It's Enough to Make You Scream

NOV 2005|RAMADAN 1426|NO.364 UK£2.50 | US$5.00 |RM10.00

ABDAL-HAKIM MURAD

Pope Benedict XVI and Islam HASAN LE GAI EATON

Faith and Justice YAHYA BIRT

After 7/7:The Challenge Ahead HAMZA YUSUF

Just Enough Religion to Hate KELLY CROSBY

In the path of Hurricane Katrina PLUS

Robin Soans on Talking to Terrorists

IT’S ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU

SCREAM

EDITORIAL

FUAD NAHDI

FROM THE PULPIT Four months after the tragic events of 7/7, it is time for introspection. Hopefully the media and political circuses are now behind us. As headline writers rest their tired clichés, politicians lower their shrill cries and civil servants take a breather, we must not forget that these are days of destiny.The reinforced new image of Islam as a ‘threat’ to society combined with both the introduction of new legislation and a new official mindset are developments likely to stay with us for years to come.

Everywhere change is being forced. The government’s indifference to the issues and concerns of British Muslims is no longer acceptable. Lethargic civil servants, doctrinaire social workers and analysts together with bumptious anti-racist activists have been pushed to re-evaluate the situation. But with Birmingham burning, jihadists still on the prowl all over the place and ‘our boys’ still in Basra, is it a matter of too little too late?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. It is neither a ‘yes’ nor a ‘no'.

Here, we must remember, we are talking about processes. The Home Office Task Force was a necessary but insufficient condition. Some of us enjoyed the spectacle of civil servants who despite all the signals - lived in a make-believe world of red herrings.When Home Office Minister Hazel Blears left Whitehall to ‘engage with the community’ it was within the dynamic matrix of interfacing with people identified ‘useful’ in dealing with the most earth-shattering issue confronting British Muslims - as identified by the Faith and Diversity Unit: that of forced marriage and honour killing.

Despite the effort of New Labour control freaks, a few did make it to the consulting table but the vast majority remained trusted party apparatchiks and those addicted to Home Office crumbs.

When the one hundred or so members of the Task Force finally met in Windsor in mid-September it was obvious that some bells were ringing: The consultation was the most diverse ever by the government, a big improvement from the pre-7/7 days when the issue of engagement had become a simple matter of talking to an umbrella body.

In a few weeks time the final report of the Task Force will be published. My advice is not to expect miracles. But do expect a shibboleth: the suggestion of setting up a National Advisory Council of Imams is as likely to contribute towards fighting terrorism as the new draconian anti-terrorism laws. Under-paid and under-trained imams working under the diktats of ignorant mosque committees and rash and harsh laws are not the best of weapons in fighting a metaphor - what the war against terrorism really is.

The proposal aimed at engaging with young people (especially university students) intellectually is much more sensible. But any such engagement needs to be broader than just one restricted by a political or sociological analysis. It needs to be deeper in order to expose the religious underpinnings of the aberration of terrorism and violence.The only acceptable counter-argument, for instance, to those sold on the idea of suicide-terror has to be primarily rooted in the theological, moral and ethical understanding of Islam.

But other things have been happening too. Nothing, however, has been more ill-advised and sinister than comments by Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE). His attacks on multiculturalism and “warning” that Britain was “sleepwalking our way to segregation” smacks of hypocrisy, shallowness and Islamophobia. Phillips comments would have been just another peccadillo from a New Labour darling if it was not for the fact that he heads a public body funded by tax money that is taken seriously on matters of community affairs.

Over the years the CRE has not been renowned to champion the causes or interests of British Muslims. But since Mr Phillips took over the CRE’s anti-Muslim crusade has attained new unacceptable levels. Behind his sugar-coated speeches is a discernible streak of contempt for Muslims and Islam. His castigation of multiculturalism - with all the pomposity of a Guyanese Fukuyama - is preposterous, particularly to Muslims. Though the primary victims of the multicultural experiment - headed and supported by the CRE all these years - Muslims have never really been allowed to be part of the debate.

It has been claimed that the disbanding of the CRE would not be good for the anti-racist movement.That is bad news. But few British Muslims would shed a tear for an organisation that has betrayed so much Islamophobia over the years.The CRE - in its present condition - is a liability to Britain’s dynamic and vibrant visible minorities: a white elephant belonging to another age.

The troubles in Birmingham are, unfortunately, a signal of the difficult future that awaits us.Time has come to roll up our sleeves and deal with real issues: one of racism within the British Muslim community and of Islamophobia within the anti-racist movement. It is time for honest and courageous warriors of change to go to battle and for spinmeisters and cronies to look for new pastures.

Q - NEWS

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CONTENTS 9 Classic Q Travelcard to Jannah A funny thing happened to Munib Chelebi on the Northern Line. He learnt something about wearing your faith on your sleeve and being proud of it.

10 Upfront

Publisher Fuad Nahdi Managing Editor Fareena Alam Contributing Editors Abdul-Rehman Malik Nabila Munawar Fozia Bora Art Director Aiysha Malik Administrative Assistant Rizwan Rahman Events Coordinator Waheed Malik Featuring Ibrahim Abusharif Fauzia Ahmad Taris Ahmed Yasmin Al-Mas M. Shahid Alam Abidullah Ansari Yahya Birt Abdullah Bradford Yasser Chaudhary Affan Chowdhry Kelly Izdihar Crosby Fatima Durdane Hasan Le Gai Eaton Dave Enders John Jackson Sonia Malik Abdal Hakim Murad Nadir Nahdi Md Siddique Seddon Robin Soans Imran Tyrer Shaid Latif Calvin White Hamza Yusuf Dave Zirin Contact Us Tel: 07985 176 798 www.q-news.com Editorial: editor@q-news.com Subscriptions: subs@q-news.com General Info: info@q-news.com Subscriptions For discounted rates, visit at www.q-news.com To subscribe by post, send your full name, postal address, e-mail address and telephone number along with a cheque for the correct amount to: Q-News, P.O. Box 4295, London W1A 7YH United Kingdom UK 1 year: £24 individuals, £20 students, £30 organisations UK 2 year: £44 individuals, £35 students, £55 organisations

Subscriptions are open to readers around the world.

Non-UK cheques are not accepted so if you are outside the UK please subscribe with a credit or debit card at www.q-news.com

Established 1992

Roots to Reckoning Muhammad Ali, the Black Panthers and Omar Sharif are just a few of the individuals featured in this exhibition of iconic and evocative images of London’s black experience.

11 Diary Affan Chowdhry on missing prayers, remembering Balakot before the earthquake and the cerebral joys of academic life.

12 Q-Notes 15 Scrutiny Postscript: Panning Panorama. In the wreckage of the London bombings lie some tender pieties about the harmlessness of the radical streak in inner city Islam, writes Abidullah Ansari.

Those Muslim women are at it again!

Fauzia Ahmad and Imran Tyrer ask if it is time to move beyond tabloid coverage of young Muslim women and address more relevant issues. Pat Tillman, our

hero. Dave Zirin pays tribute to an allAmerican war hero who turned out to be a conscientious objector to the Iraq war. And that was after he died.

Demanding withdrawal. Dave Enders reports from Baghdad on why it isn’t just the Sunnis who want the Americans out. Burma’s dirty little secret. John Jackson on the Rohingyas - Burma’s embattled Muslim minority and their struggle for recognition. Recognising Israel or selling out? M. Shahid Alam on why general Musharraf is on a mission to legitimise Israel. Welcome to prison Gaza. Once the dust of withdrawal settles,Taris Ahmed argues that Palestinians will find the path to peace in shambles and their struggle for a state stymied.

28 Shelter from the storm Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans underwater and her people divided by race and class. Kelly Izdihar Crozby chronicles her flight from the chaos.

36 The Nightmare after the Nuclear Holocaust 60 years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the possibility of self-destruction has not dimmed.

Ihsanic Intelligence looks at the legacy of the world’s first and only nuclear holocaust.

31 A Pope’s Progress Pope Benedict XVI’s approach to Islam

has placed him at marked odds with his predecessor, leaving many to conclude that the future of Catholic Muslim relations looks bleak. But Abdal-Hakim Murad says, there is more to this Vatican traditionalist than meets the eye.

39 Faith: Ramadan Counterculture and Soul Ibrahim N. Abusharif explains why Ramadan helps us step outside our cartoon world.

62 Legacy: Worry Beads In times of stress, when most people reach for an aspirin, the Muslim is likely to reach into his pocket and come up with a string of beads.

64 Travel: Seeking prayers for La Paz Shaid Latif travels to Bolivia and finds a community of hope and warmth, struggling to establish itself against the odds.

38 Portfolio: After 7/7 - It’s enough to make you scream Yahya Birt on the difficult challenges ahead. Yasmin Al-Mas takes on the socalled “Islamic” justifications for terror. As tensions grow between British Muslim leaders, Mohammad Siddique Seddon reflects on what we can learn from the legacy of Malcolm X. Robin Soans talks about his controversial new play, Talking to Terrorists. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf calls on British Muslims to reject facile calls for an Islamic reformation and come to terms with the true meaning of jihad. David Shaylor considers the impact of the Iraq war and why it’s the right time to scrap MI5 and MI6. Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton explores the true great pillars that support the edifice of faith - peace and justice. Calvin White wonders why Christian leaders aren’t asked to condemn terror and violence done in their name. Fatima Durdane’s poetry explores the dark lives of 7/7’s suicide bombers.

Feroukhi’s quiet masterpiece.

Sport: Praise the Ashes, Whither Karachi Yasser Chaudhary on a series that united the nation, and the EnglandPakistan tour that has already hit rough waters.

70 Vox Populi Q-Readers respond vociferously to the London bombings, BBC’s Panorama program and the state of Muslim university students.

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Review Theatre: The Lore of the Rings Nadir Nahdi on Nathan the Wise.

Write Mind: Drunk at Birth Although according to the Islamic worldview we are all born naturally pure, little Abdullah Bradford was born with a hangover and a bad habit.

Film: Le Grand Voyage Abdul-Rehman Malik on Ismael

6 | Q - NEWS

C O N T R I B U T O R S ABDULLAH BRADFORD

ABDAL-HAKIM MURAD

KELLY IZDIHAR CROSBY

is a doctoral student at the University of London where he is assessing communitybased waste management strategies in Ghana.

Director of the Sunna Project at the Centre of Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge University, is currently on sabbatical in Istanbul.

is an artist and writer based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the editor of an upcoming Islamic arts magazine, and a personal blog that is read by people all over the world.

CHARLES LE GAI EATON

JOHN JACKSON

SIDDIQUE SEDDON

is one of British Islam’s most eminent authors and broadcasters. He is author of Islam and the Destiny of Man, Remembering God and King of the Castle.

former Co-Director of the Burma Campaign UK, has recently joined MTV to work on a global initiative on HIV/AIDS.

is a writer and a Research Fellow at the Islamic Foundation in the Muslims in Britain Unit.

YAHYA BIRT

SONIA MALIK

ROBIN SOANS

is the coordinator for the Muslim World Book Review at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester.

is a law graduate currently working as a freelance journalist. She recently returned from a month-long trip through Iran.

is an eminent British playwright and actor. He is writer of The Arab-Israeli Cookbook and more recently, Talking to Terrorists.

8 | Q - NEWS

CLASSIC Q

Travelcard to Heaven funny thing happened to me on the Northern Line last week. There I was jolting along somewhere between Colindale and Brent Cross, when a couple of Asian midteens, a boy and a girl, came along and sat opposite me.

“Owz yer dad then?” I heard the girl ask. Her accent was pure Tower Hamlets, the kind that white Cockneys don’t speak any more.

“I’m not livin’ wiv dad, innit,” came the reply.

“Why’s that then?” She was intrigued “Me dad’s an ‘Indu, innit, and four months ago I took Islam. I’m not living in Ilford no more.”

Fascinated, I strained to hear more. Looking around, I could see that the boy’s announcement had created a frisson in the carriage. Yuppies had stopped turning the pages of their Evening Standards. A West Indian group fell silent, listening carefully.

He spoke again. “Are you a Muslim?”

“Yeah,” she said, “So why’dja become a Muslim then?”

And he launched into an enthusiastic jumble of reason.

Hinduism wasn’t really a religion; it was a culture with three million gods which were supposed to put you in touch with Brahman. Islam was a hotline to God, with no operator needed in between to connect you. In Islam there are no castes, everyone is equal, like the teeth of a comb. And if you saw a pig for the first time in your life you’d feel sick, right?

Would you want to eat it?

She was smiling and nodding. But his uninvited audience was clearly upset. No one looked at him, of course - it was all very English. But the carriage was thick with a sense of shock and bafflement.

Stereotypes (to use the modern phrase) were being challenged.

As I hopped out at Camden Town, I said a quick prayer for him. He hadn’t known that a Muslim was listening, of course - apart from my sound dress sense

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I resemble a typical Londoner.

What impressed me about him was his lack of diffidence. Too many Muslims have acquired the Anglo-Saxon hang up about religion in public. Christians are embarrassed when religion is discussed publicly, but should Muslims follow suit?

Thanks to his confident faith, a couple of dozen non-Muslims went home that day with some ideas on Islam that they would never have come by otherwise. His notion may have been simpler.

But thanks to his pure-hearted love for Islam and the Prophet he had, quite without effort or expense on his part, managed to spread the word.

“Pass on my message,” the Blessed Prophet said, “even if only one verse.”

This is one of the most basic commandments of Islam. And yet how many of us however punctilious we are in our salat, are obeying it?

We are living in a society suffering the agonies of agnosticism. Families are cracking up, drugs and crime proliferate. The decayed relics of Christianity are increasing less attractive than occultism and New Age cults. The British people are crying out for faith. But we, amazingly, refuse to give it to them.

A British teenage I know, who converted to Islam, complains to me that the Asians at her school refuse to accept that she is a Muslim. The fact that she prays, and they do not, makes no difference to them. As far as they are concerned, Islam is an ethnic club and new members are not welcome. Shalwarkameez, aloo-gobi, Punjabi and Islam all form a single, exclusive package.

If our community is to survive, we have to throw out this kind of primitive tribalism. Muslims must be re-educated to see beyond their own ghettoes.

Every one of us has the opportunity to share the gift of Islam. Living in the midst of an increasingly troubled society, we have a heavy duty to proclaim the Muslim message to people who need it more than ever. Not through leaflets in broken English. Not through apologetic TV ‘conversations'. Not through Ahmad Deedat tapes and screaming Wahhabi sermons. But by using every reasonable opportunity to explain Islam to those whom Allah puts in our way in our everyday lives.

