Category: Posts

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.

Turkish nationalism wins in Turkey

Mustafa Malik June 1, 2023

LIKE MOST EUROPEAN and American pollsters and pundits, I was surprised by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory in both the first and second round of the Turkish presidential election. In fact in my last blog entry (“Erdogan: Secular Muslim icon”), I said Erdogan could be walking into the sunset of his political career in this election.

I hadn’t visited Turkey for years and was relying on the forecasts of Western pundits, who were saying that Turkey’s high inflation rates (45%-85%), skyrocketing prices of essential goods, and the Erdogan regime’s slow response to the disastrous Feb. 6 earthquake would inevitably hand the election to the staunchly secularist opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

Since Erdogan was reelected president on Sunday, I’ve gone through explanations of his victory by various scholars and commentators. None seemed to spotlight the event as poignantly as a comment made by a taxi driver in Istanbul a quarter-century ago.

On a muggy August afternoon in 1999 I hailed a taxi near my apartment on Istanbul’s Aydede Caddesi, a bloc from the city’s historic Taksim Square.

“Boazici University,” I instructed the cabbie.

I had a 3:30 p.m. interview Professor Binnaz Toprak, a famed political scientist at the university. I was researching the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union and, at that point, trying to learn how the country’s steaming Islamic resurgence might be affecting the issue.

Kerem was in his late 30s, from near the Anatolian city of Eskisehir, and had been a cabbie in Istanbul for six years. He communicated with me with a mixture of Turkish and English words and physical gestures.

What did he think of Mesut Yilmaz? I asked. Ultra-secularist Yilmaz was Turkiye’s prime minister.

“Hirsiz,” he said. The Turkish word meant thief.

“Is Tansu Ciller good?” I inquired. Ciller had preceded Yilmaz as prime minister.

“Not good,” he replied in English. “Not good.” He waved his right hand dismissively.

“Is Tayyip Erdogan any good?” I asked.

Erdogan had been known at that time as a gung-ho Islamist. (He would proclaim himself a “secular Muslim” later.) Just three weeks before, the second-ranking leader of Turkiye’s Islamist Virtue Party had come out of prison, having served a four-month term to which he had been sentenced by an ultra-secularist court. His crime: He had recited a provocative Islamic poem at a public meeting. Erdogan had also been fired from the post of mayor of Istanbul for the same offense. All this had made the former Istanbul mayor a rock star among, not just Islamists, but most everyday Muslim Turks who resented the radically secular system that banned Islamic symbols in the public sphere and discriminated against practicing Muslims.

“Good!” the cabbie replied enthusiastically. “Tayyip Erdogan good.”

“Erdogan, basbakan!” the man continued. Basbakan means prime minister. He obviously meant that he wanted to see Erdogan as prime minister of Turkiye.

“Erdogan!” he repeated excitedly, took both his hands off the wheel and began kissing his fingers.

The car swerved to the right, and then to the left.

“Stop!” I shouted. “Steady the car now and drive carefully.”

I wanted to get to the university alive and didn’t say another word until we arrived at the Boazici University parking area. Before getting off, I asked Kerem why he was so excited (heyecanlı) about Erdogan.

“Toorkish,” he said, with soft “t”. “No Avrupali,” meaning European.

I had some half an hour to the interview and was thinking of what the man was trying say about Erdogan as I strolled the bank of the adjacent Bosphorus Strait, which splits off the European part of Istanbul from its Asian segment and links the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean and eventually to the Atlantic Ocean via the Gibraltar. I got distracted from my thoughts about Kerem and Erdogan as I reminisced my previous visit to the iconic landscape, about which Henry Adams wrote, “The Judas tree will bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time.” I didn’t see any Judas tree greeting me; but the ripples of the Bosphorus, sparkling in the sun, seemed to be welcoming me.

I had known Toprak from an earlier interview. The political science professor handed me a folder with several clips of her writings. I began the conversation by narrating my cab driver’s excitement about Erdogan. What was he trying to say about Erdogan being “Turkish” and not “Avrupali”? I asked.

She said the man had “summed up” why many Turks supported Erdogan and “the so-called Islamist movement” in Turkey. The driver obviously was “Islamic-minded” because he admired Erdogan, she said. Erdogan and most other Turkish Islamists represented “the Turkish brand” of Islam. Turkish Muslims, she explained, didn’t care much about Arabs and “many of them aren’t fond of Europeans,” even though the founder of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and his followers, known as “Kemalists,” were. Toprak added that by saying he liked Erdogan because he wasn’t “Avrupali,” Kerem was “telling you that he resented the secularist Turkish establishment’s Europhilia.”

On the evening of May 13 – the day before the first round of Turkish elections – Kemal Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s rival from Ataturk’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), concluded his campaign with a visit to the mausoleum of the anti-Islamic founder of the nation. Erdogan, on the other hand, marked the end of his campaign with a prayer at Hagia Sophia Mosque. Hagia Sophia used to be the world’s most majestic Christian cathedral until the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II conquered Istanbul (then called Constantinople) in 1453 and converted the cathedral into a mosque. In 1934 Ataturk turned it into a museum. In 2020 Erdogan reconverted the museum into a mosque.

If Kerem was listening to his president’s victory speech Sunday night, he must have been pleased to hear him say that his triumph over Kilicdaroglu was a victory of Turkey and “all Turkic people,” emphasizing further his Turkish cultural identity.

It actually was a victory for Turkish nationalism and culture, as different from other Muslim national cultures. It certainly marked a rejection of European culture, favored by Kilicdaroglu and other Kemalists – and Ataturk.

Mustafa Malik, who hosts the blog After the Clash, researched Turkish-European relations as a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

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.

Ukraine: Russia resists NATO trap

Mustafa Malik February 28, 2023

An adventure, for sure! But to what end?

Joe Biden had an arduous 10-hour train ride through Ukraine into Kyiv to become the first American president ever to venture into a war zone not under American occupation or control. The Ukrainian capital had been under continual Russian bombardment.

Before Biden entered Ukraine, though, Washington had alerted Moscow about his visit. So it was actually a low-risk high drama.

The event that highlighted his Eastern European trip was a speech he gave on Tuesday to nine members of Eastern NATO countries. In it the president declared that he was there to show American support not only for Ukraine but also for “freedom of democracy at large.”

“Democracies of the world,” he asserted, “will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever. … There is no sweeter word than freedom. There is no nobler goal than freedom. There is no higher aspiration than freedom…. What is at stake here is freedom.”

In fact the project to disseminate freedom and democracy is what had, ostensibly, propelled America into the defense of Ukraine and, for that matter, NATO’s unbridled expansion that triggered the Ukraine-Russia war. Critics have, however, called that mission an “empire-building” one (journalist Elizabeth Drew was the first used the phrase).

That mission had been conceived in the 1970s by a group of American intellectuals who abhorred traditional American conservatism and also the Vietnam-era pacifism and leftist radicalism. Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Kagan and others were wedded to different concepts of liberal democracy, and they believed that America should go about promoting freedom and democracy in the world.

A second generation of intellectuals and activists who shared their views also were committed to market capitalism, and they believed, moreover, that it was America’s historic destiny to disseminate this ideology through, if need be, the use of military power. Hence they also espoused U.S. military and economic dominance over the world. The leading lights of these “neoconservatives,” as they came to be known, included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), David Wurmser, Frederick Kagan (son of Donald) and Elliott Abrams.

The demise of Soviet communism and the unraveling of Eastern European Communist states convinced the neocons of the veracity of their views and got them excited about their mission, which became a major topic of American intellectual and media discourse in the early 1990s.

In their writings and talk show appearances the neocons argued that a democratized world would be one of peace because democracies, in their view, would never go to war against one another. Democracy, according them, was also an antidote to terrorism because 9/11 and other acts of Muslim terrorism stemmed from “the almost complete absence of democracy in the Middle East.”

