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Broadminded and Misunderstood ?

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Oct 26, 2006
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Islam-A broadminded religion, misunderstood by masses

Noted Islamic scholar and social activist, Asghar Ali, heads the Mumbai-based Institute of Islamic Studies and the Centre for the Study of Secularism and Society. In this interview with Yoginder Sikand, he reflects on various aspects of the Indian-Muslim leadership.

Q: One often hears Muslims complain that they suffer from a leadership crisis, that they have no leaders, in the true sense of the term, to guide them. How do you see this complaint? How do you account for it?

A: There is, undeniably, a serious leadership crisis among the Muslims, but I don’t think this problem is specific to them alone. Rather, it is one that affects the country as a whole as well as communities other than Muslims as well. Of course, with regard to the Muslims, the crisis is even more acute because, on the whole, they are educationally, economically and socially backward. Further, most Indian Muslims are descendants of converts from various what are today called ‘Dalit’ and ‘backward castes’, and they still carry that historical baggage. The state as well as the Muslim community organisation has done little for their educational and economic empowerment. Muslim Backward castes have not reaped the benefits of state-sponsored affirmative action policies in any significant way, and Muslim Dalits continue to be wrongly denied Scheduled Caste status. So, to expect the emergence of a progressive leadership to emerge from their ranks is perhaps unrealistic.

I think Zakir Husain was the last Muslim leader in whom large numbers of Muslims from across India could repose their trust. But now there are no such charismatic Muslim leaders with a strong following, not even at regional level. Instead, the leaders they have are all dependent on the patronage of some political party or the other, and lack grassroots links and an independent voice of their own. The crisis of the Muslim leadership needs to be seen in a historical context. The bulk of the so-called ashraf or ‘high’ caste Muslims, especially from northern India, migrated to Pakistan in 1947. This is an additional reason for the overall backwardness of the Indian Muslims, which is reflected in the backwardness of their present leadership. Prior to 1947, there was a sizable Muslim middle-class, which had emerged, for the most part, from the decaying feudal order, and they had a long tradition of cultural and intellectual activity. Many of them set up educational institutions, worked for social reform and heralded a new progressive social consciousness. Many of them migrated to Pakistan in 1947. The Muslim middle-class that remained was simply too small to assert itself and to carry on with the work that progressive sections of the pre-1947 Muslim middle-class had been engaged in. From the 1980s onwards, a new Muslim middle-class began to emerge in northern India, but, in contrast to its pre-1947 counterpart, it has emerged largely from the Muslim backward castes, who lack the cultural capital of the latter. Moreover, it’s a quest for upward social mobility and assertion is often expressed in the form of a very conservative sort of religiosity, such as in building fancy mosques or patronising madrasas, which only exacerbates the malaise of the Muslims rather than solving it. In addition, with job options limited for the growing Muslim middle-class in India, many of them have taken up better-paying jobs in the Gulf, from where they often return with a very conservative understanding of Islam, which they seek to propagate here.

Q: Why is it that almost all organisations that claim to represent the Indian Muslims are mullah-led—the various tanzeems, jamaats and anjumans? Why is the middle-class intelligentsia, small though it may be in numbers, not active in such groups? Why have they not tried to assert their voice publicly?

A: The major reason for the continued hold of the maulvis on the Muslim populace and the influence they enjoy is because the vast majority of the Indian Muslims are backward—economically, educationally, socially and intellectually. The power of the conservative maulvis is strengthened by their nexus with political parties that regularly court them in order to use them to garner Muslim votes. This works to strengthen the influence of the maulvis, who are wrongly projected by these parties as the representatives of the Muslims, a claim that the maulvis themselves never tire of asserting. These parties will never do a thing that would displease the maulvis, for they know this would cost them Muslim votes. So, you can see how these parties have a vested interest in keeping Muslims backward, under the leadership and control of conservative Maulvis.

The Urdu papers are also deeply complicit in this nexus with the maulvis, routinely projecting them as the leaders of the community, and, in doing so, reinforce Muslim backwardness. By highlighting the maulvis, they know their papers will sell. Conversely, they know that if they dare criticise the maulvis their circulation will plummet. But how can the maulvis provide proper leadership at all when they know next to nothing about the modern world? When the maulvis themselves are backward, how can the Muslims advance under their leadership? The intellectual backwardness of the Maulvis is immediately apparent from the absurd fatwas that keep being issued from one madrasa or the other. And, because they exercise such a major influence on the Muslims through the community institutions that they control, the Maulvis have an impact far beyond what their numbers might otherwise suggest on the way millions of Muslims think.

Q: But what about the Muslim middle-class, small though it may be? Why have they been unable or unwilling to challenge the authority of the Maulvis or their way of understanding the world and Islam? Why is it that progressive voices of Islam, such as yours, are so rare in India, even among the middle-class? Why have they let the Maulvis assert a monopolistic claim to speak for Islam and the Muslims?

