Muslims – mustafamalik.com

Exodus 2.0?

Mustafa Malik August 4, 2023

JAKE SULLIVAN’S MARATHON mission to Saudi Arabia to normalize Saudi-Israeli relations is also intended to revive the “two-state solution” to the Palestinian-Israeli imbroglio. Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman was reported to have been indifferent to the Palestinian issue, but reports from Jeddah indicate that the Saudis are now insisting on the revival of “the Arab Peace Initiative,” the 2002 proposal from the late Saudi King Abdullah that called for the creation of a Palestinian state in return for the recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

It reminds me of Haider Abdel Shafi. In 1991 Abdel Shafi had led the Palestinian delegation to the U.S.-mediated peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis, held in Madrid, Spain. I was interviewing him the following year on his visit to Washington to follow up on those talks.

I asked the Palestinian physician-turned-politician if he thought the Israelis would “allow you to have a state of your own.”

“They should,” he said, tartly, “unless they want to stay as pariahs in the Arab world for ages and ages.”

“Jack Khazmo told me,” I replied, “that you are wasting your time with the Israelis.” I quoted the editor of the Arabic-language Jerusalem weekly Al-Bayadir al-Siyasi as saying that “the Jews will not return an inch of our land until we make them truly miserable.”

Khazmo, a Palestinian Christian, was also a valiant activist in the Palestinian struggle for independence. I used to meet him on my visits to Jerusalem.

“Doesn’t being a pariah make you miserable?” Abdel Shafi said.

Abdel Shafi died in 2007. Meanwhile, four Arab states have established diplomatic relations with Israel and the Biden administration is now trying to help normalize Israel’s relations with a fifth, Saudi Arabia. If the veteran politician from Gaza were alive today, I would have asked if he still considered Israel a pariah state.

President Biden has been pretty insensitive to the horrible Israeli brutality to the Palestinians and Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Yet he also hates Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right administration. And his relations are severely strained with bin Salman, the Saudi kingdom’s effective ruler. All the same, the American president has been trying tenaciously to help formalize the Saudi-Israeli relations. You wonder why.

The question haunts you, especially, as bin Salman has put forward a stiff price tag for the American initiative. He wants a NATO-like defense treaty with the United States, which would oblige Americans to come to the kingdom’s defense if it’s attacked by an adversary, conceivably Iran. In addition, the Saudis want America to let them have a “peaceful” nuclear program. And bin Salman wants to see the “two-state” formula for the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict revived, mostly for the consumption of the anti-Israeli Arab public.

Biden has taken on a daunting task. The U.S. Congress or the American public would have a hard time agreeing to go to war to defend the repressive and obscurantist Arab kingdom. They would be reluctant, too, to allow Saudi Arabia to have a nuclear program, which may not remain peaceful and could one day trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Also, Netanyahu’s the far-right ministers, dominating his government, are bent expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank to absorb the territory within a Greater Israel. Persuading them to concede a Palestinian state would be next to impossible.

Biden’s gambit

Actually, Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, has been assigned a task that is irrelevant to the reality on the ground. Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies have been cooperating for years. The Saudi government uses Israeli intelligence and tools to track internal dissent. Riyadh has allowed Israeli aircraft to use its air space. It’s courting Israeli investments and is talking about allowing Saudi investments in Israel. If they feel the need, the Saudis and Israelis could formalize their relationship without outside help. About the only reason the monarchy isn’t embracing Israel publicly is the everyday Saudi citizens’ loathing for Israel, mainly because of the Jewish colonization of Palestine and the daily Jewish atrocities toward Palestinians.

“If it weren’t for [Saudi] public hostility toward the [Israeli] Jews, bin Salman would have jumped into Netanyahu’s bed,” a Saudi businessman told me this off-color joke last summer in Arlington, Virginia, on condition of anonymity. As Abdel Shafi said 31 years ago, Israel remains a pariah state to most Arabs, Saudis included.

An Arab Barometer poll has shown that support for the recognition of Israel by Arab states is 5% in Egypt, 5% in Jordan, 6% in Palestine, 14% in Iraq, 17% in Lebanon, 7% in Libya, 11% in Tunisia, 4% in Algeria, and so on. And an Israeli public opinion survey has found 35% of Saudis support the normalization of their kingdom’s relations with Israel, but only 24% of them accept Israel’s right to exist and 88% insist on the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Biden’s widely publicized interest in normalizing Saudi-Israeli relations is plainly opportunistic and cynical. Donald Trump, his predecessor as president, started the normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab states through what is called “Abraham Accords,” which is one of the few foreign-policy issues supported by most Americans, Democrats and Republicans. Democrat Biden sees Republican Trump as his likely rival for the presidency in next year’s election. By engaging publicly in the talks to help Israel formalize its relations with a key Arab state, Biden is trying to steal the popular issue from his potential Republican rival. Well, even if he fails, American voters and America’s powerful Israel lobby would remember his efforts.

I didn’t mention to Abdel Shafi the history of Jewish communities living as pariahs among Europeans, Egyptians, Romans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and so forth. The problem, however, is with living within a modern nation-state with a growing and increasingly assertive Palestinian population.

I see Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation and atrocities increasing progressively, prompting ever more brutal Jewish reprisal. But I don’t believe that the 21st century will be putting up with this grave injustice for very long. With prospects for a separate Palestinian state almost non-existent, Palestinians, Israelis and the world will be forced to deal with the reality of a single state between the Jordan River and the sea. In this state Jews are 6.5 million and Palestinians 6.41 million. The Palestinian birth rate is 4.1 children per woman, compared to the Jewish 3.1 children. Greater Israel is going to be a Palestinian-majority state pretty soon.