The neocons formalized their agenda in a rendezvous in 1996 in which they adopted what was called the Project New American Century (PNAC). Most of them Jewish, the PNAC prepared a report for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on resolving Israel’s security challenges based on the use of Western ideas and American military force. One of their specific prescriptions was to overthrow the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, then the most vocal Arab leader against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They tried, unsuccessfully, to get Presidents George HW Bush (Papa Bush) and Bill Clinton to get Saddam knocked off.

Spreading freedom

Wolfowitz became secretary to then U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the Papa Bush administration and he got Cheney imbued with the idea of empire-building through the neocon mission. Their big moment came when George W. Bush (Baby Bush) – a totally blank slate in foreign affairs – was elected president in 2000. Cheney became the head of the Baby Bush transition team and he and Wolfowitz stuffed the new administration with a host of diehard neoconservatives.

As always, the American foreign policy establishment and news media had little grounding in trans-Mediterranean societies, especially Muslim societies. They were mostly mesmerized by the neoconservative ideas of spreading freedom and democracy in the Arab world. Leading neocons, especially Perle and Wolfowitz, became a feature on American TV talk shows. I was among a minority in the American news media who, while believing in freedom and democracy in general, were skeptical about spreading these ideas through the use of military power. I was also concerned about liberal democracy’s market economic version, which spawned economic injustice and inequality. I believed, too, that in order for political institutions to work they needed to evolve in each society and adapt to its cultural environment.

On the morning of Dec. 10, 2002, an audience at the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) auditorium in Washington was waiting for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (now president of Turkey), to give a speech. I had been scheduled to interview the Turkish leader after his speech, after which he would go on to meet Baby Bush at the White House. Wolfowitz, then U.S. deputy defense secretary, entered the room, flanked by three or four other people, and nearly half the room burst into applause.

A man in his mid-50s, wearing a blue jacket and a solid red tie, was sitting next to me in the second row. He asked another person who this acclaimed visitor was but didn’t get an answer. When he turned to me and asked the same question, I whispered light-heartedly: “He’s going to start a democratic revolution in the Muslim world. Paul Wolfowitz.”

The man gave me a dirty look. “Do you have a problem with having a democratic revolution in the Muslim world?” he shot back. The neocon mission to spread freedom and democracy in the world had become quite popular in America.

The neocons saw 9/11 as a golden opportunity to launch their project. Saddam was an Arab dictator among a half-dozen others. His harsh rule included the brutal suppression of a secessionist Kurdish uprising in the mid-1970s with the support of then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. With the help of zealous American media, the Baby Bush administration anointed Saddam an Arab “Hitler” and a stumbling block to the democratization of Iraq. They also accused the Iraqi leader of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having links to Mohammad Ata, one of the 9/11 terrorists. All these charges would eventually prove concocted and blatantly false.

As president-elect, Baby Bush had appointed Cheney the head of his transition team. Cheney and his one-time secretary Wolfowitz crowded the new administration with neocons. The neocons got Baby Bush and his national security adviser (later secretary of state), Condoleezza Rice, excited about democratizing Iraq and through it the Muslim Middle East and eventually much of the rest of the world.

“Iraqi democracy will succeed,” Bush declared in his 2002 State of the Union address, “and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future of every nation.” Not just that, the president added that “the establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”

In Iraq, Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and mostly Sunni Kurds were the major contenders for power. The latter two groups collaborated with the American invaders to replace Saddam’s Sunni Arab regime. As Sunni Arabs resisted the U.S. invasion, the Americans got the Iraqi military and bureaucracy cleansed of most Sunni Arab elements, who were also subjected Shiite Arab pogrom in many Shiite-majority areas. A group of youth from among these persecuted Sunni Arabs launched the anti-U.S. terrorist outfit called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Meanwhile, on Oct. 26, 2003, Wolfowitz paid a visit to Baghdad to see for himself the outcome of his “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The U.S. deputy defense secretary was greeted by a group of Sunni Arab guerrillas with some 20 rockets fired from a home-made launcher at Al Rasheed Hotel, where he was staying. One 11th-floor room of the hotel was destroyed. Part of the ceiling collapsed. A door was blown off. And smoke engulfed part of the hotel. As hotel staff and American security personnel hurried him out of the hotel, Wolfowitz declared in a shaken voice: “These terrorist attacks will not deter us from completing our mission.”

The mission to transform Iraq into a liberal democracy remains unfulfilled. The invasion and a decade-long American occupation has pretty much unraveled the Iraqi state. The three Kurdish-majority northern provinces have all but seceded from the state, and the rest of the state reels from the belligerency of multiple Iraqi and Iranian guerrilla groups. Nearly 1 million Iraqis and more than 4,000 Americans perished in the Iraq during the war, which has become a Shiite pseudo-theocracy.

In 2003, as America’s war raged in Afghanistan (as also in Iraq), I had a conversation with the neocon Zalmay Khalidzad, an immigrant from Afghanistan whom I had met at the Rand Corporation, a Washington think tank. (Khalidzad would later become the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.) He had been among the signatories to a letter the neocons had written to Clinton calling for the overthrow of Saddam.

I reminded Khalidzad that his native Afghanistan had been an extremely backward county, which had never tried democracy. Could the Afghans work out “liberal democracy” the neocons’ professed mission? I asked.

“It may take some time,” he replied. “But there should be no problem, really. The America will always support them.” The Americans have returned home, being soundly defeated by the Taliban, which they had overthrown, and Afghanistan has revived its old obscurantist Islamic theocracy.

Ukraine imbroglio

Among those who were alarmed by the neocon agenda to democratize the world through the American military might were the Russians, especially Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Soviet leaders joined their European and American counterparts to decide a reunified Germany’s niche in the world. East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow wanted a reunified Germany to be a neutral state unattached to any security bloc. Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister, Eduzard Schevardnaze, were skeptical of the idea. The havoc wreaked by Nazi Germany to Russia during World War II was fresh in their minds. They wanted the new, unified Germany to become part of a multi-state security structure. West Germany had been a NATO member, but when NATO wanted the reunified state to retain the membership of the alliance, they balked. They were concerned that the Western defense alliance might begin to expand eastward to countries that had been in the Russian sphere of influence.

Gorbachev sought an assurance from the Western leaders against NATO’s eastward expansion as a condition for Germany’s inclusion into the alliance. A host of Western statesmen, including Papa Bush and then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave him that assurance. “Not one inch eastward,” declared James Baker III, Bush’s secretary of state, on Feb. 9, 1990.

In the ensuing neoconservative hullabaloo about the democratization of the world and expansion of the American hegemony the commitment given to the Russians was forgotten. NATO began to rake in one cluster of Eastern European countries in 1999 and then another in 2004. In April 2008, at its Bucharest summit, the Western military alliance declared that it would next bring in Georgia and Ukraine. Moscow was alarmed. The two countries are at Russia’s doorsteps and the Russians saw the proposal as a Western scheme encircle Russia militarily. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the move “a direct threat to Russia.”

As NATO ignored his warning, Putin, in 2014, invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula and also the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Both territories are inhabited by a plurality of Russians, who had been agitating for political and cultural autonomy. The current Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched last February, is intended to prevent Ukraine’s accession to NATO.

This past Tuesday, when Biden – a Cold War retiree committed to the neocon mission – vowed to spread freedom and democracy; Putin, in Moscow, reminded the Russians that the war in Ukraine was not about Ukraine, but “about Russia’s national security.” He vowed to continue the war as long as it took. He declared, specifically, that Russia would hold on to the Donbass region and help the Russian-speaking people there to continue “fighting, defending their right to live on their own land, to speak their native language.” I can’t imagine Putin, or any other Russian leader, returning Donbas, let alone Crimea, to Ukraine again.

It’s hard to believe that the war can be sustained very long. Ukraine has lost 100,000 lives in the war. About 16 million Ukrainians have been uprooted from their homes. Up to 18 million Ukrainians, 40 percent of the of the country’s population, will need some sort of humanitarian aid in the coming months.

