a  call to  reform Islam  according  to  a
strict and  narrowly defined theology. There are, of course,
political implications  to this  understanding of Islam, but
Wahhabism is  still best  understood as a theological reform
movement.

The Muslim  Brotherhood, on  the other  hand, is a political
organization  originating  in  Egypt's  cosmopolitan  cities
during the  twentieth century. The Brotherhood's Islamism is
one of  several political  ideologies to emerge out of Egypt
in the  late nineteenth  and early  twentieth century.  Like
Pan-Arabism, nationalism,  and socialism, which also emerged
in Egypt  at that time, the Brotherhood's Islamism is at its
heart a  political identity.  The historical  mission of the
Brotherhood has  been political  reform based  on an Islamic
political identity.  Just as nationalists promoted an ethno-
national identity,  and socialists  promoted  a  class-based
identity, the  Brotherhood  promoted  a  political  identity
based  on   Islam.  Unlike   the  Wahhabists,  however,  the
Brotherhood was not concerned with implementing a particular
theology.   It    recruited   members   who   held   various
understandings of  Sunni Islam  and its leaders were laymen,
not Islamic  scholars. The Brotherhood's founder, Hassan al-
Banna was a school teacher, as was the important brotherhood
theorist, Sayid Qutb. Al-Banna's successor Hassan al-Hudaybi
was a  lawyer. Thus,  the reforms  that the  Brotherhood has
called  for   have  almost   always  been   political,   not
theological. In  fact, they  often mixed  traditional  Islam
with modern  political thought. For example, the Brotherhood
has    embraced    nationalism,    constitutionalism,    and
participation in  elections. Its  rhetoric was-and continues
to be-full  of anti-Imperialist  arguments that  are  common
throughout the  third world. These were not strictly Islamic
concepts.

It should  be clear,  then, that  Wahhabism and  the  Muslim
Brotherhood are  two distinct  movements. Indeed  the Muslim
Brothers and  the Wahhabists  have often been fierce critics
of one another. They each consider the other to have divided
the  Islamic   community.     Wahhabists  blame  the  Muslim
Brotherhood for  what  it  calls  hizbiyyah  (partisanship).
They  claim   that  because  the  Brotherhood  supports  the
formation of  political parties,  it has  divided the Muslim
world  into   competing  factions.     Further,   Wahhabists
criticize the Brotherhood's theological leniency, as well as
its modern  political influences.  As one Wahhabist recently
put it,  the Muslim  Brothers "have  consistently overlooked
the principal  aspect of  calling their  followers to tawhid
(the oneness  of God)  and forbidding  them from polytheism,
because these  are matters  which require time and effort to
change, matters  which people  do not  find easy  to accept.
[The Muslim  Brothers] were  more  concerned  with  amassing
groups of  people together rather than calling the people to
the way  of the  Prophet."[1] The  Brotherhood, on the other
hand, has accused the Wahhabists of being so strict in their
interpretations  of  Islam  that  they  have  caused  fitnah
(schism). They  argue that  this fitnah  pits one  group  of
Muslims against another and that Islam strictly forbids such
divisions.

REGIONAL POLITICS
Unfortunately, the  differences  and  indeed  the  conflicts
between the Brotherhood and the Wahhabists have not received
the attention  they deserve.   In  the aftermath of the U.S.
invasion of  Iraq in  2003,  a  bloody  conflict  broke  out
between Iraq's  Sunnis and Shias. This conflict has led some
to see  the entire  region through  the prism of the age-old
Sunni-Shia  struggle.   While  this  conflict  is  certainly
important, dividing the Middle East along sectarian lines is
not an  accurate way  to assess the loyalties-or predict the
actions of-various regional actors.

For example,  when Israel  went to  war  with  Hezbollah  in
Lebanon in  the summer of 2006 and with Hamas in Gaza in the
winter  of  2008-2009,  the  region  did  not  divide  along
sectarian lines.  In both of these conflicts, the Shias from
Hezbollah and  Iran aligned  with Sunni Islamists from Hamas
and other  Muslim Brotherhood  associated organizations.  On
the other  side of  the  regional  divide  were  Sunni  Arab
Nationalists,  traditional   Sunni  monarchies,   and  Sunni
Islamists with  Wahhabist tendencies.  These  groupings  are
generally indicative  of the  political order  in the Middle
East. Indeed,  on other  contentious issues that are said to
divide Sunnis  and Shias,  the divisions  that were apparent
during the  recent Israeli  wars with  Hezbollah  and  Hamas
continue to  be dominant.  For  example,  the  Sunni  Muslim
Brotherhood  has   often  defended  Iran's  nuclear  program
ignoring the  interests of  its fellow  Sunnis. So  while  a
divide does  exist in  regional politics,  it is not between
Sunnis and Shias.

One reason  for the Brotherhood's alliance with the Shias is
that the  Brotherhood is a political movement concerned with
bringing  Muslims   together  under   an  Islamic  political
identity. It  is open to differing interpretations of Islam,
and is, therefore, less critical of the Shias. Additionally,
Ruhollah Khomeini's political Islam in Iran was very similar
to the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology. Both called for taqrib
(the  bringing   together   of   sects),   both   downplayed
traditional theology,  and both  have similar understandings
of an  Islamic state.  Iran, for example, has a constitution
and  holds   elections.  The   regime,   therefore,   claims
legitimacy based  on a mix of Islamic and modern principles.
If the  Muslim Brotherhood were to form an Islamic state, it
would probably  look similar  to the  current Iranian state.
This is  despite the  fact that  one group  is Sunni and the
other is  Shia. The Wahhabists, on the other hand, care more
about theology  than  politics.  They,  therefore,  denounce
democracy  as  un-Islamic  and  often  forbid  Muslims  from
participating in  elections. They deplore what they consider
deviant sects  such as Shiism, and even when their interests
align  such  as  in  Hezbollah's  war  against  Israel,  the
Wahhabists refuse to support Shias.

Both the Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabists compete for power
and influence  in  most  Arab  states.  Because  the  Middle
Eastern political  order is currently defined by Iran's push
for hegemony,  the competition  between the  Brotherhood and
the Wahhabists  has a  profound affect on regional politics.
Any  gain   the  Brotherhood  makes  in  comparison  to  the
Wahhabists pushes  the Arab  states closer to Iran. Any gain
the Wahhabists  make pushes  the Arab states away from Iran.
This battle  is currently  taking place  throughout the Arab
Middle East,  yet because most researchers and analysts lump
all Sunni Islamists together, it has been mostly overlooked.
Policymakers, therefore, should understand that (1) the most
important division  in the Middle East is not between Sunnis
and Shias, but the internal divisions within Sunni Islamism,
and (2)  the success  or failure  of Sunni  Islamism,  as  a
whole, is  not as important to the regional balance of power
as who among the Sunni Islamists are successful.

JIHAD AND TERRORISM
The deep  divisions between  Sunni Islamists  are  not  only
important to  the regional  balance  of  power.  The  United
States, for  example, in  trying to  combat terrorism,  must
understand the  difference between Wahhabists and the Muslim
Brotherhood. Both  streams of  Sunni Islamism claim to carry
out jihad  in the name of Islam, so researchers and analysts
often mistakenly  lump them together. In reality, the Muslim
Brotherhood's  jihad   is  not  the  same  as  that  of  the
Wahhabists. These  two separate  understandings of jihad may
share several  important similarities,  but they  also  have
significant   differences    and    are    sometimes    even
contradictory.  Understanding  how  each  group  comprehends
jihad is,  therefore, paramount  for policymakers  concerned
with terrorism.  Failing to  distinguish between  these  two
groups  could   result  in  wasting  valuable  resources  on
preparing for  an attack  that will  never come,  or  worse,
being unprepared in the face of imminent danger.

In the  modern world,  the concept of jihad can been seen as
both useful  and problematic  for Muslims.   It is useful in
offering a powerful and religiously sanctioned call to arms.
Many  modern   Muslims,  from  both  secular  and  religious
movements, have  called for  jihad as  a means  of  rallying
support for  war. However, for modern Muslims engaged in the
battle of ideas, the legacy of jihad can be problematic.  At
present, there is a widely accepted stigma against offensive
and expansionist  warfare. This  is particularly true in the
Muslim world  which was  conquered and ruled by expansionist
European empires  in the  nineteenth and  twentieth century.
Therefore,  many  Muslims,  attempting  to  fuse  Islam  and
modernity, have  trouble coming to terms with the historical
practice of  expansionist jihad.  Consider, for example, the
sermons of  the prominent Muslim Brotherhood related scholar
Yusuf al-Qaradawi.  In one  sermon, al-Qaradawi insists that
the "Prophet  Muhammad did  not carry  a sword, but used the
good word  to preach  his message."[2]  Nevertheless,  in  a
sermon less  than a  year earlier,  he had  claimed that the
Prophet Muhammad's  life "was  one of continuous jihad.  The
ten years  he spent in Medina were bloody jihad and fighting
against non-belief, infidelity, Judaism, and others."[3]

Because of  this  friction  between  pre-modern  and  modern
norms, the  Muslim Brotherhood has reinterpreted the meaning
of jihad,  infusing it  with modern  concepts. It  generally
understands jihad  as resistance to expansionist warfare and
imperialism.  It   does  not   consider  domestic  political
violence to  be jihad  and  it  condemns  attacks  on  other
Muslims. The only time the Brotherhood considers jihad to be
legitimate is  when it  takes place  on Muslim  land that it
deems occupied  by a  non-Muslim force.  Today,  this  would
include Israel,  Iraq, Afghanistan,  Chechnya,  Kashmir  and
other similar  locales. Once jihad is declared, however, the
Brotherhood uses whatever means it has at its disposal. This
includes suicide  bombings, targeting civilians, and the use
of women and children.

