Right or Wrong

Not in the name of Islam

2007-07-03T12:21:00.000-05:00

I have long held the view that terrorism cannot be defeated if it is blamed on a religion, as such I think nor religion, advocates terrorism. It is only when some people bend religion for a political motive that terrorism can be justified. The recent car bombings in U.K. is a call for all the majority of moderate muslims to stand up and say 'Not in the name of Islam'. Looks like progress is happening.

British Muslim group condemns car bombings
Tue Jul 3, 9:07 AM ET
Britain's main umbrella group of Muslim organisations on Tuesday strongly condemned the three failed car bomb attacks here, calling for cross-community efforts to tackle the extremist threat.
"Those who seek to deliberately kill or maim innocent people are the enemies of us all," said Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the moderate Muslim Council of Britain.
Speaking at a news conference at the MCB's east London headquarters, Bari said there was "no cause whatsoever" to justify the attempted bomb attacks in central London early Friday and at Glasgow airport on Saturday afternoon.
"Those who engage in such murderous actions and those that provide support for them are the enemies of us all, Muslims and non-Muslims, and they stand against our shared values in the United Kingdom," he added.
Bari's comments come amid continued concern among some sections of Britain's 1.6-million-strong Muslim community about radicalisation as well as government and police efforts to tackle it.
There have been complaints since the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States that the Muslim community has been unfairly targeted after a series of high-profile raids.
Those concerns were exacerbated following the July 7, 2005, attacks on London, in which four British Islamist extremists blew themselves up on the capital's public transport network, killing 52 others and injuring over 700.
But like many commentators, Bari praised new Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for their "calm and reassuring" response and also singled out Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond for his calls for calm.
"It cannot be stressed enough that terrorists actively seek to divide us and to undermine our collective strength," he went on.
"To be successful in our collective effort to deal with the threats of terror it is imperative that we all work together.
"We need to have confidence and mutual trust in each other. The challenges facing us as a nation require us to work together for the joint benefit of all."
Bari and his deputy Daud Abdullah expressed their shock that up to six of the eight people in custody were medical doctors.
"As we have stated in the past, terrorism is not a regional nor a national matter. Neither does it have a profession or class," Abdullah told AFP as the MCB called on all Britons to help the police and the security services.

Yet another boil.....

2007-06-14T15:24:00.000-05:00

Yet, another disgrace in the name of Islam and muslims. When will these people realize that this is wrong. Now it's going to be a while before a state is restored in Gaza. Almost similar to the coming of power by the taliban. This only brings misery to the ordinary people but may be Hamas and other millitant groups can enjoy their 'success'.

As Islamist gunmen mopped up his routed forces in Gaza, Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the Palestinian government on Thursday and declared a state of emergency after six days of bloody faction fighting.
But as the United States rallied support for Abbas, Hamas fighters stormed remaining strongholds of his secular Fatah group in the Gaza Strip, leaving the presidential compound the last bastion of Abbas's authority in the enclave.
The violence has ripped apart Palestinian hopes for a state.
Hamas said Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of Hamas, would ignore his dismissal decreed by Abbas in the West Bank. Jubilant Hamas men hunted down Fatah loyalists in Gaza, killing some and parading one top militant's mutilated body through the streets.
Abbas said in a statement he was "declaring a state of emergency in all the lands of the Palestinian Authority because of the criminal war in the Gaza Strip ... and military coup."
Medics said at least another 30 people were killed during the day, taking the death toll since Saturday to over 110 in a civil war that has ripped apart Palestinians' hopes for a state and leaves an aggressive Islamist entity on Israel's borders.
Abbas, the successor to the late Yasser Arafat who embraced negotiation with Israel to try to found a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, said he would form an emergency cabinet to rule by decree and held out the prospect of early elections.
But gun law not the constitution held sway in Gaza.
Gunmen hoisted green Islamist flags over Fatah buildings and pounded a Abbas' Gaza compound with heavy weaponry.
The White House accused them of "acts of terror" and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Abbas to emphasize support for Palestinian "moderates" but admitted that finding troops for any international force for Gaza would be tough.
Some of Gaza's impoverished 1.5 million people view with trepidation the success of religious rulers set on defying a crippling Israeli and Western embargo on the Strip. But Hamas, which enjoys support from Iran and Syria, has many supporters.
Rice's spokesman said she had "underlined U.S. support for President Abbas, for Palestinian moderates who made the commitment to working with the Israeli government, working with others around the world on the issue of peace."
Analysts believe that could signal an easing of year-old anti-Hamas sanctions on the West Bank to bolster Abbas.
PRISONERS
Casualty figures are unclear, as was the fate of Fatah fighters seen led away, bare-chested, after surrendering. There were unconfirmed reports of prisoners being shot.
A Fatah official in Gaza said he had seen eight colleagues gunned down while he escaped death "by a miracle."
Hamas's armed wing issued a statement saying it had "executed" Samih al-Madhoun of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a close ally of Abbas's top security aide Mohammad Dahlan. His body was later dragged through a Gaza refugee camp.
For Hamas fighters, some in camouflage uniforms, the fall of the security headquarters was a cause for celebration. They fired gunshots in the air to seal their victory and handed out chocolates to local people in the coastal enclave.
"Allahu akbar!" (God is Greatest) one chanted through a megaphone from the roof of the beachfront headquarters of Fatah's intelligence service, captured later in the day.
Others paraded in the streets and showed off weaponry seized from Fatah, whose forces the United States has helped train and arm in a bid to counter the rise of Hamas -- to little effect.
Diplomats told Reuters that an aide to Abbas had admitted that hundreds of Fatah's men ran from the battle or ran out of bullets during the fighting. Those in Abbas's own presidential compound in Gaza were among the few still holding out.
The Islamist group said it had also swept control of other Fatah strongholds across Gaza. Pro-Fatah broadcasts went off the air and the Voice of Palestine radio station was set ablaze.
Some Fatah gunmen retaliated against Hamas in the West Bank, shooting and wounding a Hamas man near Ramallah, seizing Hamas supporters in the towns of Jenin and in Nablus, where they also stormed a Hamas office and hurled its computers out the window.
Even businesses owned by Hamas supporters were targeted by angry crowds in the territory occupied by Israel, where some 2.5 million Palestinians live, in the hills around Jerusalem.
Hamas won a parliamentary election last year, triggering Western sanctions on the whole of the Palestinian Authority.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi and Wafa Amr in Ramallah and Ori Lewis, Allyn Fisher-Ilan, Jeffrey Heller and Alastair Macdonald in Jerusalem)

We need more of this.

2007-06-12T15:24:00.000-05:00

BALI, Indonesia - Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, hosted an unusual gathering Tuesday of religious leaders and victims of terrorist attacks who denounced
Iran' 's president for claiming the Holocaust was a myth.
The daylong conference on the resort island of Bali brought together Indonesia's former President Abdurraham Wahid, Hindu spiritual head Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Buddhist teachers, a Jesuit priest and even rabbis — rare in a country that does not recognize
Israel or the Jewish religion.
One of the goals was to discuss ways to end the growing polarization between faiths since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Another was to counter a December conference hosted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that tried to cast doubt on the killing of an estimated 6 million Jews during World War II.
Wahid, who led Indonesia from 1999 to 2001 and remains a highly respected moderate Muslim leader, said it was important that people have the courage to speak the truth.
"Although I'm a good friend of Ahmadinejad, I have to say that he is wrong," he said. "I visited Auschwitz's Museum of Holocaust and I saw many shoes of dead people. Because of this, I believe the Holocaust happened."
A Jewish survivor of the Nazi genocide made an impassioned plea for tolerance.
"I hope people will learn from the past," said Sol Teichman, 79, who was a teenager living in Czechoslovakia when his city was occupied first by the Hungarian army and then the Germans. "We should try to improve life instead of destroying it."
The conference was sponsored by the Libforall Foundation, a U.S.-based organization that seeks to counter Muslim extremism in the Islamic world by supporting religious moderates, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance.
"Why are the Jews so concerned about the Holocaust? Well one-third of our people were killed and only within six to seven years," said Rabbi Daniel Landes, who teaches theology in Jerusalem.
"That abhors us not only as Jews, it's abhorrent to us as members of humanity," he said. "If it can happen once to a group of people, it can happen to everyone."
Security was tight at the five-star hotel that hosted the discreetly organized event.
Indonesia's government is secular and most of its 190 million Muslims are moderate, but a vocal militant fringe has grown louder in recent years. Al-Qaida-linked terrorists have twice attacked Bali — a mostly Hindu enclave — killing more than 220 people.
"It has been difficult for me to excuse in my heart those who committed this act," said Tumini, a Balinese woman who suffered severe burns over her body during a nightclub blast on the island in 2002.
She said she still has not recovered emotionally, physically or financially.
Holocaust survivor Teichman, speaking publicly for the first time in a predominantly Muslim nation, said Ahmadinejad's questioning of the Holocaust made him want to "push a little harder" to talk to Islamic leaders.
"I ask only one question," said Teichman, who was sent to Auschwitz, Dachau, and three other concentration camps before allied forces liberated him in 1945.
"If that is a lie, can you tell me what happened to my mother? To my sister? To my brothers? To my grandparents?"

The Liberals speak

2007-04-20T07:31:00.000-05:00

Yeah, there are some people who have the guts to do what is needed. According to The News

Hundreds rally against religious extremism

Civil society opposes ‘state’ within state; urges govt to take action against Lal Masjid, Jamia Hafsa administration.

ISLAMABAD: Hundreds of rights activists rallied in big cities on Thursday against Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa, which are trying to impose a Taliban-style justice system.More than 300 demonstrators, around half of them women, rallied in the federal capital, chanting slogans including “No to terrorism and extremism” and urged the government to take action.“We want to mobilise public opinion against violations of the law by religious students and the inability and reluctance of the state to deal with these violations,” rally organiser Shireen Mazari told AFP.“The government should take very stern action against the rowdyism being demonstrated by the mosque’s administration,” leading rights activist AH Nayyar told AFP.Liberals and rights activists rallied in Lahore on Thursday to press the government to act against Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa.“Mullahs have ruined our society. They have distorted the image of Islam. We’ll not accept extremism anymore,” Jugnu Mohsin, a rights activist, told a rally after around 700 people had marched, shouting slogans outside the Lahore High Court.“It is government’s failure. They have been blackmailed by the Mullahs of Lal Masjid who are pushing the country towards Talibanisation,” Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Chairman Asma Jehangir said. -AgenciesSyed Bukhar Shah adds from Peshawar: Activists of various civil society organisations and political parties staged a protest demonstration in front of the press club and later took out a procession here on Thursday to condemn what they termed religious extremism propagated by the Jamia Hafsa and Lal Masjid in Islamabad.The Women Action Forum, Peshawar chapter, had given the call and activists of various NGOs, including Aurat Foundation, Action Aid, Noor Education Trust (NET), Human Resource Management and Development Centre (HRMDC), Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO), Tribal Women Welfare Association (TWWA), Awami National Party (ANP) and Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PMAP), gathered in front of the press club to register their protest against the ongoing activities of the Jamia Hafsa and Lal Masjid administration. Tribal women from Khyber, Mohmand, Bajaur and Orakzai agencies were prominent among the participants.Carrying banners and placards inscribed with slogans against religious extremism, the participants chanted full-throated slogans against “bigotry in the name of enforcement of Shariah”.Speaking on the occasion, representatives of NGOs and political parties deplored that a moderate majority in the motherland had always been held hostage by a small conservative minority for the sake of vested interest. They said the clerics of Jamia Hafsa and Lal Masjid were trying to set up a state within the state by forcing the people to conform to their own brand of religion.Criticising the administration of Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa, the speakers said that illegal occupation of the state land in the federal capital by fanatics in the name of religion was totally unacceptable. The protesters reminded the religious extremists that Islam did not permit coercion of any type and instead put stress on tolerance and humility.“Asking women to give up driving cars and threatening owners of shops to stop selling audiocassettes and video CDs and switch over to other businesses is nothing but an encroachment on the rights of the citizens,” they said.The civil society members asked all the freedom loving people to rise in unison and join hands against the religious intolerance and extremism. “It is a must as the actions taken by the intolerant religious elements of Jamia Hafsa and Lal Masjid are tarnishing the image of the country in the comity of nations,” they said, telling the baton-wielding students of the seminaries that the people of Pakistan were well-conversant with religious teachings and there was no need to force on them any ideology.The protesters said they have decided to organise various functions and seminars to educate the people regarding the on going activities of the seminary students in Islamabad. They said it would lead the country to civil war if the government did not stop the religious students from imposing their own brand of Islamic ideology on people.

A good point

2007-04-10T15:49:00.000-05:00

Double standard

It was understandable that many Catholics were offended by the "chocolate Jesus," just as it is understandable that many Muslims were offended that their Prophet was deliberately and gratuitously mocked in Danish cartoons. All people of faith reject seeing their beliefs defamed so hatefully.However, death threats and violence on the part of either side is unacceptable. And, yes, newspapers were right in not reprinting the hateful cartoons, not out of fear, but out of journalistic ethics and the true meaning of free speech as opposed to hate speech.
Yet, why does Kathleen Parker apply double standards when she tries to say that violent threats from one side aren't as serious as when they come from another side? Is Parker blinded by a hatred of Islam and Muslims that becomes apparent when she makes stereotypical generalizations?Parker doesn't mention that the vast majority of the 1.3 billion Muslims condemned violence committed by a few people. Nor did she mention the peaceful protests by Muslims across the world or the boycotting of Danish goods, knowing that "money trumps everything." For Parker, Muslims -- broadly -- are people who are reactionary, unintelligent and animalistic, contrary to people of other faiths.More than ever, we need unprejudiced writers on our op-ed pages who are able to present fair arguments on issues affecting religious people so that we, readers from various religious backgrounds, can examine the root causes and offer solutions that are beneficial to our community and the world.Sabiha KhanExecutive DirectorCouncil on American-IslamicRelations -- Florida/Orlando

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/letters/orl-le10_507apr10,0,1917972.story

Oceans of hatred and ıgnorance

2007-02-26T07:40:00.000-06:00

This article appeared in Daily Times by Razi Azmi and it correctfully points out the ignorance and backwardness that is widespread among our so-called champions of Islam.

