Obama needs some lessons in Islam

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/obama-needs-some-more-lessons-in-islam/472601/

Obama needs some more lessons in Islam

Tavleen Singh

Jun 07, 2009

The day before President Obama set off to win Muslim hearts and minds last week, I had an interesting conversation about Islam with a Lebanese gentleman and his wife. I met them at a discourse by an ex-Buddhist monk who smiled a lot and talked of happiness. It was when he said that all religions were the same that trouble began. An Indian friend I was with pointed out that Indian religions did not urge believers to rush off and brutalise (or convert) the nearest unbeliever while Islam did. This made the Lebanese lady angry and she stomped off asserting that the Koran said ‘to each his own belief’.

Then her husband got really angry when the subject of women’s rights came up. He said the Prophet of Islam had given more rights to women than anyone ever. I pointed out that what was progressive fourteen hundred years ago may not be progressive today. Many Islamic countries continue to declare nine as the age of consent for girls because the Prophet’s wife Ayesha was nine. I drew his attention to the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia (the Prophet’s native place) and reminded him that 60 girls were burned alive in a hostel some years ago because the morality police would not let them out unveiled. This infuriated him. “What about Mumbai,” he said, “where they sell the eyes and liver of young girls. If you hit on Saudi Arabia I will hit on Mumbai.”

I recount this exchange to make the point that when it comes to winning hearts and minds, the exercise must happen both ways. It is not just President Obama who should be required to do all the ‘outreaching’; the Muslim world has its share to do as well. Why should Saudi Arabia be allowed to get away with funding virulent strains of Islam in countries like ours? Why should Pakistan get away with textbooks that teach school children about ‘evil’ Hindus and Jews? Why should Pakistan get away with releasing Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed?

What is the point of fighting the Taliban in Swat and Waziristan if you can release the man who created the Lashkar-e-Toiba? The organisation he created has been declared a terrorist organisation not just by us but by the United States. It has been responsible for terrorist acts on Indian soil, including the attack on Mumbai. By any standards, that makes Sayeed a terrorist. If Pakistan were serious about fighting Islamist terrorism, they would have charged Sayeed with the crime of starting a terrorist organisation. Even before Mumbai was attacked.

The jihad did not appear one morning out of a clear blue sky. It happened because of a system of education in most Islamic countries that perpetuates the idea that Islam is the best thing that happened to mankind and that pluralism is wrong in Allah’s eyes. As for us happy idol-worshipping types, we are doomed to damnation. This idea is in direct conflict with the Indian idea of ‘sarva dharma samabhaava’. But, it is more than just religion that is the problem.

The Islamic sense of grievance is now so confused that the Americans are blamed for ‘abandoning’ Afghanistan after the Russians were defeated. Now that they are back, they are blamed for interfering in Islamic affairs. In the Middle East the stated objective of the jihad is to obliterate Israel but if Israel attempts to resist this fate it is charged with being brutal to Palestinians. It may not be politically correct to say this but the truth is that there could have been a solution in Palestine decades ago if Yasser Arafat had not been corrupt and amoral. The peace treaty that nearly got signed when Bill Clinton was President was as good as anything President Obama will be able to deliver. Do Palestinians ask why it did not go through?

What saddened me most about President Obama’s speech was that without actually apologising for America’s mistakes he made it sound as if all the mistakes were on one side. It would have been nice when he mentioned American mistakes if he had mentioned a few made by Islamic countries. Pakistan ran a black market in nuclear bombs. Saudi money builds madrasas in Indian villages that poison our happy heathen atmosphere. The war with the United States was started by Osama bin Laden. India is under constant threat from terrorist groups that continue to be nurtured by the Pakistani state. The release of Sayeed is proof. And, the reaction of President Obama’s government is to give Pakistan more aid than ever before.