That ex-Hindu I saw on the train is probably closer to Allah than most of our ‘community leaders.’ Its time we woke up to a fundamental Islamic duty here.

Otherwise, who can tell what wind of punishment might come to us by night, while we are heedless? !

Munib Chelebi, in Q-News, 15-22 April 1995, Vol. 3, No. 3 Q - NEWS

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Roots to Reckoning uhammad Ali, the Black Panthers and Omar Sharif are just some of the individuals featured in this exhibition of iconic, intimate and powerful photographs reflecting the forces that have shaped the lives of London’s black communities since the war. Over 100 images in Roots to Reckoning showcase the lives and times of three pioneering Jamaican-born British photographers and the tumultuous world they documented through their lens.What their remarkable work reveals are communities shaped by resistance, racism and faith.These are photographs taken by insiders who have witnessed four decades of tremendous change.

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All three photographers were living in London by the 60s, having come over as lone children to rejoin parents they scarcely knew.The exhibition reflects their different careers and interests and their search for their own identities as black and African Londoners, rather than the children of West Indian immigrants.

Armet Francis has, since the 1970s, used his photographs to pursue his personal exploration of the experiences and identities of African people around the globe, whether in Jamaica, America, Africa or Britain. In his forceful and dignified studies of black people in differing circumstances he aims to “create a poetic commentary on the way humanity can survive displacement and hardship”.

Official photographer to the British Black Panther movement, Neil Kenlock’s work documents the rallies, racism and upheaval during the 1970s and early 1980s in London.

Alongside the big picture of marches, protests and portraits of prominent campaigners there are images focusing on telling detail - a 1972 front door daubed with the slogan ‘KEEP BRITAIN WHITE', or his 1970 closeup of four schoolgirls carrying shoulder bags embroidered with Black Panther badges.

Charlie Phillips, having been given his first camera in 1959, began documenting the life around him in Notting Hill in the 60s. Phillips’ more recent photographs taken at black funerals in London are a poignant reminder that many of the eager young migrants who came to London in the 1940s and 1950s to help the city’s recovery after the Second World War are now in their seventies and that London’s Caribbean community is not only the capital’s largest post-war migrant community but also one of its oldest.

These are evocative images and a testament to the complexity of London’s black experience. Anyone who seeks to understand what makes this city tick ought to know that this exhibition is unmissable.

Roots to Reckoning is at the Museum of London until 26 February 2006. www.museumoflondon.org.uk

DIARY

DIARY AFFAN CHOWDHRY

n London, when you tell a friend you will meet them at 5 p.m., you actually mean 5:15 or later. With some friends, I add a full 30 minutes. I am by no means superior in my punctuality. Everyone is trying to squeeze a little more into their day. Amidst all this running around, and underestimating how long it takes to move around the city, sometimes the good ‘ole salah gets squeezed out. Forget about what the four schools have to say about prayer times.

There ain’t a London Muslim who hasn’t doubled up on prayers, or simply sailed in and out of a prayer window without their forehead ever touching the ground. I don’t mean to sound all holy. It’s been a while since I observed all five in a single day in a timely fashion. And that, I’m afraid, is the truth. As I sometimes say to my Momma: a few is better than none. But Ramadan demands a higher standard. Hence, the pangs of guilt are suddenly near self-mortification. The other day, after work, as I walked towards Green Park tube, I decided enough is enough. No more excuses. I was going to pray whether it was in a mosque or in the middle of the street.With more than 30 minutes to spare before meeting my friend - I was obscenely early - I walked into the park and observed the stretch of green grass, the rows of trees, the fallen leaves and parade of people. Praying in public is never just about fulfiling a religious ritual. It is a strange brew of obligation, fear of ridicule, and public statement.When I laid down my jacket on the muddy ground, I found myself facing a large tree trunk. I prayed quickly, with my shoes on. I wondered how I appeared to passers-by. Did they look on with interest or disdain? Or, perhaps more likely, did they pass without noticing, without a thought to spare? A dog ran around the tree and came within a few feet. It stopped at a tree nearby, lifted its leg and marked its territory.

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he drive from Mansehra to Balakot was a winding road that climbed until the nausea made my head spin. A young Pakistani medical student offered me menthol cough drops to clear my head. I was grateful. Later, when I joined him and

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his group of young Karachi professionals in to Pakistan’s Kaghan valley on the back of a Toyota pick-up, he taught me the art of biting into a lemon to suppress vomiting. Remarkably, it worked. But late that afternoon in July, when we all got off in Balakot, I’ll never forget how the sun slipped behind the mountains and darkness fell over the city. It was ghostly. There was the sound and sight of the mighty river running through the city.We walked the bazaar, snapped some photos - one in front of the Niagara Falls department store. I still have that picture. I am 18 years old, wearing a scruffy beard - a holdover of my teenage Islamic awakening - one foot on a rock, hands on my hips, below the silly sign. Before it was too dark, we climbed up one of the hills to visit the grave of a Muslim personality whose name I had never heard before.

Sayyid Ahmed Shah Barelwi lived and died in the early 19th century.To these students, he was a forerunner of latter freedom fighters. He was, so to speak, the original mujahid. I knew nothing of this figure, shrouded in such mystery. But it was 1992, and the mujahideen of Afghanistan had pushed the Russians out, ushering in a new era of carnage and destruction. Any mujahid even if he lived more than a 150 years ago - was worthy of my prayers and respect. But what did I know about the so-called mujahideen of my day, and those that came before? So little. I did not know that Sayyid Ahmed Shah Barelwi led a jihad movement, not against the British, but against the Sikhs. I did not know that he was steeped in the Sufi tradition of his day, initiating his followers into numerous Sufi orders, including his own. I did not know that he travelled from qasbah to qasbah, raising money and recruits, and spreading his message of purifying Islam of all corrupt influence. He was a complex figure, evading all categorisations, be it jihadi, wahhabi, or sufi. He inhabited several conflicting ideological positions. We offered fatiha at the hill-side grave where he is buried. He died in Balakot battling the Sikhs. Even after his death, his disciples talked for decades of his return.

The Balakot I remember of so many years ago is now gone.Vanished.Those who gave me shelter and food are probably buried beneath rub-

ble.When I read about Balakot in the papers, I hurt for those who have lost loved ones and their belongings. I know that one day when I take the bus to Balakot, it will be with a heavy heart and the knowledge that this region is haunted by history. aybe what I will miss most about being a post-graduate student is lugging home a dozen or more library books, piling them on the desk and opening them one at a time over several days. Often, certain books were never opened. They would sit on a shelf, until they were overdue, and then I would lug them back to the library. I will miss those late-night conversations with myself - my mind would suddenly speed up and not slow down until the wee hours of the morning.The next day, I would try to remember those thoughts and discoveries.They either eluded me, or seemed so obvious and intuitive. No, what I will miss most is feeling like a young scholar - knowing that I had the luxury to read and write, where others did not. Like any profession or enterprise, being an academic is a whole lot of posturing.The young scholar seldom possesses any answers. Instead, he or she has many questions. In other words, a profound and irritating sensibility for the complexity of things. There is no straight-talk from his mouth. Just a lot of nuance and mumbo-jumbo. “But it is such a complicated issue and there are no easy answers,” I heard myself saying time and again. I had become the very thing I detested when working as a radio journalist: a hot-aired academic unable to give simple answers.We are so impatient, aren’t we?

Give me a sound-bite, or go to hell. No, what I will miss most about post-graduate study is that moment when something inside me shifted, a seed had grown into a mature idea, and what was once assumed and understood was suddenly under scrutiny. Maybe that is a university education at its best.When I started my year, I thought I already possessed a voice that would articulate my take on the world. Now, I understand that that voice is always maturing, often changing, and never complete. !

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Q - NEWS

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Q-NOTES A Druid’s curse on Q-News All manner of loathsome, incendiary hate mail - from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, we’ll have you know - has come through our mail slot and popped up in our inbox since the London bombings.We have been accused of everything from being Zionist agents and agent provocateurs, to treasonous fifth columnists worthy of arrest, deportation or a one-way ticket to Belmarsh. Nothing, however, could match the creativity and humour (probably unintentional) of the Successors of Cathbad and Brian Boroimbe, High King of Ireland. In short, we have been cursed by Druids.

Now, if you thought all modern day Druids were benign neopagans who spent the solstice singing drunken songs to ancient gods at Stonehenge, think again. Iowerth Frych ap Gruffyd and friends sent us the following charming message: “Be advised that Cathbad’s curse is promulgated... aimed at those guided and inspired by Eblis, who encourages the belief that fatalism and discipline for Islam is holy, when it is more often... worship for His Evil Self as the dweller in Dar al-Harb, whence go misguided Muslims seeking Paradise and finding but Perdition.”

Cathbad it seems was a rather powerful druid from Irish mythology, capable of the most dreadful magic. If Iowerth and Co. are to be believed, we should be very scared - in fact he advises us to leave Britain while we still have time.

The Ninefold Curse calls for “all terrorists and their helpers” to be visited by the taloned claw of the Banshee to be “eaten both whole and raw” and be consumed by “powers they cannot flee.”

“Let None underestimate,” it declares, “the Powers we can command.” Apparently similar curses have been declared on the IRA and the Blair government who have both been visited by Banshees and other-worldly troubles (I guess that’s what they call Blunkett’s shenanigans).

All is not lost.The Druidic community has responded with shock and horror at these “frightening curses”.The online discussion forum of the very official Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids has members calling for the censure of these “hateful heretics”. Real druids would never do anything like this, they exclaim. It seems like they have found their own extremists to tackle. Sounds familiar.

12 | Q - NEWS

“Islamic Trojan” fights online smut Virus writers have created a Trojan horse which tries to disrupt visits the pornographic websites by displaying messages from the Qur’an. John Leyden of the online journal The Register reports that the low-risk Yusufali-a Trojan horse monitors the websites Windows users are visiting. If the malware (or “malicious software") sees one of a set of trigger words in the url it minimises the window so the user cannot see its content and displays a message from the Qur’an instead.The message, partly written in Arabic, contains the following text in English: “Know, therefore, that there is no god but Allah, and ask forgiveness for they fault, and for the men and women who believe: for Allah knows how ye move about and how ye dwell in your homes.”

“Unlike other malware, it appears this Trojan horse isn’t trying to steal money or confidential information, but acting as a moral guardian instead - blocking the viewing of websites it determines are unsavoury,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, a virus protection company. “Of course, it’s possible for the Trojan horse to make mistakes and block sites that are not pornographic - such as medical sites, or social sites designed for teenagers.”

Once the message is displayed the malware performs a variety of other actions before forcing infected users to shutdown. All very disconcerting but there’s no need for undue alarm since the YusufaliA Trojan is not yet in the wild. It’s unclear whether the malware was written as a joke, or as a serious attempt to clean up the habits of internet users. Malware featuring an Islamic theme is rare but not unprecedented. Previous examples have included the Mawanella worm which highlighted the friction between Muslims and Buddhists in Sri Lanka.

New York’s Hasidic Taliban It’s look like Saudi proponents of continuing the ban on women drivers have some unlikely supporters. Steven Weiss reports in New York City’s Forward Newspaper of a remarkable attempt by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community to reassert its ban on female drivers.

“In the Hasidic village of New Square, N.Y.," writes Weiss, “religious leaders recently issued a document reminding residents that ‘women should not sit in the front of a car.'”

“It’s considered not tzniusdik [modest] for a woman to be a driver,” village spokesman Rabbi Mayer Schiller said. ‘In Europe, would a woman have been a coach driver? It would’ve been completely inappropriate.’

The logic is fuzzy, but passions are running high. Religious leaders have also prohibited girls from riding bicycles and women are forbidden from going outside in their long housecoats. Rabbi Schiller exclaims, “If you would poll the community... 97.5% would say, ‘Yes, this is what we want.'"

We anxiously await American neo-cons, evangelicals and other selfrighteous to issue the appropriate edicts against such “backward thinking”. Don’t worry, we are not holding our breath.

“Dear Palestinian Bomber” AP recently reported the strange case of Sami Habbas and a credit card solicitation gone wrong.The address was his, but the name on the Chase credit card offer took Habbas by surprise:“Palestinian Bomber.”

“I thought it was a joke or something,” said Habbas, 54, a Palestinian American.

Habbas opened the letter, and the salutation read “Dear Palestinian Bomber.” When he called the company, JP Morgan Chase & Co., provided his post code and invitation number, two operators said to him: “Yes, Mr. Bomber, what can we do for you?”

“It’s very upsetting,” Habbas said. “I’m not what they are saying, a Palestinian bomber.That’s uncalled for. I have a name. My name is Sami Habbas.”

The information came from a list Chase purchased from a vendor, said Kelly J. Presta, Chase Card Services executive vice president. Chase Card Services, the Delaware-based credit card line of JP Morgan Chase & Co., said it doesn’t know how that name was attached to Habbas’ address but it is investigating.

“Although no Chase employee was involved in creating this information, we are embarrassed by this incident and regret that our automatic screening procedures did not catch this erroneous information,” Presta said. Habbas, a grocer who has lived in the United States since age three, doesn’t know why he would be singled out or how anyone would even know he is of Palestinian heritage.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, D.C., has asked Chase for a formal apology.This is certainly a case of identity theft gone one (or two) steps too far.Well, at least we know Mr Habbas is credit worthy.

So, did Allah make us funny?

Actor Albert Brooks latest film has got studio execs running for cover.

In Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Brooks plays a comedian sent by the State Department to India and Pakistan with a couple of minders to find out what makes Muslims laugh, so everyone can get along better in the post-9/11 world.“I steered clear of religion in this movie,” the veteran actor says, “The whole point is looking for comedy, not looking for God. I was allowed to film in the biggest mosque in India and when I told the imam the plot of the movie he laughed.”

Executives at Sony Studios weren’t buying any of it. In a 30 June letter to Brooks, Sony chairman Michael Lynton said that he wouldn’t release the film unless Brooks changed the title. Lynton wrote: “I do believe that recent incidents have dramatically changed the landscape and this, among other things, warrants changing the title of the film.”

It’s seems like a classic case of over reaction. Studios are happy to go on stereotyping Muslims and Arabs, but a movie title with the word “Muslim” is apparently where they draw their bemusing line. One Sony apparatchik told Brooks that, “If a mullah in Iran saw a poster for the movie and took it the wrong way,” he could be in deep trouble.

