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