According to the World Bank, Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and as many as 60 percent of Ukrainians are expected to end up below the poverty line.

The Russian economy is 10 times that of Ukraine. The cost of the war to Russia is minor in comparison. Indeed the Russian government has sought to project a business-as-usual picture of life for the average Russian citizen. The International Monetary Fund has upgraded its estimate of Russia’s economy, and now predicts a fall of GDP this year of only 3.4%, compared with an estimated drop of 8.5% in April this year.

Ukraine is carrying on its war mainly with Western arms and money – worth $40 billion worth so far, $30 billion of which from the United States. Meanwhile, Europe is reaching the limits to its military and financial support Ukraine. The Biden administration is pretty much the main source of support for Ukraine. But the administration is leery about escalating the military support, fearing provoking Russia into using nukes or getting into a direct conflict with the United States.

On top of it all, the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, are already resisting U.S. aid to Ukraine. And both major Republican presidential candidates, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, are vocally opposed to further U.S. commitment to the Ukraine war.

At some point, the parties have to talk seriously about peace. China and India are sending feelers for that. While Ukraine and America have announced that complete withdrawal of all Russian troops for Donbas – and even Crimea – is a precondition for peace negotiations, that would be a non-starter for the Russians.

To end the war, whenever that happens, the Ukrainians will face a choice: To cede the Russians at least part of Donbas and forget about Crimea; or let Russia wreck their country, leaving the rest of it independent, democratic, and maybe part of NATO.

That would, of copurse, be a better outcome for the neocons than that of their 20-year-long war in Afghanistan. They’ve lost all of that country to the Taliban, who have turned it into the world’s most radical theocracy! Jeffrey Sachs (“probably the most important economist in the world,” Time.) has called Ukraine “the latest neocon disaster.”

Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator.

India: ‘Democratic theocracy’

Mustafa Malik January 14, 2023

I WAS BORN in the hill town of Haflong in India’s Assam state. Surrounded on three sides by forests and hills, Haflong looks somewhat like Innsbruck, the lovely Austrian city, also flanked by hills.

Last week I got a call from a Muslim friend in the Assamese town of Nagaon, where my father taught at an Islamic seminary. “Come see the kind of hate that Himanta and Modi have fed to Hindus,” said Munim (I’m reserving his last name to keep him out of trouble with Hindu nationalists.)

Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam’s chief minister, belongs to the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups have been carrying on a relentless anti-Muslim pogrom to marginalize Muslims, the largest religious minority, and replace the once-secular India with a Hindu Rashtra, Hindu theocracy.

“Two days ago, my niece came home from school, crying,” Munim said. A Hindu boy had grabbed the breast of the pretty, 15-year-old girl and said, “Say, Joi Shri Ram,” hail Lord Ram. Ram is a Hindu god. When Hindu nationalist vigilantes swoop upon a Muslim, they often make him or her chant “Joi Shri Ram,” while beating up the victim.

A week before, Munim’s niece had given the boy an earful for pinching her in the buttock.

“Did you report this to the police?” I asked Munim.

“Police?” my friend laughed. “They are Himanta’s lackeys.” They would arrest him, branding him a “Pakistani terrorist.” Mostly Muslim Pakistan is the archenemy of the neighboring mostly Hindu India.

I live in Bangladesh and continually travel down memory lane in my native India, visiting friends and relatives and having medical checkups. The anti-Muslim pogrom raging there makes me wonder how long it would take the Hindu nationalists to turn the country into what American sociologist Peter Berger called a “democratic theocracy.” The campaign to subjugate or drive out Muslims, 14 percent of the Indian population, has overwhelming support among Hindus, who make up 80 percent.

On April 10 I was chatting with a progressive Hindu friend in his living room in the Indian city of Mumbai. Suddenly a news bulletin flashed on his TV screen, saying, “Muslim extremists” had attacked a group of Hindus in Kilgore in Madhya Pradesh state.

The story unfolded in the Indian media in the following days. Some Hindus had chanted anti-Muslim slogans and played an anti-Muslim song at a mosque in Kilgore, where Muslims were praying. Muslim youth around the mosque responded by throwing stones, slightly injuring several Hindus. Before any investigation into the incident could start, the Madhya Pradesh home minister, Narottam Mishra, announced: “The houses from where the stones were pelted will turn into rubble.” Soon 16 houses and 29 shops belonging to Kilgore Muslims were burned down while Hindu crowds cheered.

Lynching, slapping and flogging Muslims in public and demolishing Muslim homes and businesses without legal authorization have become the norm in India.

India is a multi-national country where ethnic and religious communities enjoyed wide autonomy under loosely administered kingdoms and empires for millennia. When the British colonial empire dissolved in India 76 years ago, the country was reorganized into a “nation-state” to run through a majoritarian democracy. A British Cabinet delegation had proposed a confederation of what had been “British India” to allow Hindu- and Muslim-majority provinces wide autonomy to let their religious and ethnic communities live their cultural and social lives relatively freely and comfortably. Indian leaders turned down the Cabinet Mission Plan.

The secular democratic institutions introduced by India’s Western-educated founders (Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel) often clash with Indians’ community life and religious values. Westminster-style democracy has now allowed Modi’s virulently anti-Muslim BJP to come to power in New Delhi and use the unconstrained institutions of a majoritarian democracy to persecute and marginalize Muslims.

Secular democracy hasn’t taken root in Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist societies, either. But, as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has pointed out, Hindu nationalists are more ruthless than most other religious bigots. They are “people without any piety at all,” he said, and hence their persecution of the Muslim minority has been so brutal.

Democracy is the inevitable destiny of non-Western societies, and I’m hoping that globalization and global pressures for human rights will eventually infuse tolerance toward minorities in Indian and other non-Western societies.

Mustafa Malik, the host of the blog After the Clash, worked for nearly four decades as a reporter, columnist and editor for American newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks.

Will Turkey get booted out of NATO?

Mustafa Malik December 14, 2022

Turkey’s decade-long belligerency with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad dictatorship appears to be approaching a denouement, leaving Turkey and the United States at loggerheads over Kurdish militants’ fate in northern Syria. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, supported the ill-fated Arab Spring uprising against Assad and led a faction of Syrian opposition forces to overthrow the brutal dictator.

Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a phone conversation with his Turkish counterpart and signaled that he’s making progress in pushing for meetings between lower-level Turkish and Syrian officials, and finally between the presidents of the two countries.

Erdogan had wanted to launch a ground offensive against the Kurdish militants in northern Syria, whom Ankara views as anti-Turkish terrorists. Russia, and especially the United States, opposed his move. The Biden administration has warned the Turks sternly against any land invasion against the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) because the U.S. has been using the Kurdish militia to fight Islamic State terrorists in Syria and Iraq.

Ankara considers the YPG a branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting Turkish armed forces for 38 years to carve out an independent Kurdish statelet in the Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey. The United States and the European Union, too, brand the PKK a terrorist organization. So America, Turkey’s NATO ally, is hard-pressed to explain the YPG’s links to the PKK, and hence, in 2015, gave the Kurdish militant group a civilian façade. It got the YPG to rename itself Kurdish Democratic Forces (SDF) and had some Arabs enrolled in the organization.

In Turkey, “the Kurdish problem” seems intractable. During three research trips, I found out that many Kurds there want wide “autonomy” for Turkey’ Kurdish-majority area. They grumble about Turkish “persecution” of Kurds and suppression of their cultural rights. Kurdish intellectuals also castigate the “betrayal” by Western powers who, at the end of World War I, had promised them a state of their own but later reneged on it and split their territory among four states, including Turkey and Syria.

Among everyday Turks, anti-Kurdish sentiments run high, mainly because of continual Kurdish terrorist attacks. Six Turkish opposition parties have forged an alliance known as the “Table of Six” to challenge Erdogan and his party at the elections set for June, but they all support Erdogan’s plan to drive the YPG militants out of a 30-kilometer Syrian strip on the Turkish border. They know opposing his fight against the YPG would be politically suicidal.