Wahhabists, by  comparison, care  less about modern stigmas.
While they  may employ  modern norms in their rhetoric, they
refuse  to   have  their   actions  constrained   by  modern
discourse.   For this  reason,  the  concept  of  jihad  has
evolved differently within Wahhabism.

Wahhabists generally  see the Brotherhood's reinterpretation
of jihad  as an  abomination. Muhammad  ibn abd  al-Wahhab's
interpretation of  jihad makes no apology for aggression. In
fact  offensive  jihad  was  essential  for  the  spread  of
Wahhabism in  the eighteenth  and  nineteenth  century.  The
famous union between abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud was
based on  the idea  that Saud  would have  much to gain from
religiously-sanctioned expansive warfare.

Modern Wahhabists  attempt to  stay true  to the  pre-modern
teachings of  abd al-Wahhab.  They do  not  consider  modern
norms and  stigmas to  be of any significance. In fact, they
view the  permeation of  these norms  into Islam  as a grave
threat to  the religion.  Therefore,  even  completely  non-
political  and  non-violent  Wahhabist  recognize  that  the
principle of  offensive jihad is valid, although they do not
currently practice  it. They  are extremely  critical of the
Muslim Brotherhood  related scholars  who have  argued  that
offensive jihad is invalid in the modern period. As one non-
violent Wahhabist  argues, these  Brotherhood scholars  have
"belittled"  the   Islamic  tradition   "in  the   name   of
'understanding of priorities'" and they have "declared their
loyalty for  the Infidels  in the  name of  'creating a good
picture of  Islam.'"[4] This  particular Wahhabist considers
the more  recent attempts  to reinterpret jihad unsurprising
since  historically,   the  "figureheads   of  the  Bankrupt
Brotherhood" have  been known  to "distort,  twist and water
down the objectives of Jihad."[5]

Another important  aspect of  Wahhabists' interpretations of
jihad is  their very  limited definition of who is a Muslim.
This is  based on their strict theological interpretation of
Islam. Abd  al-Wahhab had declared the overwhelming majority
of  eighteenth   century  Muslims   to  be  unbelievers  and
authorized jihad to be waged against them. Abd al-Wahhab and
his followers  were especially  confrontational toward  non-
Sunni Muslims including the Shias. This type of thinking was
reinforced in  the modern  period when  it was combined with
Sayid Qutb's  ideas. Qutb  of course,  was a Muslim Brother,
but  his   followers  formed   radical  offshoots   of   the
Brotherhood that  often combined  with  the  Wahhabists  and
ultimately  turned   against  the   Brotherhood's   original
ideology.   Unlike abd  al-Wahhab, there is no evidence that
Qutb  himself  was  anti-Shia.  His  theory  of  jahaliyyah,
however, opened the door for excommunicating Muslims who did
not conform  to his understanding of Islam. When Qutbism and
Wahhabism were merged in the 1970s and 1980s, the result was
a small  but extremely  violent strain of Wahhabist Islamism
that produced groups such as al-Qaeda.

CONCLUSION AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
Understanding the  divisions within Sunni Islamism will help
analysts both  avoid simple  mistakes and  put  events  into
their proper  contexts. For  example, one  should not expect
the Muslim Brotherhood to be anti-Hezbollah or anti-Iran and
vice  versus.   Conversely,  one   should  also  not  expect
Wahhabists and  the  Muslim  Brotherhood  to  work  together
simply because they are both Sunni Islamists. When trying to
understand terrorist  threats, analysts  should realize that
the Muslim  Brotherhood and  the Wahhabists  have  different
ideas of  what constitutes legitimate jihad. Analysts should
not expect  the Brotherhood  to carry  out  Al  Qaida  style
attacks on  the U.S. homeland or against other Muslims. Yet,
Muslim Brotherhood  critiques  of  this  type  of  terrorism
should not  be taken  to indicate  that the  Brotherhood has
renounced violent  jihad. To  misunderstand  this  would  be
extremely dangerous  because in  several cases,  such as  in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood's understanding
of jihad  represents a  direct military threat to the United
States and our allies.

By viewing  the Muslim  Brotherhood  and  Wahhabism  as  two
separate movements, U.S. policymakers can address each group
separately, forming distinct policies for each.

Wahhabism presents  a unique challenge for U.S. policymakers
in that  Wahhabists consider  any  epistemology  not  rooted
entirely in  traditional  Islamic  sources  to  be  invalid.
Therefore, it  would be very difficult for the United States
to engage  Wahhabists in direct public diplomacy or a battle
of ideas.  After all,  they do not accept the modern secular
premises-whether liberal,  realists, Marxist,  etc.  -  that
Western arguments rest upon. However, the United States does
have a direct interest in limiting the influence of the more
violent Wahhabists, and in empowering the most non-political
scholars.

The first  step  is  for  U.S.  diplomats  and  policymakers
concerned with  the Middle  East to  familiarize  themselves
with  the  internal  arguments  and  language  of  Wahhabist
debates. All  Wahhabists, from  the most violent to the most
passive, share  the same  basic beliefs.  What separates  Al
Qaeda from  Wahhabists who  oppose  attacks  on  the  United
States, such  as the  Saudi religious establishment, is that
some Wahhabists  consider the  United States to have entered
into a  treaty or  an alliance  with an  Islamic ruler.  The
United States is, therefore, protected under Islamic law and
an illegitimate  target for  jihad. These are technicalities
of Islamic law but they are very important to Wahhabists and
can make the difference in convincing a Muslim to support or
refrain from  supporting terrorism.  Groups such as Al Qaeda
understand this and use it in their propaganda. For example,
when addressing  its critics  in the  wake of 9/11, Al Qaeda
made sure  to assert that "Truly, America is not, nor has it
ever  been,   a  land   of  treaty   or  alliance."[6]  U.S.
policymakers  and   practitioners  should  understand  these
debates and  in this  example, make  sure  that  the  United
States is  portrayed as  having entered into a treaty with a
legitimate  Islamic   ruler.  This   can  be  done  both  by
pressuring  Middle   Eastern  governments  to  depict  their
relationship with  the United  States in  this  manner,  and
through public  diplomacy which  does the  same. Of  course,
this type  of public diplomacy will not, on its own, end the
threat of  Al Qaeda and other violent Wahhabists, but it can
make it  much easier for nonviolent Wahhabists to discourage
others from attacking American targets.

Conversely,   the   Muslim   Brotherhood,   while   not   an
organization that  U.S. policymakers  should support  in its
current form,  is open to modernity and modernist arguments.
The Brotherhood  has made clear that, at least in theory, it
accepts the  validity of  modern norms  such as nonviolence,
non-aggression,     human     rights,     democracy,     and
constitutionalism.  Policymakers   concerned   with   public
diplomacy should,  therefore, identify  where they  feel the
Brotherhood is  not living  up to  these norms. For example,
when the  Brotherhood claims  to be nonviolent, it should be
challenged over  its support  for violence  in Israel, Iraq,
Chechnya, and Kashmir. When the Brotherhood claims to accept
human rights,  it should  be  shown  where  it  falls  short
concerning religious minorities and women's rights. When the
Brotherhood claims  to be  democratic, it  should underscore
where  its   proposed  policies   fail  to  meet  democratic
standards.  Thus  far,  the  United  States  has  failed  to
articulate these types of arguments well. It has, therefore,
let the Brotherhood's propaganda stand unchallenged; causing
many in the Islamic world to conclude that the United States
opposes the  Brotherhood not  because it  is an undemocratic
and often  militant organization, but because it is Islamic.
Policymakers should make clear that they intend to treat the
Muslim Brotherhood  as they would any other political party,
regardless of  religion. The  more the debate focuses on the
Muslim Brotherhood's politics and the less it focuses on its
religion, the  more successful  U.S. policy will be. Through
engaging the  Brotherhood indirectly in the battle of ideas,
the United  States can  challenge the Brotherhood to live up
to the principles that it already claims to accept.

By  refusing   to  favor   either  the  Brotherhood  or  the
Wahhabists,, U.S.   policymakers  might neutralize  the most
radical elements  of each  movement. This impartial approach
might also  avoid  destabilizing  the  regional  balance  of
power. The  United States could then form policies that pull
the Muslim  Brotherhood away  from militancy without pushing
it toward Wahhabism. Concurrently, it could attempt to limit
the extremes  of Wahhabism without pushing this group toward
the Iranian-led  anti-Western camp. The United States would,
therefore, be  able to  pursue its  interests  in  long-term
liberalization/democratization while  continuing to  support
short-term stability.

----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Haneef James Oliver, "Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun" The Wahhabi
Myth.
http://www.thewahhabimyth.com/ikhwan.htm

[2] "Near/Middle  East: Round-Up  of Friday  Sermons 22  Sep
06," BBC Monitoring, September 26, 2006.

[3]   Qatar TV, "Live Sermon from Umar Bin-al-Khattab Mosque
in Doha,"  (November 25,  2005), BBC Monitoring: Near/Middle
East: Round-Up  of Friday  Sermons 25  Nov 05, (November 29,
2005).

