Muslim Heretics Conference

‘The jihadists are dragging us into the Middle Ages’

December 19, 2008

Reportage: Arthur J Pais

Imagine the economic and social problems of Muslims in India is solved, Salman Rushdie said the other day; imagine the Kashmir problem is also solved; imagine too, the Israelis and Palestinians have made peace. Would al Qaeda and the various self-proclaimed jihadists “then put their guns down?”

He has no illusions any such thing would happen, he said firmly.

The jihadists are bent not only on “dragging us into the Middle Ages,” he declared but are also planning on world domination. “It is all about power grabbing.”

Rushdie was musing, at an Asia Society event in New York, over the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

The terrorists were not really concerned what happened in Kashmir, he continued, and their action has to do with everything that overtook Sufi Islam in Pakistan and had it replaced by “fanatical Islam, an Arabised Islam.”

Mumbai-born Rushdie (who refuses to call Bombay by its new name, asserting that the name Mumbai is the creation of politicians), shared the evening with two other New York-based writers — Mira Kamdar (Planet India) and Suketu Mehta (Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found) — with immediate connections with Mumbai

Rushdie was forced underground for many years in the United Kingdom following the death fatwa against him by Iran in the 1980s

He was speaking for the first time extensively on the Mumbai attacks, and he covered a wide spectrum of topics including the “lamentable” response to the attacks by the security forces, the “nauseating” reaction of fellow Mann Booker Prize-winning writer Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) to the attacks and the “utter duplicity” of the Pakistan government in addressing the charges that terrorists were trained and dispatched from Pakistan.

Calling Pakistan the centre of world terrorism, he said, “all roads of terrorism in the world lead to Pakistan,” and though religious parties there got just about two percent votes in the general elections less than a year ago, the Pakistani “elite” is conniving with the religious groups to undermine India.

The jihadists tap into “the resentment the Pakistani elite feels for the success of India,” he said.

“Broadly speaking India is a free country, broadly speaking India is a democracy and broadly speaking India is economically successful,” he added. “On the other hand, Pakistan is a basket case.” There is no institution in Pakistan there on which a free society can be built.”

America has blindly poured billions of dollars into Pakistan after 9/11 and it only strengthened Pakistan’s jihadists, with the encouragement of the previous President and military leader Pervez Musharraf, he said. Mushraff “skillfully” manipulated the West. “To the westerners, he was a westerner, and to the mullahs he was a mullah,” he said.

Americans treated Pakistan with “velvet gloves,” he said even as the country was becoming the “world centre of terrorism.”

rediff.com: ‘The jihadists are dragging us into the Middle Ages’

A London-based think tank has revealed that the cofounder of a Muslim communal organization whose spokespeople are used by mainstream media outlets has glorified terrorism and attacks on Israel.

The Center for Social Cohesion (CSC) reported that last week Asghar Bukhari, cofounder and spokesman for the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC UK), said on the social networking site Facebook that any Muslim who died fighting Israel was a martyr.

Responding to comments by another contributor on a discussion entitled ‘Has Europe come to terms with Islam?’, Bukhari said, “Muslims who fight against the occupation of their lands are mujahadeen and are blessed by Allah. And any Muslim who fights against Israel and dies is a martyr and will be granted paradise.”

The Muslim leader went on to justify jihadism, saying, “The concept of jihad is a beautiful thing, and logical to those with a sincere heart. It tells the human being to stand up and fight against those who bring evil and oppression on this earth, and by standing up - roll back that oppression until the people are free from it.”

He continued, “There is no greater oppressor on this earth then [sic] the Zionists, who murder little children for sport. Any public attack on Islam… is not going to be tolerated by men like me. I have dealt with these Zionists before, a veneer of reason below which lies a crooked mind plotting and planning to extend their hatred against us.”

In 2006, The Observer newspaper revealed that Bukhari had given money to the convicted Holocaust denier David Irving.

In an e-mail to Irving, Bukhari wrote, “You may feel like you are on your own, but rest assured, many people are with you in your fight for the truth.”

The National Union of Students (NUS) has banned MPAC UK from campuses for being anti-Semitic. However, mainstream media organizations such as the BBC and Sky continue to use MPAC spokespeople, and Bukhari in particular.

