Posts – mustafamalik.com

Time to get over anti-Islamist paranoia

Mustafa Malik March 23, 2013

ANDREW J. BACEVICH says “the big story of Muslim self-determination is likely to continue unimpeded” and lead to the rollback of American hegemony over Muslim societies. In his Washington Post piece, the historian recalled that when the British Empire was collapsing, it could turn over its “imperial responsibility” to the United States. But Americans today, he adds, see “no readily available sucker to to whom we can hand off the mess we’ve managed to create” in the Middle East.

I’ve long admired Professor Bacevich’s insights and agree that there doesn’t seem to be any takers of America’s “imperial responsibility” in Muslim societies. But I do see a whole lot of “suckers” jumping in to clean up “the mess” created in much of the Muslim world by American and European hegemons during past decades and centuries. They’re the same revolutionary youths who are liberating themselves from American hegemony as much as domestic autocratic tyranny. And they’re struggling to reform colonial-era institutions that they see stifling their societies‘ natural growth and evolution from their indigenous, Islamic roots.

For years I have been discussing Muslim affairs with young and not-so-young Muslim activists, ideologues and plain folks in the East and the West. A large majority of them don’t share the views of the so-called “Islamic extremists” such as the Salafis and Al Qaeda. Many maintain, however, that Muslim guerrilla groups, known in the west as “terrorists” and “extremists,” have waged the “necessary” struggle to liberate Muslims from tyranny and subjugation. The history of the Protestant Reformation and other ideological movements shows that the extremism associated by the early phases of those movements tapered off when the conditions that bred them changed. In contemporary Muslim societies, those conditions are political suppression and foreign aggression and domination.

A majority of Muslims in post-colonial societies also don’t identify with Westernized Muslim elites. Quizzed closely, they typically say that they would just want to live as Muslims, adhering to basic Islamic laws and values; and want their societies modernized fast. Moderates such as supporters of the Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia and the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East believe in peaceful and democratic methods of Islamizing their societies. Extremists such as the followers of the Taliban and Harkat al-Mujahideen in South Asia and the Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in the Middle East have few qualms using force to achieve their goals. But both Islamist categories want to change or modify the alien institutions and cultural patterns in Muslim countries.

They remind me of the Brazilian statesman, philosopher and social theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger. He argues that ideational and social change that brings fulfillment in life isn’t possible without freeing men and women “from their institutional chains,” or the “context” that creates the pernicious social, economic and political institutions. Unger taught Barack Obama at the Harvard Law School, but waged a media campaign last summer against the president’s reelection.

The professor says Obama and most Democrats are busy “humanizing” the Republican agenda, instead of trying to change the context, or the sources, of the economic and political malaise paralyzing America. Unger argues that “all that the Democratic Party has offered, at least since the presidency of [Lyndon] Johnson is a sugarcoating, a dilution, a humanization of the Republican program.” He calls the paradigmic shift he’s proposing “the second way.”

Few of the Muslim intellectuals and activists I have come to know appeared to have heard of Unger, but they echo his thesis nonetheless. They’re calling for conceptual and institutional change in their societies and polities. They denounce, or just ignore, Western-style secularism, the Western concept of privatizing religion, the colonial-era legal framework, and so forth. And they say they would want new institutions (about which most only have vague ideas) to build modern, progressive Muslim societies. Those societies would be based on the key Islamic values of social justice, charity and brotherhood.

The popularity of Islamist guerrilla groups in the Syrian civil war is the latest manifestation of the appeal of Islamic values among everyday Muslims. Earlier, Iranians, Turks, Iraqis, Egyptians, Tunisians and other Muslim peoples have demonstrated their preference for social and political orders based on Islamic principles.

The Islamic reassertion has spurred a lot of American paranoia about Muslims in America and Muslim countries. The Obama administration wouldn’t even give arms to Syrian rebels fighting the murderous Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which it wants overthrown, because Islamist guerrillas there have turned out to be the most effective and popular fighting force and could dominate the post-Assad Israeli society. “I am very concerned,” the president said in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Friday, “about Syria becoming an enclave of extremism.”

For many Americans, Muslims struggling to usher in what Unger would call a “second way” are “terrorists” by definition and need to be resisted or hunted down. The Shari’a, or Islamic law, has become a dirty word in American media and public discourse, even though most of the Muslim world lives under it, even under secular, pro-American governments.

In the United States, many innocent, law-abiding Muslims have been under surveillance since 9/11 in case they’ve any form of contacts with Muslims suspected of terrorist proclivity. American law denies Muslims designated “enemy combatants” by the administration the right to be tried in civil courts under American law. Mosque building creates public hysteria in many neighborhoods.

The atmosphere is reminiscent of the McCarthy-era hysteria about communism, which swept up American conservatives and liberals alike. The icon of American liberalism Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota joined the right-wing Republican Senator John Marshall Butler of Maryland to get the notorious Communist Control Act of 1954 passed by the Senate. Other liberal Democratic senators who supported the Butler-Humphrey bill included John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Paul Douglas of Illinois, and Wayne Morse of Oregon.

What makes America work, however, is Americans’ sense of pragmatism. The paranoia about the Other usually evaporates when they fail to prevail against it. After a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race, the United States realized by the late 1960s that it can’t defeat international communism, after all. And lo and behold, the rabidly anti-Communist President Richard Nixon did a U-turn and began normalizing relations with the Soviet Union and China.

