Mustafa Malik

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Is Obama a Muslim?

Mustafa Malik September 8, 2012

A Republican activist I had met last month at a Middle East Policy Council seminar in Washington called over the weekend. She asked what I thought about President Obama’s speech at the Democratic  convention in Charlotte, N.C., before getting to the reason for her call.

Did I know if “Obama is really a Muslim”?  The middle-aged woman had learned that Muslims consider the Old and New Testaments part of their faith.  She was trying to find out if Obama could be adhering to his father’s religion, Islam; and mother’s, Christianity; at the same time

She left me wondering if some Republicans are trying to dig up some plausible rationale to paint Obama as a Muslim on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign trail.  I will presently address the president’s religious affiliation. First, a word about what the persistence of the question of his religious identity says about race and religion in America.

A Pew Research Center survey, put out in July, found that only 49 percent of respondents believed that Obama is a Christian. One-third didn’t know his religious affiliation, and 17 percent believed he’s a Muslim. There’s concern among the president’s campaign team that the perception of his Muslim identity may cost him votes on November 6th.

Of course,  the Declaration of Independence  and the Bill of Rights confer social and political equality on all Americans, regardless of their race or religion. But many white American Christians still look askance at their colored and non-Christian compatriots’ claim to political and social equality.

Obama’s father was a black Kenyan Muslim, who gave his U.S.-born son his own skin color and his own Muslim name: Barack Hussein Obama. The president’s mother is  a white American-born Christian, who brought up young Obama as a Christian. Obama Jr. has since been practicing the Christian faith.

The awful history of American slavery and European Holocaust has delegitimized racism in the Western public domain.  Religion remains a widely approved value system in America.  The Christian right and Christian Zionism have a stranglehold on the Republican Party . Religious values and prejudices on abortion, homosexuality, Islamophobia, etc., continue to color American political discourse.

Islamophobia — the loathing and resentment of Islam and Muslims — has heightened in America  and Europe for several reasons.  One, resurgent Islam has posed a serious challenge to U.S.-NATO hegemony over many Muslim societies. Secondly, Muslims generally are resistant to assimilation with white Christians in the West, and Muslim lifestyles often contrast sharply with those of the white mainstream. Thirdly, the nearly simultaneous resurgence of Christian fundamentalism in America and Islamic revival in the Muslim world has also revived the old cultural and hegemonic antagonism between Muslim and Western civilizations, which  began with Muslim invasions of Christian countries in the Levant, North Africa and Iberia in the 7th and 8th centuries.

Finally, Al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States in 2001 has turned the simmering Islamophobia into anti-Muslim hysteria among many governments and white citizens throughout the West.  Large numbers of Muslims have been profiled, surveiled, demonized, detained, interrogated and held in “black sites.” Many Americans — conservatives as much as liberals — avoid Muslims in the public space.  Some openly say they wouldn’t want to travel with Muslims in the same plane.  Hence the president’s reelection campaign’s  concern that questions about his religious identity may alienate some voters.

So, is Obama a Muslim?  Some of those who think he is have researched the question. They cite, as mentioned, Muslims’ belief in the truth of the Bible and the Torah, and their veneration of Hebrew prophets and Jesus. They point to the Quranic injunction to allow Christians and Jews to practice their faiths freely in Islamic states. Yes, Obama doesn’t worship at mosques. But Islamic scripture says a Muslim remains a Muslim even if he or she doesn’t perform any of the Islamic rites. All he or she needs to do to be a Muslim is believe that there is a God, and that Muhammad was the last and final prophet.  If so, why can’t it be possible for the president to remain a Muslim while going to Christian churches?

What these folks also need to know is that the Qur’an says unequivocally that the Bible and the Torah, God’s true revelations as they are, have been overridden by the Qur’an; and that a Muslim ceases to be a Muslim when he joins another faith.  In other words, Obama can’t be a Muslim and a Christian at the same time.

  • Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Islam and the West’: https://islam-and-west.com.

Americans fed up with right and left

Mustafa Malik August 28, 2012

The documentary “2016: Obama’s America” is drawing big crowds in the South, reports my hometown newspaper the Washington Examiner . And  “liberal and conservative voters” watching it are cursing President Obama.

“I have to get some more friends” to see the documentary, says 18-year-old Tammy Birdwell who watched it in Greenville, N.C. “We have to get Obama out.”

The production is based on Dinesh D’Souza’s controversial book The Roots of Obama’s Rage.  D’Souza is a right-wing, indian-born activist and writer who used to be an adviser to the Reagan White House. His book’s underlying theme is that Obama is inspired by the liberal “anti-colonial ideology of his African father.”  That ideology, adds D’Souza, has shaped the policies of the Obama administration. A right-wing documentary luring liberals? It reminds me of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11”, which was praised by many conservatives.  Many Americans are apparently disillusioned by both conservatism and liberalism.

D’Souza’s portrait of Obama is based mostly on the president’s writings and rhetoric.  The author selectively stitched together bits and pieces of them to draw up a profile of the first black American president that repels many  Americans.

As evidence of Obama’s liberalism and anti-colonialism, the author cites his call as a U.S. senator to withdraw American troops from Iraq, opposition to Gen. David Petraeus’ “surge” strategy in Iraq, association with “Marxist professors and structural feminists” at Occidental College, unidentified plan to “spread the wealth” in America, and so forth.