Oceans of hatred and ıgnorance

THINKING ALOUD: Oceans of hatred and jahiliya —Razi AzmiDaıly Tımes February 22 2007

Extreme conservatism, the preaching of jihad, Islamist supremacist chatter and terrorist attacks in Europe and America have allowed one Israeli academic to advance a theory that life can become untenable when the Muslim population of a non-Muslim country reaches about 10 per centSixty-six mostly elderly people from India and Pakistan visiting or returning from a visit to their relatives across the border were incinerated on a train. Not by accident, but by design. The carriage they were travelling in was firebombed by people who do not approve of the process of reconciliation and normalisation of relations between the two neighbours.No one has yet claimed responsibility and probably never will, for the crime is too ghastly to claim credit for. But one can easily surmise that the perpetrators are religious fanatics or religio-nationalist extremists. They could be Pakistani jihadists graduated from the many madrassahs that dot the land or Indian Hindu extremists from the Sangh Parivar. The perpetrators may choose to hide because of shame, but they stand stark naked before the bar of public opinion. In the name of religion they worship hatred, and are happy to sacrifice innocent human beings at its altar. “I haven’t seen anything like this. Some bodies were burnt beyond recognition, and I saw one pair stuck to each other at the stomach,” said a railway police inspector, Shiv Ram.Zille Huma, the Punjab minister of social welfare, has just been shot dead by a stonemason for simply daring to be a minister and not putting on the veil. Sarwar Mughal, fittingly known as Maulvi Sarwar, believed that a woman’s place in Islam was in the home and behind veils. And having arrogated to himself the role of lawmaker, judge and executioner, he killed the mother of two in Gujranwala, the political and cultural heartland of Pakistan.And why not? Maulvi Sarwar, like many before him, had a few years ago murdered six women for being ‘immoral’, but the case against him had been dismissed for “lack of evidence”. When it comes to women in Pakistan, especially poor women, it seems that men have an open season. Women are even less protected than the Hubara bustards.Brainwashing can do wonders. We have seen evidence of it throughout history and all around. North Korea is a good current example. Its starving and deprived people have successfully been led to believe by their despotic and totalitarian government that they live in a lucky country.But brainwashing in the name of God and with paradise as an incentive can achieve even greater results, as is obvious from the jihadists’ romance with murder, mayhem and suicide. No city, no country is safe from their grip: New York, London, Madrid, Bali, Nairobi, Casablanca, Riyadh, Cairo, Baghdad, Bali, Islamabad and Kabul. The list lengthens.Suicide bombings are now occurring in Pakistan almost on a weekly basis. As in Afghanistan, the Pakistani Taliban are making short shrift of all kinds of ‘infidels’ –teachers, social workers, women activists, shi’as, army recruits, judges and lawyers.Further afield, Iraq is in the throes of a civil war and a sectarian conflict so gruesome as to defy imagination. Multiple suicide bombings of markets and buses occur every day and the monthly death toll is in the thousands. On Tuesday, in one attack, thirteen members of a family from a tribe known to oppose the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq were killed on the road to Falluja.If fantasy and hatred are the end-products of indoctrination, then ignorance is their breeding ground. The parents of 24,000 children in the tribal areas in northern Pakistan have refused to allow health workers to administer polio vaccinations. Rumours are rife that the vaccine is a US plot to sterilise Muslim children, the aim of which is to depopulate Muslim countries.Imams and maulvis in the NWFP used loudspeakers, sermons and illegal radio stations to spread this message to villagers. The scare-mongering and appeals to Islam echoed a similar campaign in the Nigerian state of Kano in 2003. The disease then spread to 12 polio-free countries over the following 18 months.Dr Abdul Ghani Khan, chief surgeon at the main government hospital in Bajaur, was killed when a remote-controlled roadside bomb exploded as he was returning from a jirga (tribal council) to debunk rumours of an ‘infidel vaccine’ and persuade people to immunise their children against polio. Paramedic Hazrat Jamal, who is one of the three injured in the explosion, said that the residents of Mullah Said Banda were against the polio campaign. “As soon as we reached there, an armed prayer leader warned us against visiting the area. Some locals said: “On one hand, our enemy (a reference to the United States) is bombing us for no reason while on the other hand you are coming here disguised as polio campaigners to spread vulgarity,” he told Daily Times at the hospital. One recalls that when the US government first introduced the Diversity Visa lottery programme in the early 1990s, many people in Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere refused to believe that the US government could mean what it said. It was widely suggested that the DV programme was a conspiracy and a trap to blacklist applicants for visa purposes.The fact is that the Washington was perfectly honest and truthful in this matter. Thousands of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and others have been able to migrate to and settle in the US by being successful in the draws. In other words, while the programme sounded too good to be true, the US government acted faithfully and implemented it just as it said it would, year after year.Nobody should be surprised that resistance to the polio vaccinations is highest in areas where conservative clerics and self-styled ‘Pakistani Taliban’ hold sway. It is worth mentioning that everywhere and always, Muslim ulema have consistently opposed the spread of science and education.Also worth mentioning is the fact that some women have been brave enough to defy their men on the issue of polio vaccination. According to a report, “up to 200 babies a day are vaccinated at the Khyber teaching hospital in Peshawar, where burqa-clad women arrive with children in their arms. Some arrive in secret, slipping into the clinic in defiance of male relatives who oppose vaccination.”Extreme conservatism, the preaching of jihad, Islamist supremacist chatter and terrorist attacks in Europe and America have allowed one Israeli academic to advance a theory that life can become untenable when the Muslim population of a non-Muslim country reaches about 10 per cent. Professor Raphael Israeli, who specialises in Islamic history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said Muslim immigrants had a reputation for manipulating the values of Western countries, taking advantage of their hospitality and tolerance.Professor Israeli said that in France, which has the highest proportion of Muslims in Europe at about 10 per cent, it was already too late. There were regions even the police were scared to enter, and militant Muslims were changing the country’s political, economic and cultural fabric. “French people say they are strangers in their own country. This is a point of no return.”The Jewish professor may simply be advancing Israeli interests in promoting this theory, but the world is listening, for there are a lot of worried people out there. Irrespective of what the people of the world may think of jihadists and extremists, surely the masses of Muslims present a picture of backwardness and ignorance, best captured by the Arabic word ‘jahiliya’.
The writer may be contacted at raziazmi@hotmail.com

Guilty unless proven innocent

2007-01-19T07:25:00.000-06:00

Who are the bad guys? What is the 'definition' of a bad guy? These are questions I have always thought of. I may have not found the complete answer yet but there is one thing for sure. We all view the others side of people (whom we do not understand) with suspicion and if they do not fall in line with our personal interests the punishment for the other side is they get labeled as ‘bad guys’. Fox channel has come out with the new series ‘24’ which is supposed to show Muslims succeeding in blowing up a nuclear device near Los Angeles. May I ask what great purpose does this serve? Isn’t this taking monetary advantage of people’s fears and gaining on the stereotypes. Shouldn’t there be a debate on the ethics of such show? Doesn’t this contribute towards hostile feelings towards Muslims? And then the question you hear every once in a while is that ‘why are Muslims not speaking out against terrorism?’ Does it ever dawn on someone that there comes a point when the individual gets tired of proving that he is not a terrorist? Fox can afford to spend millions of dollars to make a stereotypical show like this, how many thousands can I spend to go out there and prove to every one I am not a terrorist. When does it just become too much? Full story here.

My trip to Pakistan......

2007-01-04T16:03:00.000-06:00

After staying in the Unites States for 5.5 years, I had my first trip back to Pakistan. After living over here for so long I had a lot of assumptions about how things would be when I will get there. I had imagined that people would have become very conservative (and anti-American) over the past 5.5 years due to all the wars and other stuff that has happened. I thought I will find people at every street corner willing to do ‘jihad’ and ‘preaching’ Islam. I was expecting a Pakistan that will be even more sharply divided over the sectarian lines.
But what I found was quite different from what I had expected. I found a more consumer oriented society then what I had seen a long time ago. I saw people who were richer then before. I saw people who had become brand conscious. I saw people more tolerant then what I was expecting. People were now talking more openly about things which were considered taboo before. And yes, I found private TV channels that had stolen the audience from the state channels and were openly critical about the govt. I also saw debates on TV about things from politics to religion.
While my trip was basically to see my parents and brother and sisters and attend my sisters wedding, I truly enjoyed living over there for the whole month. Something I thought couldn’t happen after living so long in the U.S. Like one of my friends had said ‘You will find that Pakistan has changed’.

Is this a joke...

2006-11-17T17:08:00.000-06:00

The first time I ran across this headline I thought this was a joke. There has been a study which found that Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri do 'not' have significant influence over the Islamic Ideology. At the same time while this might appear as ajoke to people like me it shows how great the misunderstandings are between the east and west.

Bin Laden not top Islamist thinker: study

By David Morgan
Wed Nov 15, 6:57 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden may be the leading symbol of global Islamist militancy but the al Qaeda leader wields less influence over Islamist ideology than more obscure religious thinkers, according to a new study issued on Wednesday.

The study also found that Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's second-in-command, appears to be insignificant among Islamist intellectuals despite his image as a driving force behind the al Qaeda network.

The Militant Ideology Atlas, compiled by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, instead showed Palestinian cleric Mohammed al-Maqdisi as the most influential living Islamist thinker.

Maqdisi, reportedly a mentor to the late al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is currently in prison in Jordan.

The Combating Terrorism Center is part of the West Point military academy that trains officers for the U.S. Army. Its chairman is retired Gen. Wayne Downing, a former U.S. special operations commander in chief.

The center's study examined popular books and articles posted on al Qaeda Web sites over the past year. It listed nearly 60 modern authors, including President George W. Bush and former President Richard Nixon, who were cited most often in online postings.

Bin Laden appeared among nine authors tied for fourth place on the list. Zawahri was not listed.

"Not surprisingly, bin Laden makes our list of influential ideologues, although he matters much less in the intellectual network than Maqdisi and others," the study's authors said.

"His lieutenant, Zawahri, often portrayed by Western media as the main brain in the jihadi movement, is totally insignificant in the jihadi intellectual movement," they added.

"To be sure, both men have had an enormous impact on the wider jihadi movement. But our data shows that they have had little to no impact on jihadi thinkers."

The distinction is important because U.S. intelligence officials and independent analysts say the future of the Islamist movement depends on a vigorous religious intellectual debate about violent resistance that is occurring increasingly on the Internet.

Current and former intelligence officials say the Bush administration has been loathe to influence the discussion directly because of the United States' lack of credibility in the Muslim world.

But Washington has sought to support efforts by Muslim countries, from Egypt to Malaysia, to challenge religious arguments that advocate suicide bombings and the killing of innocents, two of the debate's most heated subjects.

The West Point study said Islamists who advocate violence could be discredited by Middle East clerics who subscribe to Salafism, the form of Islam from which al Qaeda and other militant groups draw their legitimacy. Violent militants are a minority within the Salafi community.

"Salafi scholars -- particularly Saudi clerics -- are best positioned to discredit the movement," the study said.

"Given the influence of these men, they are best positioned to convince jihadis to abandon certain tactics."

Debate on reforms in Islam

2006-10-18T08:07:00.000-05:00

Following is a very important discussion taking place on reforms in Islam and the debate about conflicts relating to muslim. Unfortunately this kind of debate usually doesn't take place in countries and places where the conflicts are actually taking place. In order to destroy the current 'jihadi' terrorist organisations one has to clearly remove the support from the muslims in general and make them realize that what they are doing is wrong. This article originally appeared in United States Institute of Peace but I stole it from Watandost. Here it is:

Islamic Reform Relating to Conflict and Peace
By Qamar-ul Huda
October 2006

Sixteen Muslim scholars attended a three-day United States Institute of Peace conference to discuss various approaches to understanding conflict and peace in the Muslim world. Qamar-ul Huda, senior program officer in the Religion and Peacemaking program, organized the conference entitled "Islamic Reform Relating to Conflict and Peace." Participants explored how scholars of Islamic studies can critically engage in Islamic peacebuilding and conflict resolution through an interdisciplinary analysis. The participants had expertise in numerous fields including history, theology, philosophy, Islamic law, human rights, ethics, literature, political science, economics, education, and peacebuilding.
The group discussed the challenges of peacebuilding in respect to a broad range of issues, including asymmetric power, military institutions, non-democratic states, co-opted clergy, independent religious movements, authoritarian regimes, educational systems, media, the imbalance between classes, ethnic divide, post-colonialism, and sectarianism. The focus was on how to advance nonviolent strategies for conflict mediation and peacebuilding within an Islamic cultural context.
A presentation by Asma Afsaruddin on jihad, peace, martyrdom, patience, and the original Qur'anic context of these terms demonstrated the diversity of legal opinions to be found in Islamic tradition. By the late ninth century, Muslim jurists held divergent views and sophisticated interpretations of violence, peace, and conflict resolution. According to Afsaruddin, not only did different interpretations flourish but there was also a culture of tolerating and fostering this pluralism. It was not until the mid-tenth century that interpretations of peace, conflict, and just-war theories became driven by political expediencies. With the emergence of several competing dynasties in the Middle East and the rise of military expeditions to expand their borders, concepts of peace and conflict resolution became intertwined with the aspirations of the regime elites. The terms of the debate became appropriated by a political and military class that refused to countenance any challenge to their legitimacy.
The participants discussed the multiplicity of interpretations of violence, nonviolence, peacebuilding, and conflict resolution that obtain in Muslim texts and how violence is legitimized or not. Mohammed Abu-Nimer discussed the theoretical and practical obstacles involved in changing views on conflict. To inculcate new Muslim attitudes, such as interest in non-violent resistance, Abu-Nimer noted that it is important to move beyond the abstract theological language of the clergy and adopt holistic approaches to peacebuilding. For many in the Muslim world, nonviolent resistance is associated with the Christian tradition. Some view it as a passive and ineffective method in contesting oppression. Abu-Nimer, Huda, and Afsaruddin elaborated on the numerous canonical texts that are available in Islam on the use of nonviolent practices, texts which are often overlooked. Huda emphasized that Muslims should not think of themselves as any "less Muslim" because they support nonviolent strategies against conflict. In addition, Huda argued that Muslim scholars who argue that nonviolence is somehow not Islamic tend to intellectually isolate themselves within certain scriptural traditions. The group discussed how to promote nonviolent strategies as an active approach of engagement to reduce conflict and promote peace.
Ibrahim Kalin initiated a conversation on how peace and conflict in Islam should be viewed within four contexts: spiritual, philosophical and theological, juridical, and cultural. Each of these contexts contains insights into preventing conflict in order to maintain a harmonious peaceful society. Kalin stressed how historically Muslim scholars have viewed peace not as an absence of conflict but rather a process of cultivating positive relationships with other human beings and with the divine. In responding to Kalin, Marcia Hermansen discussed how Islamic metaphysics may represent an overly theoretical approach to peacemaking and argued that we need to focus more on practical dimensions. Kalin said that there is a real need to understand the broader conception of peace in Islam, especially theologically where violence is viewed as contradictory to the human-divine relationship. Hermansen responded that the challenge is to move beyond the Islamic sciences and Islamic philosophy to develop the field of Islamic peacebuilding.
Other participants pointed out that practical models are needed on the ground in conflict zones. Ensuring that activists have proper analytical tools for peacebuilding is just one step toward building peaceful communities. Since there is no single standard interpretation of Islam by Muslims and Muslims have numerous ways of expressing their religion, the group raised the idea of multiple Islamic approaches to peacebuilding. However, participants questioned why scholars of Islam and experts in the west place such an overwhelming emphasis on legal texts and Islamic law towards war, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding.
For some scholars a critical issue is identifying a core of independent-minded clergy scholars in the Sunni and Shi'ite communities who are not co-opted by government officials. Waleed el-Ansary and Joseph Lumbard stressed how some muftis in Egypt, Syria, Qatar, and Jordan have millions of supporters because of their insistence on justice, peacebuilding, and seeking ways to create peaceful societies. They added that these religious leaders were on record for criticizing their respective governments for not acting responsibly toward their own citizens. Others added that the politics in the Middle East, in particular the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Israeli-Hezbollah war further undermined Muslims advocating peaceful alternatives to war. Karim Crow, Ibrahim Kalin, Rahim Nobahar, and others said that Muslim peace makers in the Middle East face many challenges in advocating nonviolent strategies when Western powers do not uphold the same ideals. Because there appear to be no effective responses to the suffering of the people in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, Muslim publics are easily convinced that violent strategies are the only solution. Those who suggest otherwise, unfortunately, lose public legitimacy. Asna Husin argued that this cycle of senseless violence demands a new way of thinking and institutional changes that will foster a culture of peace.
In his paper, "Blood Sacrifice & Peace: Re-Imagining Peacemaking - A Muslim Perspective" Karim Crow suggested another innovative way in viewing how violence is constructed outside of religious, national, and tribal identities. Drawing on psychological studies, Crow explained how human violence stems from human instincts and the way we are socialized to act violently. Crow vividly described how sectarianism has gradually destroyed the ways Muslims can cooperate with each other in order to find solutions to their problems. Another problem, according to Crow, is that traditional moral and ethical education is missing from the majority of public schools. Crow stressed the need for primary and secondary schools in the Muslim world to incorporate peace studies programs based on Islamic models of peace making. This prompted a discussion about how to retrieve and amplify the sources that will create an atmosphere of peaceful action by peaceful means.
In light of the extremism that is part of the current wave of Islamism, the group wrestled with the way one can promote nonviolent strategies and Islamic peacebuilding. Scholars examined how extremists exploit the religion to impose a singular interpretation of the tradition. The way extremists reinterpret Islam anachronistically, for their own political purposes, was a serious concern for this group. "Politics, unfortunately, cannot be divorced from the conversation of peacebuilding and conflict resolution," said Anas Malik. Karim Crow added, "One cannot effectively think about real change in Muslim communities without discussing the pressing structural inequalities that exist: that is to say, criticizing repressive regimes, tyrannical forces, lack of democratic institutions to express oneself, and other international forces that work together with the regimes."
Intense debate revolved around interdisciplinary approaches versus theological and religious methodologies for Islamic peacebuilding. Reza Eslami Somea raised the issue of applying the international code of human rights in Islamic peacebuilding instead of thinking within the traditional lines of Islamic law. Asserting that shari'a is one of the problems in Iran, Somea believes using religious paradigms to peacebuilding and conflict resolution complicates the key issues and does injustice to the religious tradition. Somea said that legal, social, political, and economic reform is occurring every day in Iran. For him reform is not the issue; rather the problem is that religious principles are thought to be the answer for each area of knowledge. Somea observed that originally religious principles were meant to help human beings lead spiritual and ethical lives. Religion does not need to be the source for human rights and peacebuilding.
The participants debated whether religion is the only lens to use in understanding the Muslim world and whether the roots of approaching Islam and Muslims in "religious terms" was an incorrect way of thinking about Muslims. Rahim Nobahar, a Shi'ite cleric trained in Iran, affirmed that religion cannot be separated from resolving conflict or promoting peace. "Religion is central to being a Muslim," said Nobahar. However, some participants felt that viewing Muslims in religious terms is a misreading of history and culture, and is a continuation of the "imagined other" or Orientalism. Somea said "Religion is a personal conviction and not all Muslims feel that religion has the answer to every question." Nobahar and Kalin argued that that Islamic civilization originated in Islamic theology, philosophy, and law--divorcing religion from any analysis of the current social and political situation would be a mistake.
However, in discussing how Muslim scholars could contribute to the field of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, there were differing opinions on how to include cultural and religious dimensions. According to some scholars, in order to develop Islamic approaches to peacebuilding that are pluralistic, one needed to move beyond western models of peacebuilding. Participants argued for building upon contemporary models of peace makers in the Muslim world and examine how they use resources within the Islamic tradition to cultivate peace. Others argued that individual Muslim peace makers, while pure in their intentions, may not know the textual sources of Islam for peacebuilding and this could cause problems. Some argued that since Muslim societies have diverse ethnic, religious, cultural histories, Islamic peacebuilding may be a hybrid of all groups involved and perhaps not rooted in any single religious tradition.
Zeki Saritoprak presented a remarkable analysis of Said Nursi, the Turkish nonviolent activist and scholar who died in 1960. Moving from Nursi's theological, philosophical, and historical understanding of Islamic peacebuilding, Saritoprak showed vividly the way nonviolent activism was grounded in Islamic tradition and how Nursi's nonviolent strategies of "positive action" is influential around the world. The discussion revolved around the practical ways in which Nursi's model can be implemented in the Muslim world and how to expose his thought to a larger audience. Huda added several examples from Islamic history, in particular within the Sufi tradition, demonstrating that nonviolent strategies and interfaith dialogue are central to Islam.
This conference of Muslim scholars on Islamic Reform Relating to Conflict and Peace highlighted major contemporary issues in the field of peacebuilding, as well as the obstacles scholars face in creating a new paradigm of thought and practice. The proceedings of the conference will be published in the near future. The conference participants were: Asma Afsaruddin; Karim Crow; Ibrahim Kalin; Anas Malik; Marcia Hermansen; Asna Husin; Reza Eslami Somea; Waleed el-Ansary; Joseph Lumbard; Zeki Saritoprak; Mohammed Abu-Nimer; Muqtedar Khan; Qamar-ul Huda; Rahim Nobahar.

In honour of the brave and bold

2006-09-29T08:33:00.000-05:00

Asma Jahangir

The pocket protector

By Tim McGirk Islamabad

At 152 centimeters tall, Asma Jahangir is a mere sparrow of a woman. But she's got a big voice, which she isn't afraid to use. Jahangir and her colleagues at the Lahore-based Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent body of lawyers and activists, defend Christians and Muslims sentenced to death by stoning under harsh and capricious blasphemy laws. She shelters women whose families want to murder them—only because they deserted cruel husbands. She investigates the fate of prisoners who vanish in police custody and battles for their release through the courts and in the press. In short, Jahangir rails against the myriad injustices that plague her homeland, a type of cage rattling that doesn't always get popular support. "People aren't willing to believe that these injustices happen in our society," says Jahangir, 51. "But it's all going on next door."

Jahangir's father, Malik Jilani, was a politician who spent years in jail and under house arrest for opposing a string of military dictatorships, so his daughter grew up in Lahore with secret policemen at the garden gate. "Asma was always charging off against bullies," says Seema Iftikhar, a childhood friend, "or challenging the school's silly rules." She earned a law degree in 1978 and managed in the mid-1980s to overturn a death sentence against a blind woman who was gang-raped and then, grotesquely, charged with adultery. Since then, she and I.A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission, have defended thousands of hopeless cases.

Yet many Pakistanis wish Jahangir would just shut up. President Pervez Musharraf occasionally explodes into fury against her, saying she is unpatriotic. Eight years back, five gunmen burst into her house, searching for her and her young son; fortunately, neither were home. Five years ago, a policeman was caught creeping up to her house with a dagger.

Today, in addition to her work for the Human Rights Commission, Jahangir serves as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, a job that has taken her to Afghanistan, Central America and Colombia. "There have to be principles, justice," she insists. "Otherwise, we fall into a cycle of revenge." And back home, people are starting to recognize that a voice capable of challenging authority is invaluable. Checking in at the Lahore airport recently, she was asked by fellow passengers to confront an immigration official who was harassing passengers for bribes. She did, and the official swiftly backed down. "I couldn't resist," Jahangir says with a laugh. She's a small lady—with a large job.

The politics of Jihad

2006-09-28T09:24:00.000-05:00

A two par series article on 'Johad' by Yale Global.

The Jihad and the West – Part I
Before defining or reacting to the word “jihad,” the meaning must be considered in its historical context. This two-part series debates the meaning and role of “jihad” in a modern global society. In Part I, sociologist Riaz Hassan cautions that any interpretation that dismisses jihad as merely a violent manifestation of religious fanaticism strips the term of its complexity. Throughout history, jihad has connoted the personal goal of the betterment of oneself, the nationalist goal of the glorification of a state, the theological struggle for the purification of Islam and the political struggle for the restructuring of society in an Islamic fashion. Recognizing the political, and therefore worldly, implications of jihad allows for the hope that resolution can come through dialogue and negotiation. Constructive dialogue, however, can only take place with the elimination of mutual oversimplification and misperception. – YaleGlobal

The Jihad and the West – Part I

Jihad is ultimately political action that can be influenced by dialogue and negotiations

Riaz Hassan
YaleGlobal, 21 September 2006

ADELAIDE: The need for a dialogue between Islam and the West has never been more acute than now, but Pope Benedict XVI’s recent description of Islam as “evil and inhuman” is clearly not the best approach. In his lecture on “Faith and Reason” at Regensburg University, the pope quoted the 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor Manuel II Palaeologus as saying, “Show me just what Mohammad brought was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by sword the faith he preached.” Notwithstanding the Vatican’s statement that the pope meant no offense and, in fact, desired dialogue, in the eye of many Muslims his remarks only reinforced a false and biased view of Islam – not conducive to dialogue.

In his lecture the pope made several references to Islamic theology on the nature of God, reason and faith, but his passing reference to jihad presents the stereotypical Western view of the concept, which totally ignores extensive Islamic debates on the topic. The word “jihad” appears in more than 40 verses of the Koran with varying connotations. No single “reading” of the verses can claim primacy. It is surprising that a theologian of the pontiff’s stature sees jihad as an Islamic holy war in the Christian tradition. In Islamic theology, war is never holy: It is either justified or not, and if it is justified, then those who are killed are regarded as martyrs.

The meanings of “jihad” in Islamic history have been profoundly influenced by the prevailing social, political and material conditions. “Jihad,” in other words, is not a fixed category of Islamic thought, but has a complex and contested history that refracts changing understandings about the scope and meaning of worldly action. The meanings of “jihad” in Islamic jurisprudence have included, first, personal striving for achieving superior piety; second, justifications for early Arab conquests of non-Muslim land; third, struggle for Islamic authenticity; fourth, resistance against colonialism; and finally, now, the struggle against the perpetrators of, what sections of Islamists have labeled, “Muslim holocaust.”

For contemporary Islamists, jihad is neither simply a blind and bloody-minded scrabble for temporal power nor solely a door from which to pass from this life into the hereafter. It is, in fact, a political action in which the pursuit of immortality and martyrdom is inextricably linked to a profound endeavour in this world to establishing a just community on earth. It is a form of political action whose pursuit realizes God’s plan on earth and immortalizes human deeds in its pursuit. The penultimate focus of jihad is, Human beings must change so that they may change the world. From this perspective, jihad can be viewed as a revolutionary process with stages that proceed from the spiritual to the temporal realm of politics.

This interpretation is counter to the prevailing conceptions, primarily Western and like the one given by the pope, which view jihad in terms of destruction and suffering inflicted by religious fanatics on civilian populations. It is seen as a pure and simple expression of violent impulses born of religious conviction. Such interpretations ignore the political dimension of the action. In doing so, they also ignore the violence, genocide and coercion undertaken in the name of political convictions such as democracy, with the war in Iraq just one example. American sociologist Michael Mann has called this method of implementation “the dark side of democracy.”

Throughout history humans, inspired by faith, have undertaken action to gain for themselves and their group immortality. In this respect, the modern-day Muslim jihadists such as Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami, Laskar-i-Taiba have much in common with the “constant warfare” waged by Puritan saints of the European Reformation. They fought their own natural inclinations to fulfill their visions of an ordered society and improve their chances for divine salvation. The Puritan Christians, by linking military action and politics to scripture, according to American philosopher Michael Walzer, were transformed into political revolutionaries, instruments of God for whom action in pursuit of the Holy Commonwealth on earth became the ultimate expression of faith.

The irony of modern jihadists is that the West contributed to building structures and institutional frameworks that sustained their Jihadist consciousness and these structures continue to exist to this day. In the 1980s, with the assistance of Western governments, jihadists were recruited from across the Muslim world, asked to support the people of Afghanistan in resisting the cruel and unjust occupation of the Russian “infidels.” President Reagan called them freedom fighters battling an evil empire, stating, “To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom.” These jihadists have since turned into Frankenstein’s monsters, taking on the task of destroying their one-time sponsors.

After having won the war against the Russian “infidels” in Afghanistan, jihadists have turned their attention to the sufferings of their fellow Muslims in other “occupied” Muslim countries. My recent study of 6000 Muslim respondents in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Kazakhstan suggests that this is a significant component of contemporary Islamic consciousness. For its strategic success, the US-led war on terror relies on the overwhelming economic and military superiority of the West, but its very asymmetry will likely continue to inspire the jihadists to improvise their own weapons and strategies. Thus the war on terror will go on in the foreseeable future.

To understand what is driving large sections of Islamist jihadi movements around the world would require an understanding of the political nature of their action. To portray jihadists as incarnations of evil and as “Islamic fascists” is counterproductive because it only reinforces the pervasive view in the Muslim world that the “war on terror” is a “war on Islam.” This acts as a powerful catalyst for the recruitment of potential jihadists. If war is the failure of politics, then it would seem that political action is a prerequisite to prevent war. Again in the course of my research on Islamic consciousness, I was struck especially in the Middle East by an all-pervasive sense of humiliation arising from the inability of the Arab countries to match the military and economic superiority of Israel. This sense of humiliation is a major underlying cause of Islamic militancy and terrorism.

