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Arab News - Sept. 16, 2005
The Alternative Voice is not a hostile voice - Part I
By M. J. Akbar
On Sept. 9,2005, a select group of scholars and intellectuals gathered in Makkah at the invitation of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah. The objective of this “Preparatory Forum of Eminent Muslim Scholars” was clearly defined: To formulate, over three days of intense discussions in the shadow of the Kaaba, a new vision for the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the world body of the Islamic Ummah. The key word of the new vision was also clearly defined: Reform. M.J. Akbar was the only Indian invited to the forum. He presented these ideas, in which he outlined the response to the American neocon onslaught against Islam and Muslims, as well as the real challenges facing the Muslim world in the 21st century: Poverty, knowledge and equality.
Islam and Muslim nations, particularly those with energy resources, are being subjected to an intellectual assault, based on a carefully constructed dialectic, disseminated through mass media that must be challenged by facts and reason. We Muslims lose the argument when we become either submissive-defensive, or aggressive-hysterical. There is a lot of space in-between.
We need to establish that an alternative voice is not a hostile voice.
It is ironical that there should be so much misunderstanding between Americans and Muslims over faith, given that they may be the only true believers left. A Pew poll taken early this year indicated that 60 percent of Americans pray once a day, 70 percent say that the American president must have strong religious beliefs and 61 percent favor tighter restrictions on a moral issue like abortion. I do not have equivalent figures for Muslims, but in each category the number would probably be the same or higher. A Muslim president or prime minister makes it a point to be seen periodically at Friday prayers. Europe, in contrast, lost religion to rationalism or one of its byproducts, communism. Two European atheists, Marx and Lenin, had such impact that they ravaged Tao, Confucius and Buddha in half of Asia and Christ in half of Europe.
Religion is not limited to human reason. Faith is ethical, aesthetic, doctrinaire and inspirational. Islam acknowledges the power and beauty of the one Creator, Allah and accepts that while we may know how we are born and die, we do not know why. Muslims believe in existence before and after death: Inna lillahe wa inna e-laihe raajaoo (From Allah we come, to Allah we go). The Islamic view of heaven and hell is no more “unreasonable” than the Christian or Judaic one.
Problems arise when one incidental aspect of a faith is wrenched from context and used to demonize a religion and its believers. Every suicide mission is sneered at as a journey to the virgins of Heaven rather seen for what it often (though not always) is: A cry of despair. Even a cursory reading of the Islamic text indicates that we do not retain our physical bodies after death and that the needs and pleasures of this life are very different from those of the next. But allegory is deliberately misrepresented, because it seeks to trivialize the roots of sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of life. Demonization is conducted like a choir through the media and it must be answered. This answer must come from a common voice.
The Organization of Islamic Conference must have two sets of priorities: Tactical and strategic. An immediate priority is to establish that common voice to win the battle for the mind.
A critical fact: The intellectual onslaught against Muslims started long before 9/11, it was not a reaction. Huntington wrote about a clash of civilizations seven years before 9/11. It was a time when almost every Muslim nation had supported America in the wars for the liberation of Afghanistan and Kuwait. To blame the neocons is not enough. We have to answer them.
Judging by some of the reporting in the West, one would imagine that suicide was invented by Muslims. Suicide missions have always been an element of war tactics, with the highest honors being reserved for those who risk their lives to the maximum. One commentator wrote recently in the Guardian that surely Samson was the world’s most famous suicide-missionary. Japanese Air Force pilots in World War II made kamikaze a tool of battle. The American reaction was interesting and is still relevant. “The psychology behind (kamikaze) was too alien to us. Americans who fight to live, find it hard to realize that another people will fight to die,” said Adm. William Frederick Halsey (1884-1959), commander of the US 3rd Fleet, after the kamikaze attack on USS Intrepid, Oct. 25, 1944.
The Japanese did not view kamikaze as suicide: They called it a moral victory over cowards who take comfort in numbers. They told the pilots: “Put the sorrows and joys of life behind you, for as you move toward death you move toward heaven.” Vice Admiral Takiiro Onishi wrote a haiku for the pilots:
Blossoming today, tomorrow scattered
Life is like a delicate flower
Can one expect the fragrance to last forever?
The most effective use of suicide missions in what might be called irregular war has been made by the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who are Hindus. One such mission took the life of a beloved prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. But such has been the distortion of world opinion that the average person today believes that “terrorism” is something created by the doctrines of Islam. This is calumny of the most perfidious kind.