Film producer Steve Bing sees the film as an attempt to redress the post 9/11 paranoia:“For so long [after 9/11] whenever I heard anyone talk about Muslims, it was in association with terrorism and I thought, what could I do in a teeny way to defuse this? There had to be some way to separate the 1.5 billion people who don’t want to kill us from the 100,000 or so who do. I thought if I could get five Muslims and six Hindus and maybe three Jews to laugh for 90 minutes, then I’ve accomplished something.” The film will now be distributed by Warner Independent with a January release date. But rumours persist that the real reason that film was dropped in the first place is because it isn’t actually funny. Looks like the last laugh might be on poor Al.

Goodbye Barbie, Salam Fulla!

Barbie has been one of America’s most successful cultural ambassadors. She may not be good at math (as she herself embarrassingly admitted a few years ago), but when she hits the streets dressed to the nines in the most couture of fashions and the most chic accessories, she is the quintessential All-American girl. She never grows old and while Ken is ever faithful, even after decades of “going steady” we still don’t hear the wedding bells.

Well, it looks like more and more customers in the Muslim world aren’t sticking around to witness the happy ending.

With sales haemorrhaging, the era of the Barbie is ending. Bye, bye Barbie! Say salams to her modest Syrian cousin, Fulla.

The New York Times reports that Fulla is a dark-eyed doll with “Muslim values”.While Fulla has Barbie’s size and proportions, she steps out of her shiny pink box wearing a black jilbab and a matching head scarf. She has an extensive and beautiful wardrobe (sold separately, of course), but Fulla is usually displayed wearing her modest “outdoor fashion”. Fulla’s creator, NewBoy Design Studio, based in Syria, introduced her in November 2003, and she has quickly become a bestseller all over the region spawning a Fulla breakfast cereal, Fulla chewing gum, Fulla bicycles, Fulla frisbees, Fulla pool toys and even a doll and girl-sized Fulla prayer mat - all in trademark “Fulla pink.”

Fulla is not the first doll to wear the hijab. Mattel markets a group of collectors’ dolls that include a Moroccan Barbie and a doll called Leila, intended to represent a Muslim slave girl in an Ottoman court. In Iran, toy shops sell a veiled doll called Sara. A Michigan-based company markets a veiled doll called Razanne, selling primarily to Muslims in the United States and Britain. But none of those dolls have enjoyed anything approaching Fulla’s wide popularity.

Fulla has no Muslim Ken - at least not yet.

When Fulla goes out for a quick bite, at least in France, you won’t find her in Macdonald’s or Burger King. In Paris you’ll find her hanging out with the “sisters” at Beurger King Muslim. The hijab seems like a world away as BKM staff - hijabed and bearded - serve up quality halal burgers to a young French Muslim clientèle that just can’t get enough.

According to blogger Subzero Blue (www.subzeroblue.com), though “Muslim” fast food abounds in France with endless street-side shawarma shops selling sliced-meat sandwiches or kebabs, Beurger King Muslim is the first to clone the set-up and decor of American-style fast food joints so popular among French youth.And not without humour.The name is a play on both the huge American chain as well as the French slang word “beur”, which means second generation North Africans living in France.

Customers can order “bakon halal” - a bacon burger made with halal meat - or a “double koull cheese”. The cash register lights up with “Salamalekum,” after each sale, while flatscreen televisions play films on the life of the Prophet.

I’m sure Fulla’s angling to be the chain’s next CEO... as long as she can avoid getting the secret sauce on her brand new abaya.

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POSTSCRIPT: PANNING PANORAMA In the wreckage of the London bombings, both successful and botched, lie some tender and immensely vulnerable pieties about the harmlessness of the radical streak in our inner city Islam. Among the casualties too, writes Abidullah Ansari, has been the official belief that given the chaos of mainstream Islam in the UK, the government can safely regard representatives of tightly-organised overseas ‘Islamic Movements’ as the community’s voice. e should not forget that things could be worse. Individuals muttering support for al-Qaeda are generally excluded from these ‘Islamic Movement’ bodies, which are anxious at having been chased from the throne of global vanguardism by the takfiri-Wahhabi extremists. In the Muslim world, the ‘Islamic Movement’ is increasingly torn between pro-Bin Laden camps (often stirred up by the insurrection in Iraq), and into ‘moderate’ wings, outmanoeuvred by the upsurge in terrorism, and confused about the future of their once-optimistic movements. In the UK, we should be thankful that it is generally this ‘moderate’ Islamist wing that controls the organisations that the government likes.

Yet their culture is still alien to the Muslim reality on the ground. The older generation is overwhelmingly Barelvi, and indifferent to Qutb and Mawdudi, if not hostile. The younger generation increasingly seems to be either criminalised, wahabised, or educated. In the latter case, the simple formulas of the ‘Islamists’ are simply not persuasive. A good spread of GCSEs, coupled with strong Muslim faith, seem to be providing a good inoculation against the ‘Islamic Movement'.

It is time for these educated young people to stand up and be counted and to kickstart the debate over whether we really wish to be represented by minds schooled in distant, failed, and simpleminded forms of Muslim ideology. Reading the texts of that ideology one would be forgiven for thinking that Islam was nothing more than a childish but arrogant fundamentalism, absolutely detached from any principle of deep civilisation. Movement Islam is less vicious than Wahabis extremism of the kind to be heard in many Saudi-funded mosques and publishing houses, but may still prove a danger to the survival of the British Muslim community.

The Panorama documentary broadcast on 21 August 2005 showed the vulnerability of such organisations. Their spokesmen seemed unable to grasp that it is immensely dangerous for the Muslim community to be represented by individuals who attend the funerals of Hamas masterminds. One would expect them to understand this; but it has evidently not dawned on them, as their flailing responses showed. To be ambiguous about suicide bombing in Israel, and to denounce it elsewhere, is precisely the kind of fuzzy logic which makes journalists pounce and populations despair. Had the minority of Middle Eastern ulama (and yes, it is a minority, despite the Islamophobic claims of the far-right) who allowed their emotions to push them into supporting suicide bombing in occupied Palestine paused to consider the rules of Shariah and the nature of today’s world, they would have sensed that they were opening a door into hell. If suicide bombing is halal in Palestine, then anyone else who feels similarly oppressed will

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see no reason why he should not copy the ‘human bomb’ technique. There are rumours that the elderly Qaradawi is now feeling the strength of this criticism, as the practice spreads uncontrollably, like a disease, throughout the world.

The documentary was merciless in its exposure of the hapless East London Mosque. It was dismaying to watch the double-talk of the Wahabis preacher Sudais as he praised Islam’s record of encouraging ‘peace and harmony’ between followers of different religions, when opening the mosque extension before the British press and assembled bishops, while everyone knew of his furious khutbahs against “the callers of the trinity and the cross worshippers, those influenced by the rottenness of their ideas, and the poison of their cultures”. Those who have attended his khutbahs in person will have heard all this, again and again. Whose idea was it to invite a Wahhabi hardliner to open a mosque in London?

Sudais is hardly famous for his multicultural views. Again, the Muslim community’s fondness for petrodollars landed it in deep trouble. This was hardly less of an own goal than the Sheikh Faisal case, when the Saudis spent an estimated two hundred thousand dollars and eight years training a British ‘da’ee', who then returned to advocate the murder of British Hindus. Many thanks, Saudi Wahabistan.

Another own goal was supplied by the Friday khateeb at the Leeds mosque where suicide bomber Abdullah Jamal learned some important lessons about his new religion. It seems that the khateeb is happy to speak of “a vicious Zionist-Crusader attack.

Godless and full of hatred on this ummah”, even though publicly the mosque is keen on good relations between communities. More publicity material for the BNP, the Zionist lobby, the Evangelical Christians in Washington! Panic has reportedly spread in the mosque committee, but whether they will encourage speakers better prepared to serve the interests of the community remains to be seen.

It was heartening to see the courage of Muslim dissidents willing to speak out against the Islamist politburo. Mahboob Kantharia was horrified by one UK-based Islamist who glorifies suicide bombings in Palestine. “Here was a man leading a socalled credible organisation,” Kantharia said, “sending out a clear message to not just the young Muslims of this country but every other young person who has some radical ideas that it was OK to become a suicide bomber.” It seems that Kantharia represents an important and growing section of British Muslim activism that has supported and then rejected the Islamist control of community organisations.

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Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, former lieutenant of the late firebrand Kalim Siddiqui of The Muslim Parliament. Commenting on the angry demands which some Islamists have been making in recent years, he remarked: “This is the direction the Muslim community is taking, rights and no obligations, leading to victimhood, grievance culture. We don’t seem to be grasping what makes a people respectable, lovable, likeable.”

The program was good on the persecution complex suffered by many Movement Islam activists. It was this complex, apparently, that made it impossible for their representatives to attend Holocaust Memorial Day, unless acknowledgement was made of the suffering of Muslim victims as well. Of course, Zionist activists have milked the Holocaust for all it is worth; but this is irrelevant. Jewish reluctance to attend a commemoration of the Srebrenica victims unless the Holocaust victims were also invoked would probably be angrily denounced by the Islamists. Muslim misbehaviour is never mentioned, for Muslims, in the eyes of Movement Islam, are always the victims. Darfur, for instance, is strangely absent from their khutbahs, while massacres of Shia Muslims in Iraq are ignored.

Immense capital has been made out of the prevarications of the Islamists by Islam’s many enemies in the UK. The far-right and the pro-Israel lobby were no doubt delighted by the ammunition that had been handed to them. If, as one activist asserted, most Muslims around the world believe in suicide bombing, then Islamophobia has been strongly vindicated. Naturally, most Muslims do not believe in such a thing, if you consider Malays, Indonesians, Turks, Uzbeks, and in fact the vast majority of ordinary and scholarly Muslims, to be Muslims. Even in Palestine under the cruel occupation recent polls show that support for suicide bombing has steadily declined. Despite this, some of our activists seem to insist that Islamophobia has a sound basis in fact.

They must know that their views make Islam repulsive to the great majority of educated people in the world; yet they persist. There is room here for a new conspiracy theory.

The Panorama programme was, needless to say, full of faults.

The principle of Muslim solidarity was presented as a problem as though Jewish people in Britain were any less concerned for the wellbeing of other Jews around the world. The problem of Islamist control of key organisations was explained in terms of ‘political religion', not of mistakes in interpreting shariah and aqeedah. Clearly, any attempt to depoliticise Islam is foolish, given the religion’s origins and its historic achievements. The presenter suggested that “It’s a battle of ideas - between those for whom Islam is personal - and those who also wish to pursue Islam as a political ideology.” Here he spilled his secularist beans.

Mainstream orthodox Islam is not, and never has been, apolitical.

Leaders such as the former Bosnian president Izetbegovic saw their struggle against Christian oppression in Islamic terms. This is where the programme failed totally, since it presented the struggle between the Muslim community and the Islamists as a fight between apolitical and political religion, when no one on either side sees it like this. Properly understood it is a fight between orthodox Islam, full of mercy and wisdom, and the British extrusion of Middle Eastern and Pakistani Islamism, popular only among some middle-class technocrats with a weak Islamic education. The programme claimed to range the apolitical against the politicised; but what we really saw was scholars ranged against Islamists. Few in the British establishment seem to comprehend that British Islam should be represented by scholars, rather than by medics and accountants who have read Mawdudi.

In fact, Panorama was guilty of a fundamental error in assess-

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ing the Muslim groups it was speaking to. None of them claim to be leaders of British Islam; instead, they are talking-shops for big portfolios containing mosques and groups of many shades of opinion. Their representatives cannot meaningfully be slated for not dealing with extremism in the community, when the community treats them, rightly, as nothing more than a forum for the exchange of views, and their presentation to the media and to government.

Still, despite its faults, the programme reminded us that there is a battle going on for the soul of Islam in the UK. Should we spread a confrontational Islamism in the mosques, or should we go for classical Islam? The BBC website discussion on the programme attracted a fair amount of Muslim opposition, but also recorded the comments of many Muslims who were delighted that the radicals were being challenged. The spokesmen of the more reasonable tendency in British Islam are still poorly organised; but there are signs of hope everywhere. When they gain the reins of power, we may hope that the current threat to the community will massively decrease. !

THOSE MUSLIM WOMEN ARE AT IT - AGAIN! Reporter Sonia Malik’s article, commissioned by Q-News, on the secret lives of some young Muslim women on Britain’s university campuses caused quite a stir. Her piece was reprinted in The Guardian and Italy’s La Republica and featured on the BBC. But not everyone agreed that it was the right ‘problem’ to cover. Fauzia Ahmad and Imran Tyrer ask if it isn’t time to move beyond tabloid coverage of young Muslims and address some really relevant issues. hat is it about Muslim students and the media? If it’s not one scandal it’s another. Over the past decade alleged militant Islamist recruitment on campus has dominated reporting of Muslim students’ experiences and framed discussions about them in terms of crisis and scandal. Pundits have regularly interrogated the reasons for this apparently growing trend: is it an irrational reaction to stifling communities and family conflicts, an inherent drive to extremism, or a culturally hard-wired inability to successfully negotiate the challenges and opportunities of life in postmodern, post-industrial Britain?

However, excesses of an altogether different kind have recently captured media attention, with Sonia Malik (Q-News, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Issue 360) and Claire Coleman (The Daily Mail, Amazing double life a growing trend among Muslim girls, 11 April) drawing attention to the scandal of the apparently rather louche behaviour of certain Muslim women students.

Apparently this is a “growing trend”, according to the Daily Mail, and many of its implied causes also look familiar, coalescing around one theme in particular - the idea that Muslims and Muslim families are somehow inadequate culturally, their identities somehow incoherent, and that there is a need to escape from Islam’s parochialism. Generalised references to “cultural traditions”, “growing up under lockdown”, “moral directives”, and

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Focusing only on those who ‘step out of line’ suggests a certain judgmentalism and cannot be justified as a responsible attempt to be mature and brave about challenges and problems facing our community. It can also be interpreted as suggestive of a certain shock at the apparent scandal of Muslim women students daring to defy the common stereotype of them as voiceless, oppressed and terminally obedient.

pressure to safeguard familial honour were invoked in Q-News and were built around a number of quotes from Muslim women students, and contribute to this fetishisation of their experiences and an exaggerated sense of ‘moral panic'. By falling back on generalisations and focusing our gaze on one particular sub-section of Muslim women (and let’s not forget what a loaded and contested term this is) we are in danger of giving way to popular stereotypes about the supposed backwardness of Muslim communities and cementing the scandal framing of Muslim students in popular reporting.