This image starkly contradicts Obama’s policies or actions as president.  President Obama is known the world over for  his embrace and expansion of the Bush administration’s drone war in several Muslim countries, killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children. He continues President Bush’s policies of profiling and surveillance of American Muslims, of denying Guantanamo Bay prisoners the due process of civil law, and of refusing to identify with African American issues and priorities. Early in his administration, Obama alienated many of his liberal and leftist supporters by caving in to Republicans to focus on deficit cuts over jobs and growth.

I knew the president was about to sidestep the causes of the poor and the left when he hired such died-in-the-wool conservative economists as Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Peter Orszag to frame and run his economic policies.  But I did not anticipate his adoption of the Bush administration’s militarist agenda.  Washington Post writer Ezra Klein’s characterization of Obama as a “moderate Republican” may apply to many of his domestic policies. In the Middle East and South Asia, his first presidential term looks more like Bush’s third. So the question, again, is why is the right-wing documentary “2016”  riveting liberals? Why do Moore’s liberal documentaries attract many conservatives?

My take on it all is that while vested interests and ideologues remain loyal to ideologies, most everyday Americans are fed up with them. They know in their bones that their political ideologies and economic and financial institutions aren’t answering their real-life problems.  They have been voting Democrats and Republicans to Congress and the Presidency, but their economy remains in a shambles. Too many of them are unemployed or have jobs that don’t relieve them of hardships and despair. America lurches from one bloody and costly war to another, yet Americans have never felt so insecure: airports, government offices, corporations and many other swaths of public space have turned into veritable fortresses, under disturbing and annoying security cordons.

Americans’ allegiance to their political and economic institutions is eroding fast. Yet they continue to shuttle between them because they see no alternative paradigm, or avenues of meaningful living. Well, not yet. New ideological or existential paradigms often come unannounced. We should keep an ear out for them.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington. He hosts the blog Beyond Freedom.

Syria ‘extremists’ scare off U.S.?

Mustafa Malik July 27, 2012

 The Obama administration knows by now that Russia will not let any action against the murderous Syrian dictatorship get the green light from the U.N. Security Council.  In response, the administration is taking baby steps to help the Syrian uprising, dedicated to overthrowing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

These steps include sharing intelligence with the rebels and increasing the supply of communications gear.  The administration is still unwilling to provide the rebels with heavy arms or help create a “safety zone” in Syria. The main reason, as anonymous White House aides tell the media, is the feat that “extremists” could rise to dominate post-Assad Syria.

The Assad regime will go sooner or later, but the United States needs to be seen actively supporting the Syrian opposition for its own interests.  The Arab Spring is drawing the curtain on the era when America dominated the Middle East by standing on the shoulders of tyrannical dictators and monarchs.   In the years ahead, the security of American interests in that region will depend on the goodwill of its populist and democratic Arab forces.

Besides the Islamist bugbear, a pie-in-the-sky desire to choreograph Syria’s political future is hobbling active American support for the opposition. It’s a lingering Cold War mentality, which the administration shares with many American scholars and experts on the Middle East.

These experts included most of the panelists at a  seminar on  Capitol Hill in Washington on the Syrian crisis. They sounded the alarm that American arms and aid could fall into the hands of Salafists and other “extremists.”  And they called for a strategy that would help set up a secular, pluralist democratic regime in Syria. The lone dissenting voice on the panel was that of my friend Leon Hadar. I have always admired his insights.  Hadar advised against “trying to micromanage” Syrian politics over which Americans would have “no control.”

The seminar was organized by the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council, and it reminded me of another forum the MEPC had hosted on the Hill during the run-up to the Iraq war.  At that 2003 seminar, too, most of the panelists explored options to make sure secular democracy thrives in Iraq after the dictator Saddam Hussein was  overthrown.  The proposed options included bolstering Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. As we found out later Chalabi or his INC had no foothold inside Iraq. Thanks to his neocon promoters, however, the INC reaped millions of American tax dollars for its non-existent democratic movement in Iraq.

Interestingly, this week’s Capitol Hill panel included a spokesman for the Syrian National Council, Radwan Ziadeh, who admitted that his anti-Assad group hasn’t gained much public support in Syria. He blamed it on the insufficiency of foreign assistance and asked for  $45 million in monthly aid.

In any case, the assumption behind the thrust of the experts’ arguments about Syria this week was the same as those about Iraq nine years ago:  Secular Arab democrats would ally with American and Israeli secular democracies, while Islamists would oppose them.  Obviously, America’s bitter experience in Iraq has made little contribution to the thinking of these experts.  In Iraq, the U.S. invasion has turned a staunchly secular autocracy into a pseudo-democratic theocracy. It has transformed an implacably anti-Iranian regime into one that is allied to Iran, America’s and Israel’s archenemy in the Middle East.

It’s about time American policy makers and intellectuals review the myth that Islamists or Muslim “extremists” are innately anti-American.  Sunni Muslim “extremist” Mujahedeen fighters, including Osama bin Laden, were America’s allies during the 1980s war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In Iraq, Shiite Muslim “extremist” Mahdi Army militia joined the American battle to overthrow the Saddam regime.