In August 1998 Erdogan, just fired as mayor of Istanbul, told me in one of my interviews, that the Kurdish problem stemmed from ultra-liberal Turkish governments’ insensitivity to the Kurds’ “cultural rights.” It could be resolved in an atmosphere of Islamic “brotherhood,” said the deposed Istanbul mayor, then an Islamist activist. He was packing his belongings in cardboard boxes to leave the mayor’s office and prepare to go to prison. He had been given a 10-month sentence (commuted later to four months) by a secularist court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting.

In 2012, as Turkish prime minister, Erdogan engaged Kurdish militants in a “peace process.” After three years of arduous negotiations, he stopped the talks, realizing, he said, that the Kurdish militants won’t give up on their secessionist plans.

Biden has been openly hostile to Erdogan since before coming into the White House. He apparently shares many other Americans’ and Europeans’ antipathy for Erdogan because of his long association with Islamists, although the Turkish leader has since dissociated from the Islamists and leads a secular conservative political party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

During the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign, Biden denounced Erdogan as an “autocrat” and proposed that the United States help Turkish opposition parties “take on and defeat Erdogan” at the next Turkish presidential election.

Erdogan is unlikely to back down on his widely publicized plans to drive the YPG militants out of a Syrian “security belt” along the Turkish border, especially in an election year. A peace deal between Ankara and Damascus could facilitate his plan. But Erdogan’s brazen defiance of U.S. warnings against an assault on the YPG would enrage Biden, and probably NATO. There’s speculation in Washington that Biden administration could then try to kick Turkey out of NATO. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are already calling for it.

Without Muslim Turkey, though, NATO would overtly become the military arm of the white-Christian West. In that case, China would be spreading its security umbrella over much of the rest of the world. Chinese President Xi Jinping has just returned from a significant trip to Saudi Arabia, after calling for an “independent Palestinian state.”

Would Biden want to rip the world into two rival armed camps? And would other NATO members go along with it? I’m hoping to see cooler minds nudging him and Erdogan back from the precipice.

Mustafa Malik is an American researcher and retired journalist, who conducted fieldwork in Turkey and five European countries as a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He researched the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union.

Gandhi: A martyr for Indian Muslims

Mustafa Malik August 16, 2022

WHEN INDIAN PRIME Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech, was extolling Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as one of India’s national heroes, Mahatma Gandhi’s soul must have responded, “I forgive you, Vinayak!”

In 1965 an inquiry commission was set up under the former Indian Supreme Court Justice Jiwan Lal Kapoor to investigate the Gandhi assassination. Its conclusion: “All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.”

Forgiveness is the only gift that India’s latter-day Buddha would have for his murderers. They killed the Mahatma because of what they despised as his “appeasement of Muslims.”

Savarkar was the mentor of Nathuram Godse, who pumped three bullets into Gandhi’s chest and abdomen, snuffing out his life in minutes. Savarkar also financed the newspaper Agrani (renamed Hindu Rashtra), of which Godse was the editor and Narayan Apte, the publisher. Both of them would be convicted of assassinating Gandhi and hanged.

Godse was the organizer and Apte the secretary of Savarkar’s Hind Rashtra Dal outfit, set up to carry out the secret activities of the Hindu fundamentalist organization Hindu Mahasabha of which Savarkar would be the president. Godse and Apte, too, were members of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization committed to making India a Hindu theocracy.

Modi’s introduction of Savarkar as a hero of India’s independence struggle reminded me of Sashi Tharoor, a prominent leader of India’s Congress party. Modi had built the world’s tallest statue for his other hero, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a top Congress leader who was India’s first deputy prime minister and home minister. The statue cost Rs. 2,989 crores and is 182 meters tall, dwarfing China’s Spring Temple Buddha, which used to be the world’s tallest. Modi and his Hindu nationalists adore Patel, the so-called “Hindu face of the Congress,” because of his anti-Muslim biases. Referring to the outlandish statue built for Patel, Tharoor had accused the Hindu nationalist prime minister of trying to “hijack” the Congress statesman (Patel) because Hindu nationalists had “no heroes” of their own in Indian politics.

Was Modi responding to Tharoor’s taunt by billing Savarkar as a leader of India’s struggle for freedom from British colonial rule? Savarkar never really bothered to plunge into the Indian anti-colonial movement. He invented “Hindutva,” Hinduness, the ideology of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and, as mentioned, headed the Hindu Mahasabha. But he’s hated widely in India for his ideology of hatred toward Muslims and Christians and, especially, for his role in eliminating India’s greatest saint and hero ever.

Patel was, of course, one of Gandhi’s two closest disciples, the other being Jawaharlal Nehru. But the Sudra lawyer-politician from Gujarat tried to disguise his animus toward Muslims while Savarkar did not. Well, sometimes the guise of Patel’s animosity toward Muslims was too flimsy as it was when he lamented to the Hindu fundamentalist leader Syama Prasad Mookherjee about “the dangerous possibilities inherent in the presence in India of a section of disloyal elements.” Those allegedly “disloyal elements” couldn’t have been anybody other than Muslims. While publicly criticizing religious violence, Patel was often reluctant to act against anti-Muslim rioters.

Patel’s anti-Muslim attitudes were the main cause of his estrangement with Gandhi in the last years of the Mahatma’s life. Many attribute this fissure in their relationship to the home minister’s lack of interest in providing the necessary security to Gandhi while Hindu extremists were almost openly conspiring to murder him.

An attempt to bomb Gandhi’s prayer congregation and shoot him dead was botched on Jan. 20, 1948 – 10 days before he was actually assassinated – leading to the publicization of the plot and names of the plotters. They included Godse, Apte, Madanlal Pahwa, Vishnu Karkare, Digambar Badge, Gopal Godse and Shankar Kistaiya.

The conspiracy unraveled when Madanlal failed to ignite the bomb, which gave off a puff of smoke, followed by a firecracker-like eruption. One Sulochana Devi, who was among those who saw the incident, got a policeman to capture Madanlal. During a police interrogation, Madanlal confessed that he was part of a seven-member gang who wanted to kill Gandhi and described the plot. The police dragged Madanlal to two hotels where the other conspirators had been staying, but all of them had fled.

This led to public criticism of Patel for his and his Home Ministry’s failure to make proper security arrangements for Gandhi. As a result, the Home Ministry posted nearly two dozen plain-clothes policemen around Birla House, the mansion whose owner had let Gandhi and his attendants live there, but most of the conspirators remained at large. One of those cops, A.N. Bhatia, was assigned to guard Gandhi at his prayer meetings, and a personal attendant, named Gurbachan Singh, was given the task of walking in front of the Mahatma whenever he went to the prayer congregation.

Mysteriously, on the fateful evening of Jan. 30, Bhatia, the cop appointed to serve as Gandhi’s guard, didn’t show up because he had been assigned elsewhere! And Gurbachan Singh decided to walk behind the Mahatma, instead of in front of him, when Gandhi was arriving at his prayer congregation! Khaki-clad Godse, 37, approached Gandhi nonchalantly, shoved off with his left hand the Mahatma’s grand-niece Manu from his side, and fired the three bullets into Gandhi’s frail, 107-pound frame at point-blank range.

Mass butchery, dispossession

The Hindu extremist canard against Gandhi’s “appeasement of Muslims” became shrill and pervasive as anti-Muslim riots began to spread in India with the partition of the subcontinent and Gandhi stepped up his denunciation of the Hindu and Sikh butchery and dispossession of helpless Muslims.