In proper context there’s nothing novel or shocking about this representation of student life. 1980s sitcom The Young Ones had an interesting take on stereotypes and jokes about lazy, drunken, promiscuous students existing almost solely on diets of baked beans, alcohol, and illicit drugs and exploring new-found freedom away from parental controls. Its own twist to this caricature of scholarly turpitude combined anarchic slapstick with political references to life in Thatcher’s Britain during the cold war, woven around four student variations on this stereotyped theme: hippy, punk, anarchist, ladies’ man. Now, courtesy of these recent articles, it seems a fifth variation to this theme has arrived (and been invested with its own particular political significance), in the form of an apparently “growing trend” towards “double lives” among “British Islam’s’ bad girls” at university.

Two issues need to be teased out here, one concerning evidence and the other representation. Without reference to numbers (estimated or actual) of women comprising the ‘trend’ both Malik and Coleman speak of, how can we be sure that it is indeed ‘growing'? We’re not in denial about what we see on campus - and, hey, we’ve been young ourselves once - but we do question the reliability of claims about a growing trend which appear to be based on the accounts of a relatively small number of women who presumably were interviewed precisely because they had something specific to offer on this topic.

Many students are bound to be attracted to new temptations when first away from home and may experiment in a variety of ways as part of their personal journeys, some preferring choices predicated around sobriety and spirituality and others trying anything once (at least). We must also remember that some students entering university may be more emotionally vulnerable than others. Their experiences in particular need to be handled sensitively, not turned into some tabloid spectacle.

Whilst there is empirical evidence to show that, like students of all backgrounds, some Muslim students ‘rebel’ at university

(and there are different levels and definitions of rebellion), there is also evidence from both our respective corners of Britain (Liverpool and London) that suggests the opposite: many Muslim women who enter university just as curious and excited about their new found freedom as the next meet the challenges they face rather differently and find their sense of spiritual awareness and religiosity increases in the academy.

We can cite examples of many women who, in the face of parental anxieties about ‘shame’ and rebellion, have fought and argued their way into university. But we can also point towards women who have been actively encouraged into university by their parents - interestingly, fathers are often cited as influential here - because they want their daughters to ‘stand on their own two feet’ and see higher education not just as an important step in education and career, but also as a form of social mobility that will impact on wider opportunities and choices they face socially and personally. Emerging statistics show numbers of Muslim women in university outweighing Muslim men, and marrying ages among degree-educated Muslim women are rising. In this context, these experiences seem to us far more interesting and significant than a few cases of rabble-rousing and rebellion. They challenge the ‘married as soon as possible’ stereotypes and are functions of a wider emerging culture of university entry, expressed further by the choice of university and degree course and often bolstered with shades of ‘keeping up with the Khans’ attitude. Such women play an important role in paving the way for younger siblings and women in their families and communities.

Few in the mainstream media appear interested in such cases.

Why would they be when it is so much easier to re-hash that ageold chestnut of being ‘caught between two cultures'? Focusing only on those who ‘step out of line’ suggests a certain judgmentalism and cannot be justified as a responsible attempt to be mature and brave about challenges and problems facing our community. It can also be interpreted as suggestive of a certain shock at the apparent scandal of Muslim women students daring to defy the common stereotype of them as voiceless, oppressed, and terminally obedient. As Muslim social scientists we face a particular dilemma in striking a balance between acknowledging, explaining, and understanding real social problems without ‘selling out’ through sensationalist voyeurism. When faced with a difference in perspective such as this, the likely outcome is that while one view becomes regarded as the ‘apologist', the other (usually the one that highlights the sensational aspect), is welcomed as the ‘authentic native informant'.

We are also in difficulty of allowing limiting and polarised dichotomies between ‘traditional women’ (read backward, uneducated, religious) and ‘modern women’ (read Westernised, educated, secular) to remain unchallenged and thus obscure the potential for other, alternative avenues of expression and understanding. These binaries are not just restricted to media stereotypes, but, are deeply engrained misconceptions that extend into the academic working environment. They also have direct realworld impacts, valorising and perpetuating a range of stereotypes about Muslim women and about university life.

Muslim women are often portrayed as the embodiment of religious and cultural manifestations. Amina Wadud’s recent actions have thrust the position of Muslim women once again into the media spotlight for this very reason. But while we can argue that her stance has encouraged debate, the journalistic articles on Muslim women students and their ‘double lives’ merely invoke and reauthorise the same tired stereotypes that we’ve heard many times before.

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face issues of racism and Islamophobia on campus, and have both had to deal with colleagues making condescending remarks about Muslim women who choose to wear hijab. We still see the media all too often framing representations of Muslim students by crisis.

Like the idea of a little student madness, this has become a load of old hat. It is time to move on, and time for the media to focus on issues more relevant, weighty, and representative than scandal alone. !

PAT TILLMAN, OUR HERO

The 50th anniversary of James Dean’s death raises an interesting tension - that inter-generational conflict (for which he has become an emblematic figure) is not restricted to Muslims. What often differs is how this is framed and represented - often reduced to ‘teen angst’ or reified as exciting but ultimately harmless ‘rebellion', or free-thinking hedonism for white British young people, or over-determined into a wider clash of essential cultures in the case of young people from Black and Minority Ethnic communities.

There is also an interesting contrast between the representation of those young Muslim men and women who appear to ‘rebel': many accounts scandalise the women and emphasise oriental sexuality, the breaking of taboos and crossing the ‘colour divide’ by going out with white boys, while men are often criminalized and overtly Islamicised.

These tensions interest us, for in itself there is actually nothing unusual in the clichéd figure of the undergraduate going off to university - the great market place of competing ideas - and doing things they’d not always like their parents to find out about, irrespective of the ethnicity of the students concerned. However, making spectacle of such experiences in the case of ethnicised minority young people (and particularly Muslims) serves a wider purpose in fixing their identities and ‘culture’ as problematic. The notion of a double life buys into this logic, implying an inability to articulate a coherent identity that must mark these young people as pathological and almost schizophrenic. Representations of this split subjectivity are often most radicalised around the racialised mobile concurrency of past/'east'-present/'west’ against which their supposed identity crises and conflict with family are played out, as they apparently slip between conflicting subject positions oriented relative to other essential caricatures ('traditional’ parents, ‘typical’ students, for example).

It should come as no great surprise that Muslim young women away from home respond to their new found opportunities and life changes in a plethora of ways. What is surprising is the way in which certain choices made by a small number are seen as being indicative of a growing trend and framed in ways that often imply inadequacy, incoherence, and crisis in Muslim identities. We still

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When American football star Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan last year, right wing pundits couldn’t hold back their glee. Here was a truly all-American war hero, a martyr for freedom. Foremost among them was neo-con poster girl, the ever-egregious Ann Coulter. She must have been more than surprised when she woke up one September morning to find that her war hero actually believed the Iraq war was “f***ing illegal.” Dave Zirin reports. don’t believe it,” seethed Ann Coulter. Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former National Football League star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was “f***ing illegal” and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman’s death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as “an American original - virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article’s source was Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary.

Mary and the Tillman family are relentlessly pushing for answers to the questions surrounding Pat’s death in Afghanistan.

They want to know why it took the Pentagon five weeks to tell them he died in a tragic case of friendly fire. They want to know why they were unwitting props at Pat’s funeral, weeping while lies were told by eulogizing politicians. Mary is now hoping that a new Pentagon inquiry will bring closure. “There have been so many discrepancies so far that it’s hard to know what to believe,” she said to the Chronicle. “There are too many murky details.”

The very private Tillmans have revealed a picture of Pat profoundly at odds with the GI Joe image created by Pentagon spinmeisters and their media stenographers. As the Chronicle put it, family and friends are now unveiling “a side of Pat Tillman not widely known--a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books...to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.” Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq War. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, “I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town.... We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f***ing illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s

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who he was. He totally was against Bush.” With these revelations, Pat Tillman the PR icon joins WMD and Al Qaeda connections on the heap of lies used to sell the Iraq War. Tillman’s transition from one-dimensional caricature to critically thinking human being is a long time coming. The fact is that in death he was far more useful to the armchair warriors than he had ever been in life. When the Pro Bowler joined the Army Rangers, the Pentagon brass needed a loofah to wipe their drool: He was white, handsome and played in the NFL. For a chickenhawk Administration led by a President who loves the affectations of machismo but runs from protesting military moms, this testosterone cocktail was impossible to resist. The problem was that Tillman wouldn’t play their game.

To the Pentagon’s chagrin, he turned down numerous offers to be its recruitment poster child.

But when Tillman fell in Afghanistan the wheels once again started to turn. Now the narrative was perfect: “War hero and football star dies fighting terror.” The Abu Ghraib scandal was about to hit the press, so the President found it especially useful to praise Tillman as “an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror.” His funeral was nationally televised. Bush even went back to the bloody well during the presidential campaign, addressing his team’s fans on the Arizona Cardinals’ stadium Jumbotron.

We now know, of course, that this was all a brutal charade.

Such callous manipulation is fuelling the Tillman family’s anger. As Mary Tillman said this past May, “They could have told us up front that they were suspicious that [his death] was a fratricide, but they didn’t. They wanted to use him for their purposes.... They needed something that looked good, and it was appaling that they would use him like that.” A growing number of military families, similarly angered, are criticising the war in Iraq through organisations like Military Families Speak Out. As for Chomsky, whom Ann Coulter would undoubtedly label “treasonous,” Mary Tillman says a private meeting was planned between him and Pat after Pat’s return - a meeting that never took place, of course. Chomsky confirms this scenario. This was the real Pat Tillman: someone who, like the majority of this country, was doubting the rationale for war, distrusting his Commander in Chief and looking for answers. The real Pat Tillman, the one with three dimensions, must stick in the throat of the Bush-Coulter gang, a pit in the cherry atop their bloody sundae. !

Articles by Dave Zirin and Dave Enders are reprinted with permission from The Nation magazine (www.thenation.com).

DEMANDING WITHDRAWAL As the insurgency against the US occupation continued in Iraq this summer, the world’s attention was focused on the increasingly acrimonious negotiations over the text of a new Constitution.The failure of Shiite and Kurdish factions to find agreement with Sunni negotiators led to predictions of heightened support for the insurgency among the Sunni population and a determined campaign on their part to reject the Constitution in the October referendum.

But, as Dave Enders reports, it would be foolish to

conclude that opposition to the occupation is strong only in Sunni areas. n fact, with the notable exception of the Kurdish population, support for the American military among Iraqis is virtually nonexistent two and a half years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. Before January’s elections, polls taken by Sadoun Dulaimi (now the country’s defense minister) indicated that 85 percent of Iraqis wanted a US withdrawal “as soon as possible.” On a recent trip to the country, this journalist found that dissatisfaction with the occupation has, if anything, grown.

There are a litany of reasons for this, from the post invasion looting that occurred as US soldiers sat idle, to the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison, to the flattening of Falluja and the ongoing operations along the Euphrates River in the western part of Iraq, which inflict widespread destruction and casualties among the local population while failing to remove resistance fighters. Added to this is the frustrating lack of improvement in basic services like water and electricity and the fact that wherever US troops patrol, insurgent attacks and civilian loss of life are sure to follow.

Iraqis crave security and something approaching a normal life, but such goals remain elusive. Along the highways in southern, predominantly Shiite, Iraq, villages and towns have posted signs along the road requesting in English that the foreign troops remain outside their municipalities. “This is a peaceful area,” one sign reads. “Please do not enter.” In Baghdad al-Jadida, a middleclass neighbourhood that was the site of a suicide car-bombing in July that killed one US soldier and twenty-seven children, mourning parents placed as much blame on the US troops, who were handing out candy, as they did on the man who had driven his car into the crowd.

“I think if you go back to the [January] election campaign, every list promised to provide security and help our friends in the multinational forces go home,” said Adnan al-Janabi, one of the eighty-two members of the 275-member Iraqi National Assembly who in June signed a letter calling for the withdrawal of the US military and other foreign forces. When pressed, most Assembly members will admit that it is less than ideal to have foreign troops in their country (since June several dozen more have informally indicated their agreement with the letter). The fact that only a minority of parliamentarians are calling for withdrawal is indicative of the groups that took part in the elections.

Underrepresented in the signing of the letter, and in the Assembly itself, are members of the country’s Sunni Arab community, most of whom did not participate in the elections for fear of retribution or out of a refusal to legitimise the process. If, as many of their leaders have urged, they participate in the October referendum on the Constitution and in the elections scheduled for December, the number of politicians seeking to hasten the speedy exit of US troops will certainly increase. Both those boycotting participation in the government and those in the armed resistance, mostly Sunni, have repeatedly demanded a timetable for withdrawal.

The movement for withdrawal is centred on a desire to restore full sovereignty to the Iraqi government, which at present does not have any jurisdiction over foreign troops. The US-dominated international force was officially “invited” to stay under an agreement last year between the US military and former US-appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. The Transitional Administrative Law, the document that laid out the process by which the Governing Council was replaced by January’s elections, grants the Assembly the right to negotiate a status of forces agreement governing the

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activities of foreign troops. Nonetheless, this past April the new Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, extended the Allawi agreement without putting the matter before the Assembly. This infuriated many Assembly members and led to the June letter, which reads in part: We have made an appeal that has been ignored by the National Assembly, and what’s more serious is that the Iraqi government has asked the UN Security Council to prolong the period for the invader’s troops without asking the representatives of the people, the National Assembly.... We, from the position of historical responsibility, refuse to legalise the invasion, and we ask once more to pull them out.

“I think you’ll find that more than a majority of the National Assembly feels the prime minister has gone over our heads,” said Janabi, a secular Sunni and a member of Allawi’s Iraqi List, whose members are one component of the coalition for the pullout. But a large majority of that coalition is actually from the so-called Shiite list, or United Iraqi Alliance, which took 141 seats in the January elections. Thus the people the US occupation helped bring to power are now seeking to end the American presence.

On Assembly member Falah Hassan’s desk in his small office in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of northeast Baghdad, sits a picture of a friend killed during the summer of 2004 in the fighting between the US military and the Madhi Army, the militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr City is much quieter this summer, but antiAmerican sentiment is just as deep.