CSC called into question the media outlets’ use of MPAC UK and their portrayal of it as a mainstream Muslim organization.

“The leadership of MPAC UK has been shown before to have expressed opinions which border on glorification of terrorism,” said Robin , a CSC researcher.

“Concern has previously been expressed to the BBC and other media about their continuing use of Bukhari and his organization. Despite this, they are regularly treated by the BBC and other mainstream media as representative of mainstream Muslim opinion,” Simcox said.

“Bukhari’s incitement and likely illegal public comments should be a matter of grave concern to broadcasters and others who have repeatedly given him and his organization a platform,” Simcox added.

The think tank has reported the incident to the police.

UK think tank: Muslim group spokesman praised terror | International | Jerusalem Post

What Barack Obama Can Learn From the Hajj

By Kamran Pasha

It’s a miracle (Obama, that is)
The Hajj, the grand Pilgrimage to Mecca, has just ended after having attracted a record four million Muslims from all over the world for a week of worship in the vast Arabian desert. I attended this year for the first time and experienced one of the most remarkable and transformative events known to humanity. Believers of every race, nation and age brought together to transcend our differences and unite before God.

But there was one topic that was on everyone’s lips as we sat together under a tent in the pilgrim camp at Mina – the improbable election of Barack Hussein Obama to the Presidency of the United States. Everyone I spoke with expressed wonder at God’s will in bringing such remarkable change after eight years of George W. Bush. Most were hopeful that Obama could restore to America its prestige as the moral leader of the world, squandered so recklessly by an Administration that redefined the meaning of the word “hubris.”

There was much that I learned from the Hajj on a personal spiritual level. But I also gained insight on the state of Muslim public opinion toward US foreign policy. These are lessons that would be helpful for our incoming President to keep in mind as he attempts to re-imagine America’s relationship with the Islamic world. Here are some of my thoughts:

Muslims are America’s allies against Al-Qaeda

One of the most consistent themes that I heard during the weeklong vigil at Mecca was the profound abhorrence for violence against civilians in the name of Islam. Whether I spoke with a Syrian neurosurgeon or a Saudi taxi driver, a deep-rooted rejection of Al-Qaeda and its brand of extremism was evident. This was particularly poignant due to the horrific events playing out in Mumbai at the height of the Pilgrimage. Indian pilgrims I met sorrowed for their besieged countrymen, many expressing horror that the streets they regularly walked in Mumbai had become a battlefield.

President Obama must recognize that the vast majority of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims reject murder in the name of Islam and are America’s allies against terrorism. The United States must engage with this not-so-silent majority and work with it to defeat the extremists. Part of that engagement process will be to listen to these Muslims as well and address their grievances. My conversations with fellow believers at the Hajj reaffirmed that Muslims reject terrorism – and they also reject political oppression. Whether it be the suffering of innocent Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, or at Guantanamo Bay, Muslims have valid grievances that are too often ignored by Americans. Obama must understand that the security of America requires a two-pronged approach – allying with mainstream Muslims against Al-Qaeda, while addressing the political grievances that are allowing extremists to recruit among the disenfranchised.

Saudi reform should be encouraged

As an American Muslim raised in Brooklyn, Saudi Arabia is another planet as far as I am concerned. The Kingdom’s synthesis of modern skyscrapers and medieval ideology is mind-boggling. And yet the nation is changing for the better. The new king Abdullah has proven to be a wise statesman, working to disempower the old fundamentalist elites who have been enemies of reform. King Abdullah surprised and delighted the Muslim world in March 2008 when he held a conference in Mecca inviting religious scholars of every branch of Islam, both Sunni and Shia, to work together to promote an Islam of compassion and human brotherhood. A few weeks later, he stunned the world by hosting an interfaith conference in Madrid, bringing together Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus with Muslims to work toward global peace. And he is beginning to rein in the mutawwin, the feared religious police who serve as the fundamentalists’ enforcers.

