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Secularism loses ground in Indian subcontinent

Mustafa Malik October 22, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

(Published in the Columbus Dispatch, October 12, 2011)

Bangladesh has had a big political surprise since my last visit here a year ago. Its staunchly secular Awami League party government has amended the constitution, making Islam the “state religion”! The amendment also gave the constitution this opening statement from the Quran: “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, and the Merciful.”

The event highlights the growing politicization of religion throughout the Indian subcontinent.

“It’s Allah’s revenge!” said Abdul Aziz, a friend from my college days in Sylhet, known for its 133 tea gardens and the shrine of the famed saint Shah Jalal.

Bangladesh, which is 90 percent Muslim, was founded by secularists who ushered in a constitution with “secularism” as its core principle. “It’s ironic,” Aziz said, “that the ‘Islamic state’ amendment was sponsored by [Prime Minister Sheikh] Hasina, who hates Islamic politics and parties.” Hasina turned to Islam, she said, because of “ground reality”: rapid Islamization of Bangladeshi society and politics. Islamist political parties are gaining popularity, mosques and madrassahs (Islamic schools) are proliferating and even secular politicians are trumpeting Islamic causes.

The surge of religion in Bangladeshi politics follows the same trajectory as in the subcontinent’s other two nations: Pakistan and India. In both, democratization accompanies the growth of non-secular forces and ideologies.

The two top leaders of the struggle to create Muslim Pakistan — Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan– were secular, Oxford-educated lawyers. In the 1960s President Mohammad Ayub Khan campaigned vigorously to “modernize” Islam by reforming Islamic laws of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and so forth. By the mid-1970s, Pakistan was swamped by Islamic mass movements, leading to the Islamization of much of its legal system and cultural space. In democratized Pakistan mosques and madrassahs are mushrooming; head-covered women and bearded men abound in offices, schools and shopping malls; and anti-American Islamic militancy has diffused in the social mainstream.

Equally dramatic has been the rise of Hindu nationalism in mostly Hindu India. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the foremost leaders of the Indian independence struggle, were also secular, Oxford-educated lawyers. They opposed the creation of a Muslim Pakistan out of British India, arguing religion would, in Nehru’s words, “recede into the background” in a democratic India, and hence Muslim fears of discrimination by the Hindu majority were unfounded. Yet the Hindu nationalism snowballed after India’s independence in 1947. Hindu nationalists say India is a Hindu holy land (punya bhumi) and that Islam and Christianity are “foreign” creeds. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has thrice formed the national government. Relentless campaigning by Hindu fundamentalist groups –the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Shiv Sena — has spawned anti-Muslim xenophobia in society, politics and — even academia.

In 2007 I was invited to speak at a Republic Day (January 26) event at Vikram University in India’s holy city of Ujjain. Hearing my views the previous evening, the organizer of the meeting requested me to limit my talk to 20 minutes! The next day I found out why. During my speech I was booed by the audience. I had said, among other things, that “the founders of Pakistan clearly couldn’t foresee the Islamization of their society. One could also argue that the rise of Hindu nationalism and the travails of Indian Muslims have borne out their argument for the creation of a Muslim homeland.”

One reason for religious upsurge in the subcontinent’s public sphere is the “vernacularization” of democratic procedures. The secular institutions introduced by Westernized elites don’t resonate with many of the postcolonial-era Muslims and Hindus, whose values and outlook have been shaped by religion. Secondly, the idea of confining religion to the private sphere is alien to most Muslims and Hindus. As I wrote elsewhere, the separation of religion from state affairs was prompted by Europeans’ bitter experience of religious wars, church-state power struggle, pogroms and the Inquisition. Muslims, Hindus and most other non-Western faith groups didn’t go through such nightmares over religion and cherish their religious heritage. The Arab Spring is the latest example of the democratization process spurring religious upsurge in postcolonial societies.

Unfortunately, religious passion can also trigger interfaith hostility. In all three states of the subcontinent persecution of religious minorities has increased with the rise religious militancy. It’s time policy makers and peace makers in the three countries earnestly explore avenues for outreach and engagement among their religious communities.

● Mustafa Malik, a columnist in Washington, was born in India and worked as a journalist in the United States, Britain and Pakistan. He hosts the blog site Beyond Freedom: https://beyond-freedom.com.

Muslim democracies confuse US

Mustafa Malik September 14, 2011

(Published in the Daily Star, Lebanon, September 14, 2011; Dawn, Pakistan, September 13, 2011)

By Mustafa Malik

POLASHPUR, Bangladesh – Since September 11, 2001, I visited my mother four other times here in the village of Polashpur in northeastern Bangladesh. She is 92 and lives in my ancestral home, surrounded by three fish ponds and shaded by sprawling mango and jackfruit trees. Bangladeshis are nearly 90% Muslim, and on each of those four trips, neighbors peppered me with critical questions about America. Could the United States hold on to its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq? Why did Americans hate Islam? How badly were American Muslims being treated by them?

This time, though, their America-bashing has been less intense. One of them, alluding to Egyptian protesters’ attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo, wanted to know if the United States could still help preserve the “Israeli domination” over Arabs. When would U.S. troops would be leaving Afghanistan? asked another. Is the United States or China is “the stronger country now”? inquired yet another.