The sense of humiliation is reinforced by the economic power and absolute technological superiority of the West vis-a-viz Muslim countries. For jihadists, their actions are not simply motivated by impulsive bloody-mindedness or by an overwhelming desire to book a comfortable place in the life hereafter. For them, their jihad is fundamentally a political action through which they pursue the establishment of a just society as ordained in the scriptures and in the process seek to immortalize their own actions beyond their own earthly lives. From this perspective, jihad is ultimately a this-worldly political action and, therefore, amenable to resolution through negotiations as equal citizens of a globalizing world. Such a dialogue and the negotiations it will entail would alleviate some, if not all, of the mutual suspicions between Islam and the West.

Riaz Hassan is ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. He is the author of “Faithlines: Muslim Conceptions of Islam and Society,” published in 2003 by Oxford University Press. His new book “Inside Muslim Minds: Understanding Islamic Consciousness” will be published this year.

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© 2006 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

The Jihad and the West – Part II

Jihad as armed struggle was associated with early expansion of Muslim territories and then took on a more defensive connotation in the 19th century, after Muslim nations were subjected to colonization by European powers. This two-part series explores the role of jihad in modern society, and the second article calls on Islamic scholars to consider dispensing with the term when it comes to politics or analysis of wars over national boundaries. Mohammed Ayoob, professor of international relations, traces the history of the term, offering a reminder that the most profound form of “jihad” is one’s internal struggle to undertake moral choices. Muslims cannot allow militants who rely on coercion or violence to appropriate the term for selfish goals. Sadly, as Ayoob writes, the struggle to become a better individual carries little influence in a world of politics where ethnic and religious conflict wins attention and rallies supporters. – YaleGlobal

The Jihad and the West – Part II

Muslims could benefit by removing the word “jihad” from the vocabulary of politics

Mohammed Ayoob
YaleGlobal, 26 September 2006

EAST LANSING, Michigan: In the last few years, and particularly since 9/11, “jihadism” has become synonymous with “terrorism” and “jihadists” with “terrorists.” Consequently, many Muslim intellectuals and public figures have gone into a defensive mode, trying to point out that the greater jihad is the struggle inside oneself to do what is morally right while armed struggle is merely the lesser jihad, secondary to the struggle to control one’s baser instincts.

While all this may be true, it is also the case that the greater jihad, since it does not occupy public space, is of little significance in the current global debate about the use of the term “jihad” and its offshoots “jihadism” and “jihadists.” The irrelevance of greater jihad in public life is self-evident. Fighting temptation, striving to become a better human being, may be a laudable project, but is of marginal concern in the political arena.

“Jihad” has been an intensely political term from the early years of Islam, associated as it has been with the expansion of Muslim empires and justified by the argument that Muslims had the obligation to spread the word of God to humankind. The early Muslim empires were not particularly concerned about converting non-Muslim subjects to Islam and were, therefore, tolerant of religious diversity to a greater extent than their medieval counterparts in Christendom. However, they often used the term “jihad” to justify territorial expansion usually undertaken for economic or strategic gain.

Use of religious terminology to provide a veneer for secular projects is not unique to Islam. Expansionist wars, both of the universal and sectarian variety, conducted in the name of Christianity were usually far more ferocious and destructive of life and property than those undertaken in the name of Islam. Muslim rulers at least did not kill infidels to save their souls. They preferred taxing them to raise revenues for the state, one reason for their lukewarm attitude toward conversion of subject peoples to Islam.

The term “jihad” regained currency in the 19th century when the tide turned and European powers began to subjugate Muslim lands; jihad then took on defensive connotations. The quintessential jihad of the 19th and first half of the 20th century was resistance to colonial domination and war of national liberation. As nationalism in the Muslim world became equated with Muslim identity vis-à-vis the Christian colonizer, the term came to be defined in context-specific terms. The boundaries of the colonies, later to become the borders of post-colonial states, defined the geographic scope of specific jihads. Sudan, Algeria, Somalia, British India, all saw proto-nationalist Muslim resistance wars against European efforts to subjugate Muslim populations termed “jihad.”

The colonial era nationalized jihads as a result of a paradigmatic change in international affairs associated with the development of the modern sovereign state and its corollary, the rise of nationalism in Europe, and its exportation to the colonies. Decolonization universalized the model of the nation-state, confining the notion of jihad further within national boundaries. This paradigmatic change cried out for ijtihad, interpretation based on reasoning to suit changed circumstances, but unfortunately none was forthcoming from the scholars of Islam at least as far as the notion of jihad was concerned.

The Muslim world is now in the era of nation-states and the attachment to national symbols in post-colonial societies is even stronger than in the original homeland of the nation-state, Europe. Wars are conducted on behalf of nations and primarily for reasons of state. Wars of nation- and state-building have become the norm throughout the post-colonial world, including its Muslim component. Wars among contiguous states over disputed territories have also become common. There have been several wars between neighboring Muslim states, the eight-year Iran-Iraq War being the prime example of this phenomenon.

Furthermore, the post-colonial world, including its Muslim component, is awash with ethnic conflicts and subnational revolts. Islamic terminology, including “jihad,” have been used to justify both interstate and intrastate conflicts. Saddam Hussein announced that he was fighting the battle of Qaddasiya, the 7th century battle in which the Arab Muslims defeated the Sassanid Empire of Persia, against the Islamic republic of Iran, an irony lost on most Western observers with scant knowledge of Muslim history.

Kashmiri extremists have waged a jihad against India in the name of Islam to achieve national self-determination, another irony since national self-determination is a recent concept that belongs to the era of nationalist, not religious wars. Sectarian strife has also taken on the nomenclature of jihad. The Sunni Arabs of Iraq wage a jihad against Iraqi Shia Arabs by blowing up their holy sites and causing carnage in crowded markets. The Shia retaliate by waging their own jihad, blowing up Sunni mosques and sending death squads to kill Sunnis where the latter are vulnerable.

All this mayhem in the name of Islam makes one wonder why some conflicts in which Muslims are engaged are called “jihad” and others are not despite the fact that they basically share the same characteristics. After all, what is the difference between secessionist/irredentist wars waged by Muslim Kurds against Turkey or the Muslim inhabitants of Darfur against Sudan from similar wars waged by Kashmiris or Chechens against India and Russia? Why was the liberation movement in Bangladesh in 1971 against the atrocities committed by the Pakistan army not termed “jihad” despite its obviously just nature? Clearly, all of these conflicts are products of demands for ethno-national self-determination, often triggered by accumulated grievances resulting from their respective governments’ discriminatory policies. But why does one not hear of a Kurdish jihad or a Darfuri jihad or a Bengali jihad?

All this leads to the conclusion that the term “jihad” has been and continues to be grossly misused and deserves to be removed from the vocabulary of Muslim politics. It obfuscates rather than clarifies issues, and, worse, the use of the term to justify terrorist acts against civilians demonizes Islam and Muslims. The problem of saving Muslims from the negative fallout of all these jihads will not be solved by the kind of apologetics that elevates the personal jihad over the political jihad, calling one greater or lesser. The world is not taken in by such sophistry. It is time Muslims totally abjure the use of the term “jihad” in the contemporary context.

“Jihadist” and “jihadism,” derivatives from “jihad,” have become derogatory terms used to describe the most violent and extremist groups who have arrogated to themselves the right to declare jihad against all and sundry. The only way to remedy this situation is for the scholars of Islam to reach a consensus and declare publicly that the term “jihad” no longer applies in a world of nation-states where conflicts take place over issues of territory and ethnicity rather than on the basis of the simple dichotomy between dar-al-Islam and dar-al-harb.

In fact, that simple dichotomy did not exist in the classical age of Islam as well, as intra-Muslim wars going back to the early years of Islam testify. But that is another matter and not really relevant to the present discussion. What is evident, the concept of jihad is irrelevant to the current epoch of political relations, and it is the duty of Muslim scholars to make this clear. This is an ijtihad that is long overdue.

Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations at Michigan State University. This article is based on a presentation he made at IslamExpo in London on July 7, 2006.

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© 2006 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

Making of the Islamic State

2006-09-08T08:44:00.000-05:00

The concept of forming an Islamic state has always been the core of the mainstream extremist Islamic organization both terrorist organizations and the political ones and the ones in between. What they have always failed to recognize is that the Islamic state does not exist within the physical geographical boundries of a country but it is a 'state' that should exist in the souls of the Muslims characterized by love for God and his creation. These elements have always associated the creation of physical Islamic state as the primary objective of every Muslim. These clerics already have a sort of 'authority' by claiming that they are talking and interpreting the word of God and by demanding the creation of Islamic state the are in fact asking for more authority and power which of course would be unchallenged because how can some one challenge the word of God, right? If these elements were to ever succeed of course we cannot expect any liberal to head the govt. in an Islamic state. So who would lead the govt., of course, a cleric. So here is how I would sum up the whole idea of the Islamic state as presented by the Muslim extremists: "Government of the clerics, by the clerics, for the clerics".
Here is an interesting article on this issue that was on Daily Times:

VIEW: The contested terrain of Islamist politics — Yoginder Sikand
Daily Times, September 08, 2006

Islamism is premised on the notion of an Islamic state. Such a state is seen as being charged with the responsibility of implementing God’s rule on earth, through imposition of shariah laws. Islamist ideologues see the establishment of the Islamic state as the principal purpose of Islam. Islam is thus made a political programme.

One of the most forceful proponents of the Islamic state was Syed Abul A’la Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) — the influential South Asian Islamist movement. While the critique of the JI politics and agenda by modernist Muslim scholars have received considerable attention, the fact that numerous traditionalist ulema have also engaged in such critique, often on grounds other than modernism is not well known.

One of the most incisive scholarly critiques of the Jamaat was by the late Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi, a leading Indian scholar, recognised in Muslim circles worldwide for his scholarship and his dedication to the cause of Islamic revival. Born in 1913, Nadvi was the son of Syed Abdul Hai Hasani, rector of the famous Nadwat ul Ulema seminary in Lucknow for many years. In1961 Nadvi was appointed to the same post and occupied it till his death in 1999. He was a prolific writer and associated with several Indian and international Islamic organisations.

Nadvi’s critique of the JI emerged from his personal involvement with the movement in his younger days. In 1940, he joined the JI — impressed with what he called Maududi’s bold rebuttal of Western attacks against Islam — and was made in charge of its activities in Lucknow. He left the JI in 1943. In his autobiography, Karavan-e Zindagi, he wrote that he was disillusioned by the perception that many JI members adored and glorified Maududi as almost infallible. He saw this as bordering on a personality cult.
.....
Nadvi’s critique of the JI comes out clearly in his book Asr-i Hazir Mein Din Ki Tahfim-o-Tashrih (Understanding and explaining religion in present times). Penned in 1978, it won him — so he says in his introduction to the second edition — fierce condemnation from leading JI members. Nadvi takes Maududi to task for having allegedly misinterpreted central Islamic beliefs to suit his political agenda, presenting Islam, he says, as little more than a political programme.

He accuses Maududi of equating the Islamic duty of establishing the religion (iqamat-e-din) with the setting up of an Islamic state with God as Sovereign and Law Maker. At Maududi’s hands, he says, God, the Sustainer, religion and worship (ibadat) were all reduced to political concepts, suggesting that Islam was simply about political power and that the relationship between God and human beings was only that between an All Powerful King and His subjects. Nadvi says that this relationship is also one of love and realisation of the truth.
....
Further, Nadvi wrote that Maududi’s argument that God had sent prophets to the world charged with the mission of establishing an Islamic state was misleading. The principal work of the prophets, he argued, was to preach the worship of the one God and to exhort people to good. Not all prophets were rulers. In fact, only a few of them were.

Nadvi refers to this when he says that the objective of establishment of religion needs to be pursued along with hikmat-I-din (wisdom of the faith), using constructive, as opposed to destructive, means. Eschewing total opposition, Muslims striving for the establishment of the faith should, he wrote, unhesitatingly adopt peaceful means such as understanding and reform, consultation and wisdom.
....
In short, while Nadvi remained, at heart, a conservative, he was also a realist, somewhat less idealistic and possibly more attuned to empirical reality than Maududi. As Nadvi’s critique of Maududi’s politics suggests, the terrain of Islamist politics is a sharply contested one. This should make observers guard against making facile generalisations about it.

Hindu, Muslim groups tussle over national song

2006-08-30T09:53:00.000-05:00

By Y.P. Rajesh
Tue Aug 29, 5:12 AM ET

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's opposition Hindu nationalists and Muslim groups are heading for a confrontation over a controversial move to get all Indians to sing the national song on the centenary of its adoption next month.

The row was sparked this month after the government asked all schools, including Islamic madrasas, to get students to sing the song, which is separate from the national anthem, on Sept. 7.

Within days, it backed down and made singing voluntary after Muslim leaders objected.

Muslim groups say the Sanskrit language song, "Vande Mataram", penned by Bengali poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, has strong connotations of Hindu deity worship because it reveres India as a holy goddess, which is against Islam's basic tenets.

But the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has pounced on the government's climbdown, saying it smacked of discrimination and encouraged a lack of patriotism.

The party said late on Monday that the five states it rules would make the singing of "Vande Mataram" mandatory on Sept. 7 and would act against those disobeying the order. "There are some things which are symbols of national pride and 'Vande Mataram' is one of them. It can't be made optional," said Vijay Kumar Malhotra, a top BJP leader.

"We will enforce it, whichever school it is will have to sing it. We will see what action can be taken against those who do not," Malhotra told Reuters.

"Vande Mataram", which translates as "I bow to thee Mother", was the national slogan during India's independence movement against British colonial rule.

Sept. 7 is the culmination of year-long celebrations to mark the centenary of its 1905 adoption as the national song.

PATRIOTISM VS RELIGION

Although "Vande Mataram" was the frontrunner to become the national anthem when the country became independent in 1947, it was rejected as Muslims felt offended over the depiction of the country as a Hindu goddess.

Instead, "Jana Gana Mana", penned by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, was chosen.

Muslim leaders said the BJP was once again trying to provoke the country's majority Hindus for political gain by stoking anti-Islamic sentiments.

Hindus account for more than 80 percent of India's 1.1 billion population. Muslims make up about 13 percent, the third largest Islamic community after Indonesia and Pakistan.

Nationalism should not conflict with religion in an officially secular country, said Kamal Farooqui, secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.

"My problem is Islam does not allow me to worship an image of my prophet, who is the most sacred person to me, or even my mother," Farooqui said.

"So when they represent India with an image of a Hindu goddess and ask us to sing her praise to prove we are Indians, is it fair?" he asked.

The BJP and its sister Hindu organisations have in the past raked up similar, communally sensitive issues such as banning cow slaughter, revered by Hindus but eaten as beef by Muslims, and opposed special marriage laws for Muslims.