In April 2016 Biden, then U.S. vice president, said the continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank was creating a “one-state reality,” and that Jews won’t remain the majority in such a state. Earlier, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz that without a separate Palestinian state, which is now practically impossible to create, Israel would face “a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights” in which case “Israel [would be] finished.”

But would the “one-state solution” be a real solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute? Ray Hanania, a Palestinian-American journalist, says that the idea of Jews and Palestinians living peaceably together in a Muslim-majority state is “fundamentally flawed.” He asks: “Exactly where do Jews and Christians live in the Islamic world today side-by-side with equality?”

Many among the Israeli intelligentsia see themselves face to face with this challenge. Benny Morris, the famed Israeli historian, says Jews won’t be able to live in a Palestinian-majority state in “stifling darkness, intolerance, authoritarianism.” He predicts that most Israeli Jews would eventually migrate to Western countries, with only those unable to do so for practical reasons and Ultra-Orthodox Jews staying behind. The late Steven Plaut, a writer and economist at Haifa University, agreed. He referred to the “one-state solution” as the “Rwanda Solution.” He warned that an Israeli-Palestinian state ruled by a Palestinian majority would eventually lead to a “new Holocaust.”

Palestinians won’t, of course, be doing to the Jews what the Nazis did to them, but life for modern, high tech, affluent Jews among a religiously conservative Muslim majority with memories of many Jewish injustices would be, to repeat Khazmo’s expression, “truly miserable.” Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg writes that a Muslim-majority Israel would just collapse economically. Like Morris, he says the Jewish intelligentsia won’t be able to cope in it, and that most of them would emigrate to the West.

You can call that Exodus 2.0, reminiscent of the biblical Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, led by Moses.

~Mustafa Malik, the host of the blog After the Clash, worked 32 years as a reporter, columnist and editor for American newspapers. In the 1990s he conducted fieldwork on American foreign policy options in Israel and five Arab countries as a researcher for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

Erdogan: Secular Muslim icon

Mustafa Malik April 5, 2023

POLLS SHOW TURKISH President Recep Tayyip Erdogan behind the opposition presidential nominee, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan has alienated a lot of Turks through his crackdowns on descent and media outlets critical of him. The Turkish economy is reeling from double-digit inflation and the lira has been decimated by his fixation with low interest rates. The Biden administration has been consistently supporting the anti-Turkish Kurdish militia in Syria, who have aggravated Turkey’s security problems.

Well, poll numbers could be see-sawing before the May 14 the election; we can’t predict now whom the Turkish voters will finally pick as their next president. But in case – just in case – Erdogan’s 20-year rule as president and prime minister of Turkey is coming to an end, I’m wondering what legacy he would be leaving behind.

In Western political circles and media, Erdogan has been virulently reviled since he came to power, mainly because of his Islamic roots and muscular foreign policy, which occasionally clashes with those of America and the West. On the other hand, he has continually espoused and defended Muslim causes and issues around the world as no other Muslim leader has, and a Pew Research poll has found him to be the most admired statesman in the Muslim world.

Some philosophers and sociologists (Jurgen Habermas, Gregor McLennan, et al) would call him a “post-secularist,” one retaining a secular political system while allowing religious values and symbols to infiltrate the public space. Others (e.g. Asef Bayat, Vali Nasr) would label him a “post-Islamist,” as he came from an Islamist political party but has left it and set up a secular one and has been working through secular institutions.

I prefer calling the Turkish president a “Muslim democrat,” the phrase Erdogan used to describe himself to me. It identifies him, I think, more authentically. It took me years, though, to come to realize its authenticity.

On the hot, muggy afternoon of Nov. 2, 1998, my Turkish friend and interpreter, Cemal Usak, barged in with me to the office of the then Istanbul mayor, Erdogan. Usak was his classmate and boyhood friend and had set up my interview with him. Usak was general secretary to the Journalists and Writers Association in Istanbul and had been helping me with my research project.

Erdogan was putting things into cardboard boxes in the middle of the room, but he got up and led us to a coach behind a tea table blazoning a multicolor bouquet in the middle. A few weeks before, the mayor had been fired from his job after his conviction for reciting a provocative Islamic poem at a public meeting. Turkey was under the ultra-secularist government of Prime Minister Ahmet Mesut Yilmaz. The Islamist mayor had been given a 10-month prison sentence for reading out the so-called “jihadist poem.” It read:

“The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the faithful our soldiers….”

I had been to Turkey for nearly two months and found an Islamic resurgence roiling the country. Erdogan’s prison sentence (which would later be reduced to four months) had made him a hero of sorts among Islamists and many everyday Turks.

Having seated us on the coach, our host scampered to an assistant and was instructing him about what to put into which boxes, etc. I noticed bouquets and clusters of flowers filling the whole corner of the room to my right. I asked an attendant why there were so many flowers in the room.

“People started bringing them in since the day he returned from the court,” he said. Usak explained that he meant since the day the court gave Erdogan the prison sentence.

Erdogan rushed back and sat next to me on the coach and asked how long I had been working at the Washington Times.

I realized that Usak had briefed him about me.

I said I had left the Washington Times to take up my current assignment. “I am doing fieldwork in Western Europe and here about the prospects for Turkey’s membership of the European Union,” I added.

Erdogan’s eyes lit up, indicting his interest in the subject. He asked a couple of questions about my findings on the issue in European countries. I kept my answers brief and told him that I didn’t find “Europeans very interested in having you in the European Union.”

“You think so?” he said. “We would like to join the European Union, though.”

I was surprised to hear that.

“But your leader, Mr. Erbakan, has been opposed to Turkey’s EU membership and NATO membership,” I said.