Some of these inquires and comments echoed sentiments I had recently encountered in the Middle East. On Aug. 21, Salim Kanoo, a schoolteacher in Manama, Bahrain, said to me that the Arab democratic movements would eventually target “U.S. bases and troops” near that city and in other Persian Gulf countries. Could America handle Arab democracy, which might bring anti-American forces to power? he asked.

America’s impending retreat from Afghanistan and Iraq, serious economic downturn and the Arab Spring have convinced many Muslims that the Muslim world is wiggling out of American hegemony. I can see, too, that war fatigue has set in much of America. Asked recently why Britain and France, rather than the United States, were leading the war effort in Libya, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said, “The fact is, we cannot afford more wars.”

The lesson of Vietnam, dismissed by neoconservative and other hawks, has begun to sink in among Americans. Vietnam’s main lesson, former defense secretary Robert McNamara said in 1995, was that “we failed to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting highly motivated people’s movements.”

Contemporary Muslim “people’s movements” have been fueled mainly by modernization and the strengthened bond of the global Muslim community, the umma. Twenty-five years ago few people in Polashpur would have wanted to discuss foreign invasion of a far-away Muslim country. The countryside village had then no electricity, no telephones, no newspaper readers, one college graduate and one or two radio sets. Today my home and a host of others are electrified. Just about every family has one or more mobile phones. College graduates and students abound. So do radio sets and news consumers, many of whom flock to the nearby Ratanganj bazaar to read newspapers. Dozens of Polashpuris live and work in towns and cities in Bangladesh and abroad.

The heightened awareness of the world and of the spread of the ideas of the rights and democracy have plunged a number of Muslim societies into struggles for freedom – against domestic tyranny on the one hand and foreign occupation and hegemony on the other. The Arab Spring belongs to the former category of struggle. The struggle against the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq belong to the other.

The Information Age has helped bring Muslims everywhere in wider and closer mutual interaction, bolstering their umma bond. A Pew Research Center survey found last year that Muslims in most countries consider themselves Muslims first and citizens of their countries secondarily. A research project I conducted in the late 1990s revealed that a key source of Muslims’ deepened affinity with their global community is their disenchantment with post-colonial-era nation-states and state institutions. Most of today’s Muslim states were carved out often capriciously by European colonial powers. These states are run through legal systems that are often alien to local social norms by badly corrupt and uncaring bureaucracies and governments. No wonder citizens of these states feel stronger pull of their faith and global community than of the corrupt institutions of their artificial states.

So when the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan or waged its anti-terror campaign killing, maiming and harassing Muslims, anti-American sentiments ratcheted up around the Muslim world, including in Polashpur, as I had observed during my earlier visits.

The impotence of the American military power – shown in the “war on terror” and in Iraq and Afghanistan — has helped rejuvenate Muslim movements against U.S. and Israeli hegemony as much as domestic political repression. Muslim societies that are evolving from the two-pronged struggle are likely to go through a period of turmoil, which accompanied the democratization process in almost every Western country. Eventually, they are expected to settle down as stable democracies. Muslim democracies would, however, be underpinned by Islamic social and cultural values, as we see in Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan. Egypt, Libya, Yemen and most of the other Muslim societies struggling to democratize are expected follow the same path. In fact the new Libyan leader, Abdul Jalil, has announced that “Shari’a [Islamic law] will be the mail source of law” in a democratic Libya.

Post-9/11 United States, where paranoia about “political Islam” has stalked large swaths of society and much of the foreign policy establishment, would be facing the challenge of handling democracies with Islam spanning much of the public sphere. But America has been a pragmatic society. Americans appear to have begun to take stock of the futility of their campaign to defeat “terror” and stem the tide of Islamic politics. Eventually, they are likely to appreciate the need to do business with resurgent Islam. As I told the Bahraini schoolteacher, Americans will come around to adapting to Muslim democracies as they did to the Communist Soviet Union and China.

• Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington and host of the blog site Islam and the West: https://islam-and-west.com.

POLASHPUR, Bangladesh – After 9/11 I had visited my mother four other times here in the village of Polashpur in northeastern Bangladesh. She is 92 and lives in my ancestral home, surrounded by three fish ponds and shaded by sprawling mango and jackfruit trees. Bangladeshis are nearly 90% Muslim, and on each of those four trips, neighbors peppered me with critical questions about America. Could the United States hold on to its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq? Why did Americans hate Islam? How badly were American Muslims being treated by them?

• Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington.

U.S. policy threatens Pakistan’s stability

Mustafa Malik September 2, 2011

Book Review: Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; Fall 2011

By Mustafa Malik

THE QUESTION once again: Is Pakistan a ‘failed state’ that’s going to bite the dust?

Anatol Lieven is among the latest authors to try an answer. His book Pakistan: A Hard Country is a broad and detailed survey of the security, economic, social, political and ecological challenges facing Pakistan. But he argues that a greater threat to Pakistan’s security is posed by the United States and India.

India has been Pakistan’s archenemy, with which it has fought three wars, two of them over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, or Kashmir for short. Muslim Pakistan (including what is now Bangladesh) was carved out of British India in 1947 on the principle – agreed to by its Hindu and Muslim leaders and the departing British colonial power – that the subcontinent’s Muslim-majority territories should become the independent state of Pakistan. The rest of British India would be the independent Hindu-majority India. Pakistanis believe that India, which occupies two-thirds of the Muslim-majority Kashmir, is violating the foundational principles of the partition of the subcontinent.