A: I think this has much to do with the educational system in this country in general. It is definitely not geared to promoting critical thought. Rather, it stresses conformity. It produces docile, not questioning, minds. And that is reflected in the acceptance of conservative interpretations of religion even among the supposedly educated middle-class. Take, for instance, the leading Muslim centre for modern education in all of India, the Aligarh Muslim University. It is in the grip of the most conservative elements, such as the Tablighi Jamaat and the Jamaat-e Islami. Huge numbers of Muslim students in this university are members or activists or sympathisers of these two movements that are deeply conservative and definitely not progressive. Given this, how can one expect and hope for the middle-class that is under the influence of such movements to play a socially progressive role? How can they even think of challenging the hegemony of the maulvis? Matters are made worse because of the growing terrorisation of Muslims and the demonisation of Islam, which only strengthens Muslim conservative elements and forces Muslims to retreat into their shells.

Yet another factor is at work, which inhibits the possibility of the growing modern-educated Muslim middle-class to articulate socially progressive thinking. This is the growing tendency among students — and this holds true irrespective of community — to go in for technical, professional courses, such as computers or management and commerce, which are subjects that might get them highly-paid jobs, but which certainly do not produce critical minds. And so, they readily and uncritically accept religious conservatism. By and large, they are so taken up by their careers and their consumerist aspirations that they simply have no interest, time and energy for social issues
.

Q: Why is it that Muslim organisations, by and large, do not place the educational and economic development of the Muslim masses, high on their list of priorities, whether in terms of their own practical work or in terms of the demands that they make on the state? Rather, the focus is overwhelmingly on what are projected as religious and identity-related issues. Does this not only further strengthen Muslim backwardness?

A: Yes, you are right. Their demands on the state are limited to such issues as protection of Muslim Personal Law or security in the face of communal riots and targeting of innocent Muslim youths in the name of countering terrorism. This is a vicious trap. It is also one that hardly costs the state anything in terms of resource allocation to Muslims. I think the publication of the Sachar Committee and Ranganath Mishra reports have made some difference though, because now some Muslim organisations have started talking about the need for the state to take measures for the economic and economic empowerment of the community. These reports have definitely facilitated a new thinking in Muslim circles, but I am not sure how long this can be sustained because the government seems to be unwilling to seriously act on the suggestions made by both reports. Some political parties might want some action to be taken on the lines of the recommendations of these reports in order to garner Muslim votes. However, by and large, the bureaucracy is against this. They are blocking the way because, as far as I can see, the majority of bureaucrats are RSS sympathisers.

Q: How can this process of shifting the agenda of Muslim organisations, from mere identity related issues to substantive issues of economic and educational empowerment, be facilitated?

A: For this to happen, the Muslim middle-class will certainly have to play a more important role in community affairs, which can happen only if the maulvis are sidelined. But this is an uphill task, given the small size of the Muslim middle-class and the powerful influence of the maulvis. Things have been made even more difficult than they might otherwise have been with Gulf petrodollars financing a considerable number of madrasas all over India. These Arab patrons have no interest whatsoever in promoting modern education and the economic advancement of the Muslim poor. Many rich Arab sheikhs are so neck-deep in corruption that they think that by patronising Madrasas in poor countries like India they can have some of their sins washed away! They think that in this way they can overcome their guilt and compensate for their sins. And so you have this huge amount of money coming into India to fund splendid, palace-like Madrasa buildings, even in small villages, and these are centres for promoting very conservative interpretations of Islam. Naturally, they work to strengthen the influence of the conservative Maulvis. Under-privileged Muslims might want to send their children to modern, English-medium schools, but because they are simply unable to afford their high fees, they are forced, often out of economic compulsion, to educate them in these conservative madrasas. And so the influence of the conservative maulvis continues to mount.

I often say that the Indian Muslims need an Ambedkar of their own
. The vast majority of the Indian Muslims are of ‘low’ caste background, and a Muslim Ambedkar is what they need. Babasaheb Ambedkar provided the Dalits with intellectual, social and political leadership, which played a central role in their struggle for social justice. He set up schools, colleges and hostels that catered to the Dalits, the poorest of the poor. In contrast, Muslims produced one Syed Ahmad Khan, who set up the Aligarh College. But unlike Ambedkar, Syed Ahmad Khan was hostile to the interests of the poor. The only people he was concerned about were the ashraf or so-called ‘upper’ caste Muslims, whose interests had been shaken with the advent of the British. And so he set up the Aligarh College to train sons of ashraf families, strictly keeping out ‘low’ caste Muslims, so that they could get well-paying jobs in the British administration. I think that ashraf mentality, a mentality rooted in an extremely feudal culture, is still very deeply-rooted in the psyche of Muslim organisations, especially in the Urdu-Hindi belt. Most of these organisations are led and controlled by the so-called ashraf. They seem, as Syed Ahmad Khan himself was, indifferent to the plight of the non-ashraf poor, who form the vast majority of the Indian Muslim population. I think this feudal attitude is one of the major reasons for the overall backwardness of the Muslims. The men who run these Muslim organisations have little or no concern for internal democracy. In such a situation, it would be unrealistic to expect them to be truly concerned for, and to work for, the Muslim poor. That would go against their own interests.