[4] "Readings  in Qaradawism:  Part  4,  Discontinuation  of
Jihaad." Salafi Publications,
http://www.spubs.com/sps/sp.cfm?subsecID=NDV16&articleID=NDV160

004&articlePages=1

[5] Ibid.

[6] "Translation  of  April  24,  2002  al-Qaeda  document,"
Middle East Policy Council,
www.mepc.org/journal_vol10/0306_alqaeda.asp

What USA Seeks to Destroy and How Muslims will React-This article was written in response to an e mail from a very senior US policy maker addressed to

This article was written in response to an e mail from a very senior US policy maker addressed to me in May 2002.

Basically it was a re-phrasing of what I told him how Muslims will react in response to US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although I am a leftist and free thinker this is how I thought Muslim extremists would react.

Over passage of years I believe in it more and more.

Freud was right as I read many years earlier his " Future of an Illusion " in 1985.


Article I wrote for Daily Nation Lahore 21 June 2002.The Nation published it again in AUGUST 2002 .Also published on www.orbat.com the article drew some very outraged responses from US readers:---









WHAT USA SEEKS TO DESTROY

A.H Amin

The three cardinal attributes of today's geopolitics are
"globalisation", "non ideological international themes" and "emphasis on
economics" rather than "ideological conflict" as the key theme in
international relations. It is another thing that below the surface
"ideology remains a key issue", "the desire to enslave smaller or weaker
states by larger or stronger states" remains the key issue and
"globalisation" is but another name of capitalism practiced at a global
scale.

The so called unipolar system also has limitations and is being
repeatedly challenged, if not conventionally, then unconventionally as
proved by events of 9/11. The famous philosopher Toffler may have
re-defined power but human nature remains the same as it was 2,500 years
ago. US Think Tanks and so called experts may advance subtle theses but
the underlying conflict is the same i.e. a West which adopted Eastern
Christianity and refashioned it as per Barbarian ideals versus an East
with a different mindset and a different set of values.

The international capitalist order was challenged by French Revolution
and the Communist Revolution in Russia but the power of the
imperialistic exploiters could not be broken. Nonetheless without USSR
military aid the Arabs could not have survived Israeli hegemonism. This
is an irrefutable historical reality.

Long ago the West's present dilemma was summed up by one of its greatest
historian Gibbon in the following words "Yet this apparent security
should not tempt us to forget that new enemies and unknown dangers may
possibly arise from some obscure people, scarcely visible in the map of
the world". In the same paragraph Gibbon cited the example of the Arabs
who had "languished in poverty and contempt" till the advent of Islam
when in Gibbon's words Islam" breathed into those same bodies the soul
of enthusiasm".

When modern US thinkers with links with US State decision making and
analytical bodies state with confidence that "ideology is no longer
fashionable" and that "international terrorism" is the key issue who are
they fooling. If this line of thinking is to be followed, whenever any
White Man or a Jewish man dies it is terrorism while whenever any non
White or Muslim dies this is casualty inflicted in sheer self defence in
the war against terrorism. A stooge is a man who was protected by USSR
and a King or Emir or a president protected by US Forces or US aid is a
perfect patriot.

Take the "Firebombing of Tokyo" on the fateful night of 9/10 March 1945.
On that night the US Airforce in the proud words of an American writer
"conducted the most destructive air raid in history". Sixteen square
miles of Tokyo were destroyed and some 83,793 Japanese civilian were
killed mostly by third degree burns while some 40,918 were injured. A US
General proudly exclaimed "It made a lot of sense to kill skilled
workers". Compare this with US position on 9/11. If for a moment we
accept that 9/11 was a great outrage in which some 3,000 were killed not
all of them skilled, what was Tokyo Raid of March 1945?

There is a subtle motivation here. An ulterior geopolitical agenda. The
West still fears ideology which it abandoned after 1945 in favour of
shameless materialism. It fears men who cannot be bought, who have no
fear for the tomorrow, who cannot be stopped by a NATO or the wide
Atlantic or wider Pacific. USSR may have been a more synthetic state but
the men motivated to die without motivated by the CIA pumped dollar via
Silent Soldiers is a more dangerous specie. Enters the Asian and African
Collaborator Regimes. Liberal Presidents, subtle Emirs, Egalitarian
Kings, all mustered like Sepoy Jahan Khan in the First World War to
fight the War against Terror. The Soviets were more naïve if less
morally defective than the American decision makers. The Americans seek
to accomplish enslavement through more sophisticated methods. Thus one
of their intellectuals states in an article that "unlike centuries past,
when war was the great arbiter, today the most interesting type of power
do not come out of the barrel of the gun".

Today this man says "there is a much bigger pay off in getting others to
want what you want". And there is no shortage of collaborators,
ambitious men who usurped power whether it was after the downfall of
Ottoman Empire with British or French money or in Egypt or Pakistan or
in Indonesia.

Somewhere deep inside the US decision makers are at a loss to admit as
to how with a 30 Billion USD intelligence budget, 13 Federal
Organisations dealing with Intelligence and some 30,000 eavesdroppers
employed by USA's National Security Agency was the Al Qaeda able to
strike. Compare 30 Billion USD per year spent since two decades with may
be 4 Billion USD lost in 9/11. If the East or the Islamic World has any
edge over the West it is in willingness to sacrifice rather than
materialism and selfishness.

What the West and particularly the USA fears is not nuclear weapons but
men motivated by ideology. Men who cannot be bought like the so many
Emirs, Kings and Military Presidents from Morocco till Pakistan.

The world has not changed from Gibbons' times. The New Barbarians as the
USA sees the Muslim radicals are more dangerous because they cannot be
bought. Because they have operational talent and strategic acumen.
Because they do not beg like Sadat for a Camp David but fight with their
limbs rather than Stingers. What the US seeks is destruction of ideology
which as per one theme presently floated in the so called prestigious
National Defence College at Islamabad is no longer fashionable.

This is the Clash of Civilisation and will continue till this world
exists or till the USA discovers a new planet where human beings can
survive and to which the Americans will migrate after all the mineral
resources of this world are exhausted and we are left to die without
water or fuel.

If this is so and if low intensity war is the only way in which the
conventionally weaker forces can defeat the conventionally stronger
forces then so be it. If extremism in thought or ideology is out of
fashion and out of favour with USA and its camp followers, so be it. If
we are in any case condemned to be sub humans in a world order dominated
by the G-7 and have no other recourse but to fight with bomb, dagger or
suicide explosive pack then so be it.

Jala kay Mashal-i-Jaan, Hum Junoon-Sifaat Chalay. Jo Ghar ko aag lagaay,
hamarey saath chalay.

WHY ISRAEL IS SCREWING MUSLIM STATES

Why Israel is screwing the hopeless Arabs and Muslims

Obama’s Afghan Strategy and Two Presidents of Af-Pak

IT IS NOT NECESSARY THAT WE MAY AGREE WITH ANY OR ALL OF THE ASSERTIONS MADE IN THIS ARTICLE.


AGHA AMIN

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Obama’s Afghan Strategy & Two Presidents of Af-Pak



By Usman Khalid



There were no surprises in the new strategy announced by President Obama over the now hyphenated countries Afghanistan and Pakistan referred to by Americans as Af-Pak. It is true that the cause of insurrection in both countries is the same i.e. Al-Qaeda. But there are differences, which if ignored, can lead to Viet Nam type disaster for America while the people of Af-Pak would bear much of the cost in human lives and misery. To understand that difference one has to start with a realisation that there is near unanimity in public perception in the Muslim World that America is their No 1 enemy, Al-Qaeda is No 2. What is their reasoning?



The Mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in a decade long war in which the USA provided half the money (the other half being provided by Saudi Arabia) which averaged about 600 million Dollars a year. That is a paltry sum that almost every country can afford. Pakistan organised the forces and provided logistic support. The bulk of the fighters – Mujahideen – were Afghans but there were a significant number of Pakistanis and Arabs. Almost every Muslim country and community provided volunteers in varying numbers. It was, what the Americans call, Global Jihad.



After the Soviet Union was defeated, the Mujahideen looked for a reason why they could not liberate Palestine and Kashmir like they liberated Afghanistan? After all, Israel and India are not more powerful than the Soviet Union! They arrived at the following conclusions:



1. The unconditional and total support the USA gives to Israel is the reason why Israel was able to defy the world and defeat the Arabs.

2. The USA prevented the organised state power of Muslim countries to be used to liberate Palestine and Kashmir by imposing US protégés as rulers/leaders in every country.

3. Pakistan – a potentially powerful country with large and well-trained armed forces, near self-sufficiency in defence industry, which is a nuclear power – is unable to perform its proper role because its leaders are so eager to please America that they even co-operates with the enemy – India.



The response of the Arab peoples was to: 1) Organise non- state power like in Afghanistan; 2) strike at the USA. The result was 9/11. But Al-Qaeda had been a creation of the CIA. It was the name given by the CIA to its list of Arab Mujahideen in Afghanistan, who should have returned to their countries upon the exit of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. But this did not happen because of two reasons: 1) the ranks of the foreign Mujahideen had been infiltrated by ‘Takfiris’ from Egypt, who wanted to make Afghanistan a base for global Jihad; 2) most of the Arab governments were afraid of returning Mujahideen and closed their doors on them. The Americans CIA was not unfriendly to Osama bin Laden or Al-Qaeda. It saw a role for them as the Takfiris kill mostly Muslims. They slaughter Muslims accusing them of being ‘enemy collaborators’, they kill the Shia for just being Shia, and they declare those they fear as an infidels and kill them. Al-Qaeda had no difficulty getting public support against Muslim leaders who joined the US led ‘war on terror’; it was easy to demonise them as ‘enemy collaborators’.