Necmettin Erbakan, president of the Islamist Welfare Party to which Erdogan belonged, had been denouncing Turkish governments’ attempt to join the EU and Turkey’s membership of NATO, and when he was prime minister, he tried, unsuccessfully, to form an “Islamic NATO” with eight Muslim countries. Erbakan was the founder of the Islamist movement in Turkey. He had been overthrown as prime minister the year before under the pressure of army generals, the traditional guardians of Turkey’s aggressively secular system. The generals had judged him a threat to the country’s secular system.

Erdogan didn’t respond to my comment about Erbakan’s opposition to Turkey’s accession to the EU.

Religious freedom

After asking him a couple of other questions, I said, “If the Welfare Party came to power today, would you try to introduce the Shari’a in Turkey?”

“No, the Sharia is for individual Muslims to observe,” he replied, beckoning me to a glass of soft drink and a plate of biscuits placed on the tea table. “The state should be secular.”

I was stunned again. A radical Islamist wants a secular Turkish state!”

“Isn’t the secular state sending you to prison for reading an Islamic poem?” I said, having had a sip of the drink.

He explained that “the Kemalists’ version” of secularism suppressed people’s religious freedom and persecuted women who wore Islamic head covering in public, but that under his version of secularism “the state will guarantee religious freedom.”

The officials and other supporters of the staunchly secular Turkish state, founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, are known as “Kemalists.”

“I’m a secular Muslim,” he added, “but I want religious freedom. For everybody.”

Now he’s a secular Muslim!

I was shocked.

The man who was going to prison for reciting a “jihadist poem” and has been known throughout Turkey as a diehard Islamist now says he’s a secular Muslim. He must be lying through his teeth, I said to myself. I suspected that Usak had told him that I wrote in American newspapers and journals, and he just didn’t want Americans to think of him as an Islamist zealot.

On my way back I asked Usak what he made of Erdogan’s description of himself as a secular Muslim. My friend was a follower of Fethullah Gulen, a famous Turkish cleric who would be accused in 2016 of sponsoring a failed military coup against the Erdogan government.

“We are secular Muslims, too,” he said. Gulen and his followers were indeed secular. “You are,” I replied, “but the Welfare Party is an Islamist organization and your friend [Erdogan] is a leader of that party. An Islamist firebrand.”

I recalled my interviews with Abdullah Gul, then a member of the Turkish parliament (later president of Turkey) and Ahmet Davutoglu, a professor at Marmara University in Istanbul who was known as Erdogan’s mentor (later Turkish prime minister); both had ruled out introducing Islamic law in Turkey but neither of them had identified himself as secular. I hadn’t brought up the question, however.

I was getting ready to return to the United States and wished that I had the time to investigate why Erdogan had called himself as a “secular Muslim.”

The next day I dropped in at Istanbul’s Hurriyet newspaper office for a goodbye lunch with my friend Oktay Eksi, the paper’s chief columnist.

I told him about my interview with Erdogan and said, “Can you believe that Erdogan told me that he was a secular Muslim?”

Eksi used to be a politician belonging to the secularist Republican People’s Party.

“These Islamists are hypocrites,” he said, trying cut a piece of meat on his plate with his knife and fork. “But I heard that Erdogan, Abdullah Gul, Bulent Arinc and a few others are going to leave the Rafah [Welfare] Party.”

I stopped eating, anxious to hear more about it.

“Really?” I said. “Why?”

Eksi said he had learned from Welfare Party sources that “a number of younger party members” had decided that an Islamist party won’t have a future in Turkey, “especially after Erdogan’s jail sentence and the firing of Erbakan” as prime minister.

Those party members were “led by Erdogan and Gul to a meeting with Erbakan,” he added, where they had “a fight with Rajai Kutan.” Kutan was an Erbakan’s closest associate.

I have since been following Turkish politics and have interviewed Erdogan twice more – in Turkey and Washington – and I understand that his and many other Turkish Islamists’ transition to the “secular” Justice and Development Party (AKP) was the result of serious soul searching. They have realized that an Islamist party won’t be tolerated by the Turkish army and Kemalist elites and would be ostracized by Europe and America.

During my visit to Turkey the following year Erbakan admitted to me the rift in his party. He said some of the dissidents had been “very dear to me, and they are pious Muslim brothers,” but that they thought they could serve Islam better from “outside politics.” They were “misguided” and needed “more courage” to pursue Islamist politics, Erbakan added.

Over the decades I have frequented Muslim countries in South and West Asia and Muslim communities in America and Europe. I have seen an interesting trend among many Muslims almost everywhere. They pray and fast and are building mosques and madrasas. They agitate over the persecution of Muslims in India, Palestine and Myanmar. But they are leaving Islamist organizations.

In Bangladesh, where I live now, mosques and madrasahs are proliferating. And Friday congregations in some mosques extend to the yards. But the Bangladeshi Islamist party, the Jamaat-i-Islami, has all but become extinct.

The Bangladeshi population is more than 90 percent Muslim, but the Jamaat-i-Islami there has never received more than 6 percent of the vote. Pakistanis are 96 percent Muslim. There, too, the Jamaat never got more than 6 percent of the vote. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, the largest Islamist party, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), won 8 percent of the vote at the last election, and the second-largest, the United Development Party (PPP), got 4 percent. In Morocco, the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) suffered the most devastating defeat at the 2021 elections, having lost 112 seats and winning only 13. Yet in all these Muslim-majority countries, Islamic piety, values and symbols permeate social and cultural life.

To me, it all means that Muslims are modernizing fast and jettisoning Islamism because it doesn’t fit well with the public space where modernity reigns. Yet they continue to practice the Islamic faith and cherish Islamic values, which lend meaning to their lives.