Let me come back to what I was saying about the need today of a Muslim Ambedkar. The so-called ashraf would, of course, definitely not look at this with favour, because it would directly challenge their internal hegemony — in quite the same way as ‘upper’ caste Hindus, in general, are viscerally opposed to the empowerment of the Dalits. But there is another factor to consider here. There are many reasons why the Muslim backward castes or Muslim Dalit movement has not really gained ground despite the fact that ‘low’ castes form the majority of the Indian Muslim population, and one of them is that no party wants to do anything substantial for the Muslim masses. If any party does something, it is immediately accused of ‘Muslim appeasement’. Furthermore, in this age of neo-liberalism, popular movements in general have declined. The Left is in crisis. Even the workers’ movement in places like Mumbai, has been captured by groups like the Shiv Sena and RSS. In the face of Hindutva chauvinism, the voices of conservative Muslim forces that definitely do not look at favour on progressive popular movements gain an additional boost. In such a situation, it becomes even more difficult for the ‘low’ caste Muslims to challenge ashraf hegemony and articulate a progressive political and religious discourse.

Q: To come back to the question of the agenda of the organisations that claim to represent Islam and all the Muslims of India, what do you think of their approach to Muslim women? Have they ever evinced any interest in their educational and economic advancement? Is this at all reflected in the demands that they make on the state?

A: I am afraid these Muslim organisations are definitely not making any progressive and substantive demands on the state as far as Muslim women are concerned. Rather, many of their demands are thoroughly reactionary, such as opposing much-needed reforms in the Muslim Personal Law that continues to heavily discriminate against women, although this is not mandated by the Quran. In fact, I would say that Muslim defenders of patriarchy, including these Muslim organisations, have succeeded in completely paralysing half of the Muslim community — its women. They definitely do not want Muslim women to be empowered. The maulvis are very consciously reinforcing patriarchy and the subjugation of women. They insist that women should have no role at all outside the house. They suitably misinterpret Islam for this purpose. Often, they quickly brand any talk of women’s rights as ‘un-Islamic’ and even as a ‘conspiracy’ against Islam. I have personally faced such reactions from numerous people to my writings and the workshops I organise on Islam and women’s rights, even though all that I write and say on the subject is firmly grounded in the Quran.

Q: How is it that we have so few progressive Islamic scholars like yourself in India today? Why is it that your books are rarely to be found in Muslim bookshops? How is it that Muslim organisations have not evinced any interest in translating your writings into Urdu, while your books have been translated into numerous languages abroad? In short, why is it that your writings are looked at with distaste by most conservative Muslims in India?

A: Let me answer your last question first. Since I challenge many of their interpretations of Islam on a host of issues, it is natural that conservatives vehemently disagree with much that I write on Islam, even though I adduce Quranic references and proofs for my views. That is why Indian Muslim organisations, which are mostly very conservative, have not evinced any interest in translating my writings on Islam into Urdu. But it is not true to say that my writings on Islam are not appreciated by many Indian Muslims. On the contrary, thinking Muslims, who are fed up of the narrow-mindedness of the maulvis, do agree with what I say.

As for the promotion of progressive Islamic discourses, the task is extremely difficult. When the education system itself is not geared to producing questioning minds, how can you expect people to dare to think out-of-the-box? Furthermore, Muslims have been made so insecure in India, especially with the ongoing witch-hunt against innocents in the name of countering terrorism, that the prospects of progressive Islamic discourse seem even more remote than before. In such an environment, conservative, insular discourses thrive, even among the modern-educated middle-class.
See, for instance, the enormous influence that a person like Zakir Naik and his Peace TV enjoys even among middle-class Muslims who are not educated in madrasas. They readily respond to him because they think he is trouncing what they see as the opponents of Islam and Muslims. Peace TV promotes a deeply conservative, indeed reactionary, form of Islam, and it is working to further reduce the popularity of progressive Islamic discourses now that it can be readily watched in almost every home.

I think another major hurdle to promoting progressive Islamic thinking is the work culture of most Muslim institutions, which does not tolerate dissent and critical thinking. They are often run on dictatorial lines, being steeped in a feudal ethos. Their work culture is dismally unprofessional. Employees are often treated like servants. The moment you start thinking on your own, the moment you question your bosses, you are branded as an ‘enemy’. That is also the case with the madrasas.

Q: Why is it that while Muslim organisations run literally thousands of madrasas, mostly funded by the contributions of the community, there are hardly any good quality Muslim-run schools — even simple primary schools — particularly in north India, where the bulk of the Muslim population is concentrated? What does this suggest about the priorities of Muslim organisations?

A: You are very right. Other than those madrasas that run on Gulf funds, the vast majority survive on donations from the community, particularly in the form of Zakat. Nowhere in the Quran does it say that Zakat must be given only to madrasas or to maulvis. Nowhere does it say that Zakat cannot be given to institutions that are providing what is conventionally regarded as ‘worldly’ knowledge and that cater to the poor. But the maulvis have invented this notion of ‘religious’ knowledge as being separate from ‘worldly’ knowledge, and continue to harp on this in order to promote their own interests. And so Muslims have been made to believe that if they give their Zakat to a modern school that caters to the poor, they would not earn anywhere near the same merit or sawab as they would if they gave their Zakat to a madrasa where children learn only what is conventionally thought of as ‘religious’ knowledge. It is apparent that this erroneous belief works to support the hegemony of the maulvis, many of who are neck-deep in corruption, misusing the madrasas and the funds that they receive for their own purposes. And many of them oppose, whether explicitly or otherwise, modern education, while at the same time insisting on a very ritualistic and conservative religious education. They know well that if modern education spreads among Muslims, their influence will decline. Conversely, preaching conservative and ritualistic readings of Islam works to bolstering their own authority and leadership. In a sense, the rapid growth of the madrasas in recent decades is a reflection of this.