The strong points that give Al-Qaeda credibility are: 1) being in the forefront of ‘resistance’ in Afghanistan; 2) their opposition to toady rulers in the Muslim World; 3) their ability to evolve new techniques and tactics to respond to challenges of asymmetry of power. But they have huge weakness, which include: 1) their sectarian outlook, 2) indiscriminate slaughter of Muslims in areas they control, 3) promoting a view of Islam that oppresses women, enforces regimentation and which gives law into the hands of those with guns, 4) weakening the state structures of Muslim countries already under great strain because of US pressure to ‘do more’ or to ‘do things differently’.



With the US having declared its intent to withdraw from Iraq, their weaknesses far outweigh their strong points. Al-Qaeda was beaten by the Sunnis in Iraq when they realised that its agenda was to engage in slaughter of the Shia. Al-Qaeda is being beaten in the Kurram Agency in FATA where they promoted slaughter of the Shia. The people in Bajaur and Mohmand Agencies have also taken up arms against the Al-Qaeda allies and beaten them. It would not be long before they are beaten in Waziristan also. The war against Al-Qaeda is already being won – not by the armed forces but by ‘peoples’ power.



President Obama has picked the right time and the right target i.e. to defeat Al-Qaeda now and in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda now sees Pakistan as its potential base and the worst excesses of Al-Qaeda are being perpetrated against the people of Pakistan. Since Pakistan is a country with a powerful and free press, the people have a weapon to win the war of perceptions. The people of Pakistan see themselves caught between Al-Qaeda and India. (I say India because India has operational control over US policy in Afghanistan). If the people fear and detest those engaged in wanton slaughter on their streets, they also detest their leaders eager to please India but begging for Dollars in exchange for allowing Americans to bomb their country. It appears that the USA has decided to get rid of President Hamid Karazai who kisses both cheeks of every Pakistani he encounters while allowing his intelligence to work with RAW (the Indian Intelligence) to destabilise Pakistan. It is not just Al-Qaeda but also RAW and the Afghan intelligence who are carrying out terrorists attacks in Pakistan. The attack on the Cricket Team of Sri Lanka was the work of RAW; the attack on Police Training Centre near Lahore was the work of Al-Qaeda. In both cases the ‘work’ had been carried out by their common sub-contractors who call themselves Pakistani Taliban.



The war against al-Qaeda would be lost by America because of being wrong not in broad thrust but in detail. The contact group idea is bad. It appears to have been founded on a fear that those not included would try to subvert and frustrate the US efforts. Since the L of C to Afghanistan is precarious not only in Pakistan but also through Iran, Russia and states of Central Asia, a widely based contact group appears to be a good idea. But why India? That is like showing a red rag to the bull. It is true that the present ruling parties (who represent a minority in Afghanistan) are hostile to Pakistan and friendly to India, but that is the problem. To perpetuate that is not the solution. All the neighbours of Afghanistan are Muslim countries. Even though erstwhile neighbours had been competing for influence in Afghanistan for over a century, that characterised an era when two of its neighbours – Russia and British India - were super powers. Now neither India nor Russia has a common border with Afghanistan. For the first time in its history, Afghanistan can have peace. It can transform itself from being a ‘buffer’ to being a ‘’bridge’ to Central Asia. That is the common interest of the countries of the region and the USA who would also like Central Asian states to be linked to the sea in the South.



The change of leadership in Afghanistan may not solve any problem. If the successor regime is also anti-Pakistan, the Americans might be able to declare victory somewhat earlier and leave, but Pakistan would be faced with hostile countries in its West (Afghanistan) as well as the East (India). President Zardari has welcomed the Obama speech because it promises him Dollars but the military is rightly nervous. They fear that the Americans are going to leave behind a situation even harder to deal with than in 1987. Even though the Government of Pakistan is not able to articulate or defend the interests of the country, the Americans are fully aware of what they are. Barbara Plett wrote in an article for the BBC News web site:



"The Pakistan army knows that it and the Taliban have Pashtun support on both sides of the Durand line. This gives it leverage, and means it can signal to the United States that it will not be abandoned in any Afghan deal.”



“Prior to his election, Mr Obama recognised that Pakistani peace with India was key to stability in Afghanistan. Since his inauguration, however, he has dropped any suggestion of an initiative on Kashmir in the face of Indian objections.”



“Now, he hopes a mixture of carrot and stick will force a rethink of Pakistan's security calculation.”



“But for Pakistan's security establishment, its concerns - the presence of India in Afghanistan, Kabul's refusal to recognise the border, the festering Kashmir dispute - are strategic threats far greater than those posed by Islamist militants.”



"The concept of pressuring Pakistan is flawed," Ahmed Rashid and Barnett Rubin have written in the Foreign Affairs magazine. "No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal."



“Ultimately America's leverage is limited: in pushing too much, it may lose even the limited cooperation it has.”



The Americans want Pakistan to see Afghanistan and India as its friends at a time when both are aggressively engaged in clandestine operations inside Pakistan. If America does succeed in pressurising Pakistan to do what the populace sees as ‘treachery’ there would be a revolt in Pakistan. Is that what America wants? There are many in Pakistan who believe that to be the real US plan. But if the USA does really want peace in Afghanistan, as President Obama appears to say, it would keep India out of Afghanistan.



The Obama Administration has already decided to give aid to provinces rather than the central government of Afghanistan. That is a good idea; it would reduce corruption and give the USA better control over the actions of the local chieftains and warlords. It is well within the grasp of the USA to make good friends with the entire region – Af-Pak and Central Asia. It should avoid relying on military operation to destroy the resistance that it calls the Taliban. I have said before and I reiterate, when there is stand-off the one who is more generous emerges as victorious. The USA is in a position to be generous. It wants little; it has a lot to offer. It should focus on making friends not killing them. They should make use of the culture of ‘forgive and forget’ that a jirga represents. It is a mad to kill even more Afghans and declare victory over their graveyard. Time has come for a real jirga – a peace conference restricted to Afghanistan’s neighbours - to guarantee its borders and to ensure free movement of people and goods from and to Afghanistan. Afghans are even better as traders than as fighters; let their better self be given a chance.



The writer is Director of London Institute of South Asia



--
http://low-intensity-conflict-review.blogspot.com/

THE REAL ENEMY OF ARABS AND ISLAM

NOT THE JEWS , NOT THE USA BUT THE HIGHLY CORRUPT , DUBIOUS ARAB SHEIKHS,KINGS,PRESIDENTS AND GENERALS.

THESE ARE THE REAL FIFTH COLUMNISTS WHO ARE ACTUALLY ON THE PAYROLL OF USA,BRITISH AND ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES.

THESE DUBIOUS ARAB SO CALLED LEADERS NEED TO BE ROCKETED FIRST.ONCE THIS IS DONE ISRAEL WILL LAST FOR MORE THAN A WEEK.

A REVOLUTION , A VIOLENT COUP DE TAT IS NEEDED.

Obama’s Team Prepares Escalated Bloodletting-Patrick Martin

Obama’s Team Prepares Escalated Bloodletting

Patrick Martin



(A day after he was sworn in as President, Barack Obama signed orders to close down Guantanamo and end the use of torture in the USA. The world was ecstatic that America may finally be embracing the ‘rule of law’. But the euphoria lasted only two days. On 24 January, President Obama opened his ‘murder account’ as the new Commander in Chief. He ordered Predator strikes in Waziristan that killed 22 Pakistanis in their homes. In Obama’s book, torture is intolerable but slaughter is another matter; it is the use of ‘smart power’. + Usman Khalid + )



By Patrick Martin , 24 January, 2009, WSWS.org



In a series of meetings and public appearances Wednesday and Thursday, and with the first military strikes of his administration, President Barack Obama has given a clear signal that he plans intensified bloodshed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the US escalates its military intervention in Central and South Asia.



Missiles fired from unmanned Predator drones struck two targets inside Pakistan Friday morning, killing at least 18 people. As is always the case with such exercises in remote-controlled murder, US officials claimed they were targeting Al Qaeda, although even US media accounts admitted that the majority of those killed were local residents.



Three missiles struck the village of Zharki in North Waziristan, killing ten people, of whom five were described by US "security sources" as Al Qaeda militants. A few hours later, another missile hit a house in South Waziristan, killing eight people whose identities were not known.



The strikes were the latest in a series of more than two dozen such attacks since last August, and Pentagon officials said they had carried out the attacks under existing authority from the outgoing Bush administration, while keeping the new president fully informed of the action.



The death toll from the missile campaign, according to Pakistani government figures, numbers at least 263 people. Even US government officials claim only a handful of those killed had any ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.



The attacks on sovereign Pakistani territory are blatant violations of international law, which the regime in Islamabad protests verbally, while continuing to accept billions in US subsidies to the country's military.



Obama and his newly confirmed secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, staged what amounted to a political rally at the State Department Thursday, at which they announced the appointment of two new US pro-consuls to the region.

Former senator George Mitchell is to reprise his role from the Clinton administration as the US envoy to the Middle East. Former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is special US representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The different titles reflect different roles. Mitchell has been given responsibility for reviving and supervising negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, as well as between Israel and neighboring Arab states. His job is strictly diplomatic.