“Pulling out American troops from Iraq is the demand of the people of Iraq. In March millions of people came out to demonstrations seeking the pullout,” said Hassan, a member of Sadr’s party and the author of the June letter. Hassan’s numbers are exaggerated, but certainly hundreds of thousands poured into the streets. The demonstrations were the largest the country had seen since the fall of Saddam Hussein. In July Sadr’s office collected more than a million signatures in the span of a couple of weeks on a petition calling for withdrawal. “We are asking them to stop torturing and terrifying people and killing Iraqis,” said Hassan.

A few weeks after the letter was circulated, the Assembly voted to create a sovereignty committee to meet with the defense and interior ministers to discuss drawing up a timeline for the rebuilding of Iraqi security forces and, potentially, for US withdrawal. While Hassan believes that the US government is purposely trying to prolong the military’s stay in Iraq, other Iraqi politicians believe the public mood inside the United States is beginning to favour withdrawal. Many in the latter group, primarily Kurds and some Shiites, are ambivalent about a US departure and are afraid that full-scale civil war and chaos will result.

The Americans “have to have a schedule for their leaving Iraq, and have a schedule for the preparing of Iraqi forces and making an agreement for [the US] presence,” said Salama al-Khafaji, a member of the largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Khafaji wants an end to the occupation and is a signatory of the June letter, but, she said, “We want it to be a bilateral withdrawal.” Khafaji, who chairs the Assembly’s human rights committee, may be a gradualist on the question of withdrawal, but she is nonetheless deeply concerned about the detention facilities US troops operate independent of the Iraqi justice system. They now hold more than 10,000 prisoners in three major camps across the country and 1,000-1,500 at any given time in smaller facilities on military bases. Abu Ghraib near Baghdad and Camp Bucca near Basra have become recruiting centres for the insurgency. “The prisoners in the prisons, they collect together, and the hardened ones teach the others how to become

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terrorists,” she said.

Khafaji believes that serious moves toward a pullout will dry up recruitment efforts by jihadi groups. “It will affect those with extreme religious ideas,” she said. “The Salafi, the Wahhabi. This will affect them, that American troops are having these types of aims and that they are going to withdraw. This will decrease their reasons to fight.”

Jawad al-Maliky, a prominent member of Prime Minister Jaafari’s Dawa Party, is also the head of the Assembly’s defense subcommittee, to which the timetable measure will be referred.

“We have the sovereignty on paper. In the meantime, we do not have sovereignty in the political or the economic arena,” Maliky said, referring to US advisers in Baghdad’s ministries. Maliky and other Assembly members say these advisers have veto power over allocation of finances and major policy decisions. “We would like things to get back to where they were under international law.”

“We call this a ‘leak in sovereignty,'" Hassan, the Sadr official, said with a wry smile. Bahaa al-Araji, an Assembly member who forwarded Hassan’s letter to the US Congress and the UN, said he had received no response from either. Both Maliky and Hassan cite UN Security Council Resolution 1546, which recognised a sovereign Iraqi government as of the June 2004 “transition of power,” as the basis for their motion calling for withdrawal.

In July Jaafari said US troops might be pulled out of some cities within six months, no doubt deferring to popular sentiment.

Maliky denies there is pressure from the US side not to speak of withdrawal. But after Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, said in mid-September that as many as 50,000 US troops could be withdrawn by the end of 2005, he changed his tune at a joint White House press conference the next day, claiming he did not want to set a timetable.

“We have stood against Jaafari, who thinks the Americans should stay,” said Fatah al-Sheik, a young politician from Sadr City and the editor of a newspaper that takes the Sadr line. Sheik, a fast-talking and engaging polemicist, has been arguing for a pullout on Arab satellite-news talk shows. He said Jaafari’s supporters “are very much embarrassed to talk about this subject, because by prolonging the stay of the Americans, they do not recognise people’s hopes. People want a promise that the Americans will leave. They were saying that we cannot ask for a pullout before building the security forces. We told them that we should have a timetable for withdrawal that is parallel to the buildup of Iraqi forces.” Sheik’s specific complaints about the occupation and the humiliating loss of sovereignty have great resonance with the public. “Give back the government’s palace,” he said, referring to Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace compound in the centre of Baghdad, which has become the sprawling UScontrolled Green Zone.

It is clear that Assembly members are beginning to feel pressure to address the issue. Hussain al-Shahristani, an Assembly member from the same coalition list of parties on which Maliky and Hassan ran in January’s election, did not sign the June letter but bristles at the suggestion that he opposes it. “I am waiting for the recommendations of the defense subcommittee before expressing views or making recommendations,” Shahristani said.

What Iraq will look like in the wake of a US withdrawal is uncertain. Already, Shiite political parties in the south, which is relatively stable in terms of violence against occupying forces and the government, have begun fighting one another for power, while police have turned a blind eye to extrajudicial killings and allegedly carried out some of their own. In the central region a low-level civil war is already taking place despite the presence of the US mil-

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itary, which has also failed to stop Kurds in the north from displacing Arabs and Turkmen in a bid to win a referendum on whether the oil city of Kirkuk should come under the administration of the autonomous Kurdish authority, which already runs three majority-Kurdish governorates in the north. The Iraqi army units trained and deployed by the United States in hostile cities like Falluja are made up of soldiers from other parts of the country, whom the locals accuse of oppressive tactics and random arrests. What is certain, say many Assembly members, is that the occupation has failed.

“I’m asking for a timetable for withdrawal of the Americans,” says Abdul Karim al-Mohammedawi, a member of the sovereignty committee who spent more than a decade leading resistance fighters from the southern part of the country against Saddam’s government. “They are not capable of keeping security in Iraq.

The forces they have trained so far do not represent Iraqis.”

Other Assembly members openly support armed resistance against US troops. “Denying the presence of US troops is lawful,” says Batool Qassim, another signatory of the letter and a member of SCIRI. “We do not find that the American people are doing anything to make the situation better. We ask that they help us in persuading their Administration to pull out.” !

BURMA’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET Rape as a weapon of war, millions forced into slave labour, the conscription of more child soldiers than any other country in the world - Burma’s ruling military junta has one of the world’s most notorious rap sheets. However, few know of the embattled Rohingyas, Burma’s Muslim minority and their struggle for recognition.While almost half-amillion fled to Bangladesh in 1991, the majority of the Rohingya live in virtual slavery to the military authorities, denied citizenship, mobility rights and international aid. John Jackson reports on their fight for survival and their betrayal by Southeast Asia’s Muslim nations. ntil recently the plight of Burma’s ethnic and religious minorities have been paid much less attention. A report just published reveals in detail the human catastrophe taking place in Burma. After fours years of painstaking research inside the country, Guy Horton has amassed 600 pages of detailed evidence of a policy of systematic destruction of minority communities in the East of the country. The Shan, Karen and Karenni people have had thousands of villages razed, livestock, food and essential utensils destroyed. Some estimate that possibly a million people have been forcibly relocated throughout the country. Horton contends that the policy is a form of slow genocide. He also suggests that the policy is not restricted to these groups but applies to other minorities in Burma. One such minority who have been the most neglected, but which has suffered intense violence and destruction from the ruling junta, is Burma’s Muslim Rohingya people. In fact, the greatest exodus of any minority people from Burma

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occurred when a quarter of a million Rohingya refugees fled to Bangladesh in 1991. Since then many have been returned to Burma by the UN, only to face continued persecution.

The Rohingyas live in northern Rakhine (Arakan) State in western Myanmar (on the border with Bangladesh). Although it is unclear when Muslims first began to settle in the area, it is thought that traders and mariners had already begun to arrive by the 8th and 9th centuries. Again during British colonial rule there was a mass influx of Muslims into Arakan, enlarging the already significant population living there. Muslims have been an integral part of Burmese society long before the current state was founded in 1947. They are not refugees or recent immigrants, nor are they temporary residents.

The government of Burma has patently refused to grant Rohingyas any form of citizenship. Though the government claims to treat them equally, the citizenship laws in place are reminiscent of the Apartheid pass laws used against black South Africans. Despite their long history of residence in Burma, the government does not recognise Rohingyas as one of Burma’s many ethnic groups. This status denies them even the meagre rights enjoyed by their fellow ethnic minorities. Although all of the ethnic nationalities in Burma can be considered “full citizens”, this status is denied the Rohingya.

The Rohingyas are therefore effectively stateless, and forced to suffer all of the hardships that such ‘status’ brings, including an inability to find paid work, complete lack of acknowledgement from their own government, and limited aid from the international community.

Though the Rohingya Muslims are not the only ethnic minority in Arakan State, it is clear that they suffer far worse conditions, including forced labour, than the other major ethnic minority in the region, the Buddhist Rakhine people.

The army tends to use forced labour and portering for any task they can imagine, at the cost of great suffering for those

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Given the extent of the persecution of Burma’s Muslims, it is shocking that Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh have befriended Rangoon’s military dictators.

Malaysia, under Mahathir, pushed for Burma to join ASEAN in 1997 and last year, Indonesia and Malaysia fought to have Burma join the Asia Europe Meeting, both instances against the wishes of the wider international community. Bangladesh is currently negotiating a natural gas project with Burma which will become the largest source of foreign currency for the regime. recruited for this purpose. The old, the infirm, pregnant women, children - none are spared this modern slavery. It is not uncommon that members of the Muslim minority are forced to build or renovate Buddhist pagodas, the houses of Buddhist villagers, and even work as slave labour on the private farms of border patrol officers, while they are not allowed to renovate any Muslim religious site.

As part of an insidious government program of “population control” focused specifically on the Rohingya population, fierce restrictions have been placed on the family lives of Rohingya Muslims. Two main issues - a marriage restriction and the mandatory registration of pregnancies and births - make it nearly impossible for Rohingyas to develop stable families. Marriage laws specifically targeting Rohingyas require the couple to gain permission before marrying, which normally requires both a long bureaucratic process as well as prohibitively high bribes to local army officials. It has been reported that because of this restriction, in some towns no marriages have taken place in over a year, and therefore no children have been born.

The second regulation, implemented without explanation and clearly developed purely to humiliate the people, is the mandatory registration of pregnancies and births. Rather than simply register a new baby after it is born, a pregnant woman must travel to her local military office (sometimes a matter of miles) and bare her stomach to at least one male military officer, for “proof” of the pregnancy. If the officer is not satisfied, the child will not be added to the family list, will never be eligible for travel permits (even to go to the neighbouring town), and could be expelled from Burma as an illegal migrant.

The government’s policies towards the Rohingyas render them landless, stateless, and helpless, and extremely vulnerable to the violent abuses and severe corruption rampant in the military, ministries, and border patrol in Arakan State. It is clear that it is the intention of the Burmese military junta to exclude, humiliate, and starve out the Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority.

Given the extent of the persecution of Burma’s Muslims, it will surprise some that Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh have befriended Rangoon’s military dictators. Malaysia, under the then Prime Minister Mahathir, pushed for Burma to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997 against the wishes of Europe and the US. Just last year, Indonesia and

Malaysia fought to have Burma join the Asia Europe Meeting, also against the wishes of the wider international community.

Bangladesh is currently negotiating a natural gas project with Burma which will become the largest source of foreign currency for the regime, massively boosting its military capacity and repression. Each dollar earned by the regime will be another nail in the coffin for innocent Burmese, whether Buddhist, Muslim, Christian or Hindu. While Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s pro-democracy movement is committed to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation where all would enjoy rights and the rule of law, the national leaders of Southeast Asia’s Muslims have backed tyranny instead. The same betrayal has happened to the Buddhist majority of Burma, where co-religionists in the governments’ of Thailand and Cambodia seem to have little regard for the political and humanitarian crisis taking place inside Burma.

Ultimately, it is a question of humanity. Irrespective of the religion or culture of neighbouring countries, for the sake of humanity, Asia’s leadership should show more vision and more principle in the face of such brutality. During the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the neighbouring states, the so-called front line states, opposed the regime of white minority rule. Indeed, Asia opposed it too. Strangely for Asia, apartheid in Africa is an abomination, but the equivalent of apartheid in Asia is not. The values of the region’s anti-colonial heroes, who believed in political rights, rule of law and self determination for their people against colonial autocracy seems to have almost vanished in relation to Burma.

But there is some glimmer of hope that the torch-bearers of Asia’s more noble political antecedents are re-emerging.

At last a movement of parliamentarians in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand have started to raise their voices in a break with the complicity of silence.

Parliamentary motions in Malaysia and the Philippines have called on their governments to refuse Burma its turn at chairing ASEAN in 2006. They have also called for pressure for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and for democratic reform in the country.

Zaid Ibrahim, president of the Asean Inter-Parliamentary Caucus on Democracy in Myanmar and an MP from the governing party in Malaysia, introduced a parliamentary motion on Burma. Zaid’s principles are clear: “We make no apologies for our stand. To those who argue that the future of Burma should be left to the Burmese people to decide, we say that we agree. The Burmese people have clearly voted for democracy when the country held free elections in 1990 and, in taking this stance, we are simply trying to help allow them to decide their future.” He added that “Refusing to allow Burma to chair Asean next year will make it clear to the military junta that they cannot continue to get away with impunity with breaking promises to the people of their country and the people of this region.” Parliamentarians such as Zaid Ibrahim give hope, not just for Burma, but for the future of ethical politics in Southeast Asia. However, these MPs still have a battle ahead with their own governments, who continue to defend the regime, prioritising business interests over the flagrant abuse of humanity being committed by their neighbour.

Martin Luther King Jr. said it is not the “words of our enemies that we shall remember, but the silence of our friends”. I wonder how many Rohingya Muslims would agree with that. !

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RECOGNISING ISRAEL OR SELLING OUT? It appears that General Pervez Musharraf is on a mission to legitimise Israel and, as M. Shahid Alam writes, he is going about it with the zeal of a new convert. n September 1, 2005, Pakistan’s foreign minister met his Israeli counterpart in Istanbul. This was followed by a meeting between General Musharraf and members of the American Jewish Congress in New York.

Earlier, the General praised war criminal Ariel Sharon as “a great soldier and courageous leader” for pulling out illegal and often murderous Jewish settlers from the Gaza. Moreover, after the two “courageous leaders” shook hands in New York, the Pakistani General told reporters, “And that’s very good.” Very good? The question is, for whom?