So, that is one reason why there are so many madrasas and so few Muslim-run modern schools. And I must also add that, generally speaking, the quality of education imparted in the few Muslim-run modern educational institutions — by and large, and with some notable exceptions — leaves much to be desired. They make religious education compulsory to control the students’ minds, and teach it in a conservative, sometimes very obscurantist, manner
.

A good indication of the pathetic state of social consciousness among Muslims in general is the sort of literature that Indian Muslim publishing houses produce. They specialise in producing books that preach a very narrow, ritualised approach to Islam. Hardly any of them produce anything about the empirical social, economic, political and educational conditions and concerns of the Muslims. There are hardly any Muslim social science research centres doing this sort of work in India. Muslim publishing houses know that there would be few buyers for books of this sort, but that books that preach a very traditionalist and ritualistic version of Islam sell well, and that is why they bring out the sort of literature that they do. In such a situation, when there is such intellectual poverty, it is extremely difficult to promote progressive Islamic discourses and social consciousness. It still remains an uphill task.
 
The title is "Broadminded and Misunderstood" but the interviewee did not present any analysis of why Islam is a broad-minded religion. Any such debate is likely to violate the policies of this forum.
 
From the Herald Tribune:


March 20, 2011
Mullah in Debate of Tradition vs. Modern Schooling
By JIM YARDLEY

AKKALKUWA, India — On opposite sides of a dusty road, thousands of Muslim students in this remote farming town are preparing for very different futures. On one side, inside a traditional Islamic seminary, teenage boys in skullcaps are studying ancient texts to become imams. On the other, students are hunched before computers in college classrooms, learning to become doctors, pharmacists and engineers.

The distance between them is about 50 feet, but it could be five centuries. In the middle is a bearded Muslim cleric, Mullah Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi, who has spent the past decade bridging the divide between traditional and modern education for Muslims. From his main campuses here in Akkalkuwa, he has built a network of religious schools, hospitals and colleges with more than 150,000 students across the country, and earned a reputation among India’s Muslim clerics as a reformer.

His success here led to his selection in January as vice chancellor, or rector, of India’s most prestigious and influential Islamic seminary, Darul Uloom, in the city of Deoband. Darul Uloom is known for its Orthodox rebukes of modernity, and the mullah is now in a struggle for its control.

Ordinarily, an internal dispute among Muslim clerics over an Islamic school, or madrasa, would attract limited attention in India. But Mullah Vastanvi has stirred a debate among Indian Muslims about the need for reform in Islamic society while tapping into the frustrations of those eager for religious leaders more attuned to the modern world.

“People are tired of the old ways,” said Shahid Siddiqui, editor of Nai Duniya, an Urdu-language Muslim newspaper. “People want development. People want growth. We need people like Vastanvi who can be a symbol of the fight to bring Muslims into the modern world.”

Founded in 1866, Darul Uloom has trained thousands of imams who, in turn, have founded madrasas throughout South Asia and Africa as part of the Deobandi Islamic Movement. Deobandis advocate a conservative form of Islam, and some Deobandi mosques in Pakistan and Afghanistan became radicalized in recent decades.

Many members of the Taliban call themselves Deobandis, even though the Indian leaders of Darul Uloom have strongly condemned them, rejected extremism and organized meetings of Islamic teachers to denounce terrorism. During India’s independence movement, Deobandis supported Gandhi and later rejected joining a partitioned Pakistan.

Today, Darul Uloom is better known in India for issuing so many provocative fatwas, or religious opinions, that it is often derided in the Indian news media as a “fatwa factory.” These opinions, often ignored by mainstream Indian Muslims, have included edicts against women wearing blue jeans; against women and men working together in offices; and against the practice of collecting interest on bank deposits.

Mullah Vastanvi had already proposed reviewing the fatwas when he became embroiled in controversy. In an interview in the Urdu press, later repeated in the English-language media, he was quoted as saying that Indian Muslims needed to focus on economic progress and move beyond the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat in which Hindus rampaged through Muslim areas, leaving about 1,000 people dead.

In media accounts, he was also quoted as condoning Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, who has long been accused of abetting the violence against Muslims. But the mullah said that his comments were misrepresented and that he had never given a “clean chit” to Mr. Modi.

“My statement was presented in a distorted manner,” Mullah Vastanvi said. “I do not say forget the past. I told the journalist that to my mind, today Muslims should move forward in education and business. If we stay fixated on the old things, how can we move forward?”

A media firestorm erupted, as rivals attacked Mullah Vastanvi in the Urdu press in what his allies regarded as a smear campaign. The mullah responded by offering his resignation but then received an unexpected outpouring of support: several media commentators argued in his favor and blamed the conflict on an internal struggle between his supporters and the powerful Madani family, which has long dominated Darul Uloom.

In late February, the school’s governing council appointed a committee to investigate the controversy and placed daily operations under a temporary rector until a final decision is made.

Meanwhile, many young Muslim clerics, including some from Darul Uloom, have since rallied behind Mullah Vastanvi as a symbol of reform.

“Most of the students are very happy with the appointment,” said Mohammad Asif, 22, a student at Darul Uloom. “Some powerful people did not like the progressive ideas of Mullah Vastanvi. They felt threatened by his taking over.

“He talks of good education, modern education. He is doing good things for the Muslim community.”