Today, America — even with its military might, costly nation-building projects and candy distribution among Muslim children — has all but lost the ground war against Islamist guerrillas in Iraq and Afghanistan. It can now see that its drone war in several Muslim countries can’t stem the spread of Islamist militancy. Al Qaeda, which had hunkered down in Afghanistan, and other militant Islamist groups have spread to large swaths of the Middle East and North and West Africa. Last week, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer pointed out that beginning with the Iraq war, “the bitter enmities between Al-Qaeda and other Salafist and Sunni Arab nationalist groups have given way to cooperation or even mergers.”

Sooner or later, I expect the United States — and the West — to do a U-turn in their confrontation with Islamism. Meanwhile, Islamist and other Muslim groups are changing “the context” of the evolution and modernization of their societies, and Islamic-Western relations.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Obama administration should, on a second thought, decide to begin the process. If not, I believe one of his successors to the American presidency will.

◆ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts the blog Islam and the West.

Bangladesh’s epic quest for identity

Mustafa Malik March 4, 2013

I’M SADDENED by the bloody mayhem rocking Bangladesh, where I lived and worked through two turbulent decades. Street fights between the country’s secularist government forces and Islamist activists have claimed dozens of lives. The clashes were triggered by a death sentence handed by a Bangladeshi court to a leader of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami. Maulana Delwar Hussein Saeedi, the death row inmate, and other top Jamaat leaders have been charged with having roles in the killing of Bangladeshi liberation activists 42 years ago.

The Islamist leaders have been put on trial by the Awami League party government, supported by a secularist youth movement. The Awami League is the party of the country’s secularist founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, which had been in power nearly a dozen times since Bangladesh achieved independence. But it ignored the Islamists’ alleged crime until now. The other day I called a friend in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, and asked why.

“Because public support [for the trials] was not there,” he replied. “Now huge crowds are calling for their death penalty.”

This is a new twist to Bangladeshis’ long odyssey to find their niche in a national framework, as most other post-colonial societies have been going through. It began with the end of nearly two centuries of British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, which had obliterated the political structures that had been evolving there over the millennia. Bangladeshis, as other communities in the subcontinent, now faced the baffling task of choosing the space, ideology and cultural pattern for a nation-state they were called upon to build.

Nearly 90 percent Muslim, Bangladesh comprises the eastern half of the old Bengal, which became Pakistan’s eastern province in 1947. Those days Bengali Muslims pulsated with Islamic fervor. They plunged headlong into the movement to split British India to create the Muslim state of Pakistan. A stalwart of the Pakistan movement was young Mujibur Rahman.

Years later Mujib would tell me about his work for the Pakistan movement at his home in Dhaka. He said, proudly, that undivided Muslim-majority Bengal was “the only province in all [British] India that elected a pro-Pakistan government” in a 1946 election, which legitimized the Muslim demand for Pakistan. The four provinces in then West Pakistan, he added, had larger Muslim majorities, but that none of them voted to join Pakistan. I interviewed Mujib now and then for my column in what used to be the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published in Dhaka.

Once East Bengal became East Pakistan, however, the Islamic wave there began to give way to a growing secularist one. As elsewhere in the world, ideological movements in Bangladesh began to lose steam after their immediate goals were realized. Additionally, the use of Islamic slogans by West Pakistani elites in their economic exploitation and political suppression of East Pakistanis discredited Islamic political parties. Mujib now rode the crest of the secularist tide, bringing about East Pakistan’s secession from Pakistan and emergence as independent Bangladesh. The East Pakistanis who opposed that secession included the Islamists who are now facing trial for “treason.”

Bangladeshis paid a heavy price for their independence. During spring through mid-winter of 1971, West Pakistani troops slaughtered thousands of innocent men, women and children; and raped many Bangladeshi girls and women; while trying to suppress the movement. Post-independence, the Mujib government got “secularism” enshrined in Bangladesh’s first constitution as among its foundational principles.

But then, just as the Islamic wave in East Pakistan had begun to recede after the creation of Pakistan, the secularist wave in Bangladesh tapered off almost immediately after its independence from Pakistan. Now the Islamic surge that had accompanied the Pakistan movement nearly three decades before began to revive with a vengeance.

Barely four years after Mujib created his “secular” and “socialist” Bangladesh, he and most of his family and Cabinet members were assassinated in coup d’teat by army officers. They resented his close ties to Hindu-majority India, which was seen exerting hegemony over Bangladesh. Most Bangladeshis shared this perception of him. Nobody mourned the “Father of the Nation” in public, let alone stage a protest against his assassination. Politicians who followed the new Islamic surge to power shelved the Mujib government’s secularist constitution, and at one point adopted a new one rebranding Bangladesh an “Islamic Republic.”

During trips to Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I saw droves of head-covered women milling about college campuses, where headscarves were a rarity during the country’s Pakistan phase. Mosques were proliferating all over Bangladesh and prayer congregations in many of them extended to the yards. Stores, automobiles, streets and schools for secular education flaunted Islamic names and signs as never before.

Hamidul Huq Chowdhury, an elder statesman who published my old newspaper, told me in 1982 that the new Islamic upsurge was “partly a reaction to an overdose of ‘Indiaphilia’” which disturbed many Islamic-minded Bangladeshis.

“But watch how long this [Islamic wind] lasts,” advised my old boss, a British-educated barrister.