Lieven analyzes, extensively, Pakistan’s serious economic crises, never-ending ethnic and sectarian strife, and growing water shortages. He considers the problem potentially the gravest threat to Pakistan’s survival. He demonstrates his best insights on the question of Pakistan’s stability, especially whether terrorism is going to undo the problem-ridden state.

A professor at King’s College in London, Lieven examines four kinds of terrorism roiling Pakistan. First, the Pakistani Taliban and allied groups are crossing over to Afghanistan and fighting the U.S. and NATO forces there. Secondly, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa wage campaigns of violence in India to vent their rage at the Indian occupation of Kashmir, and most Pakistanis approve of their action. Thirdly, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba, which belong to the majority Sunni Muslim sect, are striking Shia Muslim targets in Pakistan. Finally, the Taliban, Jaish-e-Muhammad and other militant groups are also attacking Pakistan’s military forces and civilian institutions because they have branded the Pakistani military and civilian government America’s “slaves” for joining the U.S. “war on terror” against militant Muslim groups in Pakistan.

Embarrassed by this kind of criticism, which is also widespread among the Pakistani public, the Pakistani government and army brass, as well as the United States, are arguing that Pakistani military forces are actually defending Pakistan against these militants. They cite militant attacks on Pakistani installations. Americans add that these militant assaults, together with economic and other problems, threaten to make Pakistan a “failed state.”

The author agrees that militant violence has been a major part of the bloody mayhem Pakistan is going through in the anti-terror campaign. “By February 2010,” he points out, “according to official figures, 7,598 civilians had died in Pakistan as a result of terrorist attacks, Taliban executions, military action or drone attacks. It is worth noting that this figure is two and a half times the number of Americans killed on 9/11.”

But Pakistanis view America as the source of the whole phenomenon of terrorism and social turmoil in their country. The Taliban didn’t begin to organize and Al Qaeda didn’t exist in Pakistan before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. “Before 9/11,” Lieven quotes a Pakistani activist as saying, “there was no terrorism in Pakistan. Once America has left Afghanistan, our society will sort itself out.”

In reality, despite their violence, the Anti-American and anti-Indian militant groups enjoy wide support among military ranks and the public. And the Pakistan army, the author says, “has been forced into alliance with the US which a majority of Pakistani society – including soldiers’ own families – detest.”

Most Pakistanis have been anti-American because of America’s support for Israel, perceived hostility to Islam and invasion of Iraq and, especially the neighboring Afghanistan. Afghanistan provides Pakistan its “strategic depth” again India, and Pakistanis are always leery about foreign hegemony over Afghanistan. Also, Pakistan is the home of twice as many Pashtun as live in Afghanistan, who are fighting to expel NATO forces from that country.

Many Pakistanis recall the massive American aid and arms supplies to Afghan Mujahedeen in their struggle to roll back the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and they “see Afghan Taliban as engaged in a legitimate war of resistance against [the U.S. and NATO] occupation, analogous to the Mujahidin war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.”

The Taliban’s violence against Pakistani military and other institutions are, however, resented by many Pakistanis. Educated Pakistanis become outraged when they see the Taliban forcing their puritanical form of Islamic religious and moral code on Pakistanis, meting out brutal punishment to villagers for violations of that code. Yet most Pakistanis don’t consider them or their violence a threat to the stability of the state.

The author argues that terrorists can’t destabilize the Pakistani state “unless the US indirectly gives them a helping hand.” By indirect U.S. action, he apparently means U.S. drone attacks on militant targets and other American anti-terror operations within Pakistan. He quotes a 2009 cable from then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, to the State Department, warning that U.S. drone and other attacks on Pakistani targets “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governing crisis in Pakistan.”

Significantly, the author also mentions the possibility of Pakistan being destabilized by direct U.S. invasion, maybe in collaboration with India. He doesn’t explain how and why America may invade Pakistan, but warns of its dire consequences. No conceivable gains “could compensate for the vastly increased threats to the region and the world that would stem from Pakistan’s collapse, and for the disasters that would result for Pakistan’s own peoples.”

On the question of possible U.S. invasion of Pakistan, Lieven echoes the fears of many Pakistanis, which some of them shared with me during research trips through Pakistan. Among them were a retired army colonel and a political activist. The retired army officer, whom I interviewed on condition of anonymity, said that “the hue and cry [in the United States] about terrorists stealing our so-called Islamic bomb” has been a “ruse to take out our nuclear weapons and facilities.” He recalled that in the mid-1980s Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the government of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to join Israel on an operation to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. He feared that if Mossad now revived its scheme, “it may have a partner” in New Delhi.

Muhammad Sirajul Islam, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) activist and resident of Karachi, voiced the same concern and added that the United States and Israel have never reconciled with “what they call our Islamic bomb.”

The roots of Pakistan’s belligerency and warfare with India lie in the dichotomy of self-image between Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent. In undivided British India, Hindus were three-fourths of the population, Muslims making up most of the other fourth. Hindus in general resented Muslims’ separate cultural niche and their demand for constitutional safeguards for their political representation and economic interests.

Without such safeguards, Muslims argued, “the brute majority” of Hindus in a majoritarian democracy would relegate them to permanent Hindu subordination. The Hindu leadership didn’t agree to the Muslim demands, and Muslims forced the partition of the old country to create a Muslim state. Most Hindus were furious at the partition, and some continue to nurture their hostility to the Muslim state.