India has at least 161 million Muslims, the third largest number of any country, but Muslims remain a largely marginalized minority in a Hindu-majority nation, disadvantaged economically and educationally.

Education is regarded as a critical issue, though often ignored by many clerics. Darul Uloom offers courses in English and computers but the rest of the curriculum is drawn from the ancient Islamic texts. Only a small percentage of Muslim students attend madrasas in India, yet scholars say these theological schools exert broad influence on Muslim society.

Yoginder Sikand, a scholar who has written extensively about Indian madrasas, said Darul Uloom trained students in an ancient worldview, using centuries-old commentaries to teach the Koran or other texts, rather than more contemporary analyses that try to apply Islam to modern concerns. “The syllabus is not reflective of contemporary demands,” he said. “It doesn’t equip students with the knowledge of the contemporary world.”

Mullah Vastanvi is hardly a wild-eyed liberal. He was born in Gujarat, trained in a Deobandi madrasa and arrived in Akkalkuwa three decades ago, where he established a one-room religious school with six students using the same syllabus as Deoband. But as his school grew, populated by children from poor families, the mullah said he realized that students also needed a way to earn a living. He began including training for imams in tailoring and other skills.

But his biggest step came when he started a parallel system for so-called modern education, soliciting contributions from Muslim business leaders to build vocational institutes and, later, certified colleges of medicine, engineering and pharmacy. Many Muslim families struggle to afford mainstream Indian universities, which often demand large advance payments and tuition; in Akkalkuwa, advance payments are not required.

“If you want to move ahead in the world, you have to go where the world is moving,” Mullah Vastanvi said. “And education is critical for that.”

To some secular Muslims, the attention on madrasas is misplaced. Abusaleh Shariff, an economist and co-author of a major 2006 government report on Muslims in India, said resources, attention and energy should be focused on government schools where a majority of Muslim students attend class with Hindus and others.

“We don’t want ghettoism in education,” he argued. “We want secular education.”

But at Akkalkuwa, Mullah Vastanvi seems to be trying to find a balance between Islam and modern schooling.

“Vastanvi tells us this is the era of globalization and competition,” said Mohammad Farooque, a mechanical engineering student. “When you are here, he says try to do your best. Then you will progress.”



Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
 
Progressive Islam in India?? well...from moving on in India , to not moving on, in Pakistan

So what's going on the other side of the divide? - what's all this about "misunderstood" ??


Politics & radicalisation
(12 hours ago) Today
By M. Zaidi



IT is often stated by many western and Islamic scholars that Islam is not only a religion, it is also a blueprint for social order, governance and politics. It is therefore believed to encompass all domains of life, including law and the state. This is supposed to set Islamic polity apart from secular western states.

In actuality, however, Muslim states have passed through a wide range of governance experiences, ranging from the caliphate to monarchy, from military and civilian dictatorship to communism and national socialism, from theocracy and religious fascism to democracy.

Even those who decry a theocratic element in governance witness it at home, as evident in the role of Israeli religious parties in politics, and the gradually increasing influence of Christianity on the highest-level American executive echelons.
The problem with interpretative discourses in Islam lies in the contextualisation of the boundaries between theocracy, society and human rights within a governance paradigm.

Despite the perception that the institutions of state and religion are unified in an Islamic polity, most Muslim societies appear not to conform to this idea, and are built around separate institutions. This is particularly true for societies imbued with values of honour and group solidarity based on tribal or loose religious affiliations. Here, it is important to understand the basic sense of social solidarity which exists in the Muslim world, which is composed more of tribal, dynastic and group affiliations rather than the idea of a monolithic Islamic state. Many scholars have argued that this is a scenario which is destined for the path of radicalisation.

Authoritarian political structures in Pakistan have also affected this radicalisation process; it has often been argued that since democracy came late to Pakistan and has faced numerous difficulties, Ziaul Haq-initiated processes have been allowed to take root. It has also been argued that dictatorships have tended to enable incumbent government to adopt repressive measures and ultimately to abolish democracy itself. Such arguments were accepted by western states which feared that radical Islamists, upon assuming power, would turn against their interests.

These regimes ostensibly inculcated virulent anti-American rhetoric in place of political dissent. Thus, by analogy to the Middle East, the conclusion was quickly drawn that the democratic deficit in Pakistan had contributed to the emergence of Islamist terrorism — notwithstanding the fact that the transition from dictatorship to democracy has often been turbulent and quite a few established democracies have struggled with terrorist threats.

Indeed, studies on democracy and terrorism — the extreme form of radicalisation — do not demonstrate a simple causal relationship between the lack of democracy and terrorism anywhere in the world, as a seminal work by Martha Crenshaw, a scholar of terrorism, suggests. She argues terrorism and radicalisation are a result of retaliation in ‘blocked’ societies resistant to innovation. Similarly, surveying the American political scene, Christopher Hewitt, a political scientist, concludes that “the resort to violence is most likely to take place when members of a group have their hopes and aspirations raised, but then become disillusioned with the political process”.

Globalisation is also one of the main agents of this disillusionment. Besides other explanations, one could argue that the exaggerated trajectories of Islamism are the reaction of a world religion influenced by the response of traditional cultures to globalisation. The reaction is a mixture of bewilderment, anger, fascination, incomprehension, confusion and violent hatred towards western modernity.