Today’s secularist upsurge and the hounding of Islamists by secularists remind me of Chowdhury’s caveat. The point, though, is that while Bangladesh’s embattled Islamists and secularists have been going through ups and downs, neither side has been quite vanquished.

Neither needs to be. The histories of Western nations, many of them bloodier and more tumultuous, show that bitter ideological and political struggles often produce societal and national integration. Unlike many other nations, most Bangladeshis belong to a single religious community, Sunni Islamic; and a single ethnic community, Bengali. I can see them integrating into a relatively cohesive national society sooner than seems possible now. Meanwhile, as Bangladeshis go on modernizing, they will continue to secularize. But they’re unlikely to be unhinged from their Islamic cultural and social roots, anymore than any other modernizing Muslim society.

John Kerry: Same old same old

Mustafa Malik February 23, 2013

WELL, JOHN KERRY doesn’t have it, either!

I was curious to see if the new secretary of state’s “major speech” at the University of Virginia might finally signal a “change” in foreign policy, which President Obama had promised Americans during his first presidential run. Sadly, it didn’t.

John Kerry’s recipe to meet U.S. foreign policy challenges appeared to have been copied from the neoconservatives’ play book: trade, aid and democracy. All these have been tried. They didn’t work.

On international trade, the U.S. trade deficit has ballooned under Bush and Obama. With China, America’s most important trading partner, it has reached an historic high of $315 billion.

The United States has poured tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid, promoting secular education and bolstering security and military forces in countries that are breeding terrorists. The idea, floated by fertile neoconservative minds, is that young Muslim men are turning to terrorism because of poverty and joblessness and anti-Western hatred engendered by madrasah education. Despite America’s prodigious aid programs during the past decade, terror is winning America’s “war on terror.” Al Qaeda used to be holed up in Afghanistan’s Hindukush Mountains. It’s now spreading dramatically — so are other terrorist groups — in South Asia, the Middle East, North and West Africa, and elsewhere. After fighting its longest war in history, the United States is getting ready to flee Afghanistan without realizing Obama’s repeatedly proclaimed vow to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” the Taliban.

Kerry’s other proposition, i.e. helping build democracy abroad, is based on another pie-in-the-sky neoconservative mantra, namely that democracies are peaceable and buddy-buddy with one another. I wonder how the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee could have failed to notice that democracy is transforming secular, and – with the exception of Iraq – pro-American regimes into Islamist ones that care less about American democracy or American interests? Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey are among the examples.

Nobody would, of course, doubt Kerry’s sanity, but he apparently plans to defy Albert Einstein’s caveat against “doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.” But why?

The main source of the secretary of state’s predicament is not himself, but his boss. For all his soaring rhetoric, Obama came into the White House as a clean slate in international affairs. He didn’t – and still doesn’t – have a vision of his own about America’s relations with the world. Most naive and perilous has been the president’s lurch toward the right-wing foreign and defense policy aficionados who had helped create the mess abroad and whom he now expected to clean it up.

I was aghast to see him fill his key defense, intelligence and foreign policy posts with such right-wing diehards from the Bush administration as Robert Gates, Tom Donilon, John Brennan, James Jones, Dennis Ross, and others. Hillary Clinton also is a dyed-in-wool establishment figure. Her traditionalist worldview was highlighted in, among other issues, her unwavering support for the disastrous Iraq war, which she has persistently refused to call a mistake. I was hoping, in vain, that the president would bring over to his administration such progressive and resourceful minds as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Aaron David Miller, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Ann Marie Slaughter and Robert Unger. His nomination of Chuck Hagel for the defense secretary post seems to have been an aberration. I would be surprised if the forward-looking and (still) morally inspired former senator from Nebraska can withstand the pressure of jingoism permeating in the administration.

No wonder the Obama administration, in international affairs, looked like a third, and now probably a fourth, Bush-Cheney administration. Noam Chomsky aptly described the Democratic president as a “moderate Republican” who is a “reactionary” on civil liberties issues. It’s because Obama lacked, not only a grounding in foreign affairs, but the moral courage and commitment to break out of America’s outmoded foreign policy establishment.

◆ Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Islam and the West.’.

On to the Malian quagmire?

Mustafa Malik February 15, 2013

ISLAMIST GUERRILLAS are fighting back French and Malian forces in northern Mali, from where they were expelled last month by invading French forces. The Muslim militant group Mojwa (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa) has twice engaged the French in sustained gun battles in Gao, the region’s largest city. The guerrillas have vowed not to let up their struggle until foreigners are expelled from Mali.

I wonder if we’re going to see a replay of the Iraq and Afghanistan dramas in West Africa.

Although Mojwa has taken the lead in these attacks, Mali’s main Islamist organization, Ansar al-Din, and Al Qaeda-affiliated fighters are reportedly planning their own offensives against the invaders.

The French invasion was quickly supported by the United States, Canada, Britain, Belgium, Germany, and Denmark. The West, too, is trying to court the secular secessionist National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA). The Islamists had allied with the NMLA to “liberate” northern Mali – which they call Azawad – from Mali. Later the two groups split, and the Islamists wrested control of northern Mali from NMLA.

There’s a difference between the French-led Western invasion of Mali and the U.S.-led ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Mali, the Western governments are saying they’re after all at war with Islam, albeit an “extremist” wing of it. They strongly denied suggestions of the anti-Islamic nature of the Iraqi and Afghan invasions.

Are they really trying to roll back Islamic resurgence in West Africa? If so why? Can they have their “mission accomplished” in Africa, which they failed to do in the Middle East?