The General wants Pakistanis to believe that recognising Israel will be good for their country. His minions in the government and media argue that this is a pragmatic, even daring, measure that finally breaks free from the ‘archaic sentimentalism’ about the ummah - a ‘vague concept’ according to one columnist. Is this true? Or is the Pakistani dictator surrendering the national interest in order to perpetuate his own grip on power? This question deserves our sober consideration.

The claim that General Musharraf is acting in Pakistan’s national interest strains credulity. What the General has found is salvation for his regime. Musharraf’s compact with his American mentors is transparent. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US would support the General and he would join America’s ‘war against global terrorism'.

This compact has been hugely profitable for the General. And he has never missed an opportunity to peddle its ethereal advantages for Pakistan even as he continues to surrender his nation’s core values and interests. His method is simple. He has redefined Pakistan’s ‘national interest’ to coincide with that of the United States. As he put it in June 2003, during a visit to Washington, “Whatever we are doing, we are doing in our national interest, and fortunately our national interest coincides with those of the United States, which is the beauty of our relationship.”

The General’s gains are clear; but what has Pakistan lost?

Pakistan surrendered its territorial sovereignty to the US, handing over Pakistan’s airspace and land bases to be used in a war against a previously friendly neighbour, Afghanistan. As a result, Pakistan lost the ‘strategic depth’ it had created in Afghanistan - though, not with the best means - by handing over Afghanistan to its strategic adversaries, the Northern Alliance and India.

On its eastern border Pakistan stopped supporting the resistance in Kashmir. In 2003 after the American invasion of Iraq, the General tried desperately to send Pakistani troops to police the US occupation of that country, but thankfully, that move was defeated by overwhelming disapproval from Pakistani public opinion that threatened to spill over into the streets.

On the domestic front the General has been supporting the US ‘war against terrorism’ by promoting a new-fangled ideology of ‘enlightened moderation', no doubt a product of neoconservative think tanks in the US. This is an attempt to shift Pakistan away from its core values of Islamic governance, law, morality and justice.

The primary targets of this campaign are the madrassahs and

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the ulama, the historical safeguards against Western imperialism and state tyranny in Islamic countries. Now the US wants to destroy them under the pretext that they are ‘breeding grounds of terrorism'.

The move to recognise Israel is merely the latest in the series of capitulations that Pakistan has witnessed since 9/11. It is an Israeli demand advanced through the agency of the US government. The General is being asked to give proof positive of his partnership in the ‘war against global terrorism’ by reversing Pakistan’s strategic opposition to the unnatural creation of Israel.

Pakistan’s founding father had described Israel as the “illegitimate child of Western imperialism”. Under Israeli-US pressure the General is determined to turn Pakistan into an instrument for promoting Israeli ambitions in the Islamic world.

Much of Pakistan’s media is now swamped with writers staking putatively ‘nationalist’ positions on the question of recognising Israel. Suddenly, these writers are beginning to discover endless - and vital - advantages that will begin to flow to Pakistan once it normalises relations with Israel. It only remains for these deluded Pakistanis now to celebrate the ancient ties - going back to Abraham - that have always bound the two fraternal nations.

If the Zionists themselves were making Pakistan’s case for recognition, they could not have sounded more specious.

If the narrow nationalism that is being peddled in Pakistan to justify recognising Israel were genuine - if Pakistani nationalism ever had a spine - it would remain suspect. It would be suspect because it fails to recognise the deep connections that bind the security and the welfare of Islamic countries.

In this connection one may recall the disastrous experience of the Arabs with their ‘nationalism'. At the outbreak of the First World War the Ottomans allied themselves with the Germans in order to neutralise longstanding British and French imperial designs against their state. When the Turkish entry in the war threatened their position in the Arab world, the British sought to incite an Arab rebellion against the Ottomans. The Arab chieftain of Hijaz - Sherif Hussein of Mecca - was picked for this service with promises of an Arab kingdom.

What did these gullible Arab nationalists receive in return for their betrayal of the Islamic Ottomans? A vivisection of the eastern segment of the Arab world into paltry Arab fiefdoms, mostly controlled by the British, French and, later, the Americans. In addition, they helped to create Israel, which would engage in ethnic cleansing and endless wars against the Arabs into the indefinite future.

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What are the much-trumpeted ‘national’ interests that Musharraf hopes to advance by recognising Israel? One common argument starts by noting, with apparent alarm, the growing economic and military ties between India and Israel. Pakistan, it is argued, can neutralise these Indian gains by normalising relations with Israel.

The wishful thinking in this argument is quickly exposed.

With its lightweight economy - currently, 12 percent of India’s and shrinking - Pakistan cannot even dream of matching the attractiveness of Indian markets for Israeli exporters. India’s trade with Israel - including trade in military hardware - will continue to grow rapidly even with Pakistani recognition of Israel.

If anything should alarm Pakistan, it is not India’s growing trade relations with Israel. After all, Israel is a mere one-third of 1 percent of the world economy. If India is our most serious adversary, economically and militarily, Pakistanis should rather worry about the rate at which they have been falling behind India in economic size, living standards, education, science, technology and democratic institutions. Could the General make a start by eliminating the last deficit - in democratic institutions?

A second argument maintains that Pakistan can begin to mobilise Israel’s powerful lobbies in the US, in particular AIPAC, for its own interests. All it has to do is normalise relations with Israel. The naiveté of this argument borders on stupidity.

Yes, Israel hankers for legitimacy, which only Islamic states can give it. It is the key that will unlock the doors to Israeli penetration of the economies of Islamic countries; this will allow Israel to undermine the Islamic resistance to Zionism from within these countries. Surely, Israel will dangle the moon before gullible Pakistani generals and diplomats. But recognition is like virginity.

Once given up, it can never be regained.

It is worth recounting here what one Pakistani newspaper Daily Times - claims is Pakistan’s chief leverage over Israel. It writes that, “Pakistan will remain strategically more important [to Israel] as a Muslim state than India as a buyer of [Israeli] arms.

India has offered itself as a partner in war; Israel actually needs a partner for peace in the Middle East.” It is hard to fathom why Israel would turn to Pakistan - a country in South Asia - if it needs a partner for peace in the Middle East.

The General has repeatedly argued that there is no moral case now for denying legitimacy to Israel. If the Palestinians can recognise Israel, he demands, why should Pakistanis insist on being “more Palestinian than the Palestinians"? On moral consideration this argument has no validity. Does a crime become legitimate if its victim - left undefended by society - ‘accepts’ his victimisation?

The Palestinian recognition of Israel amounts to nothing more than this. Abandoned by the world community - including the Muslims - some Palestinian factions chose the path of negotiation with their tormentors. In negotiations, too, the Palestinians continue to reap a bitter harvest. Yet, instead of offering substantive support to the Palestinians, Pakistan’s military rulers seek to legitimise Israeli crimes - on the plea that the victims have done the same. This cannot be deemed moral: instead, it is extreme moral cowardice.

The deluded Pakistanis who urge recognition must be told and told repeatedly - that Israel has only one strategic interest in Pakistan. Israel views Pakistan as a potential nuclear threat. Let Pakistanis ignore this incontestable fact only at their peril.

I would like to state - for the record - what I believe are the conditions that Israel must satisfy before the Islamic world - or indeed, the world - ought to willingly grant it legitimacy. Israel must dismantle its apartheid structure and remove all the barriers to the

return and rehabilitation of the Palestinians it has pushed out of their homes since 1948.

Once these conditions have been fully met, Israel - under whatever name - will cease to be an imperialist project. It will lose its expansionist logic. It can then become a native of the Middle East and live at peace with its Muslim neighbours. !

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is the author of Poverty from the Wealth of Nations and Is There An Islamic Problem?

WELCOME TO PRISON GAZA In report after report, we heard that the ‘disengagement’ from Gaza was the “end to the 38 year occupation”, a “turning point for peace” and that it was “now illegal for Israelis to live in Gaza.”

Settlers cried and journalists asked with concern, “How could a Jew ever expel a Jew?” Once the dust of withdrawal settles, Taris Ahmed argues, Palestinians will find the path to peace in shambles and their struggle for self-determination stymied. he day after the screams of the settlers died down and over 900 journalists engineered a new Jewish trauma, Gaza stayed the same - the biggest open air prison in the world.

8000 settlers may be gone, but sovereignty has not been returned to the Palestinians. The Israeli cabinet decided to retain full control over the air space, sea space and the borders. Electricity and water can be cut off at Israel’s mercy. Just like a prison. Instead of Israeli troops being in Gaza, they are now ante portas to reinvade at wish. The siege of Palestine has taken a new ugly phase.

With the infrastructure destroyed and its economy remains dependent on Western “aid”. At the same time, the West Bank is chopped into several Bantustans surrounded by walls and gates.

While 8000 settlers are withdrawn from Gaza, 87 settler families are resettled in the Khisfin settlement in the Golan Heights, the Ariel settlement in West Bank is expanded, and 3,981 “housing units” are being built around Jerusalem. The city boundaries have actually been artificially extended through new settlements creating an artificial Israeli Jewish majority eating up into the territory of the West Bank. This so called “Jerusalem Municipal Area” is entrenched by a wall, called with much euphemism the “Jerusalem envelope”.

The world is once again cunningly distracted by the prospect of peace, while Israel continues to take every measure to make peace impossible. Sharon did not even hide his agenda when announcing on the 29 August that: “We are leaving the Gaza Strip… so that we can ensure those areas which have a greater strategic importance for us. The significance of the Disengagement Plan is… an increased effort to develop the Negev, the Galilee and greater Jerusalem.”

When it came to finally removing the settlers, the contrast with the way Palestinians evictees are dealt with was stark. While Palestinian homes are usually demolished at moment’s notice with the Caterpillar bulldozer standing ready at the doorstep, Israeli settlers receive a couple of months notice. While Palestinian families end up living in tent-cities, settlers receive compensation varying from US $140,000 to $400,000 per family. One Israeli com-

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mander said that “Normally we would storm a house killing everyone inside, whereas here we have to storm the house and keep everyone alive. It’s not an easy job.” In Gaza, thousands of soldiers and police are suddenly flanked by psychologists, religious officers and negotiating teams with “sensitivity training”.

To be honest, Gaza was never a prestigious land hold for Israel. It offered no symbolic historical sites, nor any significant revenues. In fact the population in the strip at the Egyptian border was becoming angrier - some say radicalised - day-by-day and life for Israeli soldiers and settlers more uncomfortable. The daily attacks by the Hamas frustrated enemy troops and propelled Israel’s military expenditure into astronomical sums.

Despite the Hamas contribution to Israeli dissatisfaction, the withdrawal is the result of another Israeli frustration: demography. According to the Palestinian Statistical Office there are 4.94 million Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories; UNRWA calculated there were further 2.5 million refugees in neighbouring Arab states in 2003 and the Israeli Central Statistics Bureau adds that 19.9% Israel’s 6.27 million people is ‘Arab'. Thus roughly some 6.2 million Palestinians face 5 million Israeli Jews. If one includes the refugees the number would swell to 8.7:5million. For the first time since 1948, Israelis are outnumbered.

In an interview with Newsnight, Shimon Peres leader of Israel’s Labour party declared “We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography.” The very notion of a single state with one man, one vote would threaten the Zionist conception of a Jewish majority nation. Unsurprisingly the official website of the Israeli foreign ministry a one state solution is deemed to be a “threat”. Even worse if, intermarriage between Palestinians and Israelis might further muddy the demographics. Already Chinese guest workers have to sign so called ‘No Sex contracts’ when entering Israel.

Since a 1948-type expulsion is not feasible, Israel now opts for a slower, more methodic option: people should be “encouraged” to leave. While British Jews can move to Palestine at any time, Palestinian families in the West Bank lose their residency once they leave the country for a few months. On a daily basis that Israel creates more refugees with no right of return. In Gaza, settlers seemed to have land kleptomania with 1% of the Gaza population (Jewish settlers) using 25% of the land. But still, Gaza with its high birth rate and dense population forestalls an Israeli victory in the demographic war.

Living conditions are purposively screwed down. While settlements splash fresh water in their gardens and pools, Palestinians are forced to drink muddy water with children exposed to health risks. Settlers enjoy 1450 cubic meters per annum, which is as more than what ordinary Israelis enjoy with their 333 m3 per annum, contrasting Palestinians with 83 m3 per annum. It is a crude fact that 75% of the Occupied West Bank & Gaza Strip’s renewable water resources are used by Israel. While the World Health Organisation calls for 100 litres per capita per day, the current domestic water supply for Palestinians is only 57-76 litres per capita per day contrasting 220 litres for Israelis.

To make matters worse, Israeli helicopters in 2004 bombarded the only well in the Mawasi area in Gaza. The only way Gaza survived was through social associations which are, according to Amira Haas, mostly Islamic, producing and distributing water purification units for free. USAID promised $50 million to the Palestinian Authority (PA) post-withdrawal, but not a single penny goes to increasing the living conditions, but only to “crush the Islamists”.

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on Gaza. There is no movement of goods, no movement of people, no control over exports, no control over sea and air space.

Worse, the Disengagement Bill decrees that no workers are allowed to enter Israel “in the longer term”. According to Shaul Mofaz, the Minister of Defence, and Ehud Olmert, the Deputy Prime Minister, no Palestinian labourers will be permitted into Israel from 2008 on. Already now 3200 Palestinians working in the settlements under minimum wage were summarily dismissed with no compensation or severance pay. Soon, the Gaza Industrial Zone will be removed to the Negev further exacerbating unemployment in Gaza. One wonders how this will serve “security”. In December 2004 it was the World Bank’s best case scenario that predicted the rise of unemployment and poverty post-disengagement.

The new Palestinian State is said to be on the horizon, but it will - if it comes into being at all - become a new US client state.

The so called “donor community” is doing its best to entrench Palestinian dependency. So for instance they purchased the hot houses of the settlers for some 14 million USD and gave it as a gift to the PA. The assets belong to the Palestinian Investment Fund and the produce is managed by the Palestinian Development Company, however the agricultural products are exported to the EU by the Israeli company Agrexco, which is 50% owned by the Israeli state. The EU “forecasts” that exports will raise to US $75 million, increase Palestinian GDP by 5% and provide 4500 farmers with jobs. The problem is not only that the actual revenues will flow back to an Israeli company and thus Israeli control, but also that the EU’s economic assumptions are based on the Palestinians having the same water supply as settlers had.