The party, which rose to prominence on the back of a Hindu revivalist movement in the late 1980s, was struggling for direction after it was thrown out of power in 2004 and has been trying to experiment with communal issues, analysts say.

Americans back anti-terrorism racial profiling: poll

2006-08-30T09:47:00.000-05:00

By Jason Szep
Tue Aug 29, 4:44 PM ET

BOSTON (Reuters) - Most Americans expect a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few months and support the screening of people who look "Middle Eastern" at airports and train stations, a poll showed on Tuesday.

The Quinnipiac University Polling Institute said 62 percent of Americans were "very worried" or "somewhat worried" that terrorists would strike the nation in the next few months while 37 percent were "not too worried" or "not worried at all."

The poll of 1,080 voters, conducted August 17-23, comes as many Americans are jittery after British authorities foiled a plot to blow up planes but is broadly in line with other surveys on expectations for another attack since September 11.

By a 60 percent to 37 percent margin, respondents said authorities should single out people who look "Middle Eastern" for security screening at locations such as airports and train stations -- a finding that drew sharp criticism by civil liberties groups.

"It's an unfortunate by-product to the fear and hysteria we're hearing in many quarters," said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy organization.

"It's one of those things that makes people think they are doing something to protect themselves when they're not. They're in fact producing more insecurity by alienating the very people whose help is necessary in the war on terrorism," he said.

Quinnipiac's director of polling, Maurice Carroll, said he was surprised by the apparent public support for racial profiling. "What's the motivation there -- is it bigotry, or is it fear or is it practicality?" he said.

Civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union say racial profiling has been on the rise since the September 11 attacks. Arab and Muslim men are often profiled for investigation and Sikhs have frequently been mistakenly perceived as being of Middle Eastern origin.

The ACLU last week accused security officials at New York's John F. Kennedy airport of racially profiling Muslims.

PEARL HARBOR VS SEPT. 11

"You really need some indication of individualized concern before you target someone for closer examination," said Dennis Parker, an ACLU director. "One of the reasons for the U.S. Constitution was to protect the rights of minorities."

The poll also said most Americans rank the September 11 attacks as more significant than the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Fifty-six percent cited September 11, while the Japanese attack that brought the United States into World War Two was named most important by 33 percent of the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

But the poll shows a deep split between young and old. September 11 is named most important by 72 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34, but the proportion falls to 42 percent for people over 65. Some advised caution with the findings.

"People have fresh memories of 9-11 and many don't have any memories at all of Pearl Harbor, and those who do don't have fresh memories of it," said Bruce Schulman, a Boston University professor of history and American studies.

"We also feel pretty confident that we know how the results of Pearl Harbor turned out, and we certainly don't know what the consequences of 9-11 are going to turn out to be," he said.

British - Pakistanis

2006-08-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

Interesting article on the issue fo terrorism relating to British Pakistanis in the The New Republic:

Kashmir on the Thames.
London Broil
by Peter Bergen & Paul Cruickshank
Post date 08.25.06 | Issue date 09.04.06

On New Year's Eve in 1999, Islamist militants had plenty to celebrate. At the Taliban-controlled Kandahar airport, a planeload of hostages was being swapped for terrorists held in India. The hijackers--Kashmiri militants--had managed to secure the freedom of three key allies. Two, Maulana Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, were Pakistani; but the third, a man named Omar Sheikh, was the scion of a wealthy British Pakistani family and had studied at the London School of Economics.That a British citizen figured so prominently in the Kandahar hostage crisis was disturbing but far from anomalous. The eleven people charged this week with conspiring to blow up planes using liquid explosives are all British citizens. So were the terrorists who attacked London in 2005, almost all of the plotters who allegedly conspired to detonate a fertilizer bomb in England in 2004, the suicide bombers who attacked a beachfront Tel Aviv bar in 2003, and an alleged Al Qaeda operative who, along with would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, planned to explode a plane in the fall of 2001.

Besides holding British citizenship, most had one other thing in common with Omar Sheikh: They were of Pakistani descent. For terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda--which, in the years since American troops deposed the Taliban, has reconstituted itself in Pakistan--ethnic Pakistanis living in the United Kingdom make perfect recruits, since they speak English and can travel on British passports. Indeed, in the wake of this month's high-profile arrests, it can now be argued that the biggest threat to U.S. security emanates not from Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan--but rather from Great Britain, our closest ally.

necdotal evidence for the influence of Muslim extremism on British Pakistani communities is not hard to come by. We visited the Al Badr Health & Fitness Centre in East London on a balmy June night to hear Abu Muwaheed--a leader of the Saviour Sect, an Islamist group--discuss who was to blame for the 2005 London bombings. His answer? Just about everyone but the bombers themselves--the British government, the British public, even moderate Muslims who betrayed their co-religionists by cooperating with the government. The evening included a video montage of fighting in Iraq that ended with footage of Osama bin Laden calling for jihad. One Pakistani man attending the session told us he considered the lead suicide bomber in the London attacks to be "a glorious martyr." Two months later, five of the Fitness Centre's regulars would be among those arrested in connection with the plot to bomb transatlantic flights.

How did Al Qaeda's militant worldview become so popular among a subset of British Pakistanis? For one thing, there is the generational divide in the community. Just as in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons--which depicts the rift between an older generation of nineteenth-century Russian liberals and their more militant, socialist sons--some of Great Britain's young Pakistanis are filled with contempt both for the moderation of their parents and for a British society that won't quite accept them. For many, this leaves a vacuum in their identities that radical Islamist preachers have been all too glad to fill. Now, young disciples of those preachers--Abu Muwaheed, for instance--have come into their own, and they are often even more radical than their mentors. Add to this the fact that one-quarter of young British Pakistanis are unemployed, and you have a population that is especially vulnerable to the temptations of radicalism.

Still, homegrown militancy can only partly account for the problem. That's because it is primarily in Pakistan--not the United Kingdom--where British citizens are being recruited into Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. About 400,000 British Pakistanis per year travel back to their homeland, where a small percentage embark on learning the skills necessary to become effective terrorists. Several of the British citizens recently suspected of plotting to blow up airliners reportedly went to Pakistan to meet Al Qaeda operatives. According to a government report released this year, British officials believe that the lead perpetrators of the 2005 attacks in London--Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer--met with Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. Several individuals allegedly involved in a 2004 plot to explode a fertilizer bomb in Great Britain also spent significant time in Pakistan. In April 2003, Omar Khan Sharif, whose family immigrated to Great Britain from Kashmir, attempted to carry out a suicide attack in a bar in Tel Aviv after visiting Pakistan. In 2001, according to British prosecutors, he e-mailed his wife from there, writing, "We will definitely, inshallah, meet soon, if not in this life then the next." And, in the fall of 2001, Sajit Badat plotted to explode a transatlantic airliner with a shoe bomb shortly after spending time in a Pakistani training camp.

But how to explain the lure of militancy for those who travel to Pakistan to become terrorists? The answer, in many cases, is Kashmir. A disproportionate number of Pakistanis living in Great Britain trace their lineage back to Kashmir. Though conventional wisdom holds that anger toward U.S. foreign policy is most responsible for creating new terrorists, among British Pakistanis, Kashmir is probably just as important. What's more, for the small number of British Pakistanis who want terrorist training, the facilities of Kashmiri militant groups have become an obvious first choice--as well as a gateway to Al Qaeda itself.

Al Qaeda's ties with Kashmiri militant groups date to the Afghan war against the Soviets, when bin Laden's forces fought alongside Pakistani groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, many of those groups turned their attention to Kashmir--the key reason why the Kashmiri conflict re-erupted in the 1990s. These ties endured throughout the decade and grew closer after Al Qaeda left Sudan and settled in Afghanistan in 1996. President Clinton's August 1998 cruise-missile strike against an Al Qaeda base in eastern Afghanistan killed a number of members of Harakat Ul Mujihadeen, one of the largest Kashmiri militant groups--suggesting that it was sharing training facilities with Al Qaeda.

Since September 11, the relationship between Al Qaeda and Kashmiri groups has only deepened, as demonstrated by the fact that Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was arrested in an LeT safehouse in Pakistan in 2002. Al Qaeda has been able to regroup in Pakistan after losing its base in Afghanistan in part by cooperating with Kashmiri militants. A senior American military intelligence official told us that there is "no difference" between Al Qaeda and Kashmiri terrorist organizations. Al Qaeda has also attempted to fit the Kashmir dispute into its anti-American narrative: Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who is writing bin Laden's authorized biography, told us that Al Qaeda propaganda accuses Pakistan's government of selling out Kashmir under pressure from George Bush and Tony Blair.

The danger to the United States of the nexus between British Pakistanis, Al Qaeda, and Kashmir is becoming clear. One of the alleged ringleaders of the recently exposed plot to blow up transatlantic flights is Rashid Rauf, a Pakistan-born British citizen whose family immigrated to Great Britain from Kashmir. According to the Associated Press, Rauf is married to a sister-in-law of Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of the Kashmiri terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed (and one of the men released as part of the deal that ended the Kandahar hostage standoff in 1999). Previously, in 2004, British authorities had charged eight men--many of Pakistani descent--with planning terrorism, including a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange. The cell's alleged leader, Abu Issa Al Hindi, a British convert to Islam, wrote a book explaining how he was radicalized by his experience fighting in Kashmir. In March 2006, British citizen Mohammed Ajmal Khan was sentenced to nine years for fund-raising on behalf of terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Khan admitted attending a terrorist training camp run by LeT. The judge in Khan's case described him as "a terrorist quartermaster" for LeT. According to The Daily Telegraph, he was a frequent visitor to the United States and talked about attacking U.S. synagogues. American prosecutors say Khan was in touch with a group of Virginia militants also tied to LeT.

ll of this should raise two concerns for American officials. The first is that American Pakistanis could pose a similar threat. "Homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like Al Qaeda, if not more so," FBI Director Robert Mueller warned in June. There are reasons to worry that he is right. Two and a half months ago, an FBI affidavit contends, Syed Haris Ahmed, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, traveled from Atlanta to Ontario to meet with a terrorist cell. The FBI alleges that Ahmed, now in U.S. custody, planned to attend a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. In 2003, Iyman Faris, an American citizen born in Kashmir, pleaded guilty to helping Al Qaeda plan attacks in the United States. Faris admitted to meeting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed--the mastermind of the September 11 attacks--in Pakistan to plan those operations in 2002.

Yet it seems unlikely that radicalism in the American Pakistani community could pose as large a threat as radicalism in the British Pakistani community. American Muslims are, on average, more politically moderate than their British counterparts. According to a 2001 survey, 70 percent of American Muslims strongly agreed that they should participate in U.S. institutions. By contrast, a recent Pew poll found that 81 percent of British Muslims considered themselves Muslims first and British citizens second.

Of more concern, then, is the likelihood that British Pakistanis will continue to target Americans--both in the United States and abroad. To address this problem, the Bush administration should encourage the British government to monitor more closely the activities of U.K.-based extremist groups. Simply banning these organizations is not enough. Weeks after we attended one of their meetings, the Saviour Sect was outlawed by British Home Secretary John Reid. But, when we spoke to one of the organization's leaders, Anjem Choudhary, by phone, he told us, "Of course we don't use that name anymore. We just hold our meetings under another name." In addition, Great Britain must step up efforts to identify its own citizens who attend Kashmiri or Al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan.

Unfortunately, there are limits to what the British government can do alone. It will need help from moderate Muslims, some of whom are waking up to the threat posed by the radicals in their midst. "These people are ill," says Ghulam Rabbani, the imam of the mosque adjoining the Fitness Centre, where the Saviour Sect held meetings. "I say very categorically and very clearly that they are misguided and they don't know the basics of Islam."

Rabbani faces a steep challenge: According to a recent poll, a full quarter of British Muslims consider the 2005 London bombings justified. And anyone who doubts how dangerous the intersection of such sentiments, Al Qaeda, and Kashmiri militants can be should consider what became of Omar Sheikh, the former London School of Economics student who won his freedom on New Year's Eve in 1999: Two years later, he was under arrest for orchestrating the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New American Foundation and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know. Paul Cruickshank is a fellow at New York University Law School's Center on Law and Security.

Numbers from the war

2006-08-17T16:33:00.000-05:00

Here are some war statistics from the 34 day Israel-Lebanon war that were accumulated by the Associated Press:

LEBANON:

• Deaths: 845 total — 743 civilians, 34 soldiers and 68 Hezbollah. Israel says it killed about 530 guerrillas. The Higher Relief Council put the overall death toll at 1,181 and said one-third were children and the majority were civilians.

• Wounded: 4,051.

• Number of buildings destroyed: More than 15,000 homes — houses or individual apartments within buildings. About 900 commercial structures, including farms and factories.

• Number of strikes: Lebanese officials reported, unofficially, more than 4,500 Israeli bombing raids on Lebanon. Israel would provide no figures of the number of its strikes in Lebanon.

• Number of displaced people: 916,000, or about one-fourth of the population.

• There were no school days lost because they were not in session.

• Figures on business days lost were not available, but up to 75 percent of the people were unemployed or unable to work because of fighting or gasoline shortages.

• Tourism: Hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue and repairs to facilities, but no specific figure available.

• Damage to transportation system: 400 miles of roads; 80 bridges; the international airport.

• Overall damage: At least $3.5 billion to infrastructure; $9.4 billion overall, including clean up of a major oil spill from an Israeli strike on a storage facility at a Beirut power plant.

• Access to water and electricity was severely interrupted. About $180 million in damage to the electricity grid; $70 million to the water treatment and delivery system.

___

ISRAEL:

• Deaths: 157 total — 118 soldiers and 39 civilians.

• Wounded: 860.

• Number of buildings destroyed: no official figures, but tax authorities report more than 6,000 claims for damaged buildings and more are expected as displaced people return home.

• Number of strikes: 3970 Hezbollah rockets, 901 of them inside cities.

• Number of displaced people: 300,000.

• There were no school days lost because they were not in session.

• Many businesses in the north of the country were closed throughout the war. No specific figures were available.

• Tourism: $80 million of lost revenue during the war, many hundreds of millions in projected losses in the future months because of the war.

• Damage to transportation system: Not immediately available.

• Overall damage: Media reports say about $3 billion in damages and lost revenue, but do not give a source for that estimate. Israeli Finance Minister Avraham Hirschon could give no precise figure but said it would be "many billions."

• Access to water and electricity: Isolated water and electricity lines hit; repairs made within 48 hours.

The question to be asked "Can we give life back to the innocent civilians including children that lost their lives on both sides?"