The reason that France and its Western allies have given for hounding the Malian “Islamic extremists” is that, if the militants can come to power in Mali, they would impose Islamic canon law, the Shari’a, in that country. The argument doesn’t make any sense. The Malian population is 90 percent Muslim. Introduction of Islamic law in a Muslim society didn’t cause Western military intervention ever before. It didn’t when Pakistan’s military dictator Muhammad Zia al-Haq clamped the Shari’a on Pakistan, getting Muslims flogged and given death sentences for infractions of his extreme version of Islamic law.

The West didn’t go to war or propose any kind of sanctions against Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his radical Islamists when they imposed another harsh version of Islamic law in Iran. Instead, sanctions were imposed on the Islamic Republic because of its holding Americans hostage, carrying on its uranium enrichment program, and other mundane reasons.

Indeed, the United States funded and armed the Afghan Islamic fundamentalist Mujahedeen in their war against Soviet invaders in Afghanistan. President Ronald Reagan was impressed by the Mujahedeen’s fierce resistance to the Communist invaders. In 1988 he counseled visiting Turkish military ruler Kenan Evren to promote Islamic education in Turkey as part of his battle with Communists and leftists.

In reality, the Malian war is about preserving and promoting Western economic and strategic interests in West Africa. The Islamists are facing the Western onslaught because they’re about the only forces that would resist Western hegemony and exploitation of their resources by the West. They’re the only ones fighting Western hegemony in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and in other Muslim societies.

Mali is the second-largest gold producer in West Africa, after South Africa. Several foreign companies have begun uranium exploration around Gao, where Islamist militants recently engaged French and Malian troops in a bitter fight. Diamond, iron, bauxite, copper and other minerals are also being explored in Mali.

The French depend heavily on uranium to run its nuclear reactors, which provide more than 75 percent of its electricity and make nuclear bombs. It was no surprise that while fighting Islamists in Mali, the French lost no time to rush special forces commandos to Niger to reinforce security around the French state-owned uranium mining company Avera there.

The United States has seized on the Malian crisis to beef up its strategic ties to that region. The Obama administration, besides providing logistical support to French forces in Mali, has signed a status-of-force agreement Niger to build a drone base there to conduct missions against Islamist groups in Africa. President Muhammad Issoufou of Niger told news media that he was planning “a long-term strategic relationship with the U.S.,” adding, “What is happening in northern Mali can happen to us.”

Western powers are aware of Africans’ sensitivity about Western “neo-colonialism.” Hence they’re anxious to localize their fight against Islamism. They’re the strengthening the military muscle of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional strategic and economic-development grouping. They plan to outsource their war on Islamism to pliant members of ECOWAS. Many of these regimes are themselves threatened by Islamist resurgence, and welcome security cooperation with the West. Chad, an ECOWAS members, already has sent several thousand troops to join the French-Malian assault on the Islamists.

The West and its West African allies may have short- or medium-term successes against the Islamists. The French and Malian government troops have dispersed the Islamist insurgents from the cities of northern Mali: Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. As mentioned, the West and the Malian government are trying to woo the secular NMLA in northern Mali. Many Malians opposed to the Islamists have hailed the invaders. They greeted visiting French President Francois Hollande with a boisterous applause. President Traore thanked “our brother” Hollande for the French intervention.

I have seen enough of adulation of invaders in the heady aftermath of invasions and its rapid evaporation. In 2003 the American invasion sparked jubilation among Kurdish secessionists in northern Iraq. Earlier, in 2001, Afghanistan’s dissident Tajik tribes fought on the front lines of the U.S. invasion. In 1971, Bangladeshi insurgents showered invading Indian troops with accolades and bouquets. In all these countries, early hospitality to foreign forces soon gave way to widespread public resistance to their presence.

Malians and West Africans are unlikely to be an exception. Mali’s Islamist guerrillas apparently made a strategic retreat to the desert and northern mountains, from where they begun to wage what’s likely to be a drawn-out struggle against foreign and Malian government forces. I’m afraid Mali is turning into the next Western quagmire after Iraq and Afghanistan.

If American experience in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen is any indication, the Western aggression would eventually bolster, rather than diminish, Islamic resurgence.

◆ Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts the blog Islam and the West.

Chuck Hagel: Oil did spark Iraq war

Mustafa Malik January 6, 2013

AS CHUCK HAGEL is about to be nominated for the defense secretary post, neocons and the Israel lobby have got their knives out. These henchmen of the Israeli right-wing masterminded the disastrous Iraq war. Most of us knew the war’s twofold goals: To take out Saddam Hussein because he was Israel’s fiercest and strongest Arab enemy; and to secure Iraq’s oil reserve – the fourth-largest in the world – for the West.

Most American politicians and media outlets, scared of the Israel lobby, kept their mouths shut about it. Among those who spoke out about the motives behind the Iraq invasion was then Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

Now The Lobby sees Hagel’s nomination hearing its payback time. Kristol and other right-wingers have waged a vicious and baseless propaganda war to derail his nomination. The issue on which they’re raising hell the most is Hagel’s remark that the United States was “fighting for oil” in Iraq. The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, a vacuous but high-profile neocon, blasted the former Nebraska senator’s remark as “vulgar and disgusting” and predicted that it “could be the straw that breaks the back of Hagel’s chances” to become the next U.S. defense secretary.