President Obama seems not to know that there are more Muslims in the Indian sub-continent than anywhere and that we lived in relative harmony till Saudi money started to fund Wahabi Isla

Obama needs some more lessons in Islam

Tavleen Singh, Jun 07, 2009

The day before President Obama set off to win Muslim hearts and minds last week, I had an interesting conversation about Islam with a Lebanese gentleman and his wife. I met them at a discourse by an ex-Buddhist monk who smiled a lot and talked of happiness. It was when he said that all religions were the same that trouble began. An Indian friend I was with pointed out that Indian religions did not urge believers to rush off and brutalise (or convert) the nearest unbeliever while Islam did. This made the Lebanese lady angry and she stomped off asserting that the Koran said ‘to each his own belief’.

Then her husband got really angry when the subject of women’s rights came up. He said the Prophet of Islam had given more rights to women than anyone ever. I pointed out that what was progressive fourteen hundred years ago may not be progressive today. Many Islamic countries continue to declare nine as the age of consent for girls because the Prophet’s wife Ayesha was nine. I drew his attention to the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia (the Prophet’s native place) and reminded him that 60 girls were burned alive in a hostel some years ago because the morality police would not let them out unveiled. This infuriated him. “What about Mumbai,” he said, “where they sell the eyes and liver of young girls. If you hit on Saudi Arabia I will hit on Mumbai.”

I recount this exchange to make the point that when it comes to winning hearts and minds, the exercise must happen both ways. It is not just President Obama who should be required to do all the ‘outreaching’; the Muslim world has its share to do as well. Why should Saudi Arabia be allowed to get away with funding virulent strains of Islam in countries like ours? Why should Pakistan get away with textbooks that teach school children about ‘evil’ Hindus and Jews? Why should Pakistan get away with releasing Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed?

What is the point of fighting the Taliban in Swat and Waziristan if you can release the man who created the Lashkar-e-Toiba? The organisation he created has been declared a terrorist organisation not just by us but by the United States. It has been responsible for terrorist acts on Indian soil, including the attack on Mumbai. By any standards, that makes Sayeed a terrorist. If Pakistan were serious about fighting Islamist terrorism, they would have charged Sayeed with the crime of starting a terrorist organisation. Even before Mumbai was attacked.

The jihad did not appear one morning out of a clear blue sky. It happened because of a system of education in most Islamic countries that perpetuates the idea that Islam is the best thing that happened to mankind and that pluralism is wrong in Allah’s eyes. As for us happy idol-worshipping types, we are doomed to damnation. This idea is in direct conflict with the Indian idea of ‘sarva dharma samabhaava’. But, it is more than just religion that is the problem.

The Islamic sense of grievance is now so confused that the Americans are blamed for ‘abandoning’ Afghanistan after the Russians were defeated. Now that they are back, they are blamed for interfering in Islamic affairs. In the Middle East the stated objective of the jihad is to obliterate Israel but if Israel attempts to resist this fate it is charged with being brutal to Palestinians. It may not be politically correct to say this but the truth is that there could have been a solution in Palestine decades ago if Yasser Arafat had not been corrupt and amoral. The peace treaty that nearly got signed when Bill Clinton was President was as good as anything President Obama will be able to deliver. Do Palestinians ask why it did not go through?

What saddened me most about President Obama’s speech was that without actually apologising for America’s mistakes he made it sound as if all the mistakes were on one side. It would have been nice when he mentioned American mistakes if he had mentioned a few made by Islamic countries. Pakistan ran a black market in nuclear bombs. Saudi money builds madrasas in Indian villages that poison our happy heathen atmosphere. The war with the United States was started by Osama bin Laden. India is under constant threat from terrorist groups that continue to be nurtured by the Pakistani state. The release of Sayeed is proof. And, the reaction of President Obama’s government is to give Pakistan more aid than ever before.

President Obama seems not to know that there are more Muslims in the Indian sub-continent than anywhere and that we lived in relative harmony till Saudi money started to fund Wahabi Islam.

Pakistan basically a Taliban state

 

Pakistan basically Taliban state

By SALIM MANSUR 

There is frantic concern in Washington and elsewhere that Pakistan has reached its tipping point and might succumb to the Taliban forces entrenched barely 80 km (50 miles) from the capital, Islamabad.

But the concern is misleading. A country of some 160 million Muslims is not about to be overrun by the Taliban. On the contrary, Pakistan is more or less a Taliban state shaped by its origin and history.