The point I’m trying make is exemplified by Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s current prime minister. I met him in Washington in the 1980s as a fire-breathing Islamist youth from Malaysia. He was the leader of Malaysia’s largest Islamic youth movement, known as ABIM (Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia) and a darling of the American Muslim leaders. Together with the Islamic scholar Ismail al-Faruqi, Anwar founded the Islamic think tank International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia.

On his return to Malaysia, Anwar plunged into radical Islamic politics and was having a hard time making progress. Along the way, he served jail terms in sodomy and corruption cases, apparently trumped up by his political rivals. While he was going through these, he began espousing ethnic pluralism and religious tolerance. He was reaching out to the Chinese minority and other non-Muslim ethnic communities and gaining their support. Last November Anwar became prime minister as the head of a progressive alliance, while the hardline Malaysia Islamic Party (PAS) led the opposition.

Democratic institutions

In one of his first press interviews as prime minister, Anwar told Reuters that he would work hard to “rid the country of corruption, racism and religious bigotry,” the last phrase was apparently aimed at the Islamist PAS.

I see Anwar following Erdogan’s political trajectory. Once a radical Islamist, Erdogan has emerged as a leading secularist among Muslim rulers in the world. He has retained Turkey’s secular constitution and democratized its laws. Turkey is about the only Muslim country where alcohol stores and bars are open. Erdogan has wrested democratic institutions from the clutches of the Kemalist army and judiciary. And he reined in the army and the courts, which were strangleholds of Kemalism.

As part of his agenda for religious freedom, Erdogan struggled for years to lift the ban on Muslim women’s headscarves in public institutions until he succeeded in doing so and got the Directorate of Religious Affairs to open new Islamic schools and mosques. In his view, that was part of his struggle for freedom, i.e. religious freedom, denied to Turkish Muslims by authoritarian Kemalist regimes. A Kemalist prosecutor made a failed attempt in a court to have Erdogan’s AKP banned for its alleged threat to the secular constitution. As prime minister, Erdogan tried hard, but unsuccessfully, to join the EU and he keeps Turkey firmly in NATO, long opposed by some of Turkish Islamists.

He not only established secular democracy in Turkey but propagated it in other Muslim countries as well. During his 2011 trip to Egypt, he enraged many of his hosts when he advised them: “I hope there will be a secular state in Egypt. One must not be afraid of secularism. Egypt will grow in democracy and those called upon to draw up the constitution must understand it must respect all religions.”

Oh yes, Erdogan is also zealously espousing Muslim causes in Palestine, Kashmir, and elsewhere. He has built more than 100 mosques in a host of foreign countries. Among them is the largest American mosque built in what used to be my neighborhood in the Washington suburbs. In 2020 he earned vociferous denunciation from the West when he re-converted Hagia Sophia (or Aya Sofia) from a museum back into a mosque. Once a Byzantine cathedral, the Turks, in 1453, had made it a mosque upon their conquest of Istanbul (then the Byzantine capital of Constantinople), but Ataturk, during his campaign to de-Islamize Turkey, had made it a museum.

All this fits into Erdogan’s version of secularism, or “post-secularism.” In contemporary philosophers’ and definition, “post-secularism” allows religious values and symbols in the public space, so long as it insured equality, freedom and pluralism.

Actually, the Western liberal brand of secularism, which quarantines religion into the private sphere, is a unique invention of the West. It was devised to rid society of Christian fanaticism, which had exploded in Europe during the “Wars of Religion.”

“’Secular’ itself is a Christian term,” the eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explains, “that is a word that finds its meaning in a Christian context.” He adds that the Western concept of secularism “doesn’t travel well and should not be imposed on other cultures.”

In fact in almost none of the non-Western societies, including democratic ones, religion or religious values are completely rinsed out of the public space, as it’s done in Western and Northern Europe – and as Ataturk and his Kemalists struggled to do in Turkey for nearly eight decades. In Erdogan’s “Muslim secularist” Turkey, religious values and symbols are visible in the public space, but their adherents are not nearly as brutal and repressive as are today’s Hindu nationalists in India, known as “the world’s largest democracy,” or right-wing Jews in apartheid Israel, which the West calls “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Erdogan’s crackdowns on his political opponents – thousands of them – has negated many of the freedoms he recovered from the authoritarian Kemalist regimes and the coup-prone Turkish military. I hear, too, that financial corruption has infected his family and party. Erdogan fatigue has crept into swathes of Turkish society. I won’t be surprised if next month’s election marks the end of Erdogan’s tumultuous political career.

But the “Muslim secularism,” or “post-Islamism,” which he has established in Turkey, will, I believe, remain his enduring political and social legacy in Turkey. I was struck to note that Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s Kemalist rival in the presidential election, co-sponsored the bill in the parliament that allowed Muslim women to wear headscarves in public institutions. Kilicdaroglu, too, has an Islamist party in his six-party electoral alliance!

On his campaign trail, Kilicdaroglu has been trying to court the conservative Muslim vote. Many of these Muslims hate many Kemalists’ drinking habits. Ataturk died of cirrhosis of the liver due to heavy drinking, and his critics criticize him for partying around the “raki [alcohol] table.” The Kemalist presidential candidate has vowed to steer clear of those “at the raki table.”

Erdogan’s “Muslim secularism” has all but replaced Kemalism in much of Turkish society.

Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, researched Turkish-European relations in Turkey and five Western European countries as a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Pakistan could be in U.S. doghouse

Mustafa Malik June 27, 2021

PAKISTAN’S REFUSAL TO allow a CIA base in its territory has pissed off the Biden administration. The Americans also resent Pakistan’s close ties to China, their global adversary.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that, given Pakistani Muslims’ bitterness toward the United States, allowing Americans a base for hostile operations in Muslim Afghanistan would be “suicidal” for his administration.