It turns out that it wasn’t just Bush administration critics who cited oil, along with Israel, as the main cause of the I2003 Iraq invasion, heavyweights within the Bush administration and its other supporters were saying it aloud, too. In a letter to Kristol, Michael Moore has reminded him of some of their comments:

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, writes in his memoir.

“Of course we should go to war for oil. It’s like saying, you’re going to war just for oxygen, just for food. We need oil. That’s a good reason to go to war,” Ann Coulter, right-wing columnist.

“Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that,” Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander.

Here’s a link to Moore’s letter:

https://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/my-friendly-offer-bill-kristol

Kashmiris try to globalize struggle

Mustafa Malik January 4, 2013

A Kashmiri Muslim noticed my Facebook comment about protests over the gang rape of a medical student in India. The 23-year-old woman has died of injuries from the brutal assault. I had applauded the electrifying protests in New Delhi and elsewhere in the country. And I had expressed hope that they would shame the Indian government and society into taking legislative and law-enforcement measures to curb rape and misogyny, which are widespread in India.

“Did you know,” asked the gentleman, “that more than 10,000 Kashmiri women have been gang-raped by Indian forces? I didn’t see you mention those heinous, those barbarous crimes.” I promised him to write this post.

Jammu and Kashmir, or Kashmir for short, is indeed one of history’s gravest tragedies, which has been virtually ignored by the “international community.” The Indian government is in a state of denial about its armed forces’ widely known gang-rape raids in the Kashmir Valley, where a rebellion against Indian rule has been raging for 24 years. Rebel sources claim that 10,042 Kashmiri Muslim women and girls have been raped by Indian troops. Their claim hasn’t been independently verified and the rape figure they provide seems too big to be credible.

But Kashmir, especially the Muslim valley, has been a human catastrophe. India has deployed about 600,000 mostly Hindu military and paramilitary troops to put down the Muslim uprising. These forces have, besides raping many women, killed some 60,000 protesters and others. In 2011 a human rights group discovered a number of unmarked mass graves in the valley with more than 2,000 bodies, obviously victims of Indian military action.

The Kashmir imbroglio has been complicated by the demographic makeup of the old kingdom. It comprises four ethnic patches. Two of them – the Indian-held valley and the Pakistan-held “Azad Kashmir” – are each 99 percent Muslim. Both are irreconcilably opposed to Indian rule. The other two segments — both under Indian rule — are Hindu-majority Jammu and Buddhist-majority Ladakh, and they would be amenable to remaining with India.

One reason the unrest in Kashmir festers for so long is the lack of international pressure or concern for the resolution of the predicament, over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars. Western, especially American, governments and societies are known for selective concern about rights and freedoms outside the West. You hear vociferous denunciation of infraction of human rights and democratic norms in Iran, an American enemy. You hear little about the horrible misogyny, rights abuses and authoritarian rule in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, with which America maintain cozy relations. Western amnesia about Kashmir has to be viewed in light of India being a world power, which has extensive trade and economic relations with other world powers. Yet the Kashmir issue isn’t going to go away.

For most of its history, the Himalayan princedom has been independent of states and empires that existed in the Indian plains. In 1947 the old India became independent of British colonial rule, and split into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Kashmir was given the options to join India or Pakistan or remain independent. It opted for independence. But then a Muslim tribal mob from Pakistan roared into Kashmir and occupied a third of it. India captured the other two-thirds after getting the the Hindu ruler of the Muslim-majority state to sign an “accession” agreement. The agreement recognized Kashmiris’ right of self-determination and stipulated that they would decide their political destiny through a plebiscite. The U.N. Security Council also passed a resolution, calling for the plebiscite.

India has since reneged on its plebiscite commitment and claims that Kashmir has become its “integral part.” The Kashmiris point out, however, that the public and politicians in British India had participated in continual elections and even formed a central government. But simultaneously, they continued their struggle for their independence from British colonial tutelage until they achieved it. Moreover, the decades-long Muslim uprising and India’s extremely brutal measures to suppress it don’t quite prove that the state is integrated into India. One can’t imagine Indians resorting to such mindless atrocities on the population of Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra, which is a real part of India.

For the past several years, the violent Muslim revolt in Kashmir is showing signs of exhaustion and life appears to be returning to normal. But Kashmiri Muslims are far from reconciled with Indian rule. On the contrary, a new generation of educated and technically savvy Kashmiri youth is ushering in a new phase of the struggle. They’re taking their cause to the global stage through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media outlets, and myriad web sites and other Internet forums.

This new campaign, somewhat like the Palestinian struggle, is meant to raise global and Indian public sensitivity about the suffering of the Kashmiris and their right to self-determination. Military and law enforcement tools, which New Delhi has used to suppress the upheaval, can be of little use in this arena. And the political climate of the 21st century, with its heightening sensitivity about human dignity and freedom, is unlikely to be conducive to the continued suppression of Kashmiris’ aspirations for freedom.

Any just and lasting settlement of the dispute has to take into account the deep-seated hostility of the two virtually all-Muslim parts of Kashmir toward Hindu-majority India. Polls have shown, though, that most inhabitants of the two Muslims segments would prefer becoming independent, rather than join Pakistan, let alone India. Pakistan opposes, as does India, opposes their independence. These Kashmiris would opt for Pakistan only if independence is off the table.