Beginning in January 1947 West Pakistan began to practically empty itself of its Hindu and Sikh populations. These Hindu and Sikh refugees, who had lost everything, were streaming to Delhi and adjoining areas. Some of them, joined by local Hindus and Sikhs, were slaughtering Muslims, occupying their homes, mosques and shrines of Muslim saints. That hurt Gandhi deeply. In response to his pleas to stop the carnage, the refugees told him tales of horror visited on them by their Muslim neighbors in Pakistan. Gandhi told them of his distress over their plight, but he kept admonishing them that their own religions did not permit them to avenge those injustices on Indian Muslims.

Gandhi told visitors that persecution of minorities would destroy Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam, but he warned Hindus and Sikhs that whereas if Islam died as an ethical system in India and Pakistan it would still have other countries for its ethical existence, but he warned them that Hinduism and Sikhism had “no world outside India” and that the loss of their ethnical core would spell the demise of both religions and social systems. He reiterated these pleas day and night to people in trouble-torn areas he visited, but the killing of Muslims and their expulsion from their homes and properties continued unabated.

Gandhi was outraged by Patel’s and his Home Ministry’s inaction to stop the anti-Muslim pogrom. On Oct. 2, 1947, Patel, among several other Congress leaders, dropped in to convey their good wishes to Gandhi on his 78th birthday. His Irish disciple, Mira, had decorated his room, but Gandhi was in no celebratory mood. He turned to Patel and asked, sternly, “What sin have I committed that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors?”

In January 1948 Gandhi learned, too, that Patel had decided to inflict what the Mahatma considered a serious injustice on Pakistan. At the time of the partition, India had assumed the obligation to give Pakistan Rs. 550 million as its share of the immovable property that belonged to the British Indian government. Citing the inroad of Pakistani Pathan tribes into Jammu and Kashmir, Patel announced that India wouldn’t, after all, transfer the money to Pakistan. To Gandhi’s surprise, Patel ignored his caveat to reverse his decision to withhold the payment to Pakistan.

His twin failures – to stop anti-Muslim riots in India and the confiscation of Pakistan’s share of British Indian assets – drove the Mahatma into using his “last weapon” to try to rectify them.

On the evening of Jan. 11, 1948, at his prayer congregation, Gandhi announced that he would soon begin to fast for an indefinite period to persuade the Indian government to pay Pakistan the Rs. 550 million India owed it and, secondly, to stop the killing and dispossession of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs in India.

“I see the Muslims of Delhi being killed before my very eyes,” the Mahatma told the gathering. “This is done while my own Vallabhbhai [Patel] is the Home Minister of the Government of India and is responsible for maintaining law and order in the capital. Vallabhbhai has not only failed to give protection to the Muslims, he light-heartedly dismisses any complaint made on this count. I have no option but to use my last weapon, namely to fast until the situation changes.”

The Mahatma began his fast on Jan. 13. The news of his fast electrified India, especially Delhi. Initially, some activists of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha and some refugees raised anti-Gandhi slogans here and there, including at one of Gandhi’s prayer congregations. But everyday Hindus were alarmed about Gandhi’s health. They hit the streets of Delhi in droves, demanding the immediate acceptance of Gandhi’s demands. RSS and Hindu Mahasabha offices were mobbed and activists of the two organizations were warned of dire consequences if Gandhi didn’t survive the hunger strike.

End of pogrom

It all worked more quickly and effectively than perhaps the Mahatma had expected. The government announced the transfer of Rs. 550 million to Pakistan. Clusters of leading citizens of Delhi and leaders of religious and social organizations visited Gandhi and promised to stop the rioting and persecution of Muslims. Leaders of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha — Lala Harichand, Lala Hansraj Gupta, R.B. Narain Das, Ganesh Datt, Basant Lal and Narain Dutt — signed a written pledge to do the same thing.

Anti-Muslim riots came to almost a complete stop. More than 130 mosques and some shrines of Muslim saints that had been occupied by Hindus and Sikhs were vacated. Hindus got Muslims to reopen the shops and other business operations they had closed in the wake of the riots.

Gandhi broke his fast on Jan. 18.

That was an eye-opener for the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha. They realized more than ever how tight was Gandhi’s grip on Hindu society, and that their plans to make India a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu religious state) can’t be realized as long as he was alive.

Meanwhile, Gandhi had been working on a plan – almost as grand as the Indian independence struggle – which was opposed by both Nehru and Patel and which had riled up the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha as never before. The plan called for the promotion of amity between India and Pakistan and reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims in both countries.

On Sept 18, 1947, Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, the last Muslim premier of pre-Partition Bengal, visited Gandhi in Delhi on his way to Karachi, then the Pakistani capital. The Mahatma asked him to remind Muhammad Ali Jinnah, now governor-general of Pakistan, of his pledges to protect minorities in Pakistan. And he asked Suhrawardy to inform Jinnah that he would be writing an important letter to the Pakistani leader soon. Later the same day Gandhi told a group of visitors that he hoped to soon “leave for Pakistan” to confront Pakistanis’ atrocities toward Hindus and Sikhs. “I shall not spare them,” the Mahatma promised. “I shall die for the Hindus and the Sikhs there. I shall be really glad to die there.”

In fact Gandhi was prepared to die for Hindus in 1946 in the East Bengal district of Noakhali, where Muslims slaughtered, tortured, and raped many thousand Hindus with hair-raising ferocity and converted many of them to Islam by force. Gandhi spent four months with a small entourage in the district, touring Muslim villages without any protection and preaching peace. Some of his associates said later that they didn’t think the Mahatma would leave Noakhali alive.

Following Suhrawardy’s visit, Gandhi wrote a note to Jinnah, proposing to move to Pakistan and live in Lahore. In a gracious reply, Jinnah welcomed him to Pakistan and suggested that Gandhi live in Karachi, instead. But the Mahatma was determined to settle in Lahore, the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab, where the worst of the anti-Hindu and anti-Sikh riots had occurred. Gandhi’s migration to Pakistan was set for Feb. 14. He asked 50 Hindu and Sikh refugee families from Pakistan to get ready to accompany him on his journey to Lahore.

Gandhi’s decision to settle in Pakistan and, especially, try to build close ties between India and Pakistan, angered Patel and Nehru. Always hateful of Muslims and Pakistan, Patel had nothing to do with them. Nehru, happily receiving accolades from the world over as prime minister of one of the world’s largest countries, had no use for Gandhi’s new mission, either. But they didn’t dare to approach their “Bapu” (dad) to ask him to cancel his Pakistan trip.

They sent Lord Mountbatten to try to dissuade him from the journey. The governor-general told Gandhi that his relocation to Pakistan would undermine the positions of his two closest disciples: Prime Minister Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Patel. Both of them, he said, opposed his Pakistan plans. Mountbatten didn’t make any argument about the interests of India or the Indian people that could be hurt by Gandhi’s Pakistan mission. The Mahatma responded to the governor-general’s plea with silence.

The news of Gandhi’s decision to resettle in Pakistan, which circulated in Delhi in early January, drove the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha stark raving mad. They had blamed Gandhi, falsely, for the Congress’ acceptance of Pakistan. In fact in the Congress High Command, Patel was the first to accept the plan to divide old India to create Pakistan, followed by Nehru. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (who never accepted the partition of India) visited Patel and demanded to know if he really wanted to split India to carve out Pakistan.

“I was surprised and pained,” the Maulana wrote in his memoir, India Wins Freedom, “when Patel in reply said that whether we liked it or not, there were two nations in India.”

The Hindu Mahasabha (like the Muslim League) had proclaimed that the Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent were two different nations. Patel took his cue from it on many Muslim-related issues.

But Gandhi’s acceptance of Pakistan and plans to reconcile with it and his defense of Muslims against Hindu and Sikh rioters cost him his life.

At his trial for Gandhi’s assassination, Nathuram Godse began his statement with the complaint that the Mahatma had “compel[led] the Dominion Government to pay the sum of Rs 55 crores [550 million] to Pakistan” and said later that “his last pro-Muslim fast, at last, goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhiji should be brought to an end immediately.”