This is the unpalatable reality that cannot be publicly discussed in Washington, London or Ottawa due to diplomatic niceties. It is also complicated by the patron-client relationship the Pakistani elite pursued with the U.S. over the past six decades as a means to counter India’s dominant position in the region.

Pakistan was forcefully established by an elite on the basis of an exclusivist and bigoted idea that since India’s Muslims constitute a “nation” they deserve a state of their own.

The perversion of Islam into a nationalist ideology hugely aggravated communal politics in undivided India that would not end with the partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, ruthlessly planned this division when he called for direct action — communal blood-letting — by his supporters which led to the massive Hindu-Muslim riots known as the Great Calcutta killings of August 1946.

This act of terror made certain that trust between Hindus and Muslims was irreparably broken, and Britain was compelled to depart by partitioning India.

To recall this history is to have an inkling of the sort of a country that emerged as a result of terrorism followed by ethnic cleansing of the non-Muslim population — most Hindus and Sikhs left or were forcefully driven out from present-day Pakistan.

Subsequently, the Pakistani elite declared the Ahmadiyyas — a small peace-loving sect of minority Muslims — to be non-Muslims, and persecuted them as the harbinger of further bigotry to be unleashed in the slide of Jinnah’s Pakistan into a Taliban state.

The economic exploitation of former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by the ruling elite began with Mr. Jinnah imposing Urdu as the national language on Bengali Muslims with their own rich linguistic and cultural tradition. Eventually the two halves of Pakistan would tear apart in 1971 following civil war and systematic massacre of Bengalis by the Pakistani military.

Since 1971 the unremorseful and bloody-minded ruling elite of Pakistan — civil and military — pushed Pakistan deeper into a dependency alliance with Saudi Arabia.

It meant importing the Saudi version of Islam — Wahhabism — and its spread deep across the country through the rapid expansion of religious schools and mosques funded by money from the Gulf countries. The products of these schools and mosques are the Taliban “jihadis,” or holy-warriors, who set forth for Afghanistan in the war against the former Soviet Union.

Steel fist

The Pakistani elite is corrupt, opportunistic and ruthless. Behind the conniving smile of the civilian politician is the steel fist of the military with nuclear weapons.

The fear of Taliban acquiring Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is manufactured by the elite to garner diplomatic and financial support from the West.

This is extortion brazenly practised by the elite responsible for making Pakistan into a rogue state with its people crushed by poverty. It is this reality that makes for terror and war in the region, and threatens peace beyond.

salim.mansur@sunmedia.ca

Sat, May 9, 2009

Pakistan basically Taliban state

By SALIM MANSUR  www.edmontonsun.com

There is frantic concern in Washington and elsewhere that Pakistan has reached its tipping point and might succumb to the Taliban forces entrenched barely 80 km (50 miles) from the capital, Islamabad.

But the concern is misleading. A country of some 160 million Muslims is not about to be overrun by the Taliban. On the contrary, Pakistan is more or less a Taliban state shaped by its origin and history.

This is the unpalatable reality that cannot be publicly discussed in Washington, London or Ottawa due to diplomatic niceties. It is also complicated by the patron-client relationship the Pakistani elite pursued with the U.S. over the past six decades as a means to counter India’s dominant position in the region.

Pakistan was forcefully established by an elite on the basis of an exclusivist and bigoted idea that since India’s Muslims constitute a “nation” they deserve a state of their own.

The perversion of Islam into a nationalist ideology hugely aggravated communal politics in undivided India that would not end with the partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, ruthlessly planned this division when he called for direct action — communal blood-letting — by his supporters which led to the massive Hindu-Muslim riots known as the Great Calcutta killings of August 1946.

This act of terror made certain that trust between Hindus and Muslims was irreparably broken, and Britain was compelled to depart by partitioning India.

To recall this history is to have an inkling of the sort of a country that emerged as a result of terrorism followed by ethnic cleansing of the non-Muslim population — most Hindus and Sikhs left or were forcefully driven out from present-day Pakistan.

Subsequently, the Pakistani elite declared the Ahmadiyyas — a small peace-loving sect of minority Muslims — to be non-Muslims, and persecuted them as the harbinger of further bigotry to be unleashed in the slide of Jinnah’s Pakistan into a Taliban state.