In any case, Kashmiris are insistent on nurturing their unique culture and values. It’s possible that one day a solution to this woeful tragedy would be found in Kashmiris in the Indian-occupied valley joining their ethnic kinfolk in Pakistan-occupied Kashmiri territory. But such a deal should ensure Kashmiris’ political and cultural autonomy.

◆ Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Islam and the West’.

Back to old Palestine?

Mustafa Malik December 2, 2012

Political columnist Pat Buchanan once described Capitol Hill as the third “Israeli-occupied territory” after the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Those days the White House frequently resisted Israeli pressure to support its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, while Congress routinely supported the Israeli stance.

Thursday, the Obama administration voted against the U.N. resolution that recognized the two Palestinian territories as a “state,” which has yet to become a full member of the world body. The U.S. vote was a high watermark in the current and last administrations’ support of Israeli colonial policies. Meanwhile, Israel has pulled out of Gaza. Buchanan could now argue that the White House has replaced Gaza as the third Israeli-occupied territory!

Israel has retaliated against the U.N. recognition of the Palestinian state by announcing the revival of a 3,000-home Jewish settlement project in a territory adjacent to Jerusalem, known as E1. The project would cut through the West Bank, making the creation of a viable state impossible,. Hence it had been suspended in 2009 under intense international pressure.

So what could come of the 138-9 U.N. vote recognizing the Palestinian state? Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, had told cheering General Assembly delegates that their landmark resolution would “save the two-state solution and salvage peace,” which he vowed to pursue through “negotiations” with the Israelis.

I wish I am wrong, but I see his vow to achieve negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians a pipe dream. It’s 19 years since the Oslo Peace Accords launched the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations. During those on-again, off-again talks, successive Israeli governments — both right-wing and centrist — have made abundantly clear that their maximum concessions would fall far short of Palestinians’ minimum demands. Those demands include the creation of a sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in East Jerusalem and return of thousands of Palestinian refugees to their homes and lands in Israel from where they were expelled by Jews in 1948.

The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority and assigned it the task of freezing the Palestinian struggle that could threaten Israel’s security. While the PA kept a lid on anti-Israeli protests and violence in the West Bank, Israel went on gobbling up large swaths of the Palestinian lands through the creation of new Jewish settlements. Together with the E1 project, these settlements are meant to be “facts on the ground” that would leave no room for a workable Palestinian state.

On the Palestinian and Arab side, swirling democracy movements have created another set of facts on the ground, which has further diminished the prospect of a “two-state solution,” meaning the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Democracy has cost Israel the two biggest pillars of its regional security system: Egypt and Turkey. For decades pro-Western secularist regimes in both these states maintained extensive security and commercial ties with Israel, defying their citizens’ overwhelming support for Palestinians and their nationalist cause. In both countries now, democratically elected Muslim governments are strongly opposed to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and suppression of Palestinians. During the recent Gaza conflict, the intervention of the Egyptian and Turkish governments, along with those of Tunisia and Qatar, prevented Israel from launching a land invasion of Gaza, which would have defeated Gaza’s Islamist Hamas regime.

So what lies ahead for the Palestinians and Israelis? The Gaza war has shown that Palestinian missiles can now rain on just about all parts of Israel, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Imagine Israel’s national nightmare when Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Lebanese Hezbollah will be able to equip those missiles with GPS and target them to Israel’s population centers and vital economic and industrial facilities. More significantly, while Israel’s E1 project is putting the last stitch on the coffin of the two-state solution, the old Palestine — comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza — is becoming a de facto bi-national state with a Palestinian majority. In such a state Jews can rule only by disenfranchising the majority Palestinians. Would the 21st century, especially the resurgent Arab Muslim world, live with apartheid in the Holy Land? If not, will most Jews reconcile with living under Palestinian domination?

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts the blog site ‘Islam and the West.’

Obama, Romney clueless about Islam

Mustafa Malik October 9, 2012

That was a shocker. On Monday, Mitt Romney launched a blistering, if empty, assault on President Obama’s allegedly “passive” policy toward Muslim extremists and terrorists. The Republican presidential nominee accused the president of not being able to tackle “violent extremists,” some of whom stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Obama “passive” about extremists and terrorists? Actually, the president’s highly charged campaign against violent and many non-violent Muslim militants has been applauded more by jingoist Republicans than progressive Democrats. As I will argue, his — and Republicans’ — single-minded focus on extremists has left broad modernizing and democratizing Islamist movements in their blind spot.

Obama has eaten his 2008 campaign pledge and kept Gitmo open. He has continued the Bush-era Patriot Act, military tribunals, indefinite detentions and extraordinary renditions. And he has intensified and vastly expanded the drone war, killing hundreds of innocent children, women and men, while targeting terror suspects.

In reality, Muslim extremism has been declining steadily, which so far has eluded U.S. politicians and media. The Arab Spring is a glaring example. In the Middle East and North Africa, mainstream Islamists and other groups waged their democratic struggles peacefully. There were few anti-American slogans or burning of the American flag, even though America had long been supporting most of the repressive autocratic regimes they were tying to overthrow. Whatever violence has occurred between Arab protesters and their autocratic regimes was triggered by violent government crackdowns. Anti-American violence is being committed, as in the Benghazi case, mostly by fringe groups such as Al Qaeda, which have long been at odds with the U.S. Middle East policy.