Gandhi valued Patel’s hard work for the Congress organization. While Nehru pontificated about Fabian socialism in living rooms and had no clue about organizational matters, Patel built the All-India National Congress of the 1930s and 1940s from the grassroots and was in regular contact with its key leaders in the provinces. But the Gujarati lawyer often sizzled in private with ill-disguised anti-Muslim vibes, which was the main reason Gandhi had reservations about his leadership of the Congress or the country. In 1929 and 1937 Gandhi overruled nominations for Patel’s presidentship of the Congress and picked Nehru for the position, instead. Patel, still an admirer of Gandhi’s, took those two incidents with relative equanimity.

Crucial Choice

But the 1946 election to the party presidency was different. India’s independence was at hand and everybody knew that the Congress president of the day would become prime minister of independent India. Congress presidents were, as a rule, nominated by provincial Congress committees, and in 1946, 12 of the 15 provincial committees nominated Patel for the position while three abstained, and not a single committee nominated Nehru.

Nevertheless, Nehru told Gandhi that he wouldn’t accept any position other than that of the president, and the Mahatma asked Patel to let Nehru have the post. Patel, usually expressionless and inscrutable, frowned. He obviously felt that Gandhi was doing him a grave injustice: He was being asked to hand undeserving Nehru not only the leadership of the organization he had built but also the prime ministership of India against the wishes of nearly the entire Congress organization. But Gandhi was the embodiment of the Congress, and to a large measure of India, and the dyed-in-the-wool Hindu chauvinist couldn’t say no. But it killed the lifelong Gandhi devotee in him, replacing it with a deeply resentful antagonist.

On April 29, 1946, when Gandhi asked Patel to forgo the Congress presidency in favor of Nehru, he knew that he was hurting the man deeply and perhaps losing him as a devoted follower. But the Mahatma had to make a crucial choice. He can either keep a loyal disciple happy or pursue his core value and mission in life, but can’t do both. For a man with a mission of Gandhi’s, the choice was easy. Compassion was Gandhi’s core value (which he said he had learned from the Christian Bible and Leo Tolstoy), and his goal in life was promoting peace and resisting violence, whose worst victims in post-independence India were the Muslims. He believed that violence and injustices against Indian Muslims would get far worse under a Patel-led government.

Prior to the failed attempt on his life on Jan. 20, Gandhi had survived four other assassination attempts, all from Hindu extremists. The elaborate conspiracy that led to this fifth attempt and the fact that most of the conspirators remained at large convinced him that his days on earth were numbered. Other people were talking about it openly. Puchalapalli Sundarayya, the prominent Communist leader of Hyderabad, said at a public meeting that the Hindu Mahasabha, RSS and Sardar Patel planned to “kill the Mahatma to perpetuate fascist rule in India.”

Gandhi hinted and talked openly about his sojourn on earth coming to a rapid end. On Jan. 28, two days before his assassination, he said to his associates, “If I’m to die by the bullet of a madman, I must do so smiling. God must be in my heart and on my lips. And if anything happens, you are not to shed a single tear.”

Early on the morning of the fateful day, Jan. 30, he said to Manu, “If someone fires bullets at me and I die without a groan and with God’s name on my lips, then you should tell the world that here was a real Mahatma…”

A few hours later the Mahatma wondered aloud: “Who knows, what is going to happen before nightfall or even whether I shall be alive?”

In the early afternoon, a delegation of Delhi Muslim leaders showed up. They talked about communal tensions and the refugee crisis. Gandhi said he had planned to visit Wardah in early February and was alerting them about his possible absence from the trouble-torn city for a few days. Then he added: “But if Providence has decreed otherwise, that is a different matter. I am not sure, however, whether I shall be able to leave here even on the day after tomorrow. It is all in God’s hands.”

After 4 p.m. Sardar Patel came in to see Gandhi. They talked about a feud between Patel and Nehru. The visitor told Gandhi that if Nehru did not “change his way of working,” – Gandhi apparently knew what he meant – then Patel would resign from the Cabinet.

Gandhi told Patel that he had discussed the matter with Mountbatten and agreed with the governor-general that both of them – Nehru and Patel — were “indispensable.” They must work things out, Gandhi admonished.

In came Manu to tell Gandhi that two leaders from Kathiawar had arrived and wished to see the Mahatma.

With Patel sitting by, Gandhi instructed his grand-niece: “Tell them that I will, but only after the prayer meeting, and that too if I am still living!”

Patel had no reaction to the comment but continued his conversation with Gandhi. Gandhi always began his prayer meeting at 5 p.m., punctually. As the time for the meeting was approaching, his attendants ended his conversation with Patel and rushed him out toward the prayer congregation, where Godse was waiting with his Beretta M1934.

~Mustafa Malik, a retired American journalist, is an international affairs commentator, living in Bangladesh.

Why can’t Iran get the feel for nukes?

Mustafa Malik October 3, 2021

THE TALKS TO revive the Iran nuclear deal will resume “soon …within an acceptable period of time,” Joseph Borrell has announced. The deal was about curbing Iran’s nuclear program in return for lifting U.S. and U.N. sanctions on that country.

Borrell, the European Union foreign policy chief, had been coordinating negotiations between the last Iranian administration and six world powers in Geneva until the process was stopped in June to allow the new Iranian government of President Ebrahim Raisi to get on board.

Raisi, his Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and some others around them are known to be “hardliners”; and the Americans and Europeans expect the new regime to drive a hard bargain over the revival of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Apparently pessimistic about the outcome of the upcoming negotiations, President Biden has announced that he could resort to “other options” should the talks fail. And the State Department has disclosed that it already is working on “contingency plans” in case the upcoming Geneva talks fall through.

Those “options” and “plans” haven’t been defined, but I tend to rule out warfare because after America’s disastrous wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially the humiliating U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan, I don’t think Americans have the stomach to start a conflict with Iran, which is a much more powerful nation than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Israelis are making noise about attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities because Tehran has been accelerating uranium enrichment. Well, Israel could strike at some of Iran’s nuclear facilities – as it has done before. But the Iranians have so dispersed and secured their nuclear program that there is a consensus among experts that even heavy bombardment can at best set the program back for two to three years but can’t destroy it. And, of course, a ground war with Iran, either by America or Israel, is almost out of the question. Israel doesn’t have the wherewithal to do it, and America just can’t stick it out: The Iranians are a deeply patriotic, battle-hardened nation of 85 million, and 500 body bags at Dover airport would spur an American national upheaval against the war.

Yet the urgency of doing something about Iran’s nuclear program is felt deeply in Washington and European capitals. Some experts are saying that Iran is already on the verge of becoming a “threshold nuclear state” — a state that has acquired or is acquiring the components of a nuclear device but has stopped short making or testing one.

America has only itself to blame for it. The JCPOA, signed in 2015, had limited Iran’s uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent purity in return for lifting the debilitating U.S. and UN sanctions on Iran. In 2018 President Donald Trump, prodded by the Israelis, ripped up the accord, restored the old sanctions on Iran and slapped a raft of new ones, hoping to put “maximum pressure” on the Iranians to bring them to their knees and make them sign a revised agreement, limiting their regional activities that threatened Israel and Arab states friendly to the United States. Those activities were Iran’s support for anti-Israeli Shiite militias in several Arab countries and its ballistic missile program.

The Achilles heel in America’s foreign relations, especially its relations with countries across the Mediterranean, has always been its policy makers’ ignorance about the cultural values and social dynamics of those countries. The Americans view Iran like some of their vassal states such as Israel or Jordan or the United Arab Emirates, which are malleable to their pressures. Iran is a different kind of a place – a 9,000-year-old civilization and nation, enigmatically proud of its national honor and dismissive of upstart nations flaunting their material wealth or military might. Tehran was little impressed by Trump’s “maximum pressure,” even though it wreaked havoc to the Iranian economy.