We must address the complex and emotive reaction to events like 9/11 and the London bombings. I do not agree with suicide missions, but surely we need to understand that they are not all alike. In some cases, as during the obvious occupation of territory by a foreign, hostile power, a suicide mission becomes an expression of the depths of a young person’s despair and desperation. We must work to end suicide missions by finding answers to that desperation. We must also define the difference between unacceptable terrorism and the need for struggle. There is no age in history without its share of problems and injustice. But if injustice is addressed through peaceful dialogue, which must always remain the objective of any sane individual or nation, then there is no need for armed struggle or suicide missions. This must be a central theme of our worldview.
A few weeks ago, in mid-August, I was at a seminar in Berlin on “Europe and Modern Islam”. My German hosts, members of a political party that hopes to be in power later this month, were neither prejudiced nor malicious; in fact they were anxious to build bridges over the stream of ignorance that has entered contemporary consciousness. And yet, almost every prejudiced nuance about Muslims was raised, almost always unconsciously. The chairman of one session kept criticizing female circumcision until I pointed out that its origins were African-tribal. The hijab, naturally, was mentioned, until I argued that covering the head was a normal symbol of modesty for women in the East across religious denominations — and that I had never ever seen an icon or painting by a Christian of the Virgin Mary in which she did not wear a form of hijab; and that every Catholic nun till today wore the traditional headdress.
It was a strange paradox, I thought, that a thong was considered civilized but a scarf was called barbaric. I heard the oft-repeated jibe that Muslims had not had their renaissance and had to point out that you needed renaissance only if you had gone through the Dark Ages: China, India, and the regions of the Ottoman Empire had no experience of such a dark age, for there were a hundred bookshops in Baghdad when Oxford University was still two hundred years away. A lady who had a doctorate said, in response to my remarks, that a Muslim had assassinated Mahatma Gandhi and was astonished when I pointed that a Brahmin called Godse had been the assassin.
Like so many other Muslims, I too have been taunted and told that my religion is nothing but “jihad”. I am not defensive about the basic tenets of my faith. Islam is a religion of peace, but it recognizes that in certain conditions, war may be forced upon you. It defines a legitimate war vis-à-vis an illegitimate one. Jihad is a war against injustice. The Prophet (PBUH) never took up arms during the long years of oppression and tyranny in Makkah; the war verses of the Qur’an were revealed only when persecution began to try and destroy the faith, and the Prophet was forced to take up arms against injustice. Jihad has clear rules: It has been stressed that you cannot kill women, children and innocents in a jihad; you cannot even destroy palm trees. And hence my proposition: Every jihad is a war fought by Muslims, but every war fought by Muslims is not a jihad.
http://arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=70162&d=16&m=9&y=2005
Arab News – Sept. 17, 2005
The Alternative Voice is not a hostile voice - Part II
M. J. Akbar
Yesterday I mentioned that a few weeks ago, in mid-August, I was at a seminar in Berlin on “Europe and Modern Islam”. The very title of the seminar was nonsense. To begin with, there is nothing called modern or medieval or ancient Islam; Islam is Islam. Second, “West” is geography and “Islam” is a religion. How can you compare the two? You can discuss the West and West Asia, or South Asia, or wherever. Alternatively you can discuss Islam and Christianity. West vis-a-vis Islam means something only if there is a prejudiced subtext in which “West” implicitly corresponds to enlightenment, progress and all that is modern-good, while “Islam” represents darkness, regress and all that is old-decadent. The notion of Islam as a “barbaric” religion while Christianity was civilized, a staple of the Crusades, has not been eliminated from the discourse.
The term “Islam”, when used as a collective noun for Muslim nations, throws a range of different histories and cultures into a meaningless common basket: The reasons for Indonesia’s current levels of economic, political and social development have absolutely nothing to do with Morocco’s. To suggest that Islam has kept some nations both poor and/or autocratic is a corruption of facts and a reduction of complex reality to stupidity.
Similarly, “Islam and Democracy”. Islam is 1400 years old. How old is democracy? America is the only nation with any right to call democracy two centuries old, for the American Constitution is an outstanding template of individual and collective freedom. And yet American democracy did not mean the same thing to a black and a white a generation ago. It was only after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the number of registered African-American voters in a state like Mississippi rose from 7 percent, in 1964, to 70 percent by 1968. France promised itself liberty, equality and fraternity three years after America won her independence, but took another century before doing something institutional about it. Universal franchise in the mother of democracies, Britain, is a 20th century story. Eastern Europe is just discovering the pleasures of adult franchise, and more than a billion Chinese have not known democracy till this day. I do not know if any academic institution has held a seminar on Confucianism and democracy.
If many Muslim nations remain undemocratic, the reasons lie in their history, including, in many cases, the history of colonization and neocolonization, rather than in faith.