Muslim political activism, secularist or Islamist, revolves around what the activists believe to be the interest of their societies or communities.  Bin Laden, who sided with the United States in the anti-Soviet Afghan war, sponsored the 9/11 attacks on America because he and other Saudi Islamists were  outraged by the deployment of American troops  in Saudi Arabia, following the 1991 Operation Desert Storm.  I learned this during two research trips to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s .  Russian President Vladimir Putin keeps reminding his American interlocutors that 15 of the 19 September 11, 2001, plane hijackers were Saudis.

Many Arabs resent America’s wishy-washy role in the Arab Spring and continued support for repressive autocracies in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.   They see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit with Egypt’s Islamist President Muhammad Mursi as recognition of a fait accompli. The administration should reverse course on Syria and get on with organizing international action outside the United Nations to rid Syria of its monstrous dictatorship.

The effort should be conducted through the Friends of Syria group and begin with supplying the rebels with heavy arms and other necessary equipment through the Saudis, Qataris and others.  A safe haven for the rebels and civilian refugees should be created inside Syria alongside its Turkish border, under NATO air cover.  The campaign against the Syrian regime will require outside financial assistance, which should be provided to opposition forces struggling in Syria, and not to organizations outside.

Meanwhile, in the interest of better understanding between America and Islam, U.S. policy makers should revisit the main lesson from U.S. experience in the Muslim world.   Muslims, secular and Islamist, have no quarrel with America when its policies accommodate their interests. They resist, often to the bitter end, those American policies and actions that hurt their interests and their dignity.

  •  Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts the blog site Beyond Freedom

Pakistan out of U.S. shadow

Mustafa Malik July 19, 2012

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” These were the words of a young antiwar activist named John Kerry, testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Forty-one years later Kerry, now chairman of the  same Senate committee, was defending the Afghan war, in which the last man has probably yet to die.

“A premature departure [from Afghanistan] would jeopardize the chances for a responsible transition,” he writes in the Chicago Tribune.

As the end game in Afghanistan draws near, half-heartedly and in confusion, the Americans are trying to put in place an exit strategy. As part of it, Pakistan has agreed to reopen Nato supplies.

The supply route was closed indefinitely seven months ago when U.S. bombers killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. For reasons of sanity, lets us not indulge in to the logic of why such an incident took place. Even if you kill my cat, I will try my best, not to allow you to live in a house next to mine.

For the Pakistani government and army, it was the last straw. Besides stopping Nato supplies to Afghanistan, Pakistan suspended other forms of cooperation with the U.S. and demanded an American apology for the killings.

For seven months the U.S. tried all sorts of diplomatic maneuvers to force Pakistan to reopen its “southern supply route” running through Pakistan. Those maneuvers included financial squeeze on Pakistan through the IMF, Pakistan’s exclusion from strategic talks on Afghanistan and overt preferential treatment of India, Pakistan’s arch rival. But Pakistan stood its ground and demanded nothing less than an apology for the killing 24 of its troops would make it consider the reopening of the supply route.

In the words of mark twain, “History never repeats itself but often rhymes.” Mention the Afghan exit strategy to any American in Afghanistan and the first thing that comes to his mind is Vietnam, America’s longest war until Afghanistan.

It is very difficult not to draw similarities between the Vietnam and Afghanistan. A corrupt government elected by a small minority, a consumer economy fueled by war spending, alienation and neglect of ground realities, and end game where exiting American forces are trying to pull a PR stunt to convince everyone that the local forces are fully capable fighting their  war.

Some Vietnam parallels to this war are amazing. In the spring of 1972 then President Richard Nixon flew in to Saigon to ink a treaty with then Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, codifying a ‘long-term’ U.S. relationship with South Vietnam, which would leave Vietnam’s security to Vietnamese. In May 2012 President Obama flew in to Kabul to sign a “strategic partnership agreement” with the Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Said Obama: ‘Afghans are responsible for the security of their nation, and we build an equal partnership between two sovereign states; a future in which the war ends, and a new chapter begins’. How much more secure will post-American Afghanistan be than was post-American Vietnam?

Before the exit of their combat forces from Vietnam, the Americans started believing that they were losing because Cambodia was supporting the rebels in Vietnam. Ali Syed writes “The Cambodians remained as neutral as they could but the Americans alleged that they are playing a double game, they bombed the border areas (since they believed that communists had set up sanctuaries there), with the result Khmer Rouge was formed and later what they did with their people is also horrid. There are stark similarities between the conflict of Vietnam and Cambodia and the one that we have now (Afghanistan and Pakistan).” In Afghanistan, many Americans blame their travails on Pakistani elements’ alleged support for the Taliban.

After seven months of intense negotiations and arm-twisting, Washington has persuaded Islamabad to reopen the NATO supply route through its territory.  Hillary Clinton agreed to release a ‘Sorry’ statement and Pakistan accepted it and allowed non-lethal shipments to pass through its Karachi port.

Even though a second NATO supply route that runs through Central Asian countries was given a lot of hype after the closure of the Pakistani one, it was not viable. Ahsanurahman Khan writes in Pakistan’s Frontier Post newspaper that the Pakistani route is ‘the inescapable requirement of the NATO for the exit phase, despite the availability of the Central Asian routes.’

