Is this a joke...

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

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

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

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.



Rights:
© 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.



Rights:
© 2006 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

Making of the Islamic State

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.

Islamic State
Islam

Hindu, Muslim groups tussle over national song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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?

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?

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...

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?

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!