It is wrong to blame Islam for the sins of Muslims. It was not Christianity’s fault that Latin America was mostly run by dictators who went to church. Islam does not glorify autocracy; instead it consciously advocates democratic ideas like social justice, equality and charity as fundamental principles. Progressive Muslim scholars have noted consistently that Islam is a democratic doctrine. In 1940, one of the great Indian Muslim thinkers and freedom fighters, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, gave a speech at Ramgarh upon being elected president of the Indian National Congress. Among Islam’s greatest contributions to India, he argued, was the gift of democratic ideas.
A famous thesis talks of the end of history. When attempting to understand the state of the Muslim world today, let me propose an alternate thought: The beginning of history. This history begins in 1918, for that was the year in which, for all practical purposes, every Muslim in the world was colonized. Iran might claim that it was independent, but only nominally so: Britain and Russia had divided the country into “zones of influence” as far back as in 1906. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 (after the collapse of the Mogul Empire sixty years before) was the last nail in the long-festering coffin of Muslim independence. Nationalist Arabs expected what had been promised during the war. Instead, the policies of the West, then led by Britain and France, hinged around the politics of oil. For the people, the control of oil became the most important definition of independence.
Democracy is essential, but it is impossible without sovereignty. A free vote under the watchful eye of American soldiers will always be suspect, irrespective of how sincere it is: No one needs a fifth wheel on the democracy coach. This is not the first time that occupation has been sold as a form of liberation: This was the rationale used by the British in Egypt in 1882. I might add that no one wants to conquer a poor nation. Robert Clive called Murshidabad, a provincial capital of India, as rich as London when he entered the city as a victor in 1757. In 1790 (about 85 years after the death of the last great Mogul, Aurangzeb, and therefore nearly a century of instability) India produced more than 23 percent of the world’s manufacturing output and Britain less than two percent. In 1947, the year India became free; Britain had more than 23 percent of the world’s manufacturing output and India less than two percent. An ideologue could not have hoped for neater figures.
But answers do not lie in anger. They lie in introspection.
The strategic vision of the OIC must address the basic problems of the Muslims, problems that Muslims have created for themselves. The OIC must offer an agenda for action to reverse this decline.
A deep political, economic and social apathy afflicts too much of the Muslim world. There is no common formula for this: Each Muslim country must find answers that emerge from its own stage of development. We must have the honesty to acknowledge that all Muslims do not live in the 21st century. Many still live in the 19th century, through no fault of their own, for they have been betrayed by their leaderships. But there is at least one idea that can be considered relevant across boundaries: The need to invest in knowledge.
We are sitting in the shadow of the Kaaba: I suggest to you that there are two Islamic conferences going on, one inside the room and the other in the Holy Mosque. We are the establishment. The other is the conference among the people. The distance between the two has grown too large. Look at the faces of Muslims and you will see on many of them poverty. The OIC has little right to exist unless the elimination of poverty among Muslims becomes a vital priority of the next ten years. Hunger is the worst form of oppression. We need an immediate anti-poverty program. This does not mean just handing out aid: Aid is just band-aid when the disease is a cancer. We need programs that create an economy in the poorest Muslim nations, free of waste and corruption.
Muslim nations are in decline not because they have a shortage of guns, but because they have lost the knowledge edge. Power does not flow from the barrel of a gun; it flows from the fountainhead of knowledge. In 1232 the sultan of Egypt presented Frederick, leader of the Bloodless Crusade, with an astronomical clock that opened the doors of technology to Europe. By the 18th century Egypt could not compete with the cuckoo clock. That decline has to be reversed. We need a Knowledge Fund that can create half a dozen universities and many times that number of schools that rank among the best in the world, pay the best salaries to teachers and create an environment nurtured by academic freedom. There is enough money; we need the will.
The OIC must stake a strong stand against the self-destructive sectarianism that divides Muslim societies. We often behave as if the interpreters of the law are more important than the faith. The Prophet gave us one Islam. Muslims have divided it into many sects.
We need social reform - to ensure the full participation of women in education and development that was among the glorious achievements of the first phase of Muslim history. If you tell a non-Muslim today that the Prophet’s wife ran a successful business, you will invite an incredulous sneer.
We need political reform. Every Muslim nation must have an inclusive polity in which traditional systems leave sufficient space for contemporary demands. Democracy may be a new idea, but it is the best one we have. The test of a democracy is the vulnerability of a government. Europe has shown that democracy can coexist with a traditional system like monarchy.