Pakistan’s help is essential for invaders’ retreat.  Soviet invaders needed assurances from Pakistan to prevent mujahedeen attacks on their withdrawing units. Now NATO will need Pakistan’s cooperation to retreat safely from Afghanistan through Pakistani territory.

Many in Pakistan such as Asif Haroon Raja believe that there is no justification  for Pakistan ‘to become party to the massacre of Afghans by the US kill teams particularly when drawdown has commenced and the US is actively engaged in parleys with Taliban in search of political settlement.’ They see the reopening of this route as ‘digging our own graves and consciously putting our heads in hornets’ nest.’

However, the closing and reopening of this route has some Geo-strategic implications. Mahmoud Majid in a policy paper  points to ‘the American policy shift in favor of a ‘regional’ approach for a grand political reconciliation is in itself evidence on the limits of US power in the region.’

The U.S. apology shows that Islamabad can finally take an independent stand for its own strategic interests. We are also seeing the beginning of an era where Pakistan can view its relations with India without the American prism. All this will also help Pakistan in its relations with China and Russia.

Tajwali Khan is a guest contributor to ‘Islam and the West’. (He is an Independent researcher and blogger  from Pakistan, with an interest in South Asian and Middle eastern issues. He is editor  of the blog  https://hopefulpakistan.org. He also writes for  Oriental Review and Islamabad Times Online)

Modern Islam Egypt Islamists’ goal

Mustafa Malik June 26, 2012

“The revolution goes on,” said Mohammed Mursi, on being declared president of Egypt in its first-ever democratic election.  He ran for president as the head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party.  The transnational Brotherhood has been the world’s oldest Islamist movement.

The president-elect has called for national unity. Mursi wouldn’t, of course, abandon his Islamist mission, but to signal his seriousness to become “president of all Egyptians,” he resigned his post as the head of the FJP.  He realizes that he needs the nation behind him for his upcoming battle with Egypt’s ruling military junta, called the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). The SCAF has got a compliant high court to dissolve the parliament, assumed all legislative powers, and curbed the power of the presidency. The military council’s decree requires the president to work with it to frame a constitution.

Assuming Mursi’s victory in the election, some Egypt watchers have been debating whether he and the Brotherhood are going to be co-opted by the military junta or pursue their Islamist agenda seriously. They have a reason to wonder. During the last three decades, the Brotherhood has consistently shied away from confrontation with military dictatorships, not even to challenge the decades-long ban on its participation in politics.

This year the Muslim Brothers were among the last to join the Tahrir Square uprising, which toppled the dictator Hosni Mubarak. And when other groups were agitating to overthrow of the SCAF, which replaced Mubarak, the Brotherhood leadership engaged the generals in a dialogue over the crisis.

“Ideology does not determine [Muslim Brothers’] behavior whatsoever,” says Omar Ashour of Britain’s Exeter University, an expert on Muslim and Middle Eastern politics. “You can say it’s a very pragmatic, opportunistic group.”

Part of the Egyptian Brotherhood’s pragmatism comes from its realization that frontal confrontation with military dictatorships could prove suicidal, and that its decisive challenge to the political establishment should wait until it had a strong footing in society. Sayyid Muhammad Qutb, the Brotherhood’s original thinker, was executed by military dictator Jamal Abdel Nasser.  Nasser is believed also to have orchestrated the assassination of the organization’s founder, Hasan el-Banna.   Successive military dictators jailed, tortured and executed its members. Because of its strong support for the Palestinian cause, it had also been anathema to Israel and the United States.  The organization’s leadership realized that a clash with the dictatorial regimes would give them the excuse to crush it with U.S. blessings, leaving its main mission of Islamizing society unrealized.

I have been visiting Egypt since the 1970s, for research or pleasure.  From interviews with Egyptians and other research I understand that the “pragmatism” that Professor Ashour mentioned is part of the Brotherhood’s strategy to pursue its larger mission.

That mission was described succinctly to me during a 1995 visit to Cairo by a leading Brotherhood ideologue, Mustafa Mashhur.  “May Allah guide us in His path,” he said. “We are working humbly to carry on the da’wa (Islamization campaign) and strengthen (society’s) Islamic roots.” How the Brothers would go about its work would be decided in light of “our ijtihad, our situation and circumstances,” added the Islamic scholar, who would soon become the head of the Egyptian Brotherhood. Other Muslim Brothers and Egyptologists have given me the same description of the Brotherhood’s goals, in different words.

Ijtihad, which Mashhur mentioned, is an Islamic canon law tool to form new rules on matters on which scripture is silent. In such situations theologically competent Muslims are enjoined to use common sense to make new rules of conduct, which shouldn’t, however, conflict with Islam’s core principles.  Most Islamists, unlike many traditional fundamentalists, believe in ijtihad.