Since partition, India has assumed a hegemonic posture on the subcontinent, to which Pakistanis isn’t reconciled. This historic Muslim-Hindu animus has been at the root of Pakistani-Indian hostility.

I’m more optimistic than the author about Pakistan’s future and its relations with the United States and Pakistan. I see Washington beginning to realize that its goal of eliminating Muslim anti-American militancy through military means is a pipe dream. Already, that realization has led to the Obama administration’s decision to begin pulling out American troops from Afghanistan, without being able to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” the Taleban, which President Obama had vowed to do. The administration also has all but given up on getting the Pakistan army to root out Taliban and Al Qaeda groups within its borders. In frustration, Washington has suspended a third of its annual aid package ($800 million) to Pakistan.

The United States is likely to better appreciate Pakistan’s strategic importance once it no

longer has boots on the ground in Afghanistan and anti-American militancy continues to percolate in South Asia.

The belligerency between Pakistan and India has already begun to abate. For one thing, Pakistan’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrent as of itself has made a large-scale Indian invasion of Pakistan almost inconceivable. Secondly, the unrelenting secession movement in the Indian-held Kashmir and India’s cool relations with Muslim Bangladesh, which it helped create, would make New Delhi extremely wary of a cataclysmic military campaign against the hornet’s nest of Muslim Pakistan. In Kashmir, India has tried all tricks to suppress the 22-year-long Muslim uprising and has to come to terms with the Kashmiris’ aspiration for some kind of self-determination.

Thirdly, my research has revealed that the memories of wars and the partition of the subcontinent, which have bred much of the India-Pakistan hostility, are fading among both Pakistanis and Indians. The generations that were most traumatized by those hostilities have mostly departed from the political scene. The lingering tensions between the two states, albeit much diminished, are now fueled by the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the army and some militant Muslim groups in Pakistan. The new generations of Pakistanis and Indians are more interested in peace and business between the two countries.

Thus while official bilateral trade between Pakistan and India amounts to only about 1 per cent of their respective global trade, Pakistani towns and bazaars, especially near the Pakistan-India border, are flooded with Indian goods. Indians’ interest in Pakistani music and literature, and the popularity of Indian movies and music in Pakistan, among other things, signal an inexorable trend toward normalization of relations between the two countries.

During its five millennia of their recorded history, peoples of the subcontinent have alternated many times between periods of relative harmony and hostility. While the boundaries between their states are likely to endure, the dark period of their mutual hostility spawned by the 1947 partition appears to be yielding gradually to new era of relative political, trade and economic harmony.

•Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog site Islam and the West: http:/islam-and-west.com/

Afghanistan eroding US hegemony

Mustafa Malik August 7, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

EVER SINCE THE U.S. NAVY SEALS killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the Obama administration is being urged by some progressives and conservatives to “declare victory and come home” from Afghanistan. The Taliban apparently have different ideas. They have ratcheted up their attacks on U.S. and NATO forces. The 30 deaths from their shooting down a U.S. Chinhook helicopter on Aug. 6 were the largest single-day American casualties of the decade-long war. They want to deny Americans any claim to victory.

In October 2007 a pro-Taliban schoolteacher in Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal agency told me why Americans would be “defeated like all other invaders” to Afghanistan. “They didn’t read Afghan history,” said the Pashtun in his 30s, whom I interviewed on condition of anonymity. Like many other Pakistanis and Afghans, he obviously was unaware that U.S. policy planners and commanders involved in the conflict have learned a great deal about Afghan history, military occupation and insurgencies.

I’ve had number conversations with American diplomats and strategists involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I was impressed to hear some of them allude to historians and analysts (Ian Becket, David Galula, Larry Cable, Amartya Sen, among others) who have criticized conventional occupation strategies and proposed cultural sensitivity and economic development models to combat insurgencies. U.S. rhetoric about “winning hearts and minds” and programs for economic development and institution building in Afghanistan and Pakistan show the administration’s commitment to those “soft power” strategies.

The problem is that these strategists and scholars are discounting a more basic lesson of Afghan and Muslim history. During the centuries of hegemonic contests between Islam and the West, Muslims have conquered and absorbed (through Islamization) a string of Christian societies in North Africa, the Fertile Crescent and the Asia Minor; but the West has failed to sustain its occupation of any Muslim country. Western occupying powers have failed to absorb Muslim cultures.

Islam inherited from Christianity the global mission to spread a faith and cultural pattern with all mankind. The biblical injunction “Go ye into the world and preach the Gospel to every creature” couldn’t, however, quite mesh with the Greco-Germanic values of individualism and rationalism. The Crusaders and many European colonialists inspired their flocks with the slogan of “saving the heathens.” But everybody knew theirs were mundane, imperialist projects.

The Islamic mission of Da’wa, or invitation to the Muslim faith and community, evolved in non-Western communitarian societies. Islamic jihad against foreign invasion and occupation has always been a communal affair. The anti-American insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq have been joined by Muslims from far-off lands. Globalization; the explosion of trans-local social networks, trade and migration; and the consequent erosion of national sovereignty are sending people around the world scurrying into the more enduring religious, ethnic and social structures. For many Muslims, the Islamic community, the umma, is that structure. The bond of the umma has been driving more and more Muslims toward jihad against foreign occupation.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars account for a quarter of America’s crippling national debt and recession. In about three decades, the U.S. economy is projected to slip behind China’s and get embroiled in fiercer competition with a host of other economies. America would then have far less appetite for the occupation foreign territory.