The King is slowly but surely pulling his country into the 21st century. But the fundamentalists should not be counted out just yet. The religious establishment may strike back against the Abdullah’s efforts to liberalize the Kingdom, and the prospect of civil war in Saudi Arabia one day is not impossible. What President Obama will have to do is work with King Abdullah to strengthen the modernizing elements within his regime. The most important reform Obama can encourage is to break the monopoly of fundamentalist religious scholars on interpreting Islam inside the Kingdom. The Kingdom must welcome Muslim thinkers of every school of thought into its Council of Senior Ulama, the clerical body that is the final authority on religious matters.

The believers I met on Hajj were united in their desire to see Saudi religious scholars bring their interpretations more in line with mainstream Muslim thought, especially in the area of women’s rights. One of the reasons I wrote my novel Mother of Believers about the Prophet’s wife Aisha was to show how active and influential women were during the birth of Islam, a tradition that has been ignored and suppressed by modern fundamentalists. Aisha was a scholar, a poet and a warrior who led armies into Iraq on an armored camel. She would have been shocked by the extreme limitations on women’s rights in the Kingdom.

President Obama will be in a position to help King Abdullah’s reform efforts. As someone who has known Muslims since childhood, Obama should be well aware that the fundamentalists are a small, if troublesome, minority in Islam. Now that King Abdullah has begun the long and painful process of moving his country out of the Middle Ages, he must be supported by the United States.

The center of Muslim power is moving East

One of the most remarkable things I noticed during the Pilgrimage was how many believers had come from Southeast Asia. I was delighted by the presence of huge numbers of faithful from Indonesia and Malaysia, which are rapidly becoming the future centers of Islamic influence. Speaking with many Southeast Asian Muslims, I realized that cultivating Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation with over 200 million believers, will be pivotal for America’s relationship with Islam. The fact that Obama studied in Jakarta as a child is a remarkable basis to solidify a strong friendship between our countries. Indonesian Muslims embrace a deeply tolerant interpretation of Islam and the White House must promote Indonesian voices in its efforts to build bridges with mainstream Muslims. There have been reports in recent days that Obama is planning to give a speech in a major Muslim country, and Indonesia should be placed at the top of the list of candidates.

Similarly, Obama should reach out to Malaysia, another Southeast Asian Muslim country with a moderate religious outlook. Malaysia will be particularly helpful in helping the United States to learn from the lessons of Islamic finance. Malaysia pioneered the idea of Islamic investment, which rejects the principal of interest that has been the cornerstone of Western finance – and will possibly be its death knell. As the world reels from the collapse of the interest-based lending system, Islamic alternatives will become increasingly popular. The Malaysians have been leaders in this now $700 billion dollar industry, and their adherence to a dual system, allowing Islamic banks to operate seamlessly alongside the traditional Western system, has many lessons for Americans seeking to find alternatives to the current financial malaise. President Obama should sponsor a conference on Islamic investment, bringing together Islamic finance experts from Malaysia, Dubai and the Persian Gulf states to work with Wall Street and develop new ways for American investors to prosper.

The Hajj represents the best of Islam

The Hajj is a chaotic event, with millions of people who speak different languages and have different cultural traditions thrown together in relatively close quarters. And yet I was heartened to see how gracious and patient people were with each other, merchants from Ghana helping elderly villagers from India perform rituals that transcended the differences between them. This was the Islam that I loved, the religion of peace and human cooperation that is almost never depicted in the media. It would be hard for any observer to imagine that the same religion that inspired millions of human beings to meet in the wilderness and embrace each other with love could also be used as the rallying cry for murder and madness. The fundamental disconnect between Al-Qaeda’s cruelty and the joyous heart of Islam was nowhere more evident than in the countless acts of kindness and generosity that I witnessed in Mecca.

President Barack Hussein Obama has the chance to ally with this Islam of joy and peace, for the good of the United States and the world. Let’s hope he takes it.