In practical life, everyday Muslims don’t go about looking for a theologian to issue a ruling on new situations, often presented by modernity and cross-cultural communication. Muslims familiar with Islam’s basic tenets and principles, use their own common sense to devise guidelines to  adapt alien values and practices to their lives. Most Islamists, including Muslim Brothers, don’t make an issue of it.  Hence unlike traditionalists and radical fundamentalists, Islamists in general are enthusiastic supporters of modernization. The difference between secular and Islamist modernizers is that the former’s goal is modernization for its sake; the latter’s modernization for Islam’s sake.

President-elect Mursi has a Ph.D. in engineering from the United States and modern education spans the Brotherhood’s rand and file.  Muslim Brothers are especially focused on scientific and technological education. Egyptians call them the “Brotherhood of Engineers” (Ikhwanul Muhandithun) because of the large number of engineers (and physicians) in its rank.

Unlike in the early phase of the movement, the Egyptian Brotherhood today has acquired deep roots in society and has grown to become the country’s largest political organization.   Mursi’s call for a nationwide struggle to rid Egypt of the new military autocracy indicates that the organization now feels strong enough to challenge the military regime.  Other opposition groups, too, understand that a nationwide campaign against the SCAF autocracy isn’t possible without the Brotherhood’s lead.  Hence in spite of their bitter ideological struggle with the Brotherhood, most leftist and centrist political parties and groups have vowed to join its struggle for the democratization of Egypt.

I believe that Professor Ashour and other observers who see the Brotherhood’s pragmatism as its abandonment of its mission will revise their views. The Brotherhood remains committed to serving and propagating Islam, while spearheading Egypt’s democratization and modernization campaigns.

• Mustafa Malik, a Washington-based columnist, hosts the blog ‘Islam and the West.’

Bangladesh’s Islamic modernity

Mustafa Malik June 13, 2012

By Mustafa Malik

POLASHPUR, Bangladesh – A casualty of your trip to Bangladesh (and many other Muslim countries) could be the belief, or illusion, that Islam and modernity are conflicting value systems.   A college classmate’s visit to my ancestral home here in Polashpur village reminded me of this illusion, which is I see widely shared in America.

I wouldn’t have recognized Rafiqul Islam if he had not told me who was, especially because of his sprawling gray beard, Islamic cap and long kurta, Islamic shirt.  It was more than three decades since the last time I had met him, then a clean-shaven businessman in slacks and a short-sleeve shirt. Relishing jackfruit from a tree planted by my deceased father, Rafiq said his children had settled down, and he now had “the freedom” to devote to some social service.

That included campaigning for “Islamic-minded” candidates at elections and fund-raising for a “modern madrasah,” or Islamic school.  The madrasah would offer the usual Islamic courses, but also English, math, science and social studies. Secular courses were rarely taught in non-government madrasahs four decades ago when I lived in Bangladesh. While madrasahs providing secular education are proliferating throughout the country, secular schools are teaching more Islamic subjects than ever.

About 90 percent of the Bangladeshi population of 160 million is Muslim. Rafiq is among the many educated ones who began their professional or business careers as run-of-the-mill secularists but eventually were swayed by the Islamizing wind.

“You look like a mujahid [one who struggles for Islam],” I said in jest.

“I wasted my life,” he replied, “doing things that don’t mean anything …. It’s already late for me to do what you would like to remember in your deathbed.”

Islamic activism such as Rafiq’s used to be red herring to Bangladesh’s staunchly secularist founding elite, especially the “father of the nation” Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.  “These beards!” he scowled during an interview with me in September 1970 at his home in what is now the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. He was referring to bearded Islamic activists. “It will take 30 years of [spread of] education and progress to weed them out,” he added.

Bangladesh was born the following year as a terribly poor and backward country. After two decades of economic and political turmoil, it began to modernize at an impressive pace.  Surveys by U.N. agencies show that the country’s per capita GDP has tripled during the past 20 years — from $217 in 1991 to $640 today. During this period, the national literacy rate has risen from 26 percent to 56 percent.  More remarkable is Bangladesh’s progress in female education.  In the 15-24 years age group, the female literacy rate is 77 percent, compared to the male 74 percent.

Bangladeshi women are highly visible in politics, business and other professions. For two decades, the country has not known a male head of government. Two women, heading the two largest political parties, have been rotating as prime ministers.

Most of these professional and activist women, however, don’t step out of home without having their Islamic head covering on.  Indeed, the country’s cultural landscape flaunts Islamic symbols and idiom so lavishly as never in history.  In Sylhet, the town nearest to my Polashpur home, many – if not most – of the business, social and educational outfits show off Islamic names: Shah Jalal (local Muslim saint) University, Ibn Sina (eminent Arab Muslim philosopher) Hospital, Al-Hambra (Muslim architectural masterpiece in Spain) Shopping Center, Islamic Insurance Company, Al-Makkah (Mecca) Pharmacy, Bismillah (in the name of Allah) traders, and so on.  During my visits in the early years of the country’s independence, I don’t remember seeing any of these Islamic symbols and thousands of others in Sylhet and outlying towns and bazaars, except that of the saint Shah Jalal.

As in many other Muslim societies, the educated class in Bangladesh who grew up under British colonial rule or in its immediate aftermath believed in Western-style secularism with mosque-state separation.  The farther they are from the colonial era, the more they feel the pull of their native Islamic culture. The more Western lifestyle doesn’t “mean anything” to them, as Rafiq mentioned.  To make modernity meaningful to their lives, they are adapting it to Islamic values and way of life.

• Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts the blog Beyond Freedom.

Democracy fluid in Bangladesh

Mustafa Malik June 12, 2012

By Mustafa Malik

SYLHET, Bangladesh – Paralyzing general strikes, known here as hartal, remain a common and effective tool of democratic politics in Bangladesh. A local opposition politician has been kidnapped from a highway, which the opposition says was arranged by the ruling Awami League party. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), to which the abducted M. Ilyas Ali belonged, called for continual hartal, demanding his release. Ali has yet to be traced, but the hartal was a complete success.

For four days, transportation, businesses and even many government offices remained closed throughout the country. Here in Sylhet town, surrounded by scores of tea gardens, about the only automobiles seen on the streets were occasional police jeeps and “ambulances,” most of them fake. Vans marked “Ambulance” carried passengers, one of whom feigning sick!

Five years ago I was in Bangladesh when the BNP chairwoman and a former prime minister Khaleda Zia was thrown into jail by the government and her son was not only incarcerated but severely tortured. For a long time, the mother and the son weren’t allowed to publicly express their views on their ordeal. For months, they were not produced before a civilian court, either. Zia, the BNP chairperson, was later linked to official misconduct and, Tarek Rahman, her son, to massive financial corruption. Bangladesh is a decades-old multi-party democracy with a free-wheeling press. But most Bangladeshis, including many BNP activists, didn’t care much about the denial of their democratic rights to free speech the due process of law.

Bangladesh is a decades-old multi-party democracy with a free-wheeling press. Why has there been this nationwide outrage over the kidnapping of a rather low-level BNP leader, but not much of a whimper about the denial of basic democratic rights of the head of the BNP? If you are familiar with Bangladeshi society and culture, you would have expected it.

The right to free speech and habeas corpus, which Zia and Rahman were denied, are alien concepts in Bangladeshi society. These institutions derive from the Enlightenment principles of liberty and freedom, among the West’s greatest gifts to mankind. In this South Asian country, too, many political activists, especially when they are in the opposition, and Western-educated elites, value these principles. They would have greater public appeal as Bangladesh modernizes further.

But 90 percent of Bangladesh’s 160 million people are Muslim, and these liberal values are not rooted in their native Islamic culture, as they are not many other non-Western ones. The Islamic faith and civilization is anchored to the concepts of equality before God, charity and brotherhood, which are viewed as dimensions of justice, the core Islamic tenet.

True, most Muslims in Bangladesh and elsewhere don’t live by many of the Islamic ideals, including justice. Yet, being organic to their native culture, they stir Bangladeshi minds more deeply than the Western institutions of liberty, democracy and the rule of law. Ali’s abduction and possible killing are widely perceived here as a grave injustice. No wonder the incident has offended everyday Bangladeshis more poignantly than the curtailment of Zia’s and her son’s democratic rights to free speech and the due process of law.

The Bangladeshi government has been promising the investigation of Ali’s abduction and urging patience to let the tools of law run its course. The public has largely ignored these pleas; many suspect them to be ploys to sap the public rage over the issue. Most Bangladeshis are unlikely to be satisfied with any outcome of the government investigation, unless they see it as fair and just.

Mustafa Malik, the host of the blog Islam and the West, is traveling in his native Indian subcontinent.

Bibi Obama’s moral test

Mustafa Malik January 11, 2012

By Mustafa Malik

The other day Robert Malley said at a Capitol Hill seminar that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was “more likely” now than ever before. Malley is a widely respected Middle East expert with the International Crisis Group, and he gave two reasons for his concern.

One, he said Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want to be remembered as the Israeli prime minister under whose watch Iran might have acquired nuclear weapons capability. Secondly, President Obama, running for reelection, wouldn’t oppose his bombing Iran. Listening to Malley, I remembered Ken Adelman, who had served as President Reagan’s arms control director.  In a 2002 op-ed in the Washington Post, Adelman predicted that occupation of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” An armed conflict with Iran would indeed make the Iraq disaster look like a cakewalk.

Because Israel isn’t expected to attack Iran without American approval or acquiescence, Iran will almost certainly unleash its Shahab, Zelzal and IRSL missiles against both Israeli and American targets.  That could be the beginning of the end of U.S. hegemony in west Asia.

An Israeli or American bombing campaign would doubtless pulverize the infra-structure and economy of Iran, which already is under severe U.S.-sponsored sanctions. Iranians are enigmatically proud, however, of their 6,000-year-old civilization and glorious heritage. Despite their internal political divides, they can unite as an indomitable force against foreign aggression, as Iraqi invaders learned in the 1980s.

In Shia Islamic Iran, sacrifice and martyrdom are core social values. The Iranians can bounce back from Israeli-U.S. air assaults, as they did after their catastrophic war with Iraq. The Islamic Republic and myriad Muslim militant groups would strike hard and relentlessly at American forces and bases throughout the region.