Holbrooke is to work with the US-backed regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the US military command in Kabul, to coordinate joint action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. He is not labelled an "envoy," according to the State Department, because he will have input into military policy as well as diplomacy, and because he will not be negotiating with the Taliban—a rebuff to pleas for such talks by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and some European countries.



Clinton called the two appointments "a loud and clear signal ... that our nation is once again capable of demonstrating global leadership." Obama said the two would "convey our seriousness of purpose" in both areas.



Mitchell chaired the negotiations in Northern Ireland that led to the 1998 Good Friday agreement, under which the IRA disarmed and Irish Republican politicians have joined the provincial government. He later chaired a commission on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whose report, delivered in April 2001, was ignored by the incoming Bush administration because it called for a freeze on Israeli settlements on the West Bank.



Israeli officials, and particularly the right-wing Likud Party, which is favored to win the country's February 10 parliamentary elections, have openly expressed their distrust of Mitchell, who is partially of Lebanese-American ancestry (his mother was a Maronite Christian).



Mitchell's appointment cannot disguise the fundamental policy of US imperialism in the region, which makes use of the Zionist regime as its military spearhead against the Arab masses. Both Obama and Clinton, to whom Mitchell will report, have made clear their support for the 24-day Israeli onslaught on Gaza, in which more than 1,300 Palestinians lost their lives, and over 5,000 were wounded.



The selection of Holbrooke is even more ominous, since he has long served as one of the most ruthless representatives of American imperialism, going all the way back to his early days in the Foreign Service in Vietnam. He came to public notice as the leader of the US diplomatic team at the 1995 talks on the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, held in Dayton, Ohio, that concluded with a US-imposed settlement in the civil war in Bosnia.



In his encouragement of ethnic cleansing by the Croatian regime of Franjo Tudjman, which drove a quarter million Serbs out of the Krajina region of southern Croatia in a 1995 offensive, Holbrooke could deservedly face war crimes charges. He later boasted, in his memoir of the Dayton talks: "Tudjman wanted clarification of the American position. He bluntly asked for my personal views. I indicated my general support for the offensive ... I told Tudjman the offensive had great value to the negotiations. It would be much easier to retain at the table what had been won on the battlefield than to get the Serbs to give up territory they had controlled for several years."



Holbrooke was fully aware at the time of the Dayton talks that the Croatian Army was carrying out atrocities against the Serbs, and was later quoted saying, "We ‘hired' these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to ‘control' them. But this is no time to get squeamish about things." He will now seek to find new "junkyard dogs" to do the dirty work of American imperialism in south and central Asia.



In his remarks at the State Department rally, Obama reiterated his concern over what he called a "deteriorating situation" in both Afghanistan and Pakistan," a region that is "the central front" of the struggle against terrorism. This language, echoing George W. Bush's description of Iraq, underscores the new administration's commitment to military subjugation of the Afghan population and wider attacks on the Pakistani population of the border region, largely Pushtun-speaking and linked by tribal ties to the majority Pushtun population in Afghanistan.



Clinton said that Holbrooke's mandate would be to "coordinate across the entire government an effort to achieve United States' strategic goals in the region." These goals have little to do with the remnants of Al Qaeda hiding out in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The real focus of the intervention, under Obama as much as under Bush, is to establish the United States as the principal power in the oil-rich region of Central Asia.



The renewed focus on military problems in Afghanistan was signalled as well by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has been retained in his position during the transition from Bush to Obama. He told a press conference Thursday that US goals in Afghanistan had been "too broad and too far into the future. We need more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years, in terms of re-establishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after al-Qaeda, preventing the re-establishment of terrorism."



There is mounting anxiety in the Pentagon over the viability of US supply lines to Afghanistan, especially if the force on the ground is doubled, as Obama plans. Two-thirds of US supplies go through Pakistan and convoys through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan have come under repeated attacks. General David Petraeus, the former Iraq commander who was promoted to head the US Central Command, with responsibility for war planning throughout the region, recently completed a trip through Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan, seeking agreements on expanding US supply shipments through those countries. He reported on his findings to the Obama White House on Wednesday.



According to a report in the New York Times January 22, another major concern of US military authorities in Afghanistan is the strengthening of Taliban influence in the southern provinces around Kandahar, patrolled now mainly by British, Canadian and Dutch troops, who are spread thinly through a vast area.



The Times reporter noted worriedly: "It is perhaps in Kandahar, one of the provincial capitals, where the lack of troops is most evident. About 3,000 Canadian soldiers are assigned to secure the city, home to about 500,000 people. In a recent visit, this reporter travelled the city for five days and did not see a single Canadian soldier on the streets. The lack of troops has allowed the Taliban to mount significant attacks inside the city."++

What else is Yazidiyyat – What Else is Karbala-By Dr. Haider Mehdi

What else is Yazidiyyat – What Else is Karbala!
By Dr. Haider Mehdi

I have known the grief and anguish of the mourners of Karbala (the martyrdom of Imam Hussain) and have emotionally, religiously, spiritually, psychologically, sociologically and politically understood the outpouring of “marsiya- khani” (lamentation commemorating Imam Hussain’s martyrdom) that has continued until today for over 1400 years. I am a Muslim. I am a Shi’a. I have protested all my life against the human savagery in Karbala and my communal participation in “marsiya khani” is an unending transcendental and generational expression of political protest against Yazidiyyat – the ultimate brutality in human spirit for the sake of power, oppression and malevolent domination over others.

Yazidiyyat is a symbol of an obvious barbaric penchant towards human massacre and carnage to satisfy a compulsion to megalomania deeply rooted as a motive in the mentality of those who practice it. It is an intentional process to seek clearly defined objectives – the victims of this doctrine are helpless, innocent and powerless human beings. It is a barbaric creed.

I had never thought in my wildest imagination that I would see, at this stage of human civilization, the doctrine of “Yazidiyyat” so blatantly and so deliberately used against humanity and a “Karbala” witnessed on my TV screen right in front of my eyes in my own living room. But such has been, hopelessly, the reality of the 23-day “Gaza holocaust” and massacre of Palestinians including children, women and men, the young and old, the sick and the starving. And the world remained a spectator during this horrifying human carnage. What else is Yazidiyyat – what else is Karbala?

A knock at a door (Zeitoun, Gaza, January 4th) where the frightened members of an extended family were hiding from Israeli bombardment and ground assault as Attiyah, 46, (husband) and Zinad Samourri, 35, (wife) mother of eight children opened the door, the Israeli soldiers in cold blood shot Attiyah dead and then went on a rampage to massacre the other members of the family in this small hiding place.

“So far dozens of bodies, mostly women, children and elderly, have been recovered, almost all from the same extended family. The 48th corpse – horribly decomposed – was found on Monday but there are fears others lie under the rubble and soil churned up by Israeli armoured vehicles,” reported Tim Butcher of The Telegraph Group of London. Navi Pillay, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights has already called for war crimes investigations against Israel for the massacre that took place in Zeitoun on January 4th and 5th.

The question is: Isn’t this the “holocaust” of the 21st century? Isn’t it Yazidiyyat? Isn’t this the “Karbala” of our times? Should not the entire humanity be protesting, mourning and condemning this savagery, this inhumanity – this kind of approach to a political doctrine explicitly and intentionally espoused by the powerful nations in their conduct of international relations and their horrifying lack of respect for human life other than their own people?

The ultimate irony and human tragedy of the “Gaza holocaust” is that it was planned, executed and supported by an absolute complacency of the outgoing and incoming American administrations and the incumbent British government. The entire West remained silently in cahoots with the Israeli-American-British plan, what the Israeli Zionist Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called “a re-formulation of objective reality” – another addition to the US-Western arsenal of inhumane political doctrines in global politics.

As a human being with enhanced consciousness and advanced awareness of human conditions and as a member of the segment of the contemporary world that wishes to place high value on human life, I had expected that the entire global civilization would turn upside down with anguish, condemn the “Gaza holocaust,” and demand an abrupt cessation to the repressive political creeds of our times. But it did not happen that way.

I had hoped that Barrack Hussain Obama, in his inaugural presidential speech, would have acknowledged Israeli brutality and categorically condemned it. I had hoped that Obama would say something along the lines of repudiation of the past American foreign policy approach to bring transformations to his country’s future direction in global politics. I had hoped that he would say: ‘The massacre of Palestinians has taken place in Gaza under our watch and America and the American people are ashamed of it. I pledge to the Palestinian victims and their families that America will do justice to them now, and my administration will not allow now and ever again such use of brutal military force and political doctrine against any people anywhere in the world. This is my pledge, the pledge of all Americans and I want to assure the entire global community that, as of this moment, America has changed – change has finally come.’ Now that would have been the declaration of a true statesman committed to the fundamental change that Obama has promised to the American voters and the people around the world.

But nothing of the sort was said or promised. Instead Obama did not condemn Israel’s barbarism in Gaza. He later spoke to Mahmoud Abbas and promised “to work with him as partners to establish a durable peace in the region.” But that is the classic repetition of American rhetoric of the past: no substance, no results, no change, no commitment to a policy of fairness to the Palestinian people – the usual political manipulation to continue the status-quo of Israel’s dominance in the Middle East and beyond.