We are vulnerable because, in a classic symptom of despair, the Muslim voice is being taken over by deviants. Why? Muslim governments must look into their hearts and ask whether they are doing enough to end internal and external injustice. Why do Muslims fantasize about Saladin? Precisely because they want a leader who will stand up for their legitimate demands. Saladin was no extremist; he was in fact almost assassinated by deviants of his time.
The OIC has a claim to be the legitimate voice of Muslims. If so, it must challenge double standards. An Iranian has the right to ask why his nuclear program is being threatened while Israel is permitted to become a nuclear military power. Why should there be two laws? Israel no longer has to fear for its existence. King Abdullah’s breakthrough peace proposals recognize the right of Israel to exist, and correctly so. Does Britain, which actively helped Israel to become a nuclear military power, accept that there are conditions in which a nation might be justified in becoming a secret nuclear power?
Too many Muslim nations believe in a bank account rather than an economy. Many nations have wealth; how many have used it for laboratories that employ scientists to do basic research on biotechnology? Instead of creating industries to produce goods that can be better than the best, we have created a mall economy in which shops are full of imports. I am not an isolationist; but I would like “Made in Saudi Arabia” to compete with “Made in USA”.
We are vulnerable because our intellectual elites have lost the plot, and our political-financial elites have lost the courage to dream of a future for their people.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=70216&d=17&m=9&y=2005
Give a dog a bad name if you want to hang him
By M. J. Akbar
What is the first thing that you do at an international conference of Islamic scholars? Count the beards, of course. The ratio was fifty-fifty at Jakarta, where we had gathered at the invitation of the Nahdlatul Ulama to discourse on Islam as Rahmatan lil Alamin — or, roughly translated, as a message of peace for the world.
But the beards made one point more forcefully than the clean-chins: That Islam was spread across dozens of civilizations, colors and tongues. The most splendidly-groomed instances of hirsute fashion belonged to a pair of strikingly handsome clerics from the Balkans, their high, round, white turbans touched off by green redolent of the glories of the Ottoman Empire. The most learned beard I encountered was a brooding imam from Kenya, who explained the creative way in which jihad was being used to fight AIDS in his country. The array of faces and cultures made an obvious nonsense of the “clash of civilizations” thesis.
Islam is a single faith spread that draws upon a multiple range of civilizations, just as Christianity has a breadth that extends across the globe. Muslims live in dozens of nations with separate histories, motivations and ambitions. They are a single brotherhood when they bow toward the Kaaba, but they become different at the doors of the Holy Mosque in Makkah — just as Catholics become seamless in the Vatican and national in Rome. It is absurd to treat Muslims as some kind of single international horde thirsting for a Western enemy.
So why was this thesis put about, and why does it get the respectability that an American secretary of state can provide by using the analogy in a major speech, as Colin Powell did recently?
If only ignorance were the answer. Ignorance is understandable, if not always defensible. But there is more going on.
The most interesting aspect of this theory is when it was floated. It might seem as if it was a reaction to Sept. 11; in fact it was a consequence of two American military victories in quick succession. The first was the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet empire. The second was the war in which Kuwait was freed from Saddam Hussein’s occupation, in 1991. The phrase emerged in its present manifestation in an essay by Samuel Huntington in the spring 1993 issue of the respected American magazine Foreign Affairs.
In Afghanistan, America had financed and armed a jihad by disparate armies to defeat the Soviets. Some of these armies consisted of radicalized Muslims; and one of them was led by Osama Bin Laden. Against Iraq, America mobilized the international establishment. In both cases America had a strong formal case: Moscow and Baghdad had violated the independence of recognized nation-states.
But in neither case could victory be taken for granted. The Soviet Union was still a fearsome power when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979; and Saddam’s feet were thought to consist of steel rather than clay. Is it a coincidence that American troops are back in Afghanistan and Iraq within a decade of their first overwhelming victories? No. The Americans declared victory but forgot to define it. Euphoria encouraged vague feelings of invincibility; and a group of extreme ideologues, known now as neocons, began to set the agenda of triumphalism. The 21st was declared the American century. It was the mood of a conqueror in search of an enemy.
No one conquers a poor nation — or at least no one sensible does, which is why even the Russians are bewildered at their occupation of Afghanistan. The returns are not worth the investment. Who wanted to conquer sand, until they discovered that it was floating on oil? It is obvious enough that by a strange coincidence some the world’s biggest reserves of oil and gas lie in Muslim nations, whether in the Arab world, Iran, Central Asia or indeed Bangladesh and Indonesia. The critical golden center of this subterranean wealth is Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Central Asia. Access to Central Asia was exploited within months of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and easily available through the colorful dictators of the region, who knew a thing or two about discretion before the mighty. Iran and Iraq were headaches.