Islamabad fears a downturn in its relations with Washington, which has almost always been the case after Pakistan failed to comply with a U.S. military or security demand. The worst case, some Pakistanis say, occurred when Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, decided to get rid of a U.S. military base in Pakistan to avoid antagonizing what used to be the Soviet Union. These Pakistanis link Liaqat’s decision to his assassination in 1951, referred to in declassified U.S. documents. Others, who included former Pakistani prime minister and my mentor Nurul Amin, accused the United States of orchestrating disruptions of Pakistan’s democratic process through its military and bureaucratic elements.

Amin told me in 1969 that the United States had got Pakistan’s second prime minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin, fired by the bureaucrat-turned Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad. Nazimuddin, Amin’s close friend, had refused to join the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad Pact unless the pact had a clause stipulating that America would defend Pakistan against “external threats” (India). My mentor said Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan, then commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, had carried the Pentagon’s instruction to Ghulam Mohammad and was sipping tea in Mohammad’s portico when the governor-general fired the prime minister. The governor-general, a titular head of state, didn’t have the constitutional authority to dismiss the prime minister and would not let Nazimuddin convene the parliament (Constituent Assembly) to demonstrate the support of a parliamentary majority behind him. But Gen. Ayub and the military brass signaled to the deposed prime minister that they supported the governor-general’s action.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto wrote in her autobiography that the United States was behind the overthrow and execution of her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, because Z.A. Bhutto had defied Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear program.

President Biden’s announcement that all U.S. troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 has been followed by a dramatic Taliban offensive against the forces of the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, an American protégé. The George W. Bush administration had invaded and occupied Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which the United States had dislodged from power in Iraq and Syria, have also increased their activities in in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials have told Biden that even though the United States and its allies have “diminished” the militant forces in Afghanistan, they could threaten the U.S. homeland again in about two years. The Biden administration is looking desperately for CIA bases to keep them in check.

Pakistan’s rejection of the CIA base proposal follows a long and devastating “war on terror” in that country, sponsored by Washington. Mostly Muslim Pakistanis have always opposed their country being dragged into a U.S. war against Muslim forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still, Pakistan had to agree to participate in that war after Richard Armitage, then U.S. deputy secretary of state, threatened the head of Pakistan’s intelligence services that America would “bomb [Pakistan] back to the Stone Age” if it did not join the U.S. fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. More than 70,000 Pakistanis perished in that war, which was ratcheted up by President Barack Obama (after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize!), infuriating further Pakistanis of all political stripes.

Most Pakistanis, too, feel bitter about U.S. support for each of their four military dictators and America’s hostility to the democratic governments who failed to fulfill U.S. demands. Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Pakistani prime minister, had angered the Harry Truman administration, not only by asking America to pull out its base outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Liaqat was friends with then Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and had turned down an American plea to pressure Mosaddeq to drop his plans to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of the BP). In 1953, four months after the Pakistani Prime Minister Nazimuddin had been overthrown, the CIA station chief in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt, and the U.S. ambassador there, Loy Henderson, openly incited and bribed Iranian army officers and bureaucrats into staging a military coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, whom the Eisenhower administration replaced with the tyrannical dictator Mohammad Riza Pahlavi.

The United States has often had direct links to Pakistani army generals independently of the country’s civilian authorities, but Imran Khan doesn’t seem to be in the danger of being overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored military coup. Khan has been coopted by the Pakistani army generals and is running the country, especially its foreign relations, at the generals’ behest. The Pakistani decision not to have a CIA base was basically made by those generals, who know that a U.S. base could trigger civil unrest in the country.

The Pakistani economy is in shambles, and Islamabad fears that the Americans could deny it the needed economic support and punish it diplomatically and otherwise for rejecting their base request and also for maintaining Pakistan’s historically close relations with China. The Biden administration apparently believes that having had Pakistan’s giant neighbor, India, in its corner in an anti-Chinese alliance (Japan and Australia being the other partners), it can afford to sideline Pakistan. Washington seems indifferent to the possibility of Pakistan joining a growing number of unfriendly Asian countries including China, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

~ Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for the late Nurul Amin, Pakistani prime minister and vice president.

Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for Nurul Amin, a former Pakistani prime minister and vice president. He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.’

Bennett to stick with apartheid?

Mustafa Malik June 13, 2021

THE SWEARING-IN of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of Israel’s pseudo-fascist Yamina party, and his Cabinet inaugurates an era for Israel without Benjamin Netanyahu in power.

Many Israelis think that this chimera of an ultra-rightist-centrist-liberal-Arab government is going to crumble soon over policy differences. If it doesn’t, what kind of an era that Bennett and the real architect of the government, Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party, are going to usher in?

Four of the eight political parties in the coalition government are rightist or religious. They don’t believe in equal rights for the Palestinians, who make up 20 percent of the Israeli population. The Palestinians are, in fact, living under an apartheid system under Israeli occupation. Is this regime going to restore real democracy in Israel? Or is it going operate as the last colonial power in the Middle East? And that in the 21^st century?

In 2015 when the Bennett was education minister, his policy of immersing science students in Torah and Mishna education prompted Haaretz writer Uri Misgav to warn Israelis that their country was “on the road to theocracy.”

Israel’s problem, he wrote, “is that religion is not separate from government, and over the years it has also become less and less separate from right-wing West Bank settler politics,” which at one point was spearheaded by Bennett.

Israeli society and politics have since been soaking deeper in ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Judaism. Are Bennett and other right-wing politicians in the coalition going to step back and let the four centrist and liberal parties restore democracy and sanity in Israeli public life? Can they, given their rightist and fundamentalist constituencies?