I had hoped that Hilary Clinton would be horrified at Israel’s audacity of placing the new American administration, at the very outset, in a political conundrum and global crisis. I had hoped that Clinton would unleash her anger by recognizing the American part in the “Gaza holocaust.” I had envisioned that, in a reflective mindset pursuing “change” in the US foreign policy doctrine, Clinton would admit and lament that President Bush and Secretary Rice’s last-minute assault on the American image world-wide by collaborating with Israel in its “Gaza holocaust” has brought disaster and shame to the cherished values of freedom, justice, fairness and peace for all people everywhere. I had hoped that she would say that the Gaza massacre is inexcusable – and that the Obama administration apologizes on behalf of the American people. I imagined that she would have assured all people everywhere that this incoming administration had no complicity, role or part in this horrendous act of savagery against an innocent population – and she would commit herself in making sure, by supporting international law and human-rights conventions, that such an outrageous onslaught against any people anywhere will not happen again in the annuals of future human history.

But Clinton did not commit herself to any “change” in the US foreign-policy doctrine of status-quo. What she said was alarmingly resonant of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Clinton said that this administration will not talk to Hamas. The problem is that Hamas is the legitimate democratically elected representative of the Palestinian people. How can a serious negotiator of peace for the Palestinians sideline Hamas? Indeed, Clinton’s statement is yet another indicator of future American foreign policy failure in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. And this failure will happen not because of misunderstanding the nature of this conflict; it is going to be the result of an intentional policy to further push forward Israeli dominance in the Middle East. Clinton envisages the so-called peace in the entire Middle East on American terms – fairness or justice is not an ingredient in this equation.

I had also hoped that Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations Secretary General, after his visit to the Gaza Strip, would have issued an ultimatum to the UN Security-Council that he would resign in protest of Israeli brutality in Gaza unless the Security-Council immediately sanctioned Israel.

But that did not happen either. Perhaps, the UN Secretary General was not moved consequentially by the human tragedy he saw. What he said was, “These are heartbreaking scenes I have seen and I am deeply grieved by what I have seen today…” But why not grab the bull by the horns and destroy its wickedness? In the meantime, as for decades, the UN political establishment keeps on working as an extended arm of American foreign policy and overall Western interests. No change there either. Sad, isn’t it?

I had hoped that all Arab regimes would have acted decisively and collectively to gain powerful and important political roles in global politics to mend the international system and make it more responsive to the larger interests of their countries and their people.

But they have virtually let the opportunity slip away yet again. It seems that oil money and American threats to destabilize their regimes are perceived more powerful than the desire and confidence to acquire commanding prowess in the global political system. Consequently, it seems that the Arab world will remain subservient to American-Western dictates for years to come. The Palestinian people will continue to suffer and Israeli military adventurism will expand in its scope as an ally of the US-West the Middle East, spreading its reach to Southeast Asia and the Central Asian Islamic States.

I had hoped that India would sever its diplomatic relations with Israel. It would do so as the largest democracy, denouncing the brutality and genocide of an innocent people in the 21st century. But it did nothing of the sort despite the fact that India is unwilling to forget the Mumbai violence for a fraction of a moment. Rightfully so. But how can it remain a passive non-actor in the global political system so as to not punish Israel for its heinous crimes against humanity? It is the ultimate contempt and neglect of the human condition and an act of absolute hypocrisy, isn’t it?

I had hoped that Pakistan’s incumbent leadership would immediately cut off military supplies to the US-Nato forces in Afghanistan that go through Pakistan’s territory unless the Bush administration forced Israel to stop its carnage in Gaza. Ask any Pakistani and you would get the same opinion. But, it seems, that the incumbent government in Pakistan does not care much for its public opinion, especially when it comes to dealing with the US. Indeed, it is alarmingly un-democratic for a regime that claims democratic credentials. Ironic, isn’t it?

I had hoped that billions of black flags would fly over billions of homes all over the Muslim world as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinians, sharing their grief and anguish over the Israeli-inflicted “holocaust” on them. But it did not happen. Hence, it confirms that the entire Muslim world is politically dead, expressionless, indifferent to the violation of their “beings” – and their political leadership and governments are “agents” of American imperialism. Unbelievably sad, isn’t it?

The only voice raised in this empty and pathetic political wilderness of the Muslim world came from the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad who, in a open letter to Obama, wrote the following on January 1st, 2009:

“1) Stop killing people. The United States is too fond of killing people in order to achieve its objectives… War is primitive, the cavemen’s way of dealing with a problem. Stop your arms build up and your planning for future wars.

2) Stop indiscriminate support of Israeli killers with your money and your weapons. The planes and the bombs killing the people of Gaza are from you.”

I wonder if my readers agree with Dr. Mahathir Mohamad? If you do, then express it – forcefully and assertively. If you don’t, imagine a Gaza-like “holocaust” in your backyard – most probably in Swat, somewhere in NWFP or Afghanistan. The wise thing is to act now – before it’s too late.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American President, said in 1933: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

What are you afraid of? What is your fear? Remember, they are trying to paralyze your advance…subjugate you to their will…implant fear in your hearts …and get away with it! Don’t let them do it to you!

Wake up and stand for yourself and your intrinsic faith in humanitarian principles – your right to justice, fairness and peace…! Mind it, that is what Karbala was all about…!


The “Gaza Holocaust” is a tragedy of a monumental scale because it has happened in our own lifetime – right in front of our eyes…! It is the Karbala of our times!!

Protest it…! Feel grief for it…! Mourn it…! Let “them” know you are not going to take it anymore…!



The writer is a professor, political analyst and a conflict-resolution expert.

An Illegitimate and Lawless Country

From: --"Kaiser Tufail"



Question: Which country alone in the Middle East has nuclear weapons?

Answer:Israel.

Q: Which country in the Middle East refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and bars international inspections? Answer:Israel.

Q: Which country in the Middle East seized the sovereign territory of other nations by military force and continues to occupy it in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions?

Answer:Israel.

Q: Which country in the Middle East routinely violates the international borders of another sovereign state with warplanes and artillery and naval gunfire?

Answer:Israel.

Q: What American ally in the Middle East has for years sent assassins into other countries to kill its political enemies (a practice sometimes called exporting terrorism)?

Answer:Israel.

Q: In which country in the Middle East have high-ranking military officers admitted publicly that unarmed prisoners of war were executed?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East refuses to prosecute its soldiers who have acknowledged executing prisoners of war?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East created 762,000 refugees and refuses to allow them to return to their homes, farms and businesses?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East refuses to pay compensation to people whose land, bank accounts and businesses it confiscated?

Answer: Israel.

Q: In what country in the Middle East was a high-ranking United Nations diplomat assassinated?

Answer: Israel.

Q: In what country in the Middle East did the man who ordered the assassination of a high-ranking U.N. diplomat become prime minister?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East blew up an American diplomatic facility in Egypt and attacked a U.S. ship, the USS Liberty, in international waters, killing 34 and wounding 171 American sailors?

Answer: Israel.

Q: What country in the Middle East employed a spy, Jonathan Pollard, to steal classified documents and then gave some of them to the Soviet Union? Answer: Israel.

Q: What country at first denied any official connection to Pollard, then voted to make him a citizen and has continuously demanded that the American president grant Pollard a full pardon?

Answer: Israel.

Q. What Middle East country allows American Jewish murderers to flee to its country to escape punishment in the United States and refuses to extradite them once in their custody?

Answer: Israel


Q. What Middle East country preaches against hate yet builds a shrine and a memorial for a murderer who killed 29 Palestinians while they prayed in their Mosque.

Answer: Israel

Q: What country on Planet Earth has the second most powerful lobby in the United States, according to a recent Fortune magazine survey of Washington insiders?

Answer: Israel.

Q. Which country in the Middle East deliberately targeted a U.N. Refugee Camp in Qana, Lebanon and killed 103 innocent men, women, and especially children?

Answer: Israel Q: Which country in the Middle East is in defiance of 69 United Nations Security Council resolutions and has been protected from 29 more by U.S. vetoes? Answer: Israel.

Q. Which country in the Middle East receives more than one-third of all U.S. aid yet is the 16th richest country in the world?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East receives U.S. weapons for free and then sells the technology to the Republic of China even at the objections of the U.S.?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East routinely insults the American people by having its Prime Minister address the United States Congress and lecturing them like children on why they have no right to reduce foreign aid?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East had its Prime Minister announce to his staff not to worry about what the United States says because "We control America?"

Answer: Israel

. What country in the Middle East was cited by Amnesty International for demolishing more than 4000 innocent Palestinian homes as a means of ethnic cleansing.

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East has just recently used a weapon of mass destruction, a one-ton smart bomb, dropping it in the center of a highly populated area killing 15 civilians including 9 children?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East routinely kills young Palestinian children for no reason other than throwing stones at armored vehicles, bulldozers, or tanks?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East signed the Oslo Accords promising to halt any new Jewish Settlement construction, but instead, has built more than 270 new settlements since the signing?

Answer: Israel

Q. Which country in the Middle East has assassinated more than 100 political officials of its opponent in the last 2 years while killing hundreds of civilians in the process, including dozens of children?

Answer: Israel

Q.. Which country in the Middle East regularly violates the Geneva Convention by imposing collective punishment on entire towns, villages, and camps, for the acts of a few, and even goes as far as demolishing entire villages while people are still in their homes?

Answer: Israel


This has got to be forwarded.