Instead of buckling under Trump’s brutal sanctions, Tehran ratcheted up its nuclear program, beginning to enrich its uranium to 20 percent and then 60 percent purity. Even though the production of a nuclear bomb requires uranium enriched to 93 percent, with its advanced centrifuges, Iran looked capable of reaching that level within months. The experts calling Iran a “threshold nuclear state” believe that status is well within its reach. That’s what has strengthened the Iranian hand, prompting the Americans to mull “other options” in case of a failure of the Geneva negotiations.

I believe, though, that Iran is not really after making the bomb. The Americans and their Western allies are operating from a starkly different assumption of what the Iranians are up to than what they actually are up to. It’s a classic dichotomy between the moralist and rationalist outlook on life and politics. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been saying over and over that the use or possession of a nuclear device, a weapon of mass murder, in “un-Islamic.” The other day Raisi underscored that point. Nuclear weapons, he said, “have no place in our defense doctrine and deterrence policy.”

The Americans’ and other Westerners’ view of nuclear weapons is free of any moral content. They see them purely as tools of slaughter and coercion. On July 24, 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman approached Soviet Prime Minister Joseph Stalin in the concourse of Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, Germany, where they and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were negotiating the terms of the end of World War II. Without an interpreter with him, Truman told the Soviet leader “as casually as he could” that the United States had made a “new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin feigned indifference to Truman’s announcement, but realized that the U.S. president was using the device as a bargaining chip for the postwar territorial settlement with the Soviets. Back in Moscow the Communist dictator ordered his spies and physicists to get on with the production of the device that America had acquired. Thus began the nuclear arms races around the world.

Later the Chinese acquired nukes as deterrent against America’s (and the Soviets’) nuclear and conventional arsenals. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, initially did not endorse the weaponization of the Indian nuclear program, but began considering it after the Sino-Indian war of 1962 in which India suffered a devastating defeat, making Nehru cry openly.

And impoverished Pakistan, India’s archenemy, became desperate to acquire te bomb after New Delhi invaded and conquered its eastern province, helping it emerge as independent Bangladesh. Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announced to his utterly demoralized nation: “We will eat grass, make the bomb and fight India for a thousand years.”

On a Saturday day in the late 1980s my wife and I had an outing at the National Arboretum park in Washington with our two little kids. We had settled on a bedsheet under a tree: I was reading the Washington Post while Patricia browsed through a book of Renaissance paintings while watching the children. At one point our baby boy, Jamal, crowled out of the bedsheet. By the time my wife picked up the child, he had managed to get two grass blades into his mouth.

“Hey,” Pat hollered at me, “what is the status of Pakistan’s nuclear program?”

“Going full speed ahead,” I said. “Why?”

“It figures,” she replied. “Your son is eating grass!”

I had come to America as a Pakistani citizen and had told my wife about my covering Bhutto as a journalist and his vow to make Pakistanis “eat grass” to make the nuclear bomb.

Beginning with the Americans, most nations in the nuclear club have got the bombs with the rationalist logic of using or threatening to use them against their adversaries, if necessary.

Despite what you’re used to hearing about Iran, the Islamic Republic tries to follow Islamic moral principles in its domestic and foreign affairs. I believed the Iranian leaders when they said they didn’t want to make, let alone use, nukes because they are against the principles of Islam. The question, though, is why are they so relentlessly enriching uranium beyond the levels usually required for medical and other civilian purposes?

Ever since 1953 when the CIA in the Eisenhower administration overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and replaced him with the pro-American tyrant Muhammad Riza Pahlavi, Iranians don’t trust the Americans, who they believe are unscrupulous and murderous by nature. Despite its strict prohibition against harming innocent lives, Islam prescribes self-preservation and the preservation of one’s community as obligatory (fardh), and it enjoins Muslims to make independent judgment (ijtihad) to adapt Islamic principles to new exigencies. Many Iranians believe the biggest of their new exigencies is defending themselves against their archenemy: the Americans. The Iranians’ acceleration of uranium enrichment indicates that they have made a calculated decision to get to the threshold of a nuclear power or close to it – but still not make the bomb -to be able to deter an American (or Israeli) misadventure.

I had known Nizar Hamdoon, the flamboyant Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations in the 1990s. He died of cancer on July 4th 2003, barely three months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. A week before his death an Iraqi acquaintance of mine went to see the former Iraqi diplomat.

“Saddam Hussein’s biggest failure in life,” Hamdoon said, “was not being able to get the bomb.” Iraq would have been spared “the catastrophe” of the U.S. war if he could.

If Iran can gain a deterrent against a U.S. invasion by enriching uranium to near-weapons grade level, a “catastrophe” could be avoided not just by Iran but by America, too. And Islamic ijtihad would, I am sure, approve of that activity. I agree with the International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez that Iran won’t cross the nuclear threshold it may reach unless and until it’s attacked.

Western negotiators at the upcoming Geneva talks would do well to acknowledge this reality.

~Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator, living in Bangladesh.

Taliban an anti-hegemonic force

Mustafa Malik August 26, 2021

AS AMERICA FLEES Afghanistan under the Taliban gun, I am wondering how far west Asian Muslim societies are from ridding themselves of Western hegemony. At an intellectual level, the global Muslim struggle against Western hegemony began in Afghanistan in the 1860s with Jamaluddin al-Afghani prodding King Dost Muhammad to oppose the British colonial power. By Western hegemony, I mean invasion and occupation by Western powers and their domination through their vassals and subordinate regimes.

President Ashraf Ghani was a typical American vassal whose power structure began crumbling as the United States announced it was going to pull out its troops from Afghanistan by Aug. 31. America is the mightiest military and economic power the world has ever known. Yet its – and the West’s – stranglehold on Muslim societies is very fragile. That fragility was demonstrated spectacularly by the Biden administration’s quick compliance with the Taliban’s ultimatum to pull out all American forces from Afghanistan by the Aug. 31 deadline.

President Biden had been under intense domestic and international pressure to extend that deadline so the NATO countries had enough time to evacuate all their troops and collaborators from Afghanistan. In desperation, Biden rushed his CIA director, William Burns, to Kabul, obviously to ask the Taliban leadership to allow an extension of the deadline. But the guerrilla leaders said no, and Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen warned that the Aug. 31 deadline was their “red line,” and a U.S. failure to comply with it would have “consequences.” Without delay, Biden announced that his regime would indeed stick with the deadline. Which meant U.S. allies in Afghanistan would follow suit.

America’s humiliation at the hands of an impoverished and backward Muslim militia sent shivers of rage through America. Congressman Michael McCaul called it an “unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.” His fellow Texas Republican, Senator John Cornyn, exploded: “Letting the Taliban dictate our military strategy is an absolute disgrace.” And so on.

I have been writing all along that the Pashtun tribes, represented by the Taliban, would one day stamp out the American tutelage and that Americans were wasting their time trying to restructure Afghan society and politics in their image. Last week I told friends, however, the Taliban leaders would heed the CIA director’s pleas. They didn’t, and Medea Benjamin, the founder-president of the radically progressive Code Pink organization, explained why.

Taliban leaders wanted to “show that they have conquered Afghanistan” from the Americans, who had occupied it for 20 years, she tweeted. Well, “reconquered” would probably have been a more appropriate word.

All this reminded me of my October 1989 foray into a small gathering of Afghan Mujahedeen, freedom fighters, in Quetta, Pakistan. They were returning home after the Pushtun-led Mujahedeen had defeated the Soviet military juggernaut, the world’s largest conventional military force, and sent the cowering Communists running home into their mothers’ and wives’ arms. The Taliban group of about 20 I came across in Quetta was from Malaysia, India and three or four Arab countries.

“The Palestinians may have to wait until the Americans retreat from our region,” said a man, apparently in his early 30s, standing with his back against the wall of the lounge of the hotel in which I was staying. “The Jews would have been nice and humble without the American Crusaders behind them.”

The man apparently was answering a question, which I had not heard as I had just lumbered into the meeting spot with my friend Jamil Ahmed, a Pakistani businessman.