Direct colonialism has become unfashionable after two world wars fought for the control of the world, but neocolonialism is a familiar sight, even when it uses pseudonyms like Halliburton. But one tactic remains in use from the more honest days of colonialism: Give a dog a bad name if you want to hang him. The British only but conquered in the cause of civilization and progress. They became limp bearing the brown man’s burden. The dialectic that was once used to justify the conquest of “brown” and “yellow” peoples has been transferred to patronize, undermine and squeeze selected Muslim nations.
And so Muslims were recast as “anti-modern” if not positively backward. The demonology is long, and often pernicious, and there is not enough space to examine them all. One uses “pernicious” because surface arguments to justify a case seem eminently persuasive. Let us examine a central canard, that Islam and democracy are incompatible. This is an absurdity. There is nothing Islamic or un-Islamic about democracy. Democracy is the outcome of a political process, not a religious process. It is glibly suggested that “every” Muslim country is a dictatorship, conveniently forgetting that the four of the largest Muslim populations of the world, in Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Turkey, vote to change governments. Pakistan could easily have been on this list. Voting does not make these Muslims either less or more religious. There are dictators among Muslims just as there are dictators among Christians, Buddhists and Hindus (check out Nepal). Robert Mugabe is not a Muslim, but no one suggests that Christianity is not compatible with democracy. Christian Latin America has seen ugly forms of dictatorship, as has Christian Africa. Is Christianity to be blamed because the Nazis were Christians? That would be preposterous. There are more than one billion people who have never enjoyed the slightest whiff of democracy since Adam — the Chinese — but no one organizes seminars on Confucianism and democracy. Nor should they.
What is unique to the Muslim world is not the absence of democracy but the fact that in 1918, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, every single Muslim in the world lived under foreign subjugation. Every single one, from Indonesia to Morocco via Turkey. The Turks resisted and threw out their invaders within a few years under the great leadership of Kemal Attaturk, but the transition to self-rule in other Muslim countries was slow, painful, uncertain and full of traps planted by the world’s pre-eminent powers.
The West, in the shape of Britain, France or America, was never interested in democracy when a helpful dictator or king would serve. When people got a chance to express their wish, it was only logical that they would ask for popular rule. It was the street that brought Mossaddegh to power in Iran and drove the Shah of Iran to tearful exile in Rome. Who brought the Shah of Iran and autocracy back to Iran? The CIA. If Iranian democracy had been permitted a chance in 1953, there would have been no uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. In other countries, where the struggle for independence was long and brutal, as in Algeria and Indonesia, the militias who had fought the war institutionalized army authority. In other instances, civilian heroes confused their own well being with national health. They became regressive dictators. Once again, there was nothing Islamic about it. Seokarno might have been as nominal a Muslim as Julius Nyerere was a nominal Christian. Muslim countries will become democracies too, because it is the finest form of modern governance. But it will be a process interrupted by bloody experience as the street wrenches power from usurpers. Democracy has happened in Turkey. It has happened in Bangladesh. It is happening in Indonesia.
It almost happened in Pakistan, and the opportunity will return. Democracy takes time in the most encouraging environments. The democratic spirit prevailed across France during its revolution in 1789, but it took more than a century for that spirit to become flesh. Democracy came to America in 1776 but it was not an even reality: Democracy did not mean the same thing to Dwight Eisenhower and Rosa Parks, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
Democracy has become the latest rationale for the occupation of Iraq, after the Weapons of Mass Destruction were found only in the imagination of the neocons and their preferred leader, President George Bush. Granted, democracy is always preferable to tyranny no matter how it comes. But Iraqis are not dupes. They will take democracy and place it at the service of nationalism. A decade ago, victorious America was careless about the definition of victory. Today it is careless about the definition of democracy.
There is uncertainty and apprehension across the Muslim nations — uncertainty about where they stand, and apprehension about both American power and the repugnant use of terrorism that in turn invites the exercise of American power. There is also anger that a legitimate cause like that of Palestine can get buried in the debris of confusion. Muslims do not see Palestinians as terrorists. They have a different take: You cannot drive a people to desperation and then accuse them of being desperate. But the real tragedy of that region of course is that both Palestinians and Israelis are becoming desperate.
There is only one message for whoever lives in the White House. An alternative voice is not a hostile voice. If there is a burden anywhere, brown or black, share it. Peace is the objective of every religion. (Prosperity might be irreligious.) The answer to complex and complicated problems is understanding. That is possible through a dialogue. But a dialogue is possible only between equals.
http://www.mjakbar.org/mjnew.htm
February 2004
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