The Islamist mainstreams’ transition to democracy has been facilitated by their growing popularity among the public, enabling them to pursue their agenda through the electoral process. During reporting trips in the Middle East and South Asia in the early 1970s, I found most Islamists espousing armed jihad against their secular autocratic regimes and foreign hegemons. Among them Matiur Rahman Nizami, the current head of the Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami party. In 1971 he and his Islamist party plunged into an armed struggle against the Bangladesh independence movement, fearing the secular nationalists would secularize Bangladeshi society and outlaw Islamist politics there.

Four years ago I dropped in to see Nizami, then the industries minister of a democratically elected Bangladeshi government, at his office in Dhaka, the country’s capital. I couldn’t believe my ears when he asserted that “democracy is the only way to serve Islam and Bangladesh.” His party had come to power (along with a secular party) through a peaceful democratic election. I have heard similar comments from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami ideologue Khurshid Ahmed and other Islamist or Islam-oriented leaders and activists.

The spread of Islamism through modern democracy has turned the old Western theory of modernization and secularization on its head. That theory said education, economic development and public participation in politics would, according to modernization theorist Daniel Lerner, lead to the “secular evolution of a participant society.” He added that “Islam is helpless” to resist the secularist tide. On the contrary, today’s modernizing Muslim societies are using the democratic process to Islamize.

Egypt’s dictatorships had persecuted the Muslim Brotherhood and banned it from politics for decades. Democracy has catapulted that Islamist organization to power, alongside a vibrant modernization process. Since 1980, Egypt’s national literacy rate has doubled to 71 percent. Especially encouraging is the literacy rate among young women aged 15-24, which is 82%, as UNICEF data show.

Democracy, too, has replaced Tunisia’s secular autocracy with the Islamist Ennahda party government. During the last three decades Tunisia’s literacy rate also has nearly doubled to 77 percent, with that of women 15-24 an enviable 96%.

As impressive is the pace of democratization and modernization in Turkey, which has replaced a military-dominated secularist regime with the democratic government of the Islam-oriented Justice and Development Party. Turkey’s literacy rate has jumped from 65% in 1980 to 94% this year, including 97% among women in the 15-24 age group.

Westerners who are rightly concerned about the backwardness of Muslim women mostly overlook today’s progressive and liberating trends. Large numbers of the young, educated Muslim women practice their faith and support Islamist movements.

Education and new winds of freedom have inspired Muslims with a deepening sense of self-worth and empowerment. They had been languishing under domestic autocratic suppression and foreign colonial subjugation for centuries. The awareness of self-worth has heightened their fervor and pride for their own religious and cultural heritage, which translate into pro-Islamist votes in the polling booths.

The United States should appreciate Islamism’s role in Muslim empowerment and the democratization of Muslim societies. It should broaden its mutually productive relations with Islamist governments. That would help neutralize Islamism’s extremist fringe, which has been feeding on the West’s hostility or disengagement with Islamist movements for freedom, dignity and democracy.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He host the blog, Islam and the West: https://islam-and-west.com

Obama’s sermon on extremism

Mustafa Malik September 28, 2012

President Obama told the U.N. General Assembly that Muslims must shun “extremism” and exercise “tolerance” for their adversaries. He was referring to the violence-prone protest rallies that the American film “Innocence of Muslims” has triggered in many Muslim countries. The amateurish video shows the Prophet Muhammad in pornographic poses and other demeaning postures.

Some Muslim societies are indeed honeycombed with anti-American and anti-Western extremists. The problem is, you can’t eliminate a vice while nursing it. Obama and many other Americans don’t seem to recognize America’s role in stirring Muslim extremism.

Muslim extremism and violence against America are fairly recent events. During the era of European colonialism, the Muslim world admired the United States for not colonizing a Muslim country and even criticizing European colonialism. In 1957 I was a schoolboy in what is now Muslim Bangladesh. I remember folks cheering America in front of a television set after hearing the news of foreign troops withdrawing from Egyptian territory. I learned much later that the Eisenhower administration had led the U.N. effort to force Israel, France and Britain to vacate the Suez Canal area they had occupied the previous year, following Egypt’s nationalization of the canal.

Systematic Muslim violence against America was rare until 1979. That year Iranian revolutionaries attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage. Through this indefensible action, they were venting their rage over the overthrow of their democratic government by the CIA in 1953 and the installation by the U.S. of a murderous monarchy they had just overthrown. Ever since, Muslims have resorted to anti-American protests and violence with greater frequency in response to American policies they see trampling Muslim interests or dignity.

I attribute the current spike in anti-Americanism among Muslims to three main reasons. First, the post-Cold War generation of Muslims are better educated and far more politically conscious than their forebears, thanks to the quickening pace of modernization and globalization. These Muslims have very little tolerance for foreign domination, and domestic political repression, for that matter. Secondly, during the last two decades, the United States has waged three major wars against Muslim countries: Iraq I and II, and Afghanistan.

These American-led invasions and the prolonged occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have enraged Muslims everywhere. Thirdly, modernization has, strangey as it many seem to many Westerners, imbued Muslims with greater appreciation of their own cultural values. Yet America and the West continue to seek to impose their liberal value system on Muslims societies, infuriating many Muslims. Western defense of the film “Innocence of Muslims,” the Danish Muhammad cartoons, the novel The Satanic Verses, etc., are classic examples of this cultural aggression. All these anti-Islamic materials have turned much of the Muslim world into a hotbed of extremists and terrorists.