Enlightened moderation and extremist threat

2006-08-17T08:40:00.000-05:00

This article is take from The Friday Times

Pervez Hoodbhoy Musharraf and his corps commanders well know that they cannot afford to sleep too well. It is in the lower ranks that the Islamists are busily establishing bases

The centrepiece of Pakistan’s relationship with the West since 9/11 has been dubbed “enlightened moderation” by General Pervez Musharraf. He claims Pakistan has rejected orthodox, militant, violent Islam in favour of a more moderate Islam. But after almost five years, it seems there is more continuity than change. It is difficult to see how the policy of “enlightened moderation” can hope to stem the tide of religious radicalism in Pakistan.

There have been some changes for the good. There is a perceptible shift in institutional practices and inclinations. Heads of government organisations are no longer required to lead noon prayers as in the 1980s; female announcers with undraped heads freely appear on Pakistan Television; thickly bearded stewards are disappearing from PIA flights; the first women fighter pilots have been inducted into the Pakistan Air Force. More importantly, the government has taken a vastly overdue, but nevertheless welcome action, by releasing hundreds of women prisoners arrested under the Hudood Ordinance. Many had spent years awaiting their trial.

But these pluses still cannot outweigh the minuses. Banned extremist groups continue to operate, though not quite as freely. After the October earthquake, they seized the opportunity of relief work to fully re-establish and expand their presence in Azad Kashmir. They openly flaunted their banners and weapons in all major towns. Some obtained relief materials from government stocks to pass off as their own, and used heavy vehicles that could only have been provided by the authorities. Only recently have they moved out of full public view into more sheltered places.

Other Pakistani leaders send similar messages. When Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz called for nationwide prayers for rain in a year of drought, it seemed odd for a man from Citibank. Then, at an education conference in Islamabad, he proposed that Islamic religious education must start as soon as children enter school. This came in response to a suggestion by the moderate Islamic scholar, Javed Ahmed Ghamdi, that only school children in their fifth year and above should be given formal Islamic education or they would stand in danger of becoming rigid and doctrinaire. The government’s 2006 education policy now requires Islamic studies to begin in the third year of school, a year earlier than in the previous policy.

The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. Total separation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. On April 9, 2006, when 21 women and 8 children were crushed to death, and scores injured, in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi, male rescuers were prevented from moving injured women to hospitals.

Soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College told 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. The action of these elders was similar to that of Saudi Arabia’s ubiquitous religious policemen who, in March 2002, had stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas . In rare criticism, Saudi newspapers had blamed the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.

The drive to segregate is increasing among educated women. Two decades ago the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university campuses. Now she outnumbers those who still dare show their faces. This has further enhanced passivity and unquestioning obedience to the teacher, and decreased the self-confidence of female students.

As religious fanaticism grips the population there is a curious, almost fatalistic, disconnection with the real world which suggests that fellow Muslims don’t matter any more, only Faith does. Even specifically Muslim causes – like US actions against Iraq, Palestine, or Iran – rarely bring more than a few protesters to the streets. Nevertheless large numbers of Pakistanis are driven to fury and violence when their faith is maligned. Mobs set on fire the Punjab Assembly, as well as shops and cars in Lahore, for an act of blasphemy committed in Denmark.

Sectarianism flows from fanaticism. Suicide attacks have become popular. The murder of Allama Hasan Turabi in Karachi last week is the latest incident. There have been scores of other incidents across the country leaving hundreds dead and injured.

Unable to combat the toxic mix of religion with tribalism, the Pakistani government is rapidly losing what little authority it ever had in the tribal parts. No one accepts the convenient fiction that the army is merely combating “foreign militants” from the Arab and Central Asian countries. The local Taliban, as well as Al Qaeda, are popular; the army is not.

According to the Pew Global Survey (2006), the percentage of Pakistanis who expressed confidence in Osama bin Laden as a world leader grew from 45% in 2003 to 51% in 2005. This 6-point increase must be compared against responses to an identical questionnaire in Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon, where bin Laden’s popularity has sharply dropped by as much as 20 points.

It is worth asking what has changed Pakistan so much and what makes it so different from other Muslim countries?

At the heart of Pakistan’s problems lies a truth – one etched in stone – that when a state proclaims a religious identity and mission, it is bound to privilege those who organise religious life and interpret religious text. This truth, for all its simplicity, has escaped the attention of several generations of soldiers, politicians, and citizens of Pakistan.

It is true that there has been some learning – Musharraf’s call for “enlightened moderation” is a tacit (and welcome) admission that a theocratic Pakistan cannot work. But his call conflicts with his other, more important, responsibility as chief of the Pakistan army. Pakistan is what it is because its army finds greater benefit in the status quo. Today the army’s first priority is to protect its enormous corporate interests that sprawl across real estate, manufacturing, and service sectors.

Today, the relationship between the army and religious radicals is no longer as simple as it was in the 1980s. To maintain a positive image in the West, the Pakistani establishment must continue to decry Islamic radicalism, and display elements of liberalism that are deeply disliked by the orthodox. But hard actions will be taken only if the Islamists threaten the army’s corporate and political interests, or if senior army commanders are targeted for assassination. The Islamists for their part hope for, and seek to incite, action by zealous officers to bring back the glory days of the military-mullah alliance led by General Zia ul Haq.

Musharraf and his corps commanders well know that they cannot afford to sleep too well. It is in the lower ranks that the Islamists are busily establishing bases. A mass of junior officers and low-ranking soldiers – whose world view is similar to that of the Taliban in most respects – feels resentful of being used as cannon fodder for fighting America’s war. So far, army discipline has successfully squelched dissent and forced it underground. But this sleeping giant can – if and when it wakes up – tear asunder the army. That would shake the Pakistani state from its very foundations.

The author teaches at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. Comments may be directed to: pervezhoodbhoy@yahoo.com

Hijab & Skarf

2006-08-15T07:54:00.000-05:00

I have never been able to fully understand why, but it is true that many conservative muslims have measured 'Islamazitaion' of any country by the Veils that the women wear. Keeping that in mind here is an interesting articel that appeared in Daily Times:

EDITORIAL: Mullahs cannot win battle of veil for women

Of all people, Gamal al Banna, a brother of the founder of Egypt’s Ikhwan al Muslimun, Hasan al Banna, has declared that “neither the Quran nor the authentic Sunnah demands that women wear the hijab or cover their hair”. This is going to disturb the hornets’ nest of Islamic ‘scholars’ of all stripes, who will now start condemning him for suggesting a relatively permissive order for Muslim women. Al Banna twists the knife a bit more, saying that “the veil is not an Islamic tradition, but a pre-Islamic one, when Arab women covered their heads and left the upper parts of their chest uncovered”. He thinks the relevant Quranic verse commands women to cover their chests, not necessarily their heads.

The Arab world has gone where the Saudi conservatives wanted it to go. Nasserism was followed by veiled girl students at Al Azhar demanding the imposition of Shariah, and soon there were youths belonging to Gamaa Islamiyya willing to thrash women who refused to veil themselves in public. When the Arabs came to Afghanistan in 1996 to fight for the Taliban, the call for “true Islam” was already a slogan that was heard loud and clear in Pakistan. Ironically, “true Islam” usually applies to women and had begun spreading with General Zia’s Hudood Ordinance, ordaining that women anchors and announcers on PTV cover their heads. But the ulema on the right of Zia wanted more. In fact they wanted nothing short of a “shuttlecock”, a brutally punitive covering that renders women half blind.

Pakistan was reluctant to take the veil because of the embarrassing fact that Fatima Jinnah and Begum Liaquat Ali Khan were national icons without the veil, but the order of the Taliban affected many parts of the country nonetheless. After a few incidents on The Mall in Lahore, religious seminarians found that it was no use threatening Pakistani women to take the veil if the government was not willing and the Constitution allowed a woman to become head of government and state. But the environment was scary enough to force Benazir Bhutto to start fingering beads in public and Hasina Wajid of Bangladesh to wear a pious head-band. The Taliban whipped unveiled women in Kabul, but could not do so in Mazar-e-Sharif. When foreign-inspired Islamists began beating up unveiled women in the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, no one really took them seriously.

The truth is that the veil has become involved in a discussion of culture, and Islam allows all kinds of regional and local cultures to flourish under Shariah. While all clerics agree on the covering of the “zeenat” of women, they can’t agree on the precise nature of the veil. Yet, as culture retreats in the face of extremist thinking, there are unhealthy signs of repression in societies heretofore known as liberal. Eastward of India, Islam was always seen as having a soft tolerant face given to it by early Muslim missionaries who grasped the importance of local cultures in people’s lives. Neither Bangladesh nor Indonesia could have dreamed 20 years ago that there would be violence against unveiled women. Funnily, today the Pattani Muslims of southern Thailand — “revived” after their leader paid a visit to Saudi Arabia — proudly display prescriptive photos of a complete head-to-foot covering for women in a climate that is sure to suffocate them to death.

Bangladesh has been bedevilled by jihadi militias in the north and south of the country acting as social police in the areas they control. The cleric, who has empowered himself at the cost of the government that feels less and less able to enforce a moderate Constitution, has been dealing out harsh punishments to women in the countryside, among people who had never known strict Islam. Bengali Muslim women complain that Bangladesh is falling under the interpretation by Maulana Maududi of a Quranic edict of the strict veil that was actually meant only for the wives of the Prophet (peace be upon him), and that too in a specific case. And although the spiritual leader of Sudan, Hasan al Turabi, has muddied the waters for the hardline clerics by saying that women are not required to cover their heads and faces, many Muslims in Sudan and Somalia still continue to circumcise their daughters!

To impose the veil, a country needs theocratic rule, but theocracy doesn’t tend to last, as happened in Afghanistan. In Iran, where it survives, an imposed veil awaits the day of release. In Turkey, which punishes women who take the veil, at least one Islamic party went around illegally punishing unveiled women in cities where it had won the local elections. But today the Islamic party in government wants to join Europe where France disallows the veil as part of its cultural policy. If Turkey joins the EU, the Shariah will go, together with the veil and an interfering army!

By choosing the veil as a battlefront, the clergy has made a fatal mistake in the Islamic world. This is a battle it can never win because no one agrees on the nature of the veil prescribed by Islam. *

Made in America

2006-08-11T08:48:00.000-05:00

Immigrants have long been criticized for being a burden on the health care system and taking away the jobs from American citizens. But numerous studies have proved other wise. One recent study published by the Pew Hispanic Center proves that the immigrants are not taking jobs away from the citizens of this country, instead the job loss can be related to the economic fluctuations. Following are the excerpts from the study published in the Washington Post:

The Pew Hispanic Center analyzed immigration state by state using U.S. Census data, evaluating it against unemployment levels. No clear correlation between the two could be found.
Other factors, such as economic growth, have likely played a larger role in influencing the American job market.

Between 1990 and 2000, he said, immigrant workers did not take jobs away from American workers "because the strong economy was creating enough jobs to employ everyone who was looking for work." But in the past five years, a subset of the workforce -- native-born men age 16 to 24 with high-school diplomas -- have in fact been displaced by immigrants, he said.

It is true though that the immigrants have taken some low paying jobs away from the American citizens since they could not compete in the highly skilled professions. But here is an idea, loosing your job to an immigrant who lives next door and pays into the tax system is better than loosing it to Beijing and then purchasing it from them, after all if the immigrant makes it, it can be labeled 'Made in America'.

"War with Islamic fascists"

2006-08-10T16:23:00.000-05:00

Bush in his recent remarks used the term 'war with Islamic fascists'. Is there something wrong with this term, yes there is. When in a white neighborhood a few black people are caught doing an illegal activity no one ever says 'drive against blacks' even though they are all blacks. If there is racist rally going on by the Ku Klux clan no one ever says put an end to 'racist whites' even though they are all white people in the rally. So lets suppose that 'all' terrorist acts are committed by Muslims (even thought that is in now way true) why use the term 'Islamic fascists'?

One thing that is always forgotten is that terrorism has no religion. The statement does not sound right because apparently it looks that the act was committed in the name of religion and by the believers of that religion. But the statement is true when you consider that the victims of the terrorism will be of all religions, races, nationalities and ethnic origins. Just take a look at this breakdown of the 911 victims.

So are we just trying to make our job easy by using the term 'Islamic fascists'.

"The problem with the phrase is it attaches the religion of Islam to tyranny and fascism, rather than isolating the threat to a specific group of individuals," said Edina Lekovic, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. She said the terms cast suspicions on all Muslims, even the vast majority who want to live in safety like other Americans.

Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based Muslim activist, said he was upset by the president's latest comments because he was concerned they would stir up resentment of Muslims in America. "We've got Osama bin Laden hijacking the religion in order to define it one way. ... We feel the president and anyone who's using these kinds of terminologies is hijacking it too from a different side," he said. "The president's use of the language is going to ratchet up the hate meter, but I think it would have caused much more damage if he had done this after 9/11," Elibiary said.

Pakistan's role

2006-08-10T16:18:00.000-05:00

After all the negative publicity that pakistan has been getting recently related to terrorism there is another news related to terrorism about the terrorist plot to blow up U.S.-bound aircrafts from UK. But this time it is in a good way. According to Boston Globe:

Pakistan intelligence helped British security agencies crack the terrorist plot to blow up U.S.-bound aircraft, a government and an intelligence official said Thursday.

He should be in Jail

2006-08-10T15:57:00.000-05:00

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed according to New York Times has been put under house arrest....house arrest?...you mean while he sleeps on a nice cozy bed in the house there are dead people in Mumbai from the train blasts. May be he should be in the jail.

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, founder of Laskhar-e-Taiba,the militant Islamic group that India accuses of sending hundreds of Pakistanis to fight in Kashmir, was put under house arrest by Pakistani authorities today.

Islam and modernity by Khwaja Masud

2006-08-10T15:52:00.000-05:00

This is a very interesting article on Islam and modernity and it appeared on The News. Here is the full text of it:

How to accept challenge of modernity?

Feuilleton

Prof Khwaja Masud

The only course open to us is to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent altitude and to appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of that knowledge, even though we may be led to differ from those who have gone before us.

Iqbal in the fourth lecture on ‘The reconstruction of religious thought in Islam’ Ideology is born, developed and has its being in dialectic i.e. dynamism fuelled by the struggle to overcome contradictions which come to the fore in its onward march. It is through constant questioning, argumentation and dialogue that the issues are threshed with the consequence that the grain is sifted from the chaff.

It is not by re-examining old problems with old terminology that an ideology can save itself from ever threatening anachronism. It renews itself by occupying itself with the questions that are the stuff of every day social life.

The question is: why have the Muslims proved themselves to be incapable of tackling their intellectual, social, economic and political problems?