The Muslim world, to a great extent, still holds on to tribal and cliquish sentiments of group loyalty or social solidarity, termed by Ibn Khaldun as asabiyya. Akbar S. Ahmed, a Pakistani scholar living in the US, suggests that this exaggerated group loyalty can become the basis of identification with Muslims under peril anywhere in the world, which can be a cause of radicalisation.

Modern Muslim nation-states have had their boundaries redrawn by colonial powers, which sometimes cut straight across the tribal and rural heartlands, separating a particular tribe, caste or religious minority across a line or divide. Imposed boundaries of this kind are bound to create a stronger feeling of group solidarity in a group which feels that it has been isolated.

As I wrote last year in the Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, “Globalisation appears to challenge the very roots of tribal identity by attacking the familiar cocoons of cultural identity which surround individuals: families are divided as individuals are forced to leave home to look for employment or in response to a political or cultural situation, sometimes never to return. The tribe is similarly affected; members gravitate to congested urban areas, due to the constraints of tribal resources to maintain themselves. This results in the weakening of the central genealogical principle of common descent, which again engenders a loss of identity.”

Simultaneously, a much more connected world has made Muslims aware of the fact that they were victimised in conflicts left over from centuries of European wars and decolonisation. The perpetual Palestine problem, the thorny Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan were seen as legacies of blatant colonial aggression. Chechnya, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo etc were seen as avoidable human tragedies, if it were not for the intransigence of the western powers, which were perceived to have acted disproportionately in the Gulf war as opposed to these orphan conflicts. Thus hegemony over oil was perceived to have overtaken human rights interests. This became a widespread perception in the Muslim world.

It is this metamorphosis of honour as the exaggerated feeling of group solidarity of Islamism, based on a perception of the grave necessity of redemption of this violated collective honour, which is arguably one of the many variables of political science contributing to radicalisation in the Muslim world that includes Pakistan.


The writer is a security analyst.
 
No honourable exception

Afiya Shehrbano
Monday, March 21, 2011


It is quite understandable that the Jamaat-e-Islami, Imran Khan and the likes consider the acquittal of Raymond Davis to be a symbol of the nation’s loss of honour. Their stand is reflective of the Pakistani Muslim male’s general obsession with lost honour. In fact, hundreds of criminal cases demonstrate just how strongly Pakistani Muslim men feel compelled to restore their stolen ‘honour’. The way to do so is to eliminate the enemy or woman that they think is responsible for the imagined but reparable loss. In both situations, the loss of lives denotes lesser significance than the loss of an abstraction, honour.

Just like in the Davis case, historically in Pakistan, the compoundability of Qisas and Diyat in its applied form, has allowed hundreds of men to get away, quite literally, with murder. Unlike the Davis case, most often it has even permitted these murderers to accrue the material profit that motivated their crime in the first place.


There should be no need to remind the saviours of Pakistan’s honour of the multiplying cases since 1990, when Qisas and Diyat was instituted into the PPC, of men who killed sisters for their properties, for not ironing their clothes, for marrying of their free will or, murdered wives, aunts, in-laws whom they suspected of illicit relations. But the courts are sympathetic to men whose fragile honour can only be vindicated through blood or blood money, or both, if the judge is suitably pious and patriarchal. Case studies of routine brutal murders, where upright Muslim men are forgiven their ‘grave and sudden(ly)’ provoked killings, can fill volumes. Reportedly, even in cases deemed fasaad fil arz where diyat has been inapplicable, murderous men have struck deals under qisas at the appellate levels.

Yet, not once over the past 20 years did these righteous guardians of Pakistan’s honour lead protest demonstrations, hold media conferences, offer a decent diyat amount to the surviving relatives of the ordinary citizen whose daughters/sisters/wives were murdered. Never have they offered protection to those who are routinely coerced into accepting pittance blood money, if at all, in order to relinquish qisas to the murderer.

Where are these saviours of honour when women are regularly demeaned and trafficked for the sex industry to friendly gulf countries? They’re busy campaigning for the only kind of recipient who qualifies for their political attention – those who fall into their anti-American political agenda. They have, however, poured many resources for the cause of a single Pakistani woman who has suffered punishment and injustice from despotic authority – no, not Mukhtara Mai but Afia Siddiqui is the nation’s deserving daughter.

This notion that men’s honour is vested in something outside of themselves (the nation or women), allows them to preserve their abstract honour by punishing, even killing any perceived threat to their self-constructed honour.


Maybe conservative men in Pakistan should shake off their outrage and join those hopefuls who see moral victory in the Raymond Davis case, rather than abstract loss. This optimistic view suggests that the US, that Great Satan and immoral munafiq suffering from Islamophobia, has been reduced to abiding by Shariah law. The trouble is, Davis has not just abided by Islamic law but like many Muslim male criminals, benefitted from it and in his case, has not even had to pay the price. How can we allow a man to get away with murder? Simple, read all the PLC cases adjudicated under Qisas that refer to Pakistani women’s murders and feel better about how lucrative this particular injustice was – at least for the legal heirs.

The irresponsible members of the legal fraternity, who know the lacunas in the law very well, refuse to raise the possibilities of improving the content and application of any religious laws. It’s far simpler, safer and intellectually dishonest to flippantly say any man-drafted shariah law is divine and immutable and far superior to western laws and stop there.