Tehran would shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which flows the West’s oil lifeline. U.S. counter-attacks wouldn’t ensure the safety of oil tankers in the channel. The closing of the Strait would send oil prices soaring, sending shivers through the wobbly Western economies.  Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps has planned its second naval exercises in the Persian Gulf to begin January 27. The drills are preparations for the Strait closing in case of war.  Iran and anti-American militant groups would persevere in such a war for as long as it takes. As seen in Iraq and Afghanistan – which are much weaker than Iran — Americans wouldn’t be able to hold out very long in such as conflict, especially when suffering war fatigue and a “deep recession.”  In the end, American bases, troops and economic interests wouldn’t be safe in that region.

A high-stakes U.S.-Israeli air campaign against Iran would be asinine, to begin with. All studies, including American and Israeli ones, have concluded that an air campaign against Tehran’s dispersed, and partly deep underground, nuclear program could only stall it for two or three years. It can’t stop the program.   By the way, the Iranian government rejects the Israeli-American accusation that it plans to develop nuclear bombs, insisting that its uranium enrichment program is meant to supply electricity. And the operations remain within the parameters of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Would the American president be willing to risk America’s vital interests in the Middle East by letting Bibi Netanyahu loose on Iran? Or would he risk alienating the pro-Israel vote in November by reining the Israeli leader in?

That would be an acid test of Obama’s backbone and moral fiber.

♦ Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts the blog Beyond Freedom.

Also on this topic:

  • “Israel is pushing U.S. toward Iran war, Russian official says,” Haaretz, January 12, 2012. https://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-is-pushing-u-s-toward-iran-war-russian-official-says-1.406963
  • “2012: The year that could bring U.S. strike on Iran,”  Haaretz, December 29, 2012. https://www.haaretz.com/blogs/the-arms-race/2012-the-year-that-could-bring-a-u-s-strike-of-iran-1.404390
  • “Whose war is it now?”,  Boston Globe, December 23, 2004. https://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/12/23/whose_war_is_it_now/

U.S.-India relations hit plateau

Mustafa Malik November 16, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

What was my take on “our growing relations with America?” asked Birendra Nath Basu. I met him on a passenger car to Karimganj town in the northeast Indian state of Assam.   Basu had a master’s degree in business administration and was returning from a job interview in Guwahati, the state capital.

I asked his take on his question.

The multifaceted relationship, he said, had “greatly helped some sectors of our economy, but we have to pull up our nation, not just certain classes.”

We parted company as I headed for the home of the late professor and historian Sujit Chowdhury.  An old friend, Chowdhury died after I had met him in 2007 at his home in Karimganj, an unhurried town of 52,000 people, which evokes fond memories of my boyhood visits with relatives.  I wanted to pay a courtesy call to my friend’s widow.

Chowdhury was a lot more upbeat than Basu about U.S.-India relationship.  He expected it to create “a brave new world of progress and prosperity.”

Washington and New Delhi began their “strategic partnership” as the Bush administration wanted to enlist India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist government in its “war on terror,” tap the huge Indian market and help build India as a counterweight to China. America became India’s largest trading partner, biggest investor and biggest provider of advanced technology.

Prodded by the American nuclear-commercial-lobby, America signed a civil nuclear agreement with India to launch lucrative nuclear trade with it. Nuclear trade would have been prohibited under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. New Delhi hadn’t joined the treaty but would need to buy nuclear technology form countries in a nuclear suppliers’ cartel, called the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. That cartel required compliance with the NPT guidelines for the purchase of its technology.  At U.S. insistence, the 45-member grouping granted India a waiver from NPT rules.

Most Indians were euphoric and expected nationwide prosperity from their partnership with the wealthiest nation.

The relationship promises to continue to stimulate the Indian economy, but has been showing considerable strains.  Washington had allowed India to build trade, economic and strategic relations with Afghanistan.  That infuriated Pakistan, which saw itself being encircled by its archenemy, India. For all their feuds with Pakistan, Americans need Pakistani help to strike a deal with the Taliban. So the United States put a break on India’s Afghan projects, angering Indians.

New Delhi, for its part, defied U.S. sanctions against Iran.  Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told Americans bluntly that relations with Iran were “a fundamental component” of Indian foreign policy.

Most troubling to Indians has been what Indian columnist Anil Kakodkar called America’s “double-cross of India.” As mentioned, nuclear technology suppliers’ group had waived their restrictions on India. But this past June, the group tightened its rules, virtually nullifying that waiver. To Indians’ dismay, the United States abstained on the cartel’s vote, instead of voicing its opposition.

To infuriate the Indians further, Washington insisted that the stricter suppliers’ rules “in no way detract from the exception granted to India.”  Indians knew that wasn’t true.

Meanwhile, India’s center-left Congress party government, which has replaced that of the rightists, has mostly reversed the Hindu nationalist tilt toward Israel on its confrontation with the Palestinians. Ignoring U.S. pleas, New Delhi recently voted for the Palestinian membership of UNESCO.

America has learned, too, that while its China policy may in cases converge with India’s, it can’t “use” India against China.  Robert Blackwill, the Bush administration ambassador to India, envisioned Indian collaboration in containing China.  Recently he said ruefully that “there is no better way to clear a room of Indian strategists than to advocate containing China.”