The water is sold by the National Israeli Water Company (Mekorot), which pushes up its prices which makes agricultural production more difficult and forces Palestinians to pump more water from the Gaza acquifers for agriculture leaving less water for drinking. Moreover, Palestinian products from Gaza sold via an Israeli company would create an Israeli competitor against other Palestinian West Bank producers. A water desalination installation would cost US$70 million and could render Palestinians less dependent on Israel. Thus far there are no donors.

The G8 summit pledged to invest £1.72 billion into Gaza thus increasing its dependency on external funding and its stringent ‘ant-terror’ conditions. The 2500 housing units evacuated in Gaza will attract tremendous corporate attention. Contracts for construction, refurbishment and electricity will be given. The construction of a harbour and a new airport are also on the PA wish list. It is predictable that nepotism amongst Palestinians in the run on the contracts will surface. But more importantly the key problem is that the PA is paying for these contractors with money from international aid or credits, which in return are linked to conditions, but perhaps even worse crushing interest rates.

Palestine does not need aid, it has the resources to sustain itself, but the Make Poverty History provisions of the G8 summit were not brave enough to realise free trade for Palestine. With its access to its own natural resources stymied by Israel and foreign aid conditions, Palestinians remain dependent on forces which have never had their best interests at heart. Once the smokescreen of disengagement and withdrawal clears and the initial euphoria of media and even the Palestinians fade, Gaza will be left blockaded and dependent again. A so-called Palestinian state will be even more unworkable than it already is. And Sharon’s much touted path to peace will be seen for what it is: a sham. !

FEATURE

SHELTER FROM

THE STORM Hurricane Katrina swept into New Orleans with devastating force.What it left behind was a city under water, a society fractured by race and class, and a government unable to meet the basic needs of its most vulnerable citizens. New Orleans writer, artist and blogger Kelly Izdihar Crosby writes about her flight from the storm and wonders when she will return to the city she loves. ife is strange. Just when you think everyday will be the same as the last, something happens that totally changes your life. Just when I thought that life would contain no surprises, God showed me that He is in control. In August 2005, I was a struggling artist in New Orleans pursuing a master’s degree from the University of New Orleans. We knew that Hurricane Katrina had hit Florida and although she was only a category one storm, she had killed seven people. Despite this fact, I wrongly assumed that such a weak hurricane wouldn’t do much damage if it came to New Orleans. All that changed when my mother came home from shopping that Saturday afternoon.

“Hurricane Katrina is coming here?” I asked quite clueless. “Where have you been? You know you need to watch the news sometime,” my mother chided. I try to avoid the news but I guess my bias against mainstream media shouldn’t have been directed towards meteorologists. I turned on the television to see our mayor, Ray Nagin, looking ominous and afraid. “It looks like the storm that we have always feared is on its way to New Orleans,” he announced. Was this really happening? Is this really the dreaded storm we have loathed and feared for almost 40 years? New Orleans, the beautiful but fragile city lying at the mouth of the Mississippi river, had been ducking the bullet for decades. Every hurricane season came with increased anxiety and prayers hoping that ‘the Big One’ would pass us by.

My mother alerted me of our evacuation plans. Her fiancé worked at the New Orleans International Airport in Metairie, a small suburb about 20 miles outside the city. With the reinforced steel and concrete of the garage, we would wait out the storm and hope that we would not receive the brunt of Katrina’s force. We couldn’t afford a hotel so we were happy that we had somewhere to stay. I made a quick call to my father and asked where he was going for the storm.

Nonchalantly he replied, “I’ll be okay. Your cousin works in a hotel and she will give me a room to stay in.” With that short statement, we all went our separate ways not knowing what was in store for us. Those who can afford it drove to another city. Some moved to the upper level of their homes and others decided to just ride out the storm and hope for the best. With 30-40% of New Orleans living in poverty, evacuation was a luxury many of us couldn’t afford.

I keep an online journal called Izzy Mo’s Blog and since the

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office we were staying in had a computer, I decided to blog on the storm and let my online friends know that my family and I were safe. Here is an entry from Sunday, 28 August 2005: “I am blogging from the New Orleans International Airport Garage! Let me explain: my future stepfather, insha’Allah, works here so he’s letting my family sleep in his office. It’s quite comfy actually. We’re in a building made of steel and concrete, which has its benefits and drawbacks but insha’Allah, we’ll be fine. We’ve got the radio on so we can keep updates on the storm. She’s a 5, the highest hurricane level but when she hits, she may decline to a category 4. New Orleans is below sea-level, shaped just like a bowl so that the Mid-city area always gets the worst flooding. No matter where you live, you are surrounded by water. I live by Lake Ponchatrain and I’ve seen the lake on a windy day. It puts the fear and awe of God in you. It’s at moments like this when I realise how much I cling to the dunya. You start worrying about everything, from the serious to the silly. La hawla wa la quwatta illa billah. I don’t know what shape New Orleans will be in 36 hours from now when Katrina strikes down. Allah tests us in the good and the bad and it’s easy to believe when everything is good, safe and clean. How will I be when I go back home and find it damaged or gone? La hawla wa laa quwatta illa billah. I keep repeating that to myself. Allah is the Rope to cling to in times of happiness and distress.”

As we waited out the storm, the sister of my mother’s fiancee begged us to come to Atlanta but the rains already started to pour. My stomach did cartwheels as she relayed reports about the storm causing “Biblical” damage. The wind was gusty and violent and the streets were filling with water.

There was no leaving or entering New Orleans at that point.

Our office had everything accept a working television.

Everyone else could see the chaos ensuing around us except us.

All we could do was wait for Monday, 29th August, the day of Katrina’s landfall.

We were all ignorant to the nightmare that lay ahead. As the electricity went out and the generators came on, we lost contact with the outside world. Travellers to New Orleans were stuck in the airport terminal with their children, suitcases and pets. On that Monday night, we did find one television.

The reception was snowy and sporadic. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Large sections of New Orleans was underwater.

There was an endless sea of rooftops and the brown toxic

FEATURE

How does the most powerful nation on Earth, that feels justified in invading sovereign nations, fail to send proper support to its own citizens?

America couldn’t get enough buses, ships and other vehicles to get them out of there? The conditions at the Superdome were subhuman. A six year old slept in urine! Crack viles were found in the bathrooms.Toilets were running over with every kind of filth you can imagine.

People were defecating and menstruating on themselves!

waters from the breeched levees.

Just like that, our home was destroyed. I could only mourn a little for our home but I was thankful to Allah that we did not stay behind.

On Tuesday, 30th August , we made plans to drive from New Orleans to Atlanta. The main highway to Atlanta was destroyed; planks of concrete knocked over as if a toddler had kicked at his building blocks. We had to escape. We couldn’t drink the water and the summer heat was unbearable without air conditioning in the windowless office. My mother’s fiancee was running out of insulin and we were running out of food. We set out early that Wednesday morning taking the only road available. After twelve hours of driving, we arrived at his sister’s house where she warmly invited is in and showed us our temporary refuge.

With her computer I was able to blog again. My friends hadn’t heard from me in three days and I wanted to let them know I was safe. But I was worried about my father and my great-grandmother. Did he make it to the hotel? Was the hotel damaged or destroyed due to hurricane force winds or flooding? He didn’t know that we were in Georgia. As I surfed the web, I found my friends and family scattered throughout the Southern United States. But as we watched events unfold on television, we couldn’t have imagined what took place in the days following Katrina. We sat back watching helplessly as pandemonium engulfed the streets. I wrote on 4 September, 2005: “The response to Hurricane Katrina’s damage has been the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life. I can barely put into words what I am feeling and I just want to scream.

How in the world does the most powerful nation on Earth, that feels totally justified in invading sovereign nations, can’t even send the proper support and supplies to its own citizens?

Who are we to tell people how to run their governments when our government sat down and let New Orleans spiral into chaos? The most powerful nation couldn’t get enough buses, ships and other evacuation vehicles to get them out of there?

The conditions at the Superdome and the Convention centre were subhuman. A six year old slept in urine! In urine! Crack viles were in the bathrooms. Toilets were running over with every kind of filth you can imagine. People were urinating, defecating, and menstruating on themselves! While the citizens of America were pouring in donations - money, food, clothing, medicine, cell phones - the government sat back and did the worst job imaginable. We, the displaced people of the Gulf South, want justice and accountability. Someone asked why we didn’t evacuate? Most of the adult population lives in poverty and so do 50% of it’s children.

Many people in New Orleans don’t have cars. Gas is $4 to $8 a gallon.

It took us $120 dollars to get us from the New Orleans Airport to Atlanta. So as you can see, most people were too poor to get out.

They prayed and hoped that Katrina would be merciful. My family and I were blessed with the few funds we had but it was a lot more money than most people have who are living from paycheck to paycheck.”

As I sit here writing this article in the holy month of Ramadan, I feel very blessed and happy despite our losses.

Eventually, we heard from my father two weeks after the storm. He is happy, healthy and currently working in New Orleans to repair the damaged plumbing. My great-grandmother is well and living in Texas but she will soon come to Georgia to live with my family once my mother and stepfather (they will be married 20th October) purchase a home. My sister is enrolled in school and is doing excellently in her studies.

As for me, I am completing my degree online and should finish in Spring 2006. I am also looking for a hijab-friendly employer. As far as for my future plans, everything is still up in the air for surely Allah is the best of planners. I do miss New Orleans but we can’t go back - not yet. Its streets are still covered with trash, mud and debris. It is uninhabitable right now and the infrastructure is all but gone. But there is hope in everything and I hope to be instrumental, in some way, in the rebuilding my home town. !

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A Pope’s Progress

Pope John Paul II was the first pontiff to visit a mosque, publicly kiss the Quran and declare that Catholics and Muslims were brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham. In the six months since his election, Pope Benedict XVI’s approach to Islam has placed him at odds with his predecessor and has left many concluding that the prognosis for Catholic-Muslim relations looks rather bleak. But Abdal Hakim Murad urges caution. Perhaps there is more to this Vatican traditionalist than meets the eye.

uslim reactions to the election of Joseph Ratzinger to the Papacy have seemed both diverse and confused. Turks have been dismayed by his very public opposition to their membership of the European Union, a view rooted in his conviction that “Europe was founded not on geography but on a common faith.” Others have pointed to the absence of any mention of Muslims from his inaugural address (a fact welcomed by the Jerusalem Post) as a hint that Vatican willingness to open minds and hearts to dialogue with Islam was now at an end. Despite this, however, some Muslims have welcomed the appointment of a man of considerable seriousness and intelligence, in the hope that he will reinvigorate the world’s moral debate. None of this Muslim ambivalence has been helped by the fact that Ratzinger has never spoken or written at length about Islam, perhaps realising that fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

His Polish predecessor had clearly recognised Islam’s immense importance, and had sought to encourage a friendly Muslim view of the papacy. This bore fruit in an outpouring of Muslim commemorations upon his death. The Shaykh al-Azhar described his demise as “a great loss for the Catholic Church and the Muslim world. He was a man who defended the values of justice and peace.” Then Iranian President Khatami praised John Paul as a master of three spiritual paths: philosophy, poet-

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ry, and artistic creativity. Yusuf al-Qardawi commended his opposition to Israel’s “apartheid wall”, and asked Muslims to offer their condolences to Christians. In Afghanistan, a Taliban spokesman said that “even though some have launched a Crusader war against Islam, the pope’s voice was for bringing peace to the world.” Overall, the Muslim world’s affection for John Paul was clear.

John Paul had earned this distinction in multiple ways.

Often impulsive, he cannot be said to have maintained a distinctive ‘Islam policy', but he made several significant gestures which indicated his awareness of the religion’s growing importance. In 1985 he became the first Pope to visit a Muslim country, and in 2001 the first to enter a mosque, where he annoyed ultra-conservative Catholics by kissing a copy of the Quran.

“Your God and ours is the same God, and we are brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham,” he told a Muslim crowd.

To date, Ratzinger has shown no sign of continuing this theologically unarticulated but sincere desire to reach out in affirmation. On the contrary, he can seem sharply judgmental. He worried Muslims across Europe when, in an August meeting with imams in Germany, he made it clear that the only issue he wished to raise was Islamic terrorism. Apparently echoing a standard right-wing claim (made by Joerg Haider, Pim Fortuyn and Jean-Marie Le Pen in particular), he has said that “Islam is Q - NEWS

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not a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.” Another theme which he shares with the far right is his apparent belief that Muslims in Europe cannot be ‘assimilated': “Islam makes no sort of concession to inculturation.”

(He does not seem to have noticed the immense differences in Muslim cultural style around the world.)

Such misunderstandings are the staple of Italy’s leading anti-immigrant writer, Oriana Fallaci, currently awaiting trial on charges of incitement to religious hatred. Fallaci is the author of three anti-Muslim works popular in right-wing circles, and has written that Islam “sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom.” One of the most striking acts of Benedict’s papacy to date has been his unusual granting of a private audience to Fallaci in the papal palace at Castelgandolfo. The meeting was arranged discreetly, but was discovered by an Italian journalist, and later acknowledged by the Vatican press office. The content of the consultation was not made public, but Muslim sources noted that Fallaci, who had repeatedly condemned the previous pope’s commitment to dialogue with Muslims, has been consistently supportive of Benedict.

Ratzinger’s seemingly harsh views on Islam should be taken in the context of his wider conservative conviction that Catholicism alone can guide human beings to true salvation, a view that his predecessor had seemed less anxious to publicise.

Muslims may wince at his opinion of Islam, but his views on non-Catholic Christians are hardly less trenchant. He was the leading contributor to the ‘definitive and irrevocable’ Catholic declaration Dominus Jesus in the year 2000, which insisted that non-Catholic churches “are not churches in the proper sense,” and implied that non-Catholics are naturally destined for hellfire.

He certainly subscribes to the traditional view that the ordination of Anglican priests is “utterly null and void,” making most church-going in England a kind of theatre, a dim groping after a truth that may only be reliably found in Rome. In fact, his formal position, and his habit of mind, are far from any kind of pluralism, and his criticisms of Islam must be seen in this light. It is not fair to say that he has singled out Islam for any special condemnation; he is passionately critical of everything non-Catholic.