The economic exploitation of former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by the ruling elite began with Mr. Jinnah imposing Urdu as the national language on Bengali Muslims with their own rich linguistic and cultural tradition. Eventually the two halves of Pakistan would tear apart in 1971 following civil war and systematic massacre of Bengalis by the Pakistani military.

Since 1971 the unremorseful and bloody-minded ruling elite of Pakistan — civil and military — pushed Pakistan deeper into a dependency alliance with Saudi Arabia.

It meant importing the Saudi version of Islam — Wahhabism — and its spread deep across the country through the rapid expansion of religious schools and mosques funded by money from the Gulf countries. The products of these schools and mosques are the Taliban “jihadis,” or holy-warriors, who set forth for Afghanistan in the war against the former Soviet Union.

Steel fist

The Pakistani elite is corrupt, opportunistic and ruthless. Behind the conniving smile of the civilian politician is the steel fist of the military with nuclear weapons.

The fear of Taliban acquiring Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is manufactured by the elite to garner diplomatic and financial support from the West.

This is extortion brazenly practised by the elite responsible for making Pakistan into a rogue state with its people crushed by poverty. It is this reality that makes for terror and war in the region, and threatens peace beyond.

salim.mansur@sunmedia.ca

How Wahabbi virus fueled Islamic terrorism in India

 

The virulent Wahabi virus

Murad Ali Baig , Hindustan Times
April 10, 2009

Mumbai. Afghanistan. Pakistan. The ‘Islamist’ terror attacks in South Asia all had the hallmarks of Wahabi ideology. Its followers are blinded by faith to believe that they have the mandate of Allah to rid the world of ‘infidels’ and ‘heretics’. Combating terrorism may thus be impossible until this Wahabi cult is thoroughly discredited. 

Mohammed Abd Al Wahab, (1703-1794), redefined Islam in a narrow and intolerant way and injected into it such a virulent cult of hatred that, though repeatedly put down, it has risen to become the single greatest threat to world peace today.

A single rough Bedouin could so radically reinterpret Islam that his followers got away with destroying the tomb of Prophet Muhammad at Madina in 1803 and later stripped the sacred Kaaba at Makkah of the treasures that pilgrims had adorned it with. Wahab disallowed ceremonies for marriage or death, worship of saints, adorning of graves, tombs or other sacred objects, holding religious processions, art, music and dance and demanded the total suppression of women. 

The Islam of the Quran suffered in the hands of many revisionists who changed its direction over time. The holy book was supplemented with the Hadith written 200 years later with further interpretations. In the Quran, Muhammad had defined jihad after the battle of Badr … “We are now finished with the lesser jihad (struggle against oppression) and are beginning the greater jihad (struggle against our own weaknesses),” but jihad is mentioned 199 times in the Hadith in stronger terms. Wahab seems to have understood the tremendous power of hatred to unite and inflame its followers in an intense ‘holy war’. He urged followers to mercilessly exterminate ‘infidels’, ‘blasphemers’, ‘idol worshippers’, Christians and even ‘Muslim apostates’  like the Shias and Sufis. He made them believe that Allah and his angels would assure success with the joys of paradise guaranteed to any who fell as martyrs for the cause. This lust for violence soon overcame inhibitions about innovations and the Wahabis soon grew adept at using the latest weapons and technology. 

Wahab’s vision enshrined in his book ‘Kitab al-Tawhid’ (book of unity) encountered strong opposition when it was first preached around 1744. Religious teachers including his father and uncle were horrified but he was fortunate to find a patron in Muhammad Al-Saud who used this vitriolic new creed as a powerful weapon to propel his tribe forward. Al-Saud went on to win his descendents the kingdom of Arabia that they rule to this day. Then the discovery of oil in 1938 gave them the power to finance the spread of their creed.

With Indian Muslims making pilgrimages to Makkah, Wahabism spread to India by the 19th century. Wahabi, also called Salafi, centres were established in our country.