Is Afghanistan, together with Iraq, going to mark the end of the era of U.S. attempts at the occupation of Muslim lands?

Mustafa Malik hosts the blog Beyond Freedom: https://beyond-freedom.com.

Norway terror echoes clash of civilizations

Mustafa Malik July 28, 2011

THOMAS HEGGHAMMER, a Norwegian terrorism specialist, says Anders Behring Breivik is no different from Osama bin Laden, and he describes Breivik’s carnage in Oslo and Utoya Island as “an attempt to mirror Al Qaeda.”

I agree. I would add that both 9/11 and the Norwegian tragedy are part of the fallout of the latest “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West.

There has been continual clashes between the Islamic and Western civilizations, states and empires during the past 14 centuries. But each phase of their antagonism — while unleashing spasms of terror, death and destruction — has also produced salutary social and cultural renewal.

During the 7^th-17th centuries, Muslim armies conquered Christian kingdoms and empires in the Levant, North Africa, the Asia Minor and southeastern Europe and built in Spain the most advanced civilization of the time. Islamic conquest of Christian lands, painful as it was to Christian Europe, had its rewards. The spectacular intellectual flowering in the Abbasid and Moorish empires (A.D. 711-1492) — noted Henri Pirenne, Bernard Lewis and other historians — spurred the pursuit of learning among the mostly backward and poor Europeans. Muslim intellectuals had been feasting on the Greek philosophical tradition, banished from Europe by the Byzantines. They now transmitted the Greek rationalist philosophy back to Europe, helping enkindle the European Renaissance.

All the same, Muslim military and cultural thrust into Europe shocked the Christian continent and spurred its military and cultural counter-attack on Muslim countries, marking a high watermark of the clash of civilizations. The European military thrust culminated in the European colonization of the Muslim world, lasting 300 years. Now, as though replaying the European reaction to the earlier Islamic hegemony over parts of Europe, Muslims societies rose up to roll back European colonialism. And by the third quarter of the 20th century, Islamic anti-colonial jihad liberated the entire Islamic civilization from European colonial subjugation.

A byproduct of the European colonialism and post-colonial interaction between the two civilizations has been the enrichment of Muslim societies through the cultivation of Western values of liberty, freedom and democracy. The Arab Spring, a watershed in the renewal of the Islamic civilization, owes much to Islam’s encounter with the West.

For a few post-colonial decades, it seemed that the clash of the two civilizations had come to an end, at least for a while. Unfortunately, it appears to have resumed, mainly because of U.S. and Israeli aggression against, and occupation of, Muslim lands, and the continued Western hegemony over much of the Muslim world. This has fueled widespread Muslim rage and violence against America and the West. This latest clash of civilizations between the two historic, hegemonic contestants is unlikely to diminish much until the U.S., Israeli and European hegemony over Muslim societies is rolled back.

A salutary impact of this round of conflicts has been the rejuvenation of the Islamic campaign for political and cultural reassertion. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and the U.S. drone attacks and covert operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in the Muslim world have bolstered the global Muslim solidarity and Muslim interest in Islamic cultural symbols and social values.

Mustafa Malik hosts the blog Islam and the West.

U.S. policy smothers Pakistani freedom

Mustafa Malik July 8, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

WHILE THE PAKISTAN ARMY reels from public outcry over it highhandedness toward the press and public, a bribery scandal involving top generals has brought the army under international scrutiny.

Would this help bring the generals under civilian control and secure freedom and democracy in Pakistan, continually disrupted by military coups? Would the United States help that process by renouncing its traditional support for coup mongers in the Pakistan army?

The Washington Post, the Reuters news agency and other Western media organizations have put out a story about North Korea paying more than $3 million in bribes to top Pakistan army generals to obtain nuclear weapons technology from that country. The report is based on the publication of a North Korean letter to the “father of the Pakistani bomb,” Abdul Qadeer Khan, who claims to have served as the conduit for the bribe. Pakistan has confirmed the transfer of centrifuges and sophisticated drawings to North Korea but denies the bribery report.

Ever since the mid-1950s when the United States and Britain prodded Pakistan into the anti-Communist alliance then known as the Baghdad Pact, the Pakistan army has been serving on the front lines of America’s wars against its enemies in that region. At the behest of the Carter and Reagan administrations, the Pakistan army directed and facilitated the decade-long guerrilla war that rolled back the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Pakistan army has now spent another decade fighting America’s “war on terror” against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Unlike the armed forces of other Muslim countries such as Turkey and Algeria, those from what became Pakistan loyally served foreign colonial power, the British, while politicians and the public fought for national independence. Once politicians created nation, the Pakistan army became busy overthrowing one democratic government after another and establishing dictatorships. While democracy flourishes in neighboring India, military adventurism has kept it from maturing in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the United States and Britain have coddled each of the four Pakistan army dictators, obviously as a payback for their support for Western strategic interests.

Times have changed, however. The current generation of Pakistanis seems fed up with the corruption, swagger and lust for political power among the Pakistan army leadership. Pakistani youth, along with news media, are vociferously demanding the army’s accountability, an unprecedented development in Pakistan. Part of their ire against the military stems from its participation in the U.S. “war on terror,” which has cost the lives of 35,000 civilians and 5,000 army troops in Pakistan. Polls have shown that more than 80 percent of Pakistanis, and the anti-terror campaign is a main source of their anti-Americanism.