Through the 1980s and 1990s U.S. administrations tried to tackle Muslim terrorism through legal tools, covert operations and torture by client governments. Then came 9/11. Fifteen of the 19 terrorists who hijacked aircraft to attack America were Saudis. The core cause of this horrible crime, as I learned during visits to Saudi Arabia, was the 1991 deployment of U.S. troops on that “land of Muhammad.”

America was unhinged by 9/11. Instead of pursuing the perpetrators of the crime, it plunged into a devastating war with Iraq, which had nothing to do 9/11; and a pointless one against Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda, a foreign group, planned the attacks on the United States. Tens of thousands of innocent Muslims have perished in the two wars, which have spread anti-Americanism among Muslims as never before. And they have proliferated Muslim guerrilla groups committed to rolling back American hegemony over Muslim societies.

These guerrillas have forced the United States to pull out of Iraq without achieving any of its strategic objectives. In Afghanistan, they have frustrated U.S. efforts to defeat them, compelling Washington to plan the withdrawal of most of its troops from that country by 2014.

One would have hoped that the Obama administration would take a serious look into the colossal failure of its formidable military machine to suppress Muslim militancy. Instead, the administration has lurched into a reckless, illegal and counterproductive drone war in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The Predator and Reaper drones are purported to be targeting terrorists. As I learned during two research trips to Pakistan’s tribal areas, local CIA informants all too often report their own adversaries or people simply venting anger at America as Taliban “terrorists.” The result: an unmitigated disaster.

A group of American academics has just put out its findings from nine months’ research of America’s drone wars. Barely 2 percent of the drone victims were known militants, said the 146-page report. Clive Stafford Smith, head of a charity working in Pakistan, told them that Pakistan’s “entire [tribal] region is being terrorized by constant threat of death from the skies.” People’s “way of life is collapsing,” he continued. “Kids are too terrified to go to school. Adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meetings, or anything that involves gathering in groups.”

The first step toward dousing Muslim hostility to America would be to review the U.S. policy and attitude toward Muslim societies. As long as Americans continue to their aggressive policy toward Muslim countries and tolerate the demonization of Muslims and their faith, as the video “Innocence of Muslims” represents, sermons about virtues of tolerance and vice of extremism would be greeted by Muslim youths with hoots of “hypocrisy.”

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington, who hosts the blog ‘Islam and the West.’

The outrage: Revisit free speech

Mustafa Malik September 15, 2012

(Published in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 2012)

It was a reprehensible crime. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. diplomatic staff members were nurturing excellent U.S.-Libyan relations until they were murdered by a Muslim mob in Benghazi. Many Libyans will fondly remember Stevens’ hard work to implement the U.S. policy to facilitate their liberation from Moammar Khadafy’s repressive dictatorship.

Unfortunately, these four innocent Americans have been the latest casualties of the West’s conscious or subconscious policy to foist its liberal ideology on unwilling Muslim societies. The amateurish movie “Innocence of Muslims,” produced in California by an Egyptian Copt and American evangelical Christians, portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a child molester and womanizer. It has triggered Muslim outrage in Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, Iran, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and probably elsewhere. But it conforms to the Western principles of freedom of speech and separation of church and state. So did the Muhammad cartoons published by a Danish newspaper, the anti-Quran movie produced by Holland’s Greet Wilder, Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” published in the United Kingdom, and other anti-Islamic works put out in the West.

All these incidents sparked indignation throughout the Muslim world. Yet Western statesmen and media generally defended the artists’ and authors’ right to produce these materials, citing the free-speech principle, even though some questioned the wisdom behind the projects.

Westerners are mostly comfortable with unbridled freedom of expression and the privatization of religion because these doctrines have evolved from the West’s unique historical experience. They stemmed from a reaction to the Catholic Church’s suppression of freedoms, the Inquisition and fierce power struggles with secular governments. Historical memories of those traumatic episodes have engendered antipathy for religion and religious values among many Westerners.

Muslim history has had no such conflicts between the laity and religious hierarchy. In fact, the Sunni branch of Islam, to which nearly 90 percent of Muslims belong, has no religious hierarchy at all. And most Muslims — religious, agnostic or even non-believers — cherish their religious heritage. So do Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and many other non-Western religious communities. Western governments and most Western citizens don’t seem to recognize this diversity of value systems, so they insist on universal applicability of their liberal ideology and its doctrine of freedom of expression.

They have waived the free-speech principle, however, in cases of Holocaust denials, racial slurs, advocacy of terrorism and other expressions that could endanger Western social order or national security. But they have persistently refused to prevent the vilification of Islam.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has staunchly justified this stance in the case of the film “Innocence of Muslims,” citing America’s “long tradition of free expression.” She added that “we do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views no matter how distasteful they may be.”

This Western insensitivity to the Islamic faith and civilization has been a major source of the smoldering anti-Americanism in many Muslim countries. The key to defusing this ominous trend lies in overcoming the delusions about universality of the West’s liberal ideology.

Islam embraces some key Western political structures and values, such as nationalism and democracy, but it rejects others, such as the ban on religious ethical standards in political discourse, the denigration of Islam in the name of speech freedom.

Islamic values and the cultural patterns built around them engender Muslims’ missions and aspirations and lend meaning to their lives. As a step toward reconciliation with anti-American Muslim masses around the world, the West should adopt measures to stop the misuse of the free-speech doctrine to attack Islam.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts the blog ‘Islam and the West’: https://islam-and-west.com.

Mustafa Malik

Stop, and look around you.

— Tolstoy

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