Kamran Pasha is a Hollywood screenwriter and the author of Mother of the Believers, a novel on Prophet Muhammad’s teenage wife Aisha, to be published by Atria Books in April 2009. To read his Hajj experiences, and learn more about the book, please visit http://www.kamranpasha.com

A JOURNAL OF HAJJ by Kamran Pasha
Part 1 Medina and the Prophet’s Tomb http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/a_journal_of_hajj_medina_and_the_prophets_tomb/
Part 2 A Jewish cemetery and a battlefield http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/a_journal_of_hajj_a_jewish_cemetery_and_a_battlefield/
Part 3 Recreating Genesis at the House of God http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/a_journal_of_hajj_recreating_genesis_at_the_house_of_god/
Part 4 Finding God in the Wilderness http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/a_journal_of_hajj_finding_god_in_the_wilderness/

The American Muslim (TAM)

What we knew as Bombay, originally a Portuguese name derived from “Bom Bahia,” or “good bay,” in the 16th century, was transformed into “Mumbai” by Indian nationalists using a questionable link to a Hindu deity called “Mumba” in the 1990s. The city was recently attacked by a terrorist group which has defied the concept of the “nation-state” — defining the nation instead as a community of believers — and has churned out a political ideology derived from religion that has molded their minds and spirits to be lethal weapons to serve causes that even their religion forbids. But then this is the nature of belief, as long as you believe, your belief has the force of material existence.

The carnage in Mumbai, carried out in the name of religion, has once again cast a shadow on Islam by a group of fanatics that have added their beliefs to the arsenal of their criminal acts. This perverted fringe group has been bitterly criticized by the majority of the adherents of that religion, who sincerely believe that their religion is a creed of peace and compassion and who plead with world leaders not to brand their faith as a source of criminality.

Now that Barack Obama has been elected president of the US, still the most influential country in the world, the Muslims who detest the fact that their religion has been turned into an ideology of opposition and violence by extremists have expectations of the new world leader.

The Obama government’s mode of conduct concerning Muslims and Muslim leaders is the primary concern of both moderate Muslims and authoritarian rulers in the wider Middle East. They all know that the Bush administration’s tragic mistakes in the Middle East have played an important role in alienating Muslims and helped the rise of Arab and Islamist radicalism. The moderates have suffered a lot from Islamist radicalism that initially targeted them as heretics and “sellouts” before reaching out for the “distant enemy,” namely the West in general and the US in particular.

On the other side of the coin, rulers in authoritarian Muslim countries fear that Mr. Obama may adopt a policy of defense of individual freedom and pluralist democracies. This would really pose a threat to their power and privilege.

Moderate or non-ideological Muslims expect Mr. Obama to support democratic trends in their countries, but not to push them from above using ruling elites that will never adopt a democratic agenda but rather will simply play for time, making only cosmetic changes. This will, in turn, further reinforce the power of autocratic regimes that are threatened by genuine democracy.

Muslim moderates look at religion as a cultural affair, wanting to render it autonomous of politics so that it will be protected from political power and in the same way, preventing it from seeking political power. So they want the Obama administration to press their governments to enact reforms that will pave the way to democratic politics and legal changes that will allow for more individual freedoms. They do not want a hypocritical stance from an America which advocates democracy but supports the most authoritarian regimes in the Arab world for the sake of oil deals and other strategic ends. The Bush administration set a very bad example of paying lip service to democracy, which, in fact, worked as a vehicle to blackmail Arab regimes and served America’s strategic interests.

Moderate Muslims see that as long as there is great disruption in the world that is caused by exclusion, marginalization, poverty and ignorance, there will be resistance or even hatred against the existing world order and its domestic actors. So Muslims plead with Mr. Obama not to consider all Muslims as terrorists, but to be aware of the dire conditions which give rise to inequality and injustice — the real sources of a radicalism that threatens all nations. They call on Mr. Obama and world leaders with the rationale that the best protection of individuals and society is social justice and inclusion, not just armed forces and the police.

President Bush has not cared much about the violations of human rights and government repression in many friendly Arab and Muslim countries. The US army’s conduct in Iraq and elsewhere, in places such as Guantanamo, has eroded America’s credibility as a country that respects democratic ideals and the rule of law. Muslims all around the world sincerely hope that the Obama government does not repeat these gross mistakes, which have cost America its respect and moral weight in the Middle East and more generally around the globe.

It will indeed be a major mistake for the Obama administration to believe that American national security can be protected through tolerating the suppression of moderate and democratic Muslims in return for their repressive governments’ support of American strategic interests. If it incurs the wrath of young Muslims who may start to label the US as the real cause of their misery and repression, it may make the world a very narrow place for US citizens and for all those who could be brandished as “enemies of Islam.” No group may be as dangerous as the one whose members feel that life has no worth unless it is sacrificed, dedicating it to a sublime cause. I hope that we do not push our youth to those extremes by making their lives miserable, for they may make everyone else’s lives even more miserable.