Israel had started out as a secular crypto-socialist state in 1948 under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Religious surge in the Israeli public life began three decades later under Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. That, in fact, coincided with the Shiite Islamic revolution in Iran, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Islamist movements in many Sunni Muslim countries. More recently, Buddhist religious politics have been swirling in several South and Southeast Asian counties.

The renewed religious pursuit in politics worldwide reflects, partly, a deepening crisis in of liberalism. Liberalism and the attendant rational inquiry promoted science, technology and the pursuit of amenities for happiness and comfort. That spurred a centuries-long orgy of production and consumption of material things for individual happiness, downgrading people’s moral and human obligations to societies. We all are beneficiaries of it, but it has also triggered a dog-eat-dog scramble for material goods, warfare and violence.

Disillusioned by the liberal materialistic paradigm and the disruption of families and communities, people are grasping at their moral roots, usually inhering in ethnic communities and religious traditions and cultures. Many Western philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists have come to recognize this as a logical trend. The late Peter Berger, a foremost American sociologist who had been a devotee of secularism for decades, woke up to a “de-secularization of the world” and attributed it to a “cultural revolution” he saw sweeping Muslim societies for a century and a half. The famed Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has been writing about “post-secular” societies. And the celebrated German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who like Berger, used to dismiss the intrusion of religious values in the public sphere, now and vouches for the legitimacy of religious concerns and viewpoints in the public space.

Voters in most of the countries undergoing religious revival have had the sense not to turn their governments over to religious parties. Except for Iran and briefly for Egypt, no Muslim country has had voted for an Islamic government. That includes the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Indian Hindus have, of course, kept a Hindu nationalist government in power for seven years, but its governance has more to do with Muslin-bashing than setting up a Hindu theocracy.

Israel seems to an exception so far. I can see two obvious reasons for that. One is the blind American support or tolerance for Israel in its subjugation, dispossession and persecution of Palestinians. Under the superpower protection, Israeli rightists and Jewish supremacists have not yet had to face an accounting for their faith-based apartheid system and subjugation and persecution of Palestinians. We saw that, again, three weeks ago when President Biden blocked four U.N. Security Council calls for a ceasefire the Israeli-Hamas conflict, slaughtering 254 Palestinians and 12 Israelis.

Secondly, the Jewish religion basically doesn’t recognize the rights or dignity of non-Jews. The Talmud and Halakhic laws don’t permit “even temporary presence” of Gentiles in the midst of Jews except “when Jews are in exile, or when the Gentiles are more powerful than the Jews.” The Halakhah requires Jews to utter curses while passing by non-Jewish cemeteries, and while passing by a Gentile home, ask God to destroy it. All these are reflected in Israeli culture and right-wing political parties’ attitudes and policies toward the Palestinians. Albert Einstein turned down an invitation to become president of Israel, complaining that Israel’s Herut party was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

For Israel to function as a normal state it needs to reform the extreme features of its religious laws, at least as they relate to politics. I am glad that Netanyahu, who stoked religious bigotry for political purposes, is out of his job now. It’s about time Israel had its own Martin Luther, whose Protestant Reformation pulled Christianity out of its age of bigotry and unfreedom into the era of religious tolerance and social progress.

Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, worked for decades as an American journalist and researcher. He’s now an international affairs commentator Bangladesh.

Can Palestinians bypass Biden’s blind spot?

Mustafa Malik May 18, 2021

PRESIDENT BIDEN’S UNSWERVING defense of Israel’s relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip reminds me of my last meeting with a friend and colleague at the Hartford Courant newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut.

On a spring day in 1985 my op-ed on the killing of several Palestinians by Israeli troops had appeared in our newspaper. Robin Frank pinched me on my left arm as I was editing a story.

“Dinner at Gianni?” she asked, as I turned around and looked at her.

“Sure,” I said.

“At 7.”

Frank was a leftist Jew and a staunch Zionist. At our meetings at the Courant café and other places, we used to trash then-President Ronald Reagan’s latest dig at welfare programs, extol socialist leader Michael Harrington’s portrayal of poverty in America, Karl Marx’s pitch for ultimate freedom in his German Ideology, and so forth.

That evening, as we sat across a table at the Gianni restaurant, I was taken aback.

Frank’s eyes were burning with rage.

“I didn’t know that you hate Jews,” she said.

In the article I had criticized Israel’s “colonial occupation” of Palestinian territories and “brutal” treatment of Palestinians, etc.

Did I know, my friend asked, that Palestine had been “the land of the Jews for ages” but had been occupied by “nomads and yahoos” before the establishment of Israel?

I realized that Frank’s knowledge of Jewish and Palestinian history was based more on Jewish propaganda than facts. I told her that both Jews and Palestinians inhabited the same land since ancient times and lived peaceably together in the hills around Jerusalem. “I don’t hate Jews, Robin,” I said. Both Jews and Palestinians, I continued, were nomads before they settled down as peasants and artisans. “But your calling Palestinians yahoos seems to me to reflect your racial bias toward them.”

Robin stood up. “You called me a racist!” She exploded. She picked up her purse and stamped away, paying the bill at the cashier’s counter.

I wondered if Frank had invited me to the meal for a dressing down and wanted it to be our parting dinner. Later, I tried twice to have a conversation with her, but she didn’t have the time.

In any case, I still think that staunchly progressive on many issues as she was, Frank’s attitude toward Palestinians was tinged with racial prejudice. I bet I have prejudices of my own, which I am not aware of.