BOYCOTT JEWISH PRODUCTS

BOYCOTT JEWISH PRODUCTS

ZIONIST ATTACK ON GAZA GHETTO CONTINUES

ZIONIST ATTACK ON GAZA GHETTO CONTINUES A.H AMINNOT A SINGLE EUROPEAN OR US MAJOR LEADER CONDENMED ITTHE UN LED BY ITS MOST SPINELESS AND SHAMELESS SECRETARY GENERAL IS TOTALLY IMPOTENTA BILLION SHAMES ON ARAB KINGS,PRESIDENTS,GENERALS..............DISBAND YOUR ARMIES,NAVIES AND AIR FORCES BECAUSE YOU ARE SHAMELESSA BILLION CURSES ON TWO SHAMELESS ARAB LEADERS SADAAT AND ARAFAT FOR MAKING PEACE WITH THE ZIONISTSMY QUARREL IS NEITHER WITH THE CHRISTIANS NOR JEWS AND I AM NOT A PRACTISING MUSLIM , BUT WITH ZIONISTS WHO ARE WORSE THAN THE KAMINSKI AND DIRLEWANGER BRIGADES OF WARSAW 1944THE PALESTENIANS BEING KILLED ARE BOTH CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS.THE LESSONS THAT THE PIMPS ATTACKING GAZA GHETTO ARE DRIVING IN THE WORLD IS THAT HITLER WAS RIGHT ! HOLOCAST WAS THE IDEAL FINAL SOLUTION.AN ERRONEOUS LESSON BUT A PERCEPTION THAT SEEMS CLOSER TO THE TRUTH THAN IT REALLY IS.SHAME ON ARAB LEADERS KINGS AND PRESIDENTS.SHAME ON EUROPE AND USA.WHERE ARE YOUR HUMAN RIGHTS WHEN STATELESS PALESTENIANS ARE KILLED.SOME EUROPEANS MAY NOT KNOW THAT MANY PALESTENIANS ARE CHRISTIANS TOO.A PATHETIC STATE OF AFFAIRS.EVEN IF ARABS KILL ZIONIST SOLDIERS , HALF THE 1000 PALESTENIAN WOMEN AND CHILDREN THAT THE PIMP ZIONISTS ATTACKING GAZA GHETTO HAVE KILLED THE ZIONISTS WILL MAKE PEACE.THE FAULT OF THE PALESTENIANS IS NOT THAT THEY ARE NOT RIGHT BUT THAT THEU DONT HAVE WMDS.THERE IS A LESSON HERE WHICH ADOLF BUSH HAS TAUGHT THE WORLD IN 2003.IF YOU DONT HAVE WMDS YOU WILL BE ATTACKED AND SLAUGHTERED LIKE COCKROACHES IN ABU GHARIB !

Tacit Approval

Tacit Approval

Is the silence of the moderate Muslim majority against terrorism making it complicit in the murderous outrages of a few Islamists?
By Mahir Ali


On Christmas Eve last year, a feature in The New York Times dwelt on Muhammad Fawaz, “a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger.” The 20-year-old had longed for a scholarship to study abroad, but did not have the right connections. “So Mr Fawaz decided to rebel,” wrote Michael Slackman. “He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanour of an Islamic activist.”
“In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood ... Now he works to recruit other students to the cause ...”
“Across the Middle East, young people like Mr Fawaz, angry, alienated and deprived of opportunity, have accepted Islam as an agent of change and rebellion. It is their rock‘n’roll, their long hair and love beads. Through Islam, they defy the status quo and challenge governments seen as corrupt and incompetent.”
“These young people – 60 per cent of those in the region are under 25 – are propelling a worldwide Islamic revival, driven by a thirst for political change and social justice. That fervour has popularised a more conservative interpretation of the faith.”
That’s not an uncommon view among the liberal western intelligentsia, nor is it particularly inaccurate. The phenomenon is a relatively recent one, however. For much of the 20th century, radical Islamic movements were generally restricted to the fringes of Muslim societies. In some cases – as in Nasser’s Egypt – they were considered a sufficient threat as long ago as the 1950s to attract state repression, which invariably backfired.
Back in that period and well into the 1980s, the United States harboured the impression that it could use such groups as a counterweight against communism and left-wing nationalism. It disbursed funds and advice with abandon. This tendency reached its apotheosis in the so-called jihad against Soviet forces and their Afghan allies, the consequences of which have resonated far and wide ever since. The events of 9/11 stand out on account of where they occurred, but a great many more lives have been lost elsewhere – not least in Algeria during the 1990s – partly through the courtesy of veterans of the Afghan crusade.
Algeria is an interesting case in point, because it spiralled out of control after the armed forces refused to recognise an irrefutable electoral victory by the Islamic Salvation Front. The decision led to years of civil war, during which both sides resorted to unspeakable atrocities. Since the 1990s, the West has been allergic to the prospect of Islamist administrations – although even during that decade it was happy to facilitate the passage of jihadis to Bosnia and Kosovo.
The contradiction between this allergy and its supposed preference for democracy perhaps took its starkest form in the Palestinian territories after Hamas – an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that in its formative stages was propped up by Israel as a means of weakening the relatively secular Fatah – secured an electoral victory. The US and most of its allies refused to engage with the Hamas leadership in the absence of its explicit recognition of Israel, thereby reinforcing the impression that notwithstanding all the clamour about democracy, popular verdicts count for nothing unless they produce results that meet Washington’s approval.
Double standards of this variety have long fed into the lack of respect that US foreign policy inspires through much of the Muslim world – a tendency that was sharply exacerbated by the war in Iraq. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the US confronts the irony of being cast in the role it had once chosen for the USSR: propping up a government of restricted appeal in Kabul while combating the combined forces of conservative nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, the latter supplemented by foreign recruits.
The historically lopsided American approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its role in bolstering unpopular and invariably undemocratic regimes throughout the Middle East are often cited as crucial explanations for the antagonism it attracts, not least from Islamists of the violent variety. This analysis is by no means mistaken, but it is incomplete. It cannot suffice as an explanation for a phenomenon that has been witnessed in recent years across and beyond the Muslim world: a drift towards increasingly rigid interpretations of Islam that most of the faithful would previously have considered anathema.
It is often pointed out that the vast majority of Muslims across the world are moderates, while attention is generally focused on the relatively small groups that advocate violent jihad and sometimes are determined to practice what they preach. A common riposte is: Why, in that case, is the moderate majority so reticent about confronting and denouncing the extremists? The implication here is that Muslim moderation is a contradiction in terms, and that the near silence of the majority makes it complicit in the murderous outrages of the few.
It’s not quite as simple as that, of course. In the same way as followers of other monotheistic religions, Muslims are an amorphous bunch, and there is little danger of this cultural and even theological diversity being obliterated in a relentless march towards Wahhabism or Salafism. There is no good reason to suspect that most adherents of the faith oppose peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims, or harbour absurd visions of some kind of caliphate extending across vast swathes of the planet.
At the same time, however, it would be unrealistic to deny that there has in recent decades been a drift towards fundamentalism across the Muslim world as well as elsewhere, wherever Muslims are settled in large numbers. The alarming increase in conspicuous piety does not in itself point towards a matching rise in support for terrorism. Many perfectly pious Muslims are more than comfortable with the tenet that there should be no compulsion in religion and will have no truck with confessional violence, be it inter-faith or intra-faith.
Yet there is cause to fear a steady increase in the numbers of those whose attitude bears comparison with that of the more virulent evangelical Christians. The latter are chiefly an American phenomenon, and although they may not personally be prone to violence, they have little objection if it is committed on their behalf. Their selective and literal interpretation of the scriptures has even led them to blindly support Israel on the grounds that the latter’s obduracy is likely to turn it into the battlefield for Armageddon. (On the utter lunatic fringe of this special interest group are those who believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist and that his ascendancy is a sign that the end is nigh).
The Muslim equivalent of this tendency includes at least tacit support for acts of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam, and can extend to support networks and other forms of sustenance for the terrorists. Those thus inclined are often affiliated, formally or otherwise, with the likes of Jamaat-ud-Dawa in Pakistan, Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Such networks are fond of emphasising their role as welfare organisations – and more often than not, this is not a spurious claim. In many countries such bodies are more effective than state agencies. It’s disingenuous to pretend, however, that this is their only, or even their primary, function.
The drift towards extremism in the Muslim world is invariably attributed to repressive regimes and economic disarray: the same sort of factors that once upon a time powered left-wing movements. This can, however, only be a partial explanation for the phenomenon. After all, recent history offers no examples of purportedly Islamic regimes – be it the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, the mullahs in Iran or the Taliban in Afghanistan – that have been anything other than repressive. Nor has Islam’s theoretical preference for an equitable distribution of wealth ever been coherently manifested in a national setting.
Another explanation points towards a siege mentality based on the impression that the rest of the world is determined to disempower, if not decimate, Muslims. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, this fear was based on the fact that Muslims were the beleaguered party in most of the world’s hotspots, be it Palestine, Bosnia, Kashmir or Chechnya. A common counter-argument in this respect is the at least equally pertinent claim that when a conflict, no matter how ugly, involves Muslims killing other Muslims, the ummah is strangely unaffected. To cite the most obvious instance, how many protests have there been throughout the Muslim world against the genocide in Darfur?
Among Muslims in the West, the siege mentality is compounded by alienation within the societies in which they have grown up. The first generation of Muslim immigrants in Britain, for instance, faced with relative equanimity the hostile environment in which they found themselves. They did not abandon their cultures, but it was widely assumed that subsequent generations would be increasingly better assimilated. It happened in some cases, but in others the drift has been towards an Islamic identity. Taken to an extreme, the latter tendency can lead to violent consequences. You can blame it on racism. You can blame it on Iraq and Afghanistan.
But these can, at best, be regarded as contributory factors rather than a satisfactory explanation. It’s as if a switch has been pulled in the Muslim psyche. It’s hard to say whether something has been switched on or something else has been switched off. This urge to indiscriminately take the lives of others is, naturally enough, considered unacceptable outside the fold of Islam (although the means deployed to countermand it all too often produce the opposite effect). What’s alarming is that some Muslims don’t consider it unacceptable. And those who do, often lack the ability or the courage to make themselves heard.
Sometimes it seems as if a veil has descended between Muslim minds and common sense. This does not affect only those who have never been afforded the opportunity to consider a worldview that might contradict what they are taught in their madrassas. It also extends to those who have been exposed to an enlightened education. The inclination to see a particular interpretation of religion as the only solution is what makes religion a problem.
Whatever your faith, there is something seriously amiss if your confessional identity supersedes your status as a member of the human race. This is a concern for all faiths: so many of the world’s conflicts would lose their raison d’etre if only Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and all the rest, without exception, could attach primacy to each other’s common humanity.
It sounds like a pipe dream, but it may well turn out to be only long-term guarantee of coexistence. Other religions, have passed through the kind of phase that Islam seems to be going through. In the case of Christianity, it took a thorough reformation to transcend the nonsense associated with the Inquisition and so on. Islam appears to be headed in the opposite direction, but that could change. About the only kind of jihad that could be justified under the present circumstances would be a struggle within Islam aimed at banishing the baser concepts that prop up obscurantism.
A few months ago, a report in the British press related how it had taken a fatwa from the Muslim Law (Shariah) Council UK to enable a blind Muslim student, Mahomed-Abraar Khatri, to enter a Leicester mosque with his guide dog. The Guide Dogs Association called it “a massive step forward for other blind and partially-sighted Muslims.” It almost made one wish a similar fatwa could offer deliverance to those Muslims who doggedly refuse to see the light.