“Do you mean the Americans will retreat on their own?” asked a younger man, sitting on his hunches on the carpeted floor. “Won’t they have to be thrown out like those [Soviet] Communists?” The questioner, Ehtesham Wakil from the Indian city of Surat, told me later that he believed that the Americans would be “easier to defeat [than the Soviets] because they can only throw bombs from the sky” and weren’t good at fighting guerrillas with guns. Tajik and Uzbek tribal fighters, the Pashtun’s traditional rivals, had done most of the fighting for the American invasion, he added. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post would write later that CIA operatives bribed Tajik and Uzbek warlords with briefcases stuffed with $100 bills.

I was on a visit to Pakistan and several Arab countries to research the political fallout of the rout of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. I had a fellowship from the University of Chicago Middle East Center. The Soviet debacle had left many Pakistanis and other Muslims talking about the longevity of U.S. domination of Muslim lands.

Asrar Ahmed, my old journalist friend in Islamabad, said the United States was “pushing us around because most Muslims lack pollical consciousness.” Khurshid Ahmad, the deputy leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami party in Pakistan, said European colonial rule over non-Western countries did not last because “liberalism is incompatible with colonialism,” and that Americans “can’t make good warriors” and won’t be able to sustain their hegemony over Muslim societies because of that. In Amman, Jordan, Nihad al-Amr, a writer, told me that the Palestinians would be freed from Israeli suppression “when the American power weakens.” And ultimately, the American domination of Muslim countries would be ended “by our children or maybe grandchildren.”

The Taliban belong to Amr’s children’s generation. And their breathtaking victory over America will, I believe, help stir up other Muslim struggles against Western hegemony in the region. The most conspicuous ones of those struggles are being waged by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah against the Israeli colonization of Palestine, facilitated by America and Europe. The systematic repression of Arab Muslims by their monarchies and dictatorships is also being abetted or condoned by the West. In many ways, the regimes are America’s underlings.

In 1992 Earnest Gellner, one of my favorite anthropologists, wrote about a “revolution in the Muslim world … [brewing] for a century and a half.” In 2011 when Arab youths from Tunisia to Syria rose up to throw out their repressive autocracies, I thought that was the finale of that revolution. I was deeply disappointed when Arab tyrants quashed that liberation struggle. Obviously, Gellner’s Muslim revolutionary journey has some ways to go. I hope the Taliban triumph over America marks the beginning of the last 385 yards of the marathon.

~ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator, living in Sylhet, Bangladesh. He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.‘

Arab Spring 2 gearing up

Mustafa Malik July 20, 2021

I WAS BUSY for two days getting ready to celebrate Eid al-Adha at my ancestral home in the Bangladeshi village of Mujahid Khani. And look what I missed.

“President Bashar al-Assad took the oath of office for a fourth term in war-ravaged Syria on Saturday, after officially winning 95.1% of the vote in an election,” the AFP put out the blurb the day before yesterday.

Don’t laugh.

The news agency mentioned that the governments in the United States, Britain, France, Italy and other countries had dismissed the election as a “farce,” which was “neither free nor fair.” I agree.

But look what the dictator said and why he said it.

The elections “have proven the strength of popular legitimacy” of his regime, Assad proclaimed in his inaugural speech.

The Syrian dictator has mercilessly put down a popular uprising that began to rattle his regime 10 years ago. Why the heck does he now need to put on a fake election? Because he knows that he lives in a new world that is roiling from a tsunami of ideas of freedom and human rights in the midst of which governments that aren’t based on “the consent of the governed” look like ugly pariahs. All tyrannical monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East know this in their bones, and the Arab Spring of 2011-2013 was a thunderous reminder of it.

Well, that Arab revolutionary upheaval was – except in Tunisia – savagely crushed in Syria, Egypt and Bahrain. It unraveled some states such as Libya and Yemen. And the convulsion has spared – for now, it seems – the Arab Gulf, except Bahrain. But that was, I believe, the revolution’s dry run. No revolution worth its name has matured in one go. The Russian Revolution was brought off in October 1917 after the Duma put down its first outburst in February. The American Revolution began with slavery, raw racism and disenfranchisement of women, and it took two centuries of turmoil, including a civil war, to get near maturity.

The French Revolution of 1789 took a full decade of skirmishes, upheavals and the Reign of Terror to stabilize with the November 1799 Coup of 18 Brumaire, installing Napoleon Bonaparte in power. Abbe Sieyes, who was a principal protagonist of the healing process, was asked how he could help usher in an era of stability in France.

“I survived,” he replied.

Many survivors of the 2011-2013 Arab uprisings are spearheading a new wave of protests against Arab monarchies and dictatorships. And they are using their experience from the earlier, botched upheavals to guide them. Many of them have led new protests in the streets and squares of Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, demanding an end to corruption, repression and suppression of human rights. Against the more oppressive regimes such as in Egypt and Bahrain, they are using graffiti, anonymous flyers, social media and small protests to put the regimes on notice that the caldrons of their grievances have begun to simmer and could boil over one day.

In Algeria, in 2019, smoldering public outcry against the two-decades-old suffocating autocracy of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika toppled the autocrat. In Sudan protests against the repressive dictator Omar al-Bashir began in 2018 and got him bundled out in a military putsch a year later. The protesters would, of course, have liked it done in a better way. In Iraq public fury against Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi for widespread corruption, unemployment and Iran’s influence on Iraqi security and political matters began in October 2019 and ended with Mahdi’s resignation at the end of November. Other despotic Arab governments will require more sustained struggles to give in.

Steven Heydemann, an insightful researcher of Arab uprisings, warns that before the forces of tyranny in the Arab world tumble, they would become “darker, more repressive, more sectarian, and even more deeply resistant to democratization than in the past.”

Some of them indeed have. Egyptian tyrant Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has dumped tens of thousands of actual and suspected political dissidents into prisons to languish in horrendous conditions. Gruesome torture is routinely used against political activists, male and female. In Syria, apart from the bombing and indiscriminate shooting of protesters and innocent Sunni and other on-Alawite people, security agencies and the mukhabarat spy outfit arrested and tortured people with complete impunity. Many of those picked up by them have disappeared without a trace.

Today’s Arab revolutionaries are using tools they reshaped in light of the lessons from the botched Arab Spring. Their protests now are mostly peaceful. The activists are using social media more widely and effectively than street demonstrations. They are adapting their methods to the West’s renewed human rights consciousness of the post-Trump era. In March the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) joined Amnesty International and other international human rights groups to write an impassioned letter to U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, detailing the “violent suppression” and persecution of dissidents by their monarchy, one of the Arab world’s most remorseless. They reminded Blinken of “President Biden’s recent commitment to bring human rights to the heart of the new administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East” and urged the administration to intercede in the monarchy’s blatant suppression of dissent. Persecuted dissidents in other Arab countries, too, are using the same kind of appeals to Western democracies against abuses by their regimes.

Because of their new and more sophisticated strategies, the 2018-2021 Arab struggles, albeit still in a relatively low gear, have been called by scholars “Arab Spring 2.0.” I am hoping they will have a better outcome.

In the fall of 1991, on a research trip to several Arab countries, I had an illuminating interview with Rami Khuri, the former editor of the Jordan Times newspaper, in Beirut, Lebanon. I asked him why he thought “Arabs have such thick skin against tyranny.”

A Palestinian native, Khuri said patience had been regarded as a “virtue in our culture” for centuries, but that the newer generations were getting excited about Western values of “freedom and the rule of law” and other liberating ideas. “Give them some time,” he added. “The West took centuries to cultivate and absorb” democracy and its institutions.

Thirty years later the new Arab generations look gifted with a much thinner skin for the despotic rule. I expect Arab Spring 2.0 to mark the beginning of the end of authoritarian rule in Arab societies. I just hope that the process would be much shorter than it was for the Americans and more benign than what the French had to endure.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs analyst, living in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.