SUNDAY’S ZAMAN

By OLIVIER ROY and JUSTIN VAISSE

Published: December 20, 2008

DURING the presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would convene a conference of Muslim leaders from around the world within his first year in office. Recently aides have said he may give a speech from a Muslim capital in his first 100 days. His hope, he has said, is to “make clear that we are not at war with Islam,” to describe to Muslims “what our values and our interests are” and to “insist that they need to help us to defeat the terrorist threats that are there.”

This idea of trying to reconcile Islam and the West is well intentioned, of course. But the premise is wrong.

Such an initiative would reinforce the all-too-accepted but false notion that “Islam” and “the West” are distinct entities with utterly different values. Those who want to promote dialogue and peace between “civilizations” or “cultures” concede at least one crucial point to those who, like Osama bin Laden, promote a clash of civilizations: that separate civilizations do exist. They seek to reverse the polarity, replacing hostility with sympathy, but they are still following Osama bin Laden’s narrative.

Instead, Mr. Obama, the first “post-racial” president, can do better. He can use his power to transform perceptions to the long-term advantage of the United States and become a “post-civilizational” president. The page he should try to turn is not that of a supposed war between America and Islam, but the misconception of a monolithic Islam being the source of the main problems on the planet: terrorism, wars, nuclear proliferation, insurgencies and the like.

This will be an uphill battle, since this view of a monolithic, dangerous Islam has gained wide acceptance. Whether we’re talking about civil war in Iraq, insurgency in Afghanistan, unrest in Kashmir, conflict in Israel-Palestine, nuclear ambitions in Iran, rebellion in the Philippines or urban violence in France, people routinely — but wrongly — single out Islam as the explanation, rather than nationalism or separatism, political ambitions or social ills. This in turn reinforces the idea of a global struggle.

Even the recent attacks in Mumbai, India, cannot be seen primarily under the prism of religion. What the terrorists and supporters of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militant group believed to have carried out the attacks, have achieved is to make normal relations between India and Pakistan impossible for the foreseeable future. Such groups have always used regional conflicts like that in Kashmir to hold on to power.

The truth is, Islam explains very little. There are as many bloody conflicts outside of regions where Islam has a role as inside them. There are more Muslims living under democracies than autocracies. There is no less or no more economic development in Muslim countries than in their equivalent non-Muslim neighbors. And, more important, there exist as many varieties of Muslims as there are adherents of other religions. This is why Mr. Obama should not give credence to the existence of an Islam that could supposedly be represented by its “leaders.”

Who are these leaders that President Obama would convene anyway? If he picks heads of state, he will effectively concede Osama bin Laden’s point that Islam is a political reality. If he picks clerics, he will put himself in the awkward position of implicitly representing Christianity — or maybe secularism. In any case, he would meet only self-appointed representatives, most of them probably coming from the Arab world, where a minority of Muslims live.

And such a conference would have negative effects for Western Muslims. By lending weight to the idea of a natural link between Islam and terrorism, it would reinforce the perception that they constitute a sort of foreign body in Western societies, or even some sort of fifth column. Most Western Muslims want first and foremost to be considered as full citizens of their respective Western country, not part of any diaspora. And most of them share the so-called Western values.

If the idea of a Muslim summit meeting should be dropped as soon as possible, then what should Mr. Obama do? No more — but also no less — than carrying out the ambitious program he put forward during the campaign: closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, withdrawing from Iraq, banning torture, pushing for peace in the Middle East and so forth. These are not in any sense concessions to “Islam,” but on the contrary a reassertion that American values are universal and do not suffer any kind of double standard, and that they could be shared by atheists, Christians, Muslims and others.

Barack Obama should also put more faith in the capacity of the rest of the world to recognize that America has turned the page on eight catastrophic years during which its values have often been betrayed. After all, Americans have just elected a president whose middle name is Hussein. That name goes a long way with many Muslims.

Olivier Roy is a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Justin Vaisse is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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