The ‘chhota (small) godown’ at Patna supplied funds, manpower weapons and materials to the ‘barra (big) godown’ at Sittana near Swat where the turbulent border tribes were drawn to this violent creed. The ‘Hindustani fanatics’ were rooted out several times by the British. 

These fanatics had great influence in the Indian madrasas where most Muslim children were educated. In 1866, two mullahs set up a madrasa at Deoband, north of Delhi, that was initially known as the Arab Madrasa, to preserve Islam from British oppression. Though Wahabism never had mass support, as it was too violent and intolerant, few Muslims dared to speak up against them though some mainstream mullahs  declared ‘fatwas’ against this heresy. After 1947 most Muslims in India were conscious of the need to fit in with a Hindu majority and the Wahabi influence diminished. 

In Pakistan however, the fanaticism was kept aflame on the issue of Muslims being oppressed in Kashmir. They were greatly encouraged when the USSR occupied Afghanistan in 1979 and the CIA collaborated with Pakistan to fund and train the Taliban to fight them. Madrasas preaching Wahabism then infected the children of some three million Afghan refugees. 

Deoband’s Dar ul Uloom, followed by a college of 6,000 Indian mullahs, recently condemned this terrorism. The gathering clarified the meaning of jihad, saying that killing women, children and Muslims was un-Islamic and rejected all kinds of injustice, violence, breach of peace, bloodshed, murder and plunder in any form. Muhammad’s merciful and beneficent Allah was clearly not the god of Wahab. Wahabism does not have majority support in Pakistan. But because Wahabis give all Muslims a bad name, Muslims need to make the fanatics understand that Wahabis are not heroes but heretics against the words of Muhammad. Indian Muslims were  too intimidated by Wahabism to speak out fearlessly against this creed. It is time they did.

Experts see Wahabis in garb of Indian Mujahideen

Experts see Wahabis in garb of Indian Mujahideen
28 Jul 2008, 0423 hrs IST, S Balakrishnan,TNN

MUMBAI: The intelligence community believes the serial blasts of Bangalore and Ahmedabad were executed by a network of Wahabi fundamentalists masquerading as Indian Mujahideen.

This terror network started by organizing blasts at holy places of rival Barelvi Muslims like the dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, Rajasthan. Over the past five years the Wahabis, who are heavily funded by religious puritans in Saudi Arabia, have been conducting a high-intensity propaganda war within the Muslim community against so-called un-Islamic practices.

Thousands of publications have been brought out by them to convince Muslims to follow the path of “true Islam”. Members of several front organizations also visit homes to convince people to abandon “non-Islamic rituals”.

Sources said predictably these activities have been vehemently opposed by the Barelvis who also brought out publications countering the Wahabi ideology, which is believed to provide a theological justification for terror.

A Barelvi publication titled ‘Gair Mokallidon ke Akeede’ quotes chapter and verse from Wahabi publications, which are against Islam. In Mumbai maulanas like Saeed Noori have been in the forefront of the campaign to counter Wahabism.

The proverbial last straw was the blast at Ajmer sharif. It provoked widespread reaction among the Barelvis against Wahabi fanaticism, which had backed the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), police sources said.

“Fearing their isolation, the Wahabi elements are now trying to project themselves as people fighting against injustice to Muslims as a whole. The decision to organize serial blasts in Ahmedabad, including four in Narendra Modi’s constituency, was clearly aimed at getting the sympathy of the Muslim masses,” a senior intelligence official observed.

“There is a big vacuum in Muslim leadership and the Wahabis are planning to fill the gap with their violent deeds, he added. However, a majority of Muslims have condemned the blasts and they say that a “big injustice” is being done to the community by those sponsoring such terror strikes.

National secretary of the Nationalist Congress Party and noted advocate Majeed Memon said: “The blasts can have no place in Islam. But if the Indian Mujahideens have any grievance then it should appoint a committee to have a dialogue with the government.

Meanwhile, the Intelligence Bureau is reported to be close on the heels of the mastermind behind the blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. The bureau is convinced that Indian Mujahideen has been trained by the ISI, which was why the blasts could be executed with professional precision.

It is feared that the next targets could be in Maharashtra where the police force is at its demoralised worst.