Continued U.S. reliance on corrupt generals — and politicians — to promote U.S. foreign policy goals in the region would further inflame Pakistani public opinion. And that wouldn’t work any longer. The Pakistan army can no longer deliver Pakistan to America and the West. Open criticism of U.S. policy by traditionally pro-American Pakistani generals shows that they can no longer defy the public opinion to act on American bidding, as it has done for decades.

The Obama administration should be doing business primarily with Pakistan’s democratic government, renouncing its decades-old policy of bypassing civilian authorities to deal with the military. That would facilitate civilian control of the military, a necessary step to promote democracy in and douse anti-Americanism in Pakistan.

Mustafa Malik is the host of the blog Beyond Freedom: https://beyond-freedom.com.

26 hours in Pakistani torture chamber

Mustafa Malik June 10, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

(Published in the Daily Star, Lebanon, June 10; Islam and the West, June 10; and the Asia Times, Hong Kong, June 6, 2011)

I’M SADDENED but not surprised by news of the slaying of Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shehzad. He didn’t have an American passport or other credentials that apparently had enabled me to come out in one piece from a dungeon run by Pakistani intelligence.

Shehzad’s “killing bears all the hallmarks of previous killings perpetrated by Pakistani intelligence agencies,” says Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan representative for Human Rights Watch. The Asia Times correspondent had antagonized Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate by exposing the Pakistani navy’s links to militant groups. Dedicated to his profession, he had defied the ISI’s warnings against digging too deep into military matters.

I have known about the travails of numerous other journalists, including myself, who incurred the wrath of Pakistani intelligence and military services; the lines between the military and intelligence are blurred. On Aug. 21, 1989, I was interviewing retired Pakistani army general Khalid Mahmud Arif at the Rawalpindi offices of then army chief of staff Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg. I was on a research trip to Pakistan. I told the general that I had heard complaints from Pakistani politicians about Pakistan’s huge military budget, 36.7 percent of the total national budget outlays the previous year. And I inquired if it wasn’t time to seek peace with India against which “Pakistan can’t expect to prevail” in any armed conflict.

Visibly angry, Arif asked what made me think “Pakistan can’t prevail” in a war with India. I reminded him that the Pakistan army had lost all their three earlier wars with the Indians, and that in the 1971 conflict 93,000 Pakistani soldiers had been taken prisoners to India. Were the continual Pakistan army coups d’etat, I inquired, affecting its morale and professionalism? I would learn later that my interviewee had been deeply involved in the military coup led by the late Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq.

His eyes blazing in rage, the general ambushed me with a series of rapid-fire personal questions including one about whether I was a practicing Muslim. When I refused to answer some of them and wanted to leave, he ordered me to “wait” and left the room. Two armed guards prevented me from getting out. About 20 minutes later three plain-clothes men barged in; arrested, handcuffed and blindfolded me; placed a hood on my head; and drove me off to an unknown location. In a basement room with spooky images on the wall and smudges of dry blood (or perhaps red dye) on the floor, I was interrogated by two angry men. I realized it was a Pakistani intelligence torture chamber. Sporting wooden staffs, they harangued me about the quality of my upbringing as a Muslim, any links I could have with Indian intelligence, the reason for my “snooping” in Pakistan’s army headquarters, and so on.

During six years I had worked as a journalist in Pakistan, I had known how the Pakistani intelligence and military harassed, tortured and killed journalists. Now desperate to calm down Arif’s demons, I hastened to tell them that I had served as press secretary and speechwriter for their late Prime Minister Nurul Amin; that I was scheduled to interview then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto three days later; and that I was an American citizen and wanted to contact the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. The interrogation gradually became more civil, even though I had to wait for long hours before being released.

The U.S. Embassy vice consul Michael Gaye investigated the incident and told me Sept. 9, 1989, that my 26-hour ordeal had occurred at the hands of Pakistan’s Military Intelligence service. He promised to get back to me with his follow-up action but never did.

I wasn’t surprised. The United States traditionally ignored the Pakistani armed forces’ brutality to journalists and others and, of course, their recurrent coups against democratic governments. America needed their help during the Cold War and the Afghanistan war against the Soviets. To please Pakistani army generals, the Reagan administration even called off an FBI investigation into the 1988 plane crash that killed the American ambassador to Pakistan, along with the dictator Zia ul-Haq. The Pakistani army brass had indicated to their U.S. interlocutors that the blowing up of the C-130 aircraft had been an inside job, and that digging into it would “create problems” for them. Today America needs the help of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services to fight anti-American militants, and I don’t expect the Obama administration to review the U.S. policy of overlooking their excesses.

I’m hoping, however, that Pakistanis themselves would eventually “create problems” for their power-drunk military and intelligence authorities. A new, politicized generation and highly motivated news media appear to be in no mood to endure the military’s repression and usurpation of political power. In Pakistani streets and living rooms, Pakistani intelligence and army officers are excoriated, as never before, for their hubris, corruption and incompetence.

The Shehzad killing has been among the recent events that have highlighted this trend. It has rallied Pakistan’s journalist community, civil society groups, political activists and students behind the demand to bring his murderers to justice. I don’t know of an earlier death in Pakistani intelligence or military custody that triggered similar outrage throughout Pakistan. Shehzad has paid the ultimate price to help galvanize Pakistanis to reform the instruments of their repression, in this case the rogues in their military-intelligence establishment.