Joe Biden, a centrist-turned-progressive Democrat, has been known for his blind support for Israel, which I have been following since the 1970s, when he was a senator from Delaware. During the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, he has been the only world leader to offer a blanket defense of Israel’s bloody and devastating bombing of Gaza. In the 15-member U.N. Security Council the United States, under his orders, was alone in blocking two attempts at issuing a statement calling for an immediate end to the Israeli-Hamas hostility. He obviously wanted Israel to continue its slaughter and destruction in Gaza. Biden’s first public comment on the Israeli bombing of civilian targets in Gaza was, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” He did not answer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) question if “the Palestinians have a right to survive.”

After the Netanyahu government had slaughtered more than a hundred Palestinians, including children and women, the American president proclaimed that Israel had not “significantly overreacted” to Hamas rockets, which had killed eight Israelis. In all this, Biden did not mention, even once, the Israeli raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque and its worshipers in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Neither did he comment on the Israeli initiative to expel Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make room for Jewish settlers. The two events had prompted Hamas to start firing rockets and missiles into Israel. When Biden was compelled by domestic and international pressure to try to stop the bloody Israeli aggression, he said he “support(ed) a ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas. He did not call for, let alone demand, a cessation of hostilities.

Biden’s utterly callous attitude toward the havoc Israel is wreaking in the abysmally impoverished enclave blockaded by Israel and Egypt flies in the face of his widely publicized human rights rhetoric and otherwise admirably progressive agenda. Biden plans to lower the eligibility age for Medicare; forgive federal loan debt for those making less than $125,000; raise $2 to $4 trillion in taxes to pay for progressive plans and programs; levy a 95 percent excise tax on pharmaceuticals if the industry doesn’t accept price controls, and so forth. His $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief law is probably the most progressive piece of legislation enacted by Congress since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In fact Bien’s strong support for black civil rights and other issues promoting black interests have made him quite popular in that community, which was pivotal to his winning the Democratic presidential primary against Bernie Sanders. But racial tolerance and empathy is selective in America. Many Americans, disabused of prejudice toward blacks, can be, and have been, hostile toward Arabs, Muslims and Asians. A brown-skinned Muslim, born in India, I have encountered racial gibes and taunts from progressive colleagues and acquaintances. (Where did I park my “camel”? Did I have a second wife tucked away in my “old country”? It was a reference to polygamy practiced by some Muslim men. How could I learn to write English so well? And so on.)

The Democratic Party, until the early 1970s, was honeycombed with anti-black racists. (Republicans by and large are racists.) The Democratic Party used to be the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, and segregationists. And many Democratic presidents, including the otherwise progressive ones, were diehard racists. Woodrow Wilson, who promoted freedom and the right of self-determination for peoples abroad, was an anti-black racist pig at home. He mandated racial segregation of the federal workforce, reversing the gains the blacks had made following Reconstruction. His segregation order hurt blacks most at the Post Office, in which 60 percent of workers were black; and the Treasury Department, which employed the second-largest number of blacks.

Monroe Trotter, the black editor and publisher of the Guardian newspaper, published from Boston, had campaigned for Wilson’s election. A brilliant Harvard scholar and civil rights leader, Trotter led a black delegation to the president to complain about his segregation order. Wilson argued that racial segregation would “prevent any kind of friction between the white employees and the Negro employees.” Trotter protested the president’s argument, citing “the established fact … that for 50 years white and colored clerks have been working together in peace and harmony and friendliness.” The 28th president replied that he had been “offended” by the civil rights leader’s insolence and ordered him out of the White House.

FDR is widely considered the most progressive among American presidents, and yet he was among the most racist of them. His internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II is widely known. Less known is his staunchly anti-Semitic attitude and policy. He persistently refused to allow Jews from Nazi Germany to immigrate to the United States. He suggested that they be resettled in Venezuela, Ethiopia or West Africa. He even opposed plans to resettle fleeing German Jews in the Dominican Republic or U.S. Virgin Islands because of those countries’ proximity to the United States, which, he feared, could enable them to infiltrate into America. When the passenger ship St. Louis with nearly 1,000 German Jews fleeing Hitler’s persecution headed toward the United States, Roosevelt did not respond to telegrams requesting that it be docked on the U.S. shore. The State Department forced it to return to Antwerp from where many of them were herded into concentration camps. In the end, wide circulation of the news of the Holocaust forced Roosevelt to admit some Jewish refugees. Historian Rafael Medoff wrote that Roosevelt’s anti-Semitism stemmed from his belief “that America was by nature, and should remain, an overwhelmingly white, Protestant country; and that Jews, on the whole, possessed certain innate and distasteful characteristics.”

Harry S. Truman was another innately racist Democratic president. He recognized Israel because Jews were among his ardent campaign activists. But he brushed aside reports of the harrowing ethnic cleansing of the new state of Israel of its Palestinian inhabitants. Jews, mostly from Europe, expelled 700,000 Palestinians (some of them were displaced by war) from their ancestral homes and lands. Truman also opposed interracial marriage. He often used racial slurs and told racist jokes. He accused civil rights activists of being masterminded Communists and called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a troublemaker.

The Democratic Party has shed much of its anti-black racism, thanks to the struggle and sacrifices of many blacks and whites in the Civil Rights Movement. Anti-black and anti-Semitic comments today are unacceptable in America. But anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Asian racism remains alive and well in American society. And in the halls of Congress, which strikes you when you listen to the comments of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), or Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) on the floors of the House and Senate.

But the tide is turning. Last week, for the first time in American history, the floor of the House of Representatives vibrated with biting criticism of an American president’s defense of Israeli aggression against Palestinians. Many critics of Biden’s and America’s callousness toward Palestinian dispossession, subjugation and persecution under Israeli occupation saw it as anti-Arab racism and likened it to racism against blacks.