The equally irresponsible religious lobbies have effectively threatened and silenced progressive, thoughtful, knowledgeable debate and discussion about irreconcilables between religion and legislation when and if there is evidence of this in the Pakistani context. So the fate is sealed. By reducing all things to political benefit, such conservative quarters have done more to discredit religion and the nation than improve its spirit and academic possibilities. Academic exercises give credibility to subjects but there must be debate and discussion to get to that irrefutable point where many ambiguities are ironed-out. Religious chauvinists tend to be intellectually lazy and reduce all thinking into ritual because everyone can be good at the simple stuff. This morass and chauvinism has given Davis his freedom.

Those who say that the Raymond Davis case will increase extremism are wrong. It may motivate more extremist attacks, which are political not religious, but if anything, the way the right wing responded to this case, their politics has been exposed for the damage and limitations that their regressive approach offers the place of religion and religious laws in society. So on the contrary, more of the younger generation may just become more secularised in their views after witnessing the blatant hypocrisy, blood-thirsty politics, moral double standards and hollow knowledge demonstrated by the guardians of Pakistan’s honour and religious identity, over the last few months. That would be true poetic justice.


The writer is a researcher based in Karachi. Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com
 
No honourable exception

Afiya Shehrbano
Monday, March 21, 2011


It is quite understandable that the Jamaat-e-Islami, Imran Khan and the likes consider the acquittal of Raymond Davis to be a symbol of the nation’s loss of honour. Their stand is reflective of the Pakistani Muslim male’s general obsession with lost honour. In fact, hundreds of criminal cases demonstrate just how strongly Pakistani Muslim men feel compelled to restore their stolen ‘honour’. The way to do so is to eliminate the enemy or woman that they think is responsible for the imagined but reparable loss. In both situations, the loss of lives denotes lesser significance than the loss of an abstraction, honour.

Just like in the Davis case, historically in Pakistan, the compoundability of Qisas and Diyat in its applied form, has allowed hundreds of men to get away, quite literally, with murder. Unlike the Davis case, most often it has even permitted these murderers to accrue the material profit that motivated their crime in the first place.


There should be no need to remind the saviours of Pakistan’s honour of the multiplying cases since 1990, when Qisas and Diyat was instituted into the PPC, of men who killed sisters for their properties, for not ironing their clothes, for marrying of their free will or, murdered wives, aunts, in-laws whom they suspected of illicit relations. But the courts are sympathetic to men whose fragile honour can only be vindicated through blood or blood money, or both, if the judge is suitably pious and patriarchal. Case studies of routine brutal murders, where upright Muslim men are forgiven their ‘grave and sudden(ly)’ provoked killings, can fill volumes. Reportedly, even in cases deemed fasaad fil arz where diyat has been inapplicable, murderous men have struck deals under qisas at the appellate levels.

Yet, not once over the past 20 years did these righteous guardians of Pakistan’s honour lead protest demonstrations, hold media conferences, offer a decent diyat amount to the surviving relatives of the ordinary citizen whose daughters/sisters/wives were murdered. Never have they offered protection to those who are routinely coerced into accepting pittance blood money, if at all, in order to relinquish qisas to the murderer.

Where are these saviours of honour when women are regularly demeaned and trafficked for the sex industry to friendly gulf countries? They’re busy campaigning for the only kind of recipient who qualifies for their political attention – those who fall into their anti-American political agenda. They have, however, poured many resources for the cause of a single Pakistani woman who has suffered punishment and injustice from despotic authority – no, not Mukhtara Mai but Afia Siddiqui is the nation’s deserving daughter.

This notion that men’s honour is vested in something outside of themselves (the nation or women), allows them to preserve their abstract honour by punishing, even killing any perceived threat to their self-constructed honour.


Maybe conservative men in Pakistan should shake off their outrage and join those hopefuls who see moral victory in the Raymond Davis case, rather than abstract loss. This optimistic view suggests that the US, that Great Satan and immoral munafiq suffering from Islamophobia, has been reduced to abiding by Shariah law. The trouble is, Davis has not just abided by Islamic law but like many Muslim male criminals, benefitted from it and in his case, has not even had to pay the price. How can we allow a man to get away with murder? Simple, read all the PLC cases adjudicated under Qisas that refer to Pakistani women’s murders and feel better about how lucrative this particular injustice was – at least for the legal heirs.

The irresponsible members of the legal fraternity, who know the lacunas in the law very well, refuse to raise the possibilities of improving the content and application of any religious laws. It’s far simpler, safer and intellectually dishonest to flippantly say any man-drafted shariah law is divine and immutable and far superior to western laws and stop there.

The equally irresponsible religious lobbies have effectively threatened and silenced progressive, thoughtful, knowledgeable debate and discussion about irreconcilables between religion and legislation when and if there is evidence of this in the Pakistani context. So the fate is sealed. By reducing all things to political benefit, such conservative quarters have done more to discredit religion and the nation than improve its spirit and academic possibilities. Academic exercises give credibility to subjects but there must be debate and discussion to get to that irrefutable point where many ambiguities are ironed-out. Religious chauvinists tend to be intellectually lazy and reduce all thinking into ritual because everyone can be good at the simple stuff. This morass and chauvinism has given Davis his freedom.

Those who say that the Raymond Davis case will increase extremism are wrong. It may motivate more extremist attacks, which are political not religious, but if anything, the way the right wing responded to this case, their politics has been exposed for the damage and limitations that their regressive approach offers the place of religion and religious laws in society. So on the contrary, more of the younger generation may just become more secularised in their views after witnessing the blatant hypocrisy, blood-thirsty politics, moral double standards and hollow knowledge demonstrated by the guardians of Pakistan’s honour and religious identity, over the last few months. That would be true poetic justice.


The writer is a researcher based in Karachi. Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com

and wat does arrest of RD depicts about USA's men ??
 
so this article prooooooooves the fact hat Pakistani Muslims are superior to Indian Muslims on racial grounds...if yes then it is sick!
 
Of crooks, cranks and madmen
Yasser Latif Hamdani



Pakistan treats murder as an optional tort in the name of religion. It is nothing but a distortion of Islamic principles in my view. In the modern concept of citizenship, the state becomes an heir of last resort as well. For reference, consider the doctrine of escheat as it applies to property, a principle that is recognised by the ‘Islamic’ Constitution of Pakistan under Article 172.

Ownerless property becomes the property of the state. So what happens when the heirs to the victim of a murder forgive the murderer? Logically, the state should still imprison him or her as tazeer punishment. In Pakistan, though, the Islamic principle of forgiveness and mercy is used in a most opportunistic fashion. Raymond Davis, for me, is not the issue, quite frankly. He enjoyed diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention. In fact, what happened seems to be poetic justice for the religious groups that insisted on having these laws on the cards. It is also now becoming clearer that there is no mystery as to who paid the diyat (blood money). Imran Khan can go on claiming that it was paid from the national exchequer but those who know better have reason to believe that the great and mighty Islamic ruler, Saudi Arabia, was involved in the transaction.

My concern is when a brother kills his sister in the name of honour and then his parents forgive him under Qisas and Diyat laws, introduced by a military dictator in their present form. Fox News recently described the whole law as “effectively a bribe”. In our zeal to Islamise our legal system, we have managed to bring Islam into disrepute.

The issue goes back to the one I discussed in my previous article ‘At ideological crossroads’ (Daily Times, March 14, 2011). Those who argue that there was something inherently wrong with the idea of Pakistan are absolutely misguided and wrong. After Ireland, East Timor, Southern Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro and countless other instances from our recent history, it is clear, as it has always been, that the principle on which we achieved Pakistan was just, fair and universally acknowledged. To understand however as to why we fell the way we did and so far off from where we wanted to be, we have to consider if we have been faithful to the real raison d’être of Pakistan and if we have even tried to fulfil the idealism with which we started.

The view of the founding fathers was that everything that is rational, just and fair cannot be in contradiction to Islam. Therefore, every just and fair secular law and system would be Islamic. The founding fathers were worldly men, well versed in modern political concepts. Therefore, at the very outset, the first amongst them warned against “priests with a divine mission” who would lead Pakistan astray.

Ironically, Pakistan abandoned this wisdom for the view of those people who had consistently opposed Pakistan’s creation. To this end, Samina Awan’s seminal work Political Islam in Colonial Punjab: Majlis-e-Ahrar 1929-1949, published by Oxford University Press, has convincingly proved that the religious right wing carried out a fanatically bigoted and sectarian religious campaign against the Pakistan Movement. Not only did Majlis-e-Ahrar and other religio-political parties, including Jamaat-e-Islami, attack Pakistan’s founding father Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s western lifestyle, liberal ideas and secularism but, according to Ms Awan, the religious parties contested the 1946 elections on a one-point agenda “rejection of the division of India ...based on an anti-Pakistan and anti-Qadiani rhetoric” (page 132). It was this group of sectarian Sunni Islamists, backed cynically by ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi and the Congress Party throughout the Pakistan Movement, who, after Pakistan was created, started the anti-Ahmedi agitation and, in the 1970s, forced their own narrow version of Islam on Pakistan. There is some evidence to suggest that even General Ziaul Haq was from an Ahrari family. Others like the unscrupulous Agha Shorish Kashmiri, who even forged an interview with Maulana Azad to discredit the whole idea of Pakistan, played a double game by paying lip service to a distorted ideology of Pakistan that had nothing to do with anything remotely linked with the Pakistan Movement while attacking the country’s very foundations.

The Raymond Davis issue has overshadowed the grave conspiracy that was unleashed on January 4, 2011 against our nation-state, our history and our very existence. The forces of reaction and bigotry unleashed by Majlis-e-Ahrar and Jamaat-e-Islami, those ancient enemies of Pakistan, killed the one man who could unhesitatingly claim to be the true child of Jinnah’s Pakistan and who stood like a rock against them. After him came the deluge. Next to depart was Pakistan’s indefatigable minorities’ minister. His crime? He staked a claim to being an equal citizen of this country. Thomas Jefferson once said that the tree of liberty needs the blood of patriots. How much more blood will our tree take before it takes root remains to be seen.

We must stand our ground for, unlike George Fulton, we do not have an England to go back to. This is our country provided we are ready to fight and take it back. Abandoning it would mean betraying our ancestors and the founding fathers of this country and leaving it to crooks, cranks and madmen to do with it as they please.


The writer is a lawyer. He also blogs at Pak Tea House | Pakistan – past, present and future and can be reached at yasser.hamdani@gmail.com
 

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