Indians’ excitement about the burgeoning U.S. ties that I observed in the early 2000s has evaporated a great deal. Besides the above irritants, the kind of economic boom that many Indians had expected from their partnership with America just hasn’t happened, at least not yet. Many are disappointed to see the bonanza from these ties being scooped up by the high-tech and business communities, that it eludes the nearly 600 million poverty-stricken Indians.  As disturbing, India’s growth rate has dropped from 8.5 percent last year to 7.7 percent. Direct foreign investment plunged 32 percent last year to $24 billion, making it Asia’s only large economy to suffer a decline.

Yet both India and the United States know they can’t let these setbacks derail their ambitious economic and strategic partnerships.  New Delhi has been downplaying its differences with the United States, while Washington has launched a campaign to reassure Indians of its commitment to long-term, productive relationships.

On Oct. 20 President Obama sent his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, to New Delhi via Beijing to convey the message that his administration had moved past the G-2 (Group of Two) power structure with China, and embraced India in G-3 formation.  The following week  the U.S. consul general to Calcutta, Dean R. Thompson, assured Indians that America “has been trying with all sincerity to further improve its relations with India.”  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other American U.S. diplomats have also been hammering on this message.

I would have told Basu in Karimganj that U.S.-India relations seemed to me to have glided out of its initial peak on to a plateau.  But I wanted to hear his views, instead.

●Mustafa Malik, a columnist in Washington, is visiting his native Indian subcontinent. He hosts the blog site: ‘Islam and the West’– https://islam-and-west.com

Taliban fight for freedom, justice

Mustafa Malik October 25, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

SYLHET,  Bangladesh — Aunt Salima Khatun, my mother’s sister, barged in to see me here in the Bangladeshi town of Sylhet.  I spend part of my Bangladesh vacations in Sylhet, known for its tea gardens, cane furniture and the shrine of the famed Muslim saint Hazrat Shah Jalal.

Behind Aunt Salima was her grandson, a college student, carrying a big bowl. It had several dozen homemade sweets, wrapped in banana leaves under plastic covering.  They were made of flour, meshed with the delicious juice of a local fruit known as “tal” and other ingredients, before being rolled into round cakes and cooked.

“When you were a little boy, you loved ‘tal sandesh’ (tal sweets),” said my aunt, 81. “See if you like them.”

As the conversation progressed, she asked if I could bring the student over to the United States for further education.  He had been “pulling out my hair,” meaning badgering her, to make me the request, she added.  I apologized for my inability to help him get a U.S. visa.

The young man was, however, a member of an Islamic student group, which campaigns against U.S. and Israeli occupation of Muslim lands.  Why was President Obama “so viciously opposed” to Palestinians’ U.N. membership? he asked.  He was elated, however, that Muslim guerrillas were “throwing out the [Western] invaders” from Iraq and Afghanistan. Would Americans “dare to occupy a Muslim country again?”

His admiration for anti-American guerrillas is widely shared by most Muslims in South Asia, as I have learned during trips through the region.  Noor  M.  Khan, a family friend in the northeast Indian town of Haflong, told me during a visit there last year that “our mujahedeen [Islamic guerrillas] are our only hope against American imperialism.”  The Afghan mujahedeen drove back Russian invaders from Afghanistan in the 1980s, he continued.  Now thanks to the Taliban, American occupation forces would be fleeing Afghanistan, “peeing in their pants.”

Many South Asian Muslims, as many Muslims elsewhere, usually get to like Americans with whom they come in contact.   Many try to migrate to the United States for a better life.  If young, some of aspire to have an American education, as my aunt’s grandson does. Yet the same Muslims would be denouncing Americans vehemently for America’s “war on Islam.”

It’s a déjà vu of the last decades (1910s-1940s) of British colonial rule in what was then “British India.”  Those days many Indians had British friends. Many were educated in British schools or British-style secular schools in India.  Yet some of them joined the struggle to liberate their country from British colonialism.  British-sponsored education had taught them Western concepts of liberty and freedom and inspired them into anti-colonial struggle.

Justice is Islam’s core principle.  Muslims, secular or religious,  innately resist foreign hegemony because they consider it fundamentally unjust. Today most of the leaders and many activists of Muslim movements against U.S. invasions and domination  zest for freedom among Muslims, firing them up against American hegemony.  In earlier times, onset of modernity  stoked their struggles for freedom against European colonialism..

Modernity, it seems, has become the West’s Frankenstein’s monster!

But many of South Asia’s anti-American Muslim guerrillas are educated in madrassahs, or Islamic schools. They’re inspired by their innate antipathy for foreign military presence — which they share with many secularist activists — and pride in Islamic civilization, which madrassahs have inculcated in them.  In October 2007 a madrassah-educated Taliban supporter in Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal agency town of Ghalanai (whose name I promised not to publish) said to me that Muslims had built “the glorious Spanish civilization and taught Europeans the sciences and philosophy for more than 700 years.”  How many years, he asked, could “American Crusaders” stick around in Afghanistan?

The Taliban and other Pakistani and Afghan militants with only a madrassah education are also fighting for freedom from foreign occupation and domination.  Most of them just don’t know that freedom is a core American value that Americans once fought wrest from British colonialists.

Muslims youths are struggling to snatch that American ideal from the jaws of the American hegemon, which they consider unjust.

● Mustafa Malik is the host of the blog site Beyond Freedom.

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