Tag: Islam

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.

Is Obama a Muslim?

Mustafa Malik September 8, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pakistan out of U.S. shadow

Mustafa Malik July 19, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Islam Egypt Islamists’ goal

Mustafa Malik June 26, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bangladesh’s Islamic modernity

Mustafa Malik June 13, 2012

By Mustafa Malik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy fluid in Bangladesh

Mustafa Malik June 12, 2012

By Mustafa Malik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taliban fight for freedom, justice

Mustafa Malik October 25, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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