Reining in these vain men in arms will not be easy, especially because Pakistani armed forces have never known civilian control. I don’t believe, however, that they can remain immune to the driving winds of democracy and freedom that are swirling in Pakistan and its neighborhoods.

Mustafa Malik is the host of the blog Beyond Freedom: https://beyond-freedom.com.

Pakistan plays China card against U.S.

Mustafa Malik May 22, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

(Published in The San Francisco Chronicle, May 20; Islam and the West, May 22, 2011)

The rebuff couldn’t have been starker. Sen. John Kerry was probably still unwinding on his return from Pakistan when the Pakistani prime minister decided to test U.S. foreign policy. He declared in Shanghai, “China is a true friend and a time-tested and all-weather friend.” Translation: America isn’t a “true friend,” and Pakistan’s friendship with it didn’t stand the test of time.

In case anyone missed the point, Yousaf Raza Gilani added that China was “the first country to show its support and solidarity” with Pakistan after the U.S. Navy SEALS raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani town. Beijing had denounced the Navy SEALs’ incursion as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

In Islamabad, Kerry, D-Mass., had ruffled the feathers of Pakistani officials by declaring gratuitously May 15 that the purpose of his visit was “not to apologize” for the May 2 assault on the bin Laden house, which had infuriated Pakistanis. Further, he warned them about the congressional threat to cut off the $1.5 billion-a-year aid to Pakistan unless they cracked down harder on Taliban and al Qaeda guerrillas in their country. They needed to prove their commitment to the anti-terror campaign “with actions, not words,” demanded the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. President Obama often uses him as a trouble shooter when U.S. foreign policy is in a quandary.

The Pakistani prime minister’s China trip had been scheduled before the raid. But the anti-American tenor of Gilani’s remarks in Shanghai signaled that Pakistan had had enough of American “bullying” (as many Pakistanis describe it); that if need be, it could turn to other sources of economic and military support. Indeed, the hallmark of Gilani’s four-day trip was the signing of a series of agreements for China’s military, economic and financial aid to Pakistan and expansion of trade between the two countries.

Since long before the bin Laden raid, most of the Pakistan army generals, politicians and everyday citizens had become fed up with what they saw as Americans’ insensitivity to the huge sacrifices they were making in the anti-terror campaign. That campaign had cost Pakistan 35,000 civilian and 5,000 military lives and alienated much of the nation to its army and government. Yet Pakistanis in general view U.S. foreign policy as the cause of the terrorism that’s stalking their country.

During two trips, I was told over and over by Pakistanis from different walks of life that Pakistan hadn’t known suicide attacks until after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, that the Taliban began to organize in Pakistan only after that invasion and that their army and security forces were being used as “mercenaries” to fight “America’s war.” Most humiliating to many were Americans’ continual threats to cut off aid to ensure Islamabad’s compliance with U.S. demands.

China, of course, will be cautious not to let its expanding Pakistani ties jeopardize its economic and trade relations with the United States. Neither is Pakistan really spoiling for a fight with the United States or willing to endanger its substantial U.S. aid package. And the Obama administration knows that Pakistan’s cooperation and economic stability are crucial to its efforts to prevent it and Afghanistan from remaining terrorist havens. All the same, Gilani was using his China trip to warn Americans that they can’t take Pakistan for granted and that they need to treat it with greater respect.

Mustafa Malik, host of the blog Islam and the West, is a columnist in Washington. He worked as speechwriter and press aide for the late Pakistani Prime Minister Nurul Amin and carried out diplomatic assignments from the Pakistani government. Contact The Chronicle at sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1.

Aiding Arab freedom serves U.S.

Mustafa Malik April 21, 2011

(Published in the Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2011)

By Mustafa Malik

Democratization of Arab societies “would be a disaster” for the West, warns Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis. Yet he predicts that Islamic political parties are “very likely to win … genuinely fair and free elections” in the Arab world.

One of the West’s best-known historians of Islam, Lewis has echoed what many American intellectuals and politicians are saying in private. And sometimes in public. Democracy, they argue, brought Hamas “terrorists” to power in Palestine and has given Hezbollah “terrorists” a lock on the Lebanese government. Democracy has replaced Iraq’s staunchly secular and anti-Iranian — albeit autocratic — regime with a pro-Iranian pseudo-theocracy. And in Turkey, an anti-Israeli government rooted in Islam has replaced an ultra-secularist and pro-Israeli ruling establishment through free and fair elections.

Ironically, Lewis had personally lobbied former President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and democratize it and other Arab societies. Many Americans supported that campaign. The new drive to sit out Arab democratic upheavals is also shared by many Americans, especially politicians and pundits. Among them Nicholas Goldberg, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times.

“It would not be beneficial to the United States for the Middle East to be democratic,” Goldberg wrote. Democracy would replace the current pro-Western Arab governments, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, with anti-Western Islamic regimes. That would force the West “to pay a fair price for petroleum, which would shake the foundation of the [Western] economic system.”

Both the Arab democratization campaign of the last decade and today’s opposition to Arab democracy have a common goal: resisting Islamic forces from seizing the reins of government. Both are based on a dire misperception, i.e. that Islam-oriented regimes would necessarily endanger U.S. or Western interests.