Among Muslim commentators there has as yet been little consideration of the ideas which drive this 78-year old Vatican insider, and which might supply a clue to understanding his view of Islam. Many Muslims think that Christianity in Europe ‘has lost its vision and is becoming a club for the elderly’ (Lord Carey’s allegation about the Anglican Church), in stark contrast to the American situation, where Christianity is politically dominant. Yet as the most significant survival from Europe’s religious past, and as an institution still immensely respected even by many secular Europeans, the Vatican is potentially an important interpreter of Islam to a Europe which now finds itself inhabited by fifteen million Muslims, concentrated in cities some of which may, within twenty years, find themselves with Muslim majori-

ties. With the growing likelihood of Turkish accession within a generation, it is not impossible that Islam will become the most active religion on the continent. This will certainly generate a backlash, and the Vatican’s view of the situation will be an important element in the debate.

Ratzinger is a European; more particularly, he is intensely Bavarian, and therefore not from a district with a long historic engagement with Islam (Poland, with its ancient and well-integrated Tatar communities, seems to have been a different case). He is an amateur pianist, a lover of Goethe, baroque sculpture and fine wine, who is less comfortable in other languages than his predecessor. The references in his many theological texts are mainly to the very introspective world of German theology; indeed, it is probably the case that he knows Lutheran theology better than he does the Catholic theology of the Third World.

Bavaria is at the heart of Europe; and indeed, was the heart of Nazism, the most intense of European attempts to reject nonwhite, non-European others.

Ratzinger is no Nazi; indeed, his thought is in large measure best understood as a reaction against the kind of modernity which produced the twentieth century’s great science-obsessed totalitarianisms. Yet he is deeply European. Faced with several Third World candidates, at the conclave in April the cardinals deliberately chose an icon of Europeanness, perhaps as an attempt to stem Europe’s drift away from Christianity. The appointment of a European was not really a surprise; what was more interesting was the choice of an icon of the anti-totalitarian reaction which saw the twentieth-century’s violence as a consequence of modernity, not as a strange aberration. Here Ratzinger parts company dramatically with other Catholic thinkers such as Hans Küng, a former friend, whose reading of the times is far more optimistic and upbeat than his own. Indeed, Ratzinger investigated and chastised such men during his time at the helm of his Vatican Congregation, the distant descendant of the Inquisition.

To understand the new pope, it helps to remember that despite this watchdog role he was once a leading light of the ‘moderate progressive’ wing of the Church. During the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s he collaborated with reformist figures such as Karl Rahner in pushing the Church roughly in the direction which had been urged by the Protestant reformers four hundred years before. The Latin Mass was scrapped, the notion of the clergy as a separate caste of human beings came under fire, many picturesque medieval traditions were removed, and space was given to lay Catholics in discussing issues once monopolised by the hierarchy. The backdrop was not, however, a stern biblefundamentalism, but the curious idealism of the post-war years.

Apparently oblivious to the threatening presence of a Soviet empire implanting nuclear warheads in silos across Eastern Europe, many in the West believed that it was time that religious conservatism gave way to a more ‘inclusive’ and affirmative attitude to human desires, which could allow Christians to partici-

European Muslims are thus faced with an interesting dilemma. Should we support the Vatican as a force for those traditional values which are the foundation of social and political stability? Such a collaboration might provide support to embattled traditionalists in bodies such as the Church of England.This is an attractive notion; yet should we not be wary of a man whose sense of Europe’s identity substantially marginalises us?

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pate in the playful culture of the modern West. Ratzinger, who in his early thirties cautiously committed to this view, repented suddenly when his students at the University of Tübingen’s Faculty of Catholic Theology, inflamed by Marxist ideas in the heady excitement of 1968, walked out of lectures shouting “Curse Christ! Curse Christ!” From that time on he solidified his position as a leading critic of what he saw as the naïve optimism of the 1960s, which had caused many in the church to read Vatican II as a ‘populist’ moment. His abiding suspicion remains that Vatican II was a plughole through which faith and tradition drained, to be replaced by a liberal Protestant modernity.

Perhaps out of guilt at his own former flirtation with liberalism, for the remainder of his busy career as bishop Ratzinger dedicated himself to a crusade against subversion by the secular, egalitarian culture of the West. He came to oppose the principle that regional bishops’ conferences might take decisions separately from the Vatican hierarchy. Most conspicuously, he used his position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to plug the leaks in the ship of faith which, as he saw it, were letting in the profane sea without. Theologians who, despite the recent lessons of Hitler and Stalin and the example of materialist secular culture, were influenced by a naïve modern optimism, were reproached, usually in private, but on occasion in the eyes of the world. This is why Hans Küng, after being stripped of his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian, compared Ratzinger’s Congregation to the KGB. Liberals, trying to ‘update’ the Church, only seemed to do so with reference to a surrounding secular culture of change and triviality. Hence the lethal danger, as Ratzinger saw it, of allowing popular preferences to shape worship. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that the crisis in the church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy.”

Ratzinger’s idealistic opposition to modernity found expression in the pages of the journal Communio, which he helped to launch with the help of his friend, the Swiss anti-modernist Hans Urs von Balthasar. Abandoning the unpleasantly liberal atmosphere of Tübingen University, he moved in 1968 to Regensburg to launch a new faculty where he energetically trained dozens of neo-conservative thinkers. Many of these, like the American Joseph Fessio, have served as staunch buttresses against the rise of Protestant agendas and modernising tendencies within the church, and were steadily recruited by John Paul II to fill the college of cardinals that one day would elect a new pope.

The theology which Ratzinger championed through this period was not the dusty repetitions of the thirteenth-century monk Thomas Aquinas that had dominated the Catholic world before Vatican II. Neither, however, was it the kind of subjective free-thinking which some feared would result from the Church’s convulsions in the mid-1960s. In common with many Catholics seeking renewal, Ratzinger returned to the fourth-century North African thinker St Augustine, and his medieval interpreter Bonaventure.

Crisis, for Ratzinger, was not an excuse for quietism, but for a fearful recollection of human sinfulness; and Augustine and Bonaventure, with their heavy emphasis on original sin, the inherited defect with which they thought all humans are born, have often been the foundation-stones of attempts to produce Catholic renewal. Ratzinger is certainly convinced of the radical sinfulness of human beings; and it is this conviction which underpins his onslaught on liberalism and his scepticism about non-Christian religions. Without the sacraments of the Catholic Church, all is implicitly a form of wickedness.

In his understanding of Judaism and Islam, Ratzinger is guided by the same Augustinian pessimism, which he finds ultimately in the letters of St Paul. Rituals of wudu and ibadah are essentially worthless, as they lie outside the grace which is only mediated by the one true church. As he writes, “the law of Moses, the rituals of purification, the regulations concerning food, and all other such things are not to be carried out by us; otherwise the biblical Word would be senseless and meaningless.” Such rituals are “slavery”, from which submission to the Church alone offers salvation. The Semitic principle is thus categorically inferior; Jews and Muslims, he seems to suggest, are slaves, and their ability truly to please God must be Biblically doubted.

But it is not only ‘the Law’ which is ruled by sin; for Ratzinger, sin also dominates modernity, which represents “the human threat to all living things.” It reduces everything, including religion, to blind cause and effect. Hence in modern eyes the Bible is not to be understood as a story leading to a conclusion, each of whose parts can only be read in terms of that conclusion, but as a series of disconnected fragments subjected to arguments over authorship. For the moderns, too, the idea of a medieval consensus as forming part of the sensus fidelium, the view of the community of believers (an idea resembling the Muslim principle of ijma') is meaningless. But in Ratzinger’s eyes, the credibility of divine providence is hopelessly undermined by the Protestant idea that most past believers were radically mistaken. And if Catholics retreat from some previous certainties about doctrine and scripture, he believes, then there will inexorably be a retreat from others, until “finally, quite a number of people have the abiding impression that the church’s faith is like a jellyfish.”

Like many Muslim church-watchers, the new Pope regards the Catholic Church as suffering from a deep crisis.

Theology, despite attempts at firm control from the centre, is wandering in the direction of subjectivism. The prohibition of the Latin Mass and its replacement with various forms of worship in local languages has not only cut congregations off from centuries of devotion and from a language unpolluted by modernity, but has opened the floodgates to trivial experiments which can make worship resemble a form of entertainment.

Sexual abuse by clergy, and subsequent cover-ups by bishops, have gravely damaged the moral authority of the church in many places (two out

The Catholic church differs from Islam on some moral issues, such as contraception and divorce, but generally advocates the set of ethics which is normal to sacred societies. With Ratzinger holding the tiller, the church is unlikely to accept further concessions to the values of the secular establishment.The challenge will be to convince Muslim communities that it is conservatives, not liberals, who are our most natural partners in the great task of guiding Europe back to God.

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of every seven graduates of one American seminary have died of AIDS; major newspapers claim that half of American priests are homosexual; several US dioceses have filed for bankruptcy in the face of claims for compensation by molestation victims). All this amounts, in Ratzinger’s eyes, to “a dark and tragic night which has fallen upon the Church.” “Everything,” he feels, “is in a state of disintegration.”

There are Muslims who regard this as an opportunity for Islam; and it is certainly the case that conversions from Catholicism have increased in recent years, although numbers are still small in historic terms. Yet it is far from clear that the ‘crisis', as the pope sees it, of the West’s most significant moral and spiritual institution, will be helpful to Muslim progress.

Europe is sinking into a mood of increasing liberal intolerance of traditional values, as was shown earlier this year when EU commissioner Rocco Buttiglione was forced to resign when he refused to condemn Catholic teachings on homosexuality. If liberalism is excluding religious believers from high office, there is reason to expect that a more thoroughgoing persecution will follow, with the hounding of all whose consciences prevent them from accepting homosexualist, feminist or other liberal beliefs. Ratzinger condemns the “agnosticism which no longer recognises doctrinal norms and is left only with the method of putting things to a practical test.” While he does not agree with his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, that the separation of church and state is a heresy, he is clear that the radical indifference of national governments to religiously-grounded morals may result in a slippage into tyranny. Terrorism was invented by the French Revolution; in Bonaparte’s anti-religious empire it became the political norm of the first European Union. The danger is that a deep-seated secular indoctrination of Europe may in the long term produce a similar result.

The disliked and impoverished Muslim minorities of Europe, resembling, at least culturally, fugitive monotheists in Roman catacombs, cannot muster the strength to campaign for a greater tolerance of non-liberal values. It is therefore crucial for Muslim communities to forge ties with other defenders of traditional humanity, and to wish them well. The Catholic church differs from Islam on some moral issues, such as contraception and divorce, but generally it advocates the set of ethics which is normal to sacred societies, and which underpinned the greatest cultural achievements of medieval Europe, both Muslim and Christian. With Ratzinger holding the tiller, the church is unlikely to accept further concessions to the values of the secular establishment. The challenge will be to convince Muslim communities that it is conservatives, not liberals, who are our most natural partners in the great task of guiding Europe back to God. European Muslims are thus faced with an interesting dilemma. Should we support the Vatican as a force for those traditional values which are the foundation of social and political stability, and develop the currently embryonic cooperation on social issues that Muslim and Catholic leaders have achieved in the past (the 1994 UN Population Summit was one example)?

Such a collaboration might provide support to embattled traditionalists in bodies such as the Church of England, apparently on the brink of validating homosexual practices. This is an attractive notion; yet should we not be wary of a man whose

sense of Europe’s identity substantially marginalises us? Tariq Ramadan has criticised the Pope’s Christian definition of Europe, on the grounds that ‘we must recognise that all the monotheistic faiths are part of Europe’s roots.’ His fear is that Ratzinger’s ideas about Semitic religions will encourage the growing legions of European chauvinists and Islamophobes. However it is by no means clear that a generic monotheism of the kind Ramadan commends will be sufficient to defeat relativism in Europe.

Does this mean that Muslims are likely to benefit more in an officially Christian Europe? American Muslims, ruled by an effectively theocratic administration in which presidential speeches are intensely Biblical and the state provides massive funding for Christian social movements (but not Muslim ones) would probably resist this notion. An increasing number of American Catholic bishops denounce as ‘accommodationists’ Catholic politicians who do not follow the Church’s line.

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver complains that “too many American Catholics - maybe most - no longer connect their political choices with their religious faith in any consistent, authentic way.” Yet a larger alliance between Catholics and the politically dominant Evangelicals, a scenario sometimes predicted by American Muslims, in reality seems unlikely. Support for the Iraq war, for instance, was strongest in Bush’s Evangelical constituency; whereas the Catholic bishops opposed it staunchly. The theological tensions between the two large sects of American Christianity have been intensified by Dominus Jesus, and the cooperation in issues of religious politics has probably progressed as far as it can.

Europe cannot be like America; and a strong religious presence here will not have the militant consequences which American Muslims have witnessed with such dismay. The Evangelicals in Europe are far weaker, and think differently on political matters. A Europe defined in Christian terms is more likely to take its guidance from Ratzinger than from any reformed thinker (there are few Southern Baptists here, and as for liberal Christian thinkers, these typically do not differ from the secular consensus on moral issues, and are hence irrelevant). Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the continent’s current coldness towards the claims of Christianity is a permanent condition. The increasing witness of Muslims may ironically trigger a Christian revival, as the Belgian novelist Jacques Neirynck has forecast. In fifty years, Europe may be composed of Muslim cities, and smaller towns and rural areas which are either secular, liberal-Christian, or conservatively Catholic. In that situation, the continent’s political domination by the Vatican would probably enhance the sense of security of the majority population, which can only be in the interests of Muslims, for whom the main threat is not the Church, but the far-right movements which may claim Christian principles, but are in no case associated with the Vatican institutions.

Many Muslims have been uncomfortable with Ratzinger because of his public statements about Islam. Yet we should be wary of emotional responses; and act in our interests, which are also those of a well-integrated, tolerant, and successful Europe. Benedict XVI may not quite intend it, but his policies are likely to be good for Islam. !

Ratzinger is convinced of the radical sinfulness of human beings; and it is this conviction which underpins his onslaught on liberalism and his scepticism about non-Christian religions.

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The Nightmare after the Nuclear Holocaust:

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after Hiroshima and Nagasaki Witnesses to its devastating power drew parallels to the wrath of God. But 60 years on, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are poignant reminders of an increasingly dangerous world where the possibility of self-destruction has not dimmed. Ihsanic Intelligence looks at the legacy of the world’s first and only, nuclear holocaust.

n 6 August 1945, the America warplane Enola Gay dropped the first nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Over 140,000 perished in an instant, but the total victims to date, including those who died from radiation-related illnesses, number 242,437. Three days later, a second nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. About 70,000 people died in a split second, with the final death toll standing at 148,793. In the aftermath