The Saudi-isation of Pakistan

The Saudi-isation of Pakistan

A stern, unyielding version of Islam is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis in Pakistan.

By Pervez Hoodbhoy




The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan’s towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind. The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan’s demise as a nation state.
For 20 years or more, a few of us have been desperately sending out SOS messages, warning of terrible times to come. In fact, I am surprised at how rapidly these dire predictions have come true.
A full-scale war is being fought in FATA, Swat and other “wild” areas of Pakistan, resulting in thousands of deaths. It is only a matter of time before this fighting shifts to Peshawar and Islamabad (which has already been a witness to the Lal Masjid episode) and engulfs Lahore and Karachi as well. The suicide bomber and the masked abductor have crippled Pakistan’s urban life and shattered its national economy.
Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
What explains Pakistan’s collective masochism? To understand this, one needs to study the drastic social and cultural transformations that have rendered this country so completely different from what it was in earlier times.
For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. This culture produced Mughul architecture, the Taj Mahal, the poetry of Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and much more. Now a stern, unyielding version of Islam (Wahhabism) is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.
This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for academic posts in universities required that the candidate demonstrate a knowledge of Islamic teachings and jihad was declared essential for every Muslim. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – still in an amorphous and diffused form – is more popular now than ever before as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state.
Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court.
In Pakistan’s lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement that frowns on any and every expression of joy and pleasure. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate “corruption” by regulating cultural life and seizing control of the education system.
“Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichitraveena are completely dead,” laments Mohammad Shehzad, a music aficionado. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is violently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba at Punjab University. So the university has been forced to hold its music classes elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists consider music haram or un-Islamic. Kathak dancing, once popular with the Muslim elite of India, has few teachers left. Pakistan produces no feature films of any consequence. Nevertheless, the Pakistani elite, disconnected from the rest of the population, live their lives in comfort through their vicarious proximity to the West. Alcoholism is a chronic problem of the super rich of Lahore – a curious irony for this deeply religious country.
Islamisation of the state and the polity was supposed to have been in the interest of the ruling class – a classic strategy for preserving it from the wrath of the working class. But the amazing success of the state is turning out to be its own undoing. Today, it is under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers.
Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.
On the previous page, the reader can view the government-approved curriculum. This is the basic road map for transmitting values and knowledge to the young. By an act of parliament passed in 1976, all government and private schools (except for O-level schools) are required to follow this curriculum. It was prepared by the curriculum wing of the federal ministry of education, government of Pakistan. It sounds like a blueprint for a religious fascist state.
Alongside are scanned pictures from an illustrated primer for the Urdu alphabet. The masthead states that it has been prepared by Iqra Publishers, Rawalpindi, along “Islamic lines.” Although not an officially approved textbook, it is being used currently by some regular schools, as well as madrassas associated with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Musharraf. These picture scans have been taken from a child’s book, hence the scribbles.
The world of the Pakistani schoolchild remained largely unchanged, even after September 11, 2001, the event that led to Pakistan’s timely desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all his hypocritical talk of “enlightened moderation,” General Musharraf’s educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned down version of the curriculum that existed under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto who had inherited it from General Zia-ul-Haq. Fearful of taking on the powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum and thus quietly allowed young minds to be moulded by fanatics. What may happen a generation later has always been a secondary issue for a government challenged on so many fronts.
The promotion of militarism in Pakistan’s so-called “secular” public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jihad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, they invited students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers and declared a war which knew no borders. Pre-9/11, my university was ablaze with posters inviting students to participate in the Kashmir jihad. Post-2001, this ceased to be done openly.
Still, the primary vehicle for Saudi-ising Pakistan’s education has been the madrassa. In earlier times, these had turned out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum that essentially dates back to the 11th century, with only minor subsequent revisions. But their principal function had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques, and those who eked out an existence as ‘maulvi sahibs’ teaching children to read the Quran.
The Afghan jihad changed everything. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. A detailed picture of the current situation is not available. But according to the national education census, which the ministry of education released in 2006, Punjab has 5,459 madrassas followed by the NWFP with 2,843; Sindh has 1,935; the Federally Administrated Northern Areas (FANA), 1,193; Balochistan, 769; Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 586; the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), 135; and the Islamabad capital territory, 77. The ministry estimates that 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas.
These figures appear to be way off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 madrassas. The number of students could be correspondingly larger. The free boarding and lodging plus provision of books to the students, is a key part of their appeal. Additionally, parents across the country desire that their children be “disciplined” and given a thorough Islamic education. The madrassas serve this purpose, too, exceedingly well.
Madrassas have deeply impacted the urban environment. Until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from the rest of Pakistan. Also, it had largely been the abode of Pakistan’s elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students, sporting little prayer caps, dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they swarm the city, making women minus the hijab increasingly nervous.
Total segregation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. For example, on April 9, 2006, 21 women and eight children were crushed to death and scores injured in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi, where a large number of women were attending a weekly congregation. Male rescuers, who arrived in ambulances, were prevented from moving the injured women to hospitals.
One cannot dismiss this incident as being just one of a kind. In fact, soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. This action was similar to that of Saudi Arabia’s ubiquitous religious ‘mutaween’ (police) who, in March 2002, had stopped school girls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas – a long robe worn in Saudi Arabia. In a rare departure from the norm, Saudi newspapers had blamed and criticised the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.
The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. Vigorous proselytisers carrying this message, such as Mrs Farhat Hashmi, have been catapulted to the heights of fame and fortune. Their success is evident. Two decades back, the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. The abaya was an unknown word in Urdu. Today, some shops across the country specialise in abayas. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, the female student is seeking the anonymity of the burqa. And in some parts of the country she seems to outnumber her sisters who still “dare” to show their faces.
I have observed the veil profoundly affect habits and attitudes. Many of my veiled female students have largely become silent note-takers, are increasingly timid and seem less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. They lack the confidence of a young university student.
While social conservatism does not necessarily lead to violent extremism, it does shorten the distance. The socially conservative are more easily convinced that Muslims are being demonised by the rest of the world. The real problem, they say, is the plight of the Palestinians, the decadent and discriminatory West, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Kashmir issue, the Bush doctrine – the list runs on. They vehemently deny that those committing terrorist acts are Muslims, and if presented with incontrovertible evidence, say it is a mere reaction to oppression.
The immediate future does not appear hopeful: increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control of the minds of worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged: Baitullah Mehsud, Maulana Fazlullah and Mangal Bagh. Poverty, deprivation, lack of justice and extreme differences of wealth provide the perfect environment for these demagogues to recruit people to their cause. Their gruesome acts of terror are still being perceived by large numbers of Pakistanis merely as a war against imperialist America. This could not be further from the truth.
In the long term, we will have to see how the larger political battle works out between those Pakistanis who want an Islamic theocratic state and those who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back those Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years and to defeat its hate-driven holy warriors. There is no chance of instant success; perhaps things may have to get worse before they get better. But, in the long term, I am convinced that the forces of irrationality will cancel themselves out because they act at random whereas reason pulls only in one direction. History leads us to believe that reason will triumph over unreason, and the evolution of the humans into a higher and better species will continue. Using ways that we cannot currently anticipate, they will somehow overcome their primal impulses of territoriality, tribalism, religiosity and nationalism. But, for now, this must be just a matter of faith.
The author teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.