It’s a tribute to the West that most of the Muslim and non-Muslim societies that once fought hard to throw off Western colonial yoke have adopted or are pursuing Western political institutions – political parties, elections, parliaments, press freedom, and so forth. Yet these societies remain deeply rooted in their own traditions and heritage. In fact the post-colonial Muslim and non-Muslim generations in the East are showing greater appreciation of their indigenous traditions than did their forebears who were brought up under Western colonial rule.

Thus in Muslim countries such as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Sudan, Westernized ruling elites have given or are giving way to political forces rooted in Islam. In others such as Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, India and Indonesia, political parties anchored to native traditions are on the rise and forcing the adaptation of their Western-oriented state laws to native traditions.

Islam is the bedrock of Muslim social and cultural traditions. Indigenization of a Muslim society’s political process means its adjustment to Islamic values and lifestyle. Decades of Western cultural and military campaigns have failed to stem this trend. Western antipathy or indifference toward Arab pro-democracy movements wouldn’t do it, either.

But the very concern that Islamic political activism would threaten Western interests is also unfounded. Sure, anti-Americanism is agitating many Muslim minds, and it sometimes triggers terrorism. But contemporary Muslim anti-Americanism has been spawned by the American invasion, occupation and domination of a host of Muslim societies, not by Islam.

At all events, if mighty imperial armies couldn’t suppress anti-colonial movements in earlier times, today’s feckless and tottering Arab autocracies can’t ride out the greatest Arab populist upheaval in a millennium. (The Arab nationalist movement of the early twentieth century was confined mostly to military and political elites.)

The Arab spring has given America and the West an opportunity to protect their interests in that region by cultivating the revolutionary forces that are going to shape the policies and agenda of tomorrow’s Arab states.

The Obama administration needs to drop its policy of supporting some Arab pro-democracy movements and ignoring others. It should adopt a bold and principled policy of defending and aiding all populist Arab struggles. Democratic or populist governments in the Persian Gulf may ask the West to “pay a fair price for petroleum.” A fair price would be cheaper than the high price that could be demanded by governments alienated by American apathy or indifference toward the struggles that would have brought them to power.

♦ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington. He conducted field research in a host of Middle Eastern and South Asian countries as a senior associate for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

U.S. liberals callous to Libyan uprising

Mustafa Malik March 30, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

President Obama always makes good speeches, and he gave an excellent one defending his administration’s participation in NATO’s military intervention in Libya.

The coalition bombing has averted, as the president pointed out, a “brutal repression and looming humanitarian crisis” brought on by Muammar Qadhafi’s forces. Even though the Qadhafi forces have halted the rebels’ advance toward his eastern strongholds, the United States and its allies aren’t going to let the dictator prevail.

I’m concerned about the resistance to the mission that the administration is facing from America’s political and intellectual establishments. Republican and Tea Party opposition to the operation was predictable. I’m disappointed, though not surprised, by the Democratic and, especially, liberal resistance to it. It’s hard to imagine more liberal Americans than Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington Post columnist Mark Shields and Rep. Denis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio. They’re leading a range of American liberals and progressives who oppose the U.S. role in the U.N.-sponsored military action. I’m not surprised by their stance because I have known conservative and liberal Americans who profess support for “universal” human rights and freedoms, but view their “universe” to be the West. (The neocons’ “democratization” propaganda about the Iraq war meant to camouflage a clumsy imperial project.)

I was a member of an “International Congress” that was pushing for military intervention to stop the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims. At our August 1995 conference in Bonn, Germany, my fellow U.S. delegates and I were elated to hear American liberals being hailed as “the bastion” of support for such a campaign. Coincidentally, the NATO bombing of Serbian aggressors began while we were heading back home. I didn’t hear Kucinich, Gelb, Shields or any other well-known American liberals denouncing the Clinton administration for leading that operation. Four years later when the United States led the NATO air raids to stop the Serbian army assaults on dissidents in Kosovo, American liberals applauded it. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are part of the West. Libya isn’t. Neither was Rwanda or Congo.

Kucinich and other liberals are criticizing Obama’s failure to obtain prior congressional approval of the Libya operation. More revealing, however, has been their silence about the morality of the campaign. Shields and others have offered a moral argument, which is equally telling. The administration, they say, didn’t prove how defending the Libyan uprising would serve America’s “vital interests.”

Suppose tomorrow troops loyal to a neo-Nazi dictator begin mowing down protesters in the streets of Berlin or Vienna. Would we hear them denounce U.S. involvement in a NATO military assault to stop it? I believe that Americans, including Shields, would then find it in America’s “vital interest” to support such intervention, just as they did in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.

I see defending the pro-democracy upheavals in Libya and other Arab countries serving an over-arching U.S. interest. Most Muslims and Arabs in west Asia and North Africa have been deeply anguished by the United States’ long-standing support for their repressive autocracies. Their resentment is the biggest challenge to U.S. security and economic interests in the Arab world. Embracing the “Arab spring” would help Washington douse the toxic anti-Americanism and court tomorrow’s rulers, generals and diplomats in that region.

Mustafa Malik

Stop, and look around you.

— Tolstoy

Category: Posts

Secularism loses ground in Indian subcontinent

Muslim democracies confuse US

U.S. policy threatens Pakistan’s stability

Afghanistan eroding US hegemony

Norway terror echoes clash of civilizations

U.S. policy smothers Pakistani freedom

26 hours in Pakistani torture chamber

Pakistan plays China card against U.S.

Aiding Arab freedom serves U.S.

U.S. liberals callous to Libyan uprising