“The Black and Palestinian struggles for liberation are interconnected,” tweeted Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), “and we will not let up until all of us are free.”

Mustafa Malik, editor and publisher of this blog, lives in Bangladesh.

A crusader for the oppressed

Mustafa Malik December 4, 2020

By Mustafa Malik

THE 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF Mahmud Ali’s passing fills my mind with memories of the man I had come to know as a human incarnation of Pakistan. Among those memories was his forecast that Bangladesh would establish good relations with Pakistan “sooner than you think.” The last time he repeated this prognosis to me was in June 2000, when he was visiting with me and my family in Washington. I remembered his prediction just yesterday as I ran into the headline “Hasina calls for strengthening ties with Pakistan” in the online edition of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. Sheikh Hasina Wajed is the prime minister of Bangladesh.

Mr. Ali was the first of my two political mentors, the other being Nurul Amin, once chief minister of East Pakistan who became Pakistan’s last Bengalee prime minister. In 1970-71 both statesmen opposed the breakup of old Pakistan, which they had struggled onerously to help create, and they lived the rest of their lives in self-imposed exile in what was left of Pakistan after Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, had become independent. Years of repression and economic discrimination by West Pakistan-based military and political elites, culminating in a brutal military crackdown, led to Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan. The two countries have since been estranged politically, diplomatically and economically.

Mr. Ali (like me) was born in the British Indian province of Assam. In 1946, as the general secretary of the All-India Muslim League in Assam, the young leader helped split the old Hindu-majority Assam province through a referendum so our native Muslim-majority part of it could join the Muslim homeland of Pakistan.

Born into an aristocratic family, he cut his political teeth in the Pakistan movement and breathed his last during a speech in Lahore, having barely finished a sentence calling for the realization of one of Pakistan’s unfulfilled causes: the liberation of Indian-occupied part of the Jammu and Kashmir state.

Besides being one of Pakistan’s architects, Mr. Ali will be remembered as a top leader in its struggle to wrest democracy back from the clutches of military dictatorships. He was one of nine leading Pakistani statesmen who in 1962 issued the first clarion call to then military dictator General Mohammad Ayub Khan to restore democracy, which Ayub and a group of other army generals had usurped through a coup d’état.

It was Mr. Ali’s battle for “the emancipation of the peasants and workers,” as he termed it, which lured me to him at age 17. The 38-year-old revenue minister of East Pakistan was presiding over a public meeting in his native Sunamganj district, in a field covered with the stubble of a newly harvested rice crop. The crowd of peasants, fishermen and a smattering of students greeted other speeches with mild applause. But when Mr. Ali began denouncing, passionately, the “exploitation” of impoverished people by zeminders (owners of large landed estates), money lenders and industrialists, they went wild with the slogans: “Mahmud Ali Zindabad” (long live Mahmud Ali), “Pakistan Zindabad,” and “Krishok-Mazdur ek ho” (Peasants and workers, unite).

I had just finished my matriculation (high school graduation) exam and was attending the meeting as a campaign activist for a progressive candidate for election to the East Pakistan legislature, supported by Mr. Ali, and was deeply impressed by his speech. The meeting over, I met him at a nearby dak bungalow and embarked on my lifelong association with him.

I had opportunities to come in contact with most of Pakistan’s major politicians and interview many of them for my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital. Except for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, Mahmud Ali was the most politically courageous and ideologically committed statesman I have known in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Mr. Ali’s relationship with Sheikh Mujib alternated between close friendship and bitter ideological and political rivalry.

Bangladesh-Pakistan ties

Among the last of Mr. Ali’s political projects was the one to promote solidarity among Muslim communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir and other parts of the Indian subcontinent through his movement Tehreek-i-Takmil-i-Pakistan. He remained optimistic about this goal to the last days of his life.

During our discursive discussions, he recalled that “the enthusiasm that Muslims in Bengal and Assam” had demonstrated for the creation of Pakistan, they had never before shown for “any other movement of causes.” That was mostly because, he said, they saw Pakistan as a “promise of liberation from Hindu zeminders and money lenders. And from caste-Hindu oppression.” Lower-caste Hindus, he went on, also shared with Muslims that aspirations for “freedom from the oppression and suppression” and in the 1937 and 1946 elections in Bengal, many of them voted for Muslim candidates. Eventually, he predicted, Muslim communities in the subcontinent would revive some kind of “solidarity as they showed during the Pakistan movement.” Bangladesh and Pakistan would, he added, establish “good relations sooner than you think.”

The last time he shared this optimism with me was, as I mentioned, in our very last meetings during June 22-24, 2000. A federal minister in the Pakistan government, Mr. Ali was on an official visit to Washington. He was staying in Omni Sheraton Hotel in Washington but was kind enough to visit with me and my family for dinner on two of those evenings.

All his life, my mentor was a staunchly secular, progressive man, whose struggle for workers and peasants earned him the “Communist” label from his conservative political opponents. Among them was one of my uncles who warned me against associating with him because “Communists don’t believe in Allah or Islam.” In reality, Mr. Ali had plunged into the Pakistan movement because he saw it as a struggle to alleviate the suffering of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, who happened to be mostly repressed and impoverished, from exploitation of the landed and moneyed class, which happened to be mostly upper-caste Hindus.

In the course of his long political career Mr. Ali changed political parties and some of his political views. But he stuck with his two things that defined him. One was his trademark costume in social and political life, a sherwani and tight pajamas. The other was his advocacy of and deep empathy for the poor and oppressed.

Mustafa Malik is a writer in Washington. He hosts the blog Community.

Mustafa Malik

Stop, and look around you.

— Tolstoy

Category: Muslims