Is Islam a bundle of rites and dogmas as visualised by our religious leaders? Or, is Islam a permanent revolution, ever inspiring its followers to intellectual, cultural and spiritual regeneration? Can Islam give a befitting response to the scientific and technological revolution? As electronic highway is piercing through all geographical and ideological frontiers, can we present a culture, which may respond to this onslaught?

If the answer to all these questions is in the affirmative, then how do we explain the prevalent hibernation of the ummah?

So far as the ummah is concerned, the trouble began when the priests claimed that they had monopoly over truth and the rulers claimed that they had monopoly over power. Not only people who claim infallibility in religion or political power do immense damage to society but these also impoverish human knowledge and understanding by the systematic suppression of supposedly subversive ideas.

Human creativity takes a marvellous diversity of forms. To a closed mind, dissent is anathema. Dogmatism flourishes. Fanaticism deals a fatal blow to the flourishing of culture. The spiritual authoritarianism breeds intolerance of the most pernicious kind, considering the slightest dissent to be punishable by death.

Nietzsche says: “Gaza not too deeply lest the abyss gazes unto you.” Those who claim to be the bearers of absolute truth are people who have gazed too deeply into the abyss. They have committed the sin of hubris i.e. overweening. This hubris enslaves people spiritually. It breeds bigotry, leading to violence, chaos anarchy and terrorism.

Iqbal says: “Tapping nature and history as the source of knowledge, Islam ushers in the modern outlook.” Unfortunately, under the malignant influence of orthodoxy, turning their back on nature and history, the Muslim intelligentsia has lost the grip on reality and hence the ability to change it.

No wonder, the Muslim intellectuals have sealed their minds to the philosophical, sociological and scientific discoveries of the modern world. They have set aside the dictum of Iqbal: “Life is a process of progressive creation and necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.”

According to Iqbal: “For the purposes of knowledge, the Muslim culture fixes its gaze on the finite and the concrete.” If we were to follow this rule, we shall find the concrete and finite truth by meeting headlong the burning problems of the ummah. Had it not been the perennial temptation of our ulema to escape from reality, from the present, from history and modern science? Little wonder the ummah that gave the world Bu Ali Sina, Ibn Rushd, Razi, Omar Khayyam and Rumi, is so deficient in science and philosophy.

We must learn to distinguish between modernism and modernity. Modernism is a narrower term, referring specific movements in modern culture. Modernity is a much broader term. It refers to the period stretching from the Renaissance to the present. The three pillars of modernity are: rationality, objectivity and empiricism. Modernity started when Descartes proclaimed: “I think, therefore I am.”

Mohammad Arkoun, professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the Sorbonne University, in his book, Rethinking Islam, makes a strong plea for integrating Islam with modernity. He believes that the essence of Islam is tolerance, liberalism and acquiescence to modernity. Iqbal has also made the same plea, as quoted in the beginning of the article.

Arkoun argues that the philosophical and cultural achievements of the early Islamic era in bringing together Quranic revelations and Greek rational humanism have long been abandoned. He believes that the Qur’aan must be re-experienced as a religious revelation that brings about an inner transformation of the individual and inspires a devotional love of God that transcends all ritual, legal, sectarian and institutional forms.

While Arkoun is a devout believer in the message of the Quran, he says that the covenant between God and man has been allowed to deteriorate into legal codes, rituals and ideology of domination in the interest of religions and political elites.

The renewal of the Quranic revelation, according to Arkoun, depends on a renewal of the philosophic, scientific and humanistic culture — a Muslim renaissance that would allow for an assimilation of the scientific, technological and information revolutions. This would establish the foundation for a critical formulation of Islamic modernity. The Muslims must approach the west with the Quranic dictum: “Take hold of that which is pure and reject that which is impure.”

It is by critical acceptance of modern knowledge that can and must give birth to Islamic renaissance, enabling the ummah to redeem lost glory.

The writer is a former principal of Gordon College, Rawalpindi. Email: khmasud22@yahoo.com

Goverment Brothels?

2006-07-27T07:58:00.000-05:00

There is nothing black and white in politics as opposed to the way the politicians might want to see it. There is reason that sincere individuals who really dedicate their life to the welfare of other human beings stay out of the politics and if they enter the politics they become legends. How much can be sacrificed in the name of politics and what are the limits, I don't know. Here is an account of a 'State run' brothel, in the form of higlights from the actual story, in Jammu and Kashmir by a country that is the largest democracy in the world.

With shady intelligence agents, betrayed militants, corrupt officials, underage girls, and a gritty brothel, the case has all the makings of a John le Carré novel, set in the gorgeous Himalayan valley of Kashmir.

When the deputy inspector general of [Border Security Forces], K.S. Padhi, was arrested, he said, "This was part of our counterinsurgency operation. We were doing our job. We used to enlist girls for spying purposes.' It means it was part of state policy."

a 14-year-old known as Yasmina, also alleged that many of her customers were top bureaucrats, politicians, and security officials.The list of those she named – now under arrest without bail – is a who's who of the Kashmiri state. They include a senior Congress Party state leader, an independent legislator from Srinagar, the principal secretary to the former state chief minister, the deputy superintendent of Jammu and Kashmir police, and the deputy inspector general of the border security force.

Jammu and Kashmir has been the major dispute between Pakistan and India and the reason of three wars between the two nuclear armed countries. The full story can be read here.
india kashmir

Where are we going?

2006-07-21T12:18:00.000-05:00

It was my understanding that the humans on this planet have reached a level of civilization and understanding that we would never go back to the old times. By old times I mean when it was ‘ok’ to kill anyone for anything as long as you could justify it to yourself. But I think my understanding was wrong, the world has become even more ignorant, we are not willing to leave the boundaries of ignorance and hatred we have built around us. While the west flourishes in latest knowledge and know how of everything from atoms to humanity itself the rest of the world continues to dig deeper and deeper into the darkness. The latest conflict in Middle East between Lebanon and Israel is a new testament to us. I am not going to dig into the political dimensions of this issue, because there are plenty of people out there doing that. What breaks my heart is to see children getting killed in Nazareth to dead bodies lying in the morgue in Lebanon. Everyone is justifying there side of the story, but it does not change the fact that the majority of people how are actually being killed have nothing to do the actual conflict. Most have them probably have never even touched a handgun. But both sides are terming it as collateral damage or collective punishment. It just does not end over there, the rest of the world leaders from whom we would expect more maturity are more concerned with being politically correct and making sure that their long term benefits don’t get hurt. We as humans should be ashamed of ourselves to reach at this point today. It was enough that this killing was going on in Iraq, then came Sudan where refugees are being slaughtered for political reasons and now comes the Israel-Lebanon conflict. Although I am a firm believer in God but sometimes this breaks me to the point where I have to sit and pause for a moment and say ‘God if you are really there why are you letting this to happen to your own people?’. Are we just going to sit around while the politicians get the politics straightened out and what if they don’t, will we just let more people being killed in the meantime?

The picture with a thousand words...

2006-07-12T08:19:00.000-05:00

I took this picture from All things Pakistan. This is a very interesting blog and has been doing a great job.
The more you look the more meaning you will find in the human misery and suffering that resulted from the earthquake, but just like All things Pakistan pointed out, looks like we have all forgetten the great tragedy and its after effects. We as humans cannot be cured from tragedy like this by just putting a bandage on the arm. A tragedy like this will take years to heal.

Are we free?

2006-07-12T07:46:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, in the third world countries the concept of freedom very much is defined as how 'bold' one can be in the face of the 'western nations' and how these countries don't like to be dictated by the other countries. Pakistan is no exception to this, as we here the political parties shouting slogans everyday to give the ordinary people a false sense of freedom. The fact though is that the ordinary person is not even free to think, now, if you can't even think free how can one act free. In this report published by the Daily Times we get a clear picture of the ground reality. Although the reports subject is minorities nevertheless it gives as a broader understanding as to how free we are. The system that has been around us was primarily developed to benefit the religious groups, army and the big wigs of the main political parties, because it is in their interest to raise a generation that has a distorted view of the world and the issues in the Pakistan. Although the whole report is available on the Daily Times website and also at watandost.blogspot.com/, here are few important highlights:

According to the report, textbooks have often served as a tool in the hands of successive governments, for propagating their biased outlook towards history, politics and religion in order to shape a certain national identity. Authoritarian governments and the “ gatekeepers of ideology” have always ensured the deliverance of carefully sifted contents to the students in order to mould them in favor of a reactionary system. The outcome, the report said, was that the system had produced a generation that was prejudiced and intolerant.

The report referred to the textbook statements, which eliminate the claims of any community other than Muslims over the country. The report points out that the lack of different viewpoints in textbooks leads to contempt and hatred for other communities.
Highlighting the disparities in textbooks and curriculum of the government and privately managed schools, the report criticizes the role of state sponsored textbooks for discouraging critical thinking through books which emphasize more on religion, civic obedience and the duty of the individual to the state.

It says that the intervention of the state in the educational process had distorted historical facts and had encouraged students to be non-critical, submissive to authority and to treat education as a process of selective memorization. The report said that educating students on these lines could make students only see a world that was limited to Pakistan and Muslim countries. “There is no reference to human unity, human rights and individual freedom in these textbooks”, the report said, adding the outcome manifests itself in the form of violence and intolerance prevalent in the Pakistani society.

The bottom line is that the process of real freedom will not begin from the borders of the country but from within each citizen of the country by freeing our thoughts from being indoctrinated by a select few as to what we should think and do. Although we do not like to admit it, we are living in a communist style govt. country where the freedom is only in the air we breathe.
We still have to be freed!

'Jihadi' sample pamphlet....

2006-06-29T08:01:00.000-05:00

Here is a picture I found on watandost.blogspot.com . I found it interesting and I decided to put it on my blog. It is a classic example of the way terrorists try to recruit and build their force on propaganda and make a blend of Islam and terrorism and call it Jihad.

New Leaders...

2006-06-22T08:49:00.000-05:00

Well, they did not waste anytime after all. They have nominated the successor of Zarqawi in Iraq. From what is known his name appears to be Abu Ayyub al-Masri. They wanted to make the maximum effort to make sure that he is portrayed as an Arab and a Muslim by naming himself according to the Arab naming conventions of naming oneself by reference to the home place and son’s name. This also gives a good insight into their thinking as to how important it is for them to have the appearance of the Muslims and holy warriors. They know that they do not have the widespread support of the Muslims in the world but their every action is filled with the appearance of the pious holy people who care about nothing other than Islam. Just listen to there web statements and you will hear the rhetoric containing words like ‘brothers of Islam’,’ Islamic Shura’, ‘jihad’, ‘martyr’, ‘revenge for all the Muslims’. They are desperate to make sure that they do not get confused as ethnic or geographic terrorists instead they want themselves to be presented as ‘Islam’s Holy Warriors’. Considering how much they feed and suck on the perceptions, although Muslims have condemned all kinds of terrorism, there is need for a huge demonstration among the Muslims similar to the one done on the publication of Prophet Muhammad’s (P.B.U.H) cartoons but without violence. This will make it very clear to them that they do not have the support of the majority of Muslims.
Although you can find idiots everywhere it is especially sad when you find them in the parliaments also. Leaders of the MMA which is a coalition of Muslims political groups in Pakistan offered fateha (prayers) for Zarqawi in Pakistan when he was killed by the American raid. A request was also made by the MMA to offer fateha on Zarqawi in the assembly but the speaker denied it citing technical rules. Nothing needs to be said, it is obvious and very sad as to how some our leaders act and behave. Let me just say this, if any of the members of the MMA would have been killed or slaughtered in Iraq by Al-Qaeda, I would like to see the Fateha coming out of there mouths. One interesting point though, the MMA also includes the heads of the Shia sect of the Pakistan and Zarqawi has been known to target Shia’s in Iraq.

Finaly the time had come...

2006-06-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

There could not have been better news yesterday then the news of death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He is finally in the grave along with numerous murders on his hand. We can all just hope now that this even leads to the breakup of the Al-Qaida structure in Iraq, so the ordinary man can take a breath of peace. His death was long overdure. Isn't it ironic, if we compare both Saddam and Zarqawi they both had there own 'sacred' missions but justified the killing of innocent people to acheive that.

Life

2006-06-06T09:38:00.000-05:00

Although the killing of innocent civilians is condemnable no matter where it happens, my heart really falls for the people of Iraq. As compared to all the other well known hot zones like Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Dafur etc. at least you have some clue where can the ‘next one’ come from, but there is not such indication in Iraq. You might get shot right in your own home in front of or with your family, or if that does not happens someone might drag you outside the house and then kill you, and if you are still lucky enough and you have made it to your car you might get shot by soldiers on the road or if you decide to take the bus there might be a drive by shooting killing everyone in there, if you are still lucky and you make it to work you might get dragged outside your workplace and be shot in the head by the Saddam loyalists for tipping off against the insurgents, if you are still lucky enough and you make it to home you might find out that your home has been leveled during an air raid and if that did not happen you might find out that your son was kidnapped by insurgents. What is the ordinary human supposed to do in all this trauma? Isn’t the person being just pushed to the limits? How long will it take for someone in this atmosphere to go crazy…may be that will help because they you won’t have to worry or lets say you can’t worry. Should the person drink alcohol to free himself from the worry of being killed anytime…no wait, alcohol is haram….should he commit suicide for failure to bring security to his family members….no wait, suicide is unforgivable crime in Islam. What is he supposed to do?
Let me make one thing very clear to all the ‘jihadis’ and politicians ‘No religion, ideology or movement is more sacred then the human life itself, period!’ I do not care if the coalition forces call it collateral damage or Al-Qaeda calls it jihad, no concept of life can prevail without the life itself, whether it is a non-Muslim or Muslim, white or black, American or Palestinian it self.
Folks, Islam is a religion of peace and does not support killing of anyone unless ones very own life is in danger.

Musharraf Vs. Washington

2006-05-30T15:46:00.000-05:00

General Pervaiz Musharraf is not the first leader to have come in power with the claim and self proclaimed obligation to ‘fix’ things. Our 55 plus history is full of such leaders. It is one thing that they did not really solve problems, but it is a whole new dimension that they never left on there own. Whether it was the Marshall law administrators or a civilian govt., once in power there only objective becomes to make sure that they don’t leave the seat of the prime minister and ironically enough 99% of them never finished there terms and our thrown outside, mostly disgracefully.
Yesterday I was going through the history of George Washington. The man was practically was Chief of Army Staff of the soon to be United States. There was really nothing too great about him, except that he was an ordinary man who learnt his lessons from experience and luck was on his side also in helping him what he is today. He commanded the greatest army of the evolving U.S. and fought of the British troops. At the end of the war, he could have alone taken over the country both based on his achievements in war that earned him tremendous respect and the fact that he was in-charge of the most powerful physical force of that time. But what this guy does is that, he simply goes back to congress and ‘surrenders’ his sword as if he is saying ‘mission accomplished’. We can sum this up in one sentence but it has a great meaning behind it. The man surrendered, yes the word is surrendered. He did not go back claiming the ‘need of the hour’ or the ‘troubled times right now justify’ theme to take over the country. If he would have there would have been almost no resistance because he had practically created the U.S. by freeing it from Britain. His act symbolizes one thing, superiority of democratic institutions over any reasoning for dictatorship. And this has laid the basis which would prevent any future military leader from taking over because in order to do so they would have to justify that if ‘George Washington did not do it, why are you doing this’. He was not completely spotless in character, he had his own demons like in a number of occasions it became an issue of what he wanted for himself rather than being what is in the best interest of the country. But in the end he realized that nothing is superior over the democratic intuitions.
Let’s not go very far and take a very small example of the recent earthquake tragedy in Pakistan. The army practically took over the whole management of the crisis although this was not clearly a place for the army to manage, instead the army should have simply assisted the civilian authorities. This is where you can plug in Darwin’s theory of evolution also that if you don’t use it you will loose it. It is not that the democratic institutions are incapable, it is that there are never allowed to learn. Democratic institutions do not learn from text books like the generals do in colleges, democratic institutions learn from trail and error.
History is again repeating in Pakistan, Pervaiz Musharraf has no interest in democracy or leaving his seat as he frequently mentions about what his ‘friends’ are suggesting him to do. These comments clearly indicate that his focus is on how to hold on to both seats or if the circumstances persist which one. I do not think the architect of Kargil needs someone else’s wisdom that free and fair elections are important for the countries future.

Who to balme?

2006-05-26T09:40:00.000-05:00

There had been a lot of talk about how the western nations have deprived the poorer nations from the latest technology and resources so that they would not become strong and capable of confronting the western nations. All the way from the African deserts to the Indian subcontinent there is a similar theme where the local resources were looted by the rich nations for there own benefit and the system was designed in a way so that these poor countries would remain poor and continue to serve as the blood line for the rich. The idea was that if they were left poor then they would be never be able to challenge the rich and powerful countries and since they will be dependent for the latest technology on the rich countries it will essentially prove to be a very good parasite-host relationship. But despite all this, the powerful west failed to foresee the terrible dangers that lay ahead. This strategy has left the other countries vulnerable from economical, political and military point of view.
About 50 years ago, this strategy might have worked just fine but not anymore. The reason being the increased effects of the globalization. Now not only it takes less time to ship the diamonds from the war torn countries of Africa but also it takes less time to ship drugs from south America to new York city. What this essentially means is that the problems in the poor countries to end up at the doorsteps of the rich countries. Let’s talk about America, it being the symbol of the western power and influence. Its biggest problem right now are terrorism, Iraq war, illegal immigration and drug trade. If the Palestinian state was allowed to prosper along with the Israel it wouldn’t have resulted in the 9/11, as it serves as the breeding grounds for the theories of terrorism that are often fed by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organization to its members. Similarly, if Saddam Hussein wasn’t supported in the first place we would have never seen the Iraq war now. If Mexico had an economy other than drugs and outsourced industries that come from U.S. it would not have resulted in the immigration issues right now in the U.S. If the U.S. wouldn't have ignored the afghan drug trade problems in the first place they would not be selling in the streets of Los Angeles right now.
Now all this does not mean that the rich countries are responsible for all this because it is not as if these countries woke up one day and found gold flowing through the cities. Germany was completely destroyed from the war hysteria before it became a super power and Japan was also completely destroyed and similarly there was a time when the people use to line up in the streets in U.S. for free food during the great depression. None of these countries were born with a silver spoon unlike the Middle East, which did strike black gold.
The whole point is that if we have a glass house in the desert, when the wind will below it will bring some sand with it inside the house. We, the underdeveloped countries need to stop blaming the developed countries for there misery and start building ourselves instead of focusing all of our resources on unproductive venues. It is possible and every country can do it, just look at the world map and there are plenty of examples.

Media Power

2006-05-25T15:03:00.000-05:00

An interesting development has been taking place in Pakistan since the liberation of the TV stations from the Govt. control (although it is still far from complete liberation). We have been seeing its effects in almost every part of the daily life of an ordinary Pakistani. To me this change translates into a new from of empowerment for the common man. Before this change the politicians and the heads of the state could easily argue one side of an issue based on just complete ignorance or intentionally to bluff the viewers by presenting the 'truth' on state television. But now they have a new competitor which will only prove to be more powerful as time passes by, provided this new hope is let to flourish. We have seen quite a few examples like innocent people being rescued from the jails because the media high lightened them. Folks, for a long time there used to be an argument 'The western media is very powerful.....', but you know how it is said 'If you can't fight it, join it' and I think that this is exactly what has been done. Although the sad part is that we are just stepping into a very new field while other nations and countries have built huge empires on it, and it will be a while before the revolution gets enough momentum.
The biggest thing I want to credit the media with is 'initiation of thinking' in the common man. Now one might say that, were we not thinking before, my answer is, no. What we were doing before was accepting what was told to us as right or wrong. E.g. we did not have any other category for India than enemy. We had been told and taught in our textbook that the 'evil neighbor India....' did this or that. About 4-6 years ago if anyone even said or talked about India in a different way he was quickly labeled a traitor. Well all that is about the political issues of Pakistan. A very interesting thing that I came across this week was the discussion on Geo TV about the Hudood Ordinance. This is a very exciting turn for us, as we will be able to eventually open discussion among all sects and about all topics without getting involved in any kind of hatred or violence. This is the one thing that will eventually free the ordinary man from the claws of the mullah and convince him that he 'can' decide right & wrong without becoming a Kafir and that the mullah's stamp is not necessary for everything from how to drink water to which side to stand while urinating. It might be worth mentioning over here that while the mullahs have 'elaborated' and laid out in great detail the day to day activities for us ignorant people they have simultaneously forbidden any discussion on this issue among the people as it might lead them astray with the exception of the one way talk from the mullah's lips to the mullah's audience.
This is certainly the beginning of a new era.

What is the real problem?

2006-05-12T08:41:00.000-05:00

In order to fight any enemy one has to be able to clearly mark him or identify him fast and then pursue an appropriate strategy to fight it. One such enemy that has been voiced by many countries and including President Pervaiz Musharraf has been extremism. Do you really think that the actual problem is extremism? Although due to the constant media churning of this word we are likely to say yes to this question but I will call it a case of mistaken identity of the target.
Let me explain. When we talk about extremism we are referring to the fact that the individual is going to extreme measures to pursue his perception of the religion. Is there anything wrong with this? Or to say it in better words ‘should’ we have a problem with this? The answer is no, if that individual believes that he should live his life in a particular way than be it. Isn’t that the basic mantra of the western nations concept of freedom, i.e. ‘I should be bale to live my life they way I want it to be’. So why are we having a problem in this case when the deciding factor is religion while we are Ok if it involves wearing tight jeans, or decisions about marriage to the person of choice or anything else that is anything but religious rituals itself. Now the question is then what is the real problem? The real problem is ‘intolerance’. Intolerance where one believes that not only that one has to live his life in a particular strict religious code and anything and everything else that is not in the book should be banned and also that he has the right to ‘enforce’ it on other people. This applies to both on individual, societal and national level. Let me give an example, if there are two neighbors and one of them happens to be a very religious person, who does prayers the whole day, reads Quran for 3 hours a day and wears a cap on the head and wears short sleeve pajamas and has a long beard and never listens to music, and then there is the other neighbor who has never offered prayers in his whole life and wakes up at the sound of the radio and goes to sleep while listening to the music, there is no problem with this arrangement. The problem only arises when the religious person goes to the liberal persons home with the belief that he has a ‘right’ to enforce his way of life on to him.
Folks, Islam is a great religion and in my belief the best religion that guarantees the rights of everyone whether you are a follower or not or if you follow a particular sect. Remember the famous incident of the Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H) where a neighbor throws trash on him every morning and the incident of the Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H) being stoned by the gangs and a angel appears asking the prophet if he wished the mountains to be crushed on them, what is the underlying theme of all this? Do you think the Prophet (P.B.U.H.) did not have enough power to force them into religion with the threat of force, of course he did, but he was also setting an example for all of us. Islam is a very simple and straight forward religion and some people will go extreme lengths by drawing complex conclusions to justify their ‘right’ to enforce a particular code or interpretation on the others. Let’s just keep the things straight as they are and not try to twist them around.
So, what we have to fight is intolerance and not extremism itself. Until and unless we identify the problem correctly we are just shooting in the air with no results.

Our Great Leaders

2006-05-11T13:18:00.000-05:00

I have long wanted to write on this issue. We have a lot of leaders on the East side of the world but despite the huge numbers it has failed to produce quality leaders, that have a vested interest only in what is in the best interest of the nation itself, and in some cases where there were great leaders the system was used against them to refrain them from taking a lead and in some instances you can simply put the blame on the mass ignorance of the citizens of the country.
Where should we start from the, the list is very long, ok, lets begin with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. My standard of measuring the credibility of a leader lies in the ability of the leader to understand the situation and problems around him and be able to drive the nation to prosperity, where prosperity could be in terms of politics, economy, religion or anything which is the need of the hour. Since Ahmadinejad came to power the only problem he saw was Israel. Not to mention folks, Iran is a country with vast natural resources and huge labor forces, but Ahmadinejad like some of the other leaders since the 1979 has focused on leadership based on hatred. We might think that this is a technique used only by the terrorists, but it is being played very effectively around us, a very good example of it can be found in Pakistan in the form of political religious parties. Lets not underscore the power of hatred over here also, it is a very effective force, but that is another topic, may be some other time. The problem with most of the religious leaders in the Asian subcontinent also remains in the fact that they have never realized the reality around them. If you ever listen to ideology of the religious political or more correctly the ‘Islamic leaders’ the theme ranges anywhere from ‘destruction of Israel’ to ‘the western nations plan to destroy Islam’. Our Islamic leaders have enough vision to sit in Peshawar (Pakistan) and spot the ‘conspiracy’ taking place in the White House but they cannot see the children dying from malnutrition and lack of medical care down the very street they are standing on, they can see the next strategy taking shape in MI5 in London but they cannot see the whole families committing suicide in the next city from absolute poverty, they can see how Israel is planning to attack the Muslim nations but they are blind from the honor killings in the villages. So if you ask them what the problem is they have one answer ‘Islam is under attack’ and if you ask them why is it so, there answer is ‘You are not good enough of a Muslim’ and if you ask them so how do you explain the poverty and illiteracy among the Muslim nations, there answer is ‘It’s the western conspiracy’.
Not only has this attitude kept us from moving ahead but has also put the ordinary citizen under a very difficult choice because he can either keep scum to the calls of these leaders or he can try to follow the tried and proven way of success which the western nations have went through but then he would be becoming a ‘Kafir’.
This is the very reason that despite revolution after revolution and after countless sacrifices of the ordinary people, a good example of which would be the rise of Taliban & the Islamic revolution in Iran, has produced no better results, instead has pushed us deep into the ever widening whirlpool of radicalization, terrorism, hatred, poverty, ignorance and destruction. But despite all this visible signs of failure it has not stopped them from pursuing even greater ‘visions’ like the, reestablishment of the Khilafat.
These are the blind leaders, that claim to see every problem and having a solution to every problem.

Cruise Vs. Zarqawi

2006-05-08T13:44:00.000-05:00

It was funny/ironic but it was a moment of grief also. The last weekend saw two new openings on the TV screen. One of them as you all know was Tom Cruise in MI-III and the second was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi starring in, hold on it does not have a name yet, let’s give it a name 'Operation Infidel'. Well the MI-III trailer was not a very big surprise as it had all the usual bang bang and expensive visual effects etc, what was great was the trailer released by Zarqawi, in action, firing his automatic guns and wearing American tennis shoes. And did anyone miss the sound effects, I guess that was necessary to bring out the heroic theme in the trailer. I think that while Zarqawi might be a good match for Tom his associate was not as sexy as Michelle Monaghan.
So much for sarcasm, it is sad, and we need to really think at what we are against at. These fanatics need to continuously justify there act and present themselves as heroes. It is the same problem across the board that these people are living in a world of there own and for them that is the reality and if you don't agree then you are to die. After hearing the statements released by Zarqawi over a period of time it is not difficult to asses that he is suffering from some kind of inferiority or deprivation complex and the only way he can fill this big gap in himself is by pursuing his fanatical ideas, not to mention how does it feel like when you know you can kill someone at your choice. Doesn't that give him a feeling of being a 'God' also knowing that he can take this persons life or let him live. So much for his jihad, I think he is committing blasphemy himself.
We can probably write books and books to prove how they are wrong but that is not where we need to put most of our effort. We, as Muslims, need to unite and stand up and tell them that you do not represent us and that the damage you have done to Muslims in the name of God & Islam cannot be forgiven.

Homeless

2006-05-03T08:39:00.000-05:00

Today I do not know what do I feel like, may be I feel like crying with blood tears or may be I feel very angry at the ignorance of the other people who are responsible for this or may be I feel hopeless and do not want to hope anymore so that I can stop feeling sad or may be I feel a new energy to do something about it, I don't know. I lived most of my life in a country other than my own, and always had one hope that there is a land on the other side of the sea where I can stand and no one can say to me that 'go away you do not belong here' where I can pick up the sand and rocks from the earth and claim that they are 'mine', a place where I would feel like home, but today my dreams are showing a crack and I can feel it on my heart, trust me it is a very deep wound. The question may be I want to ask is 'Why'. As you all know today Pakistan was on the Failed States Index, I can't believe it, is the word really 'Failed' or am I hallucinating. I always maintain myself but this is the one point where I do want to loose my mind and bring all the political leaders who have played a role in this into a line try them for treason, treason to the motherland, the land they never believed in but the land that was the hope for the millions of other people, treason for deceiving the hard work and sweat and prayers of the ordinary citizens of this country.

Yeah I have a home but I feel homeless today!

The Journey

2006-04-27T09:52:00.000-05:00

My mother thought me a lesson at a very early stage of my life and that was

'Stand up for what is right and don't back of no matter what'

That is the mission of my life. This is a long journey, a journey that will never end and should never end. I am determined to play my part in it. There is just too much going on in the world for me to just sit and be a spectator. This blog will be one of the venues where I can put my effort at.

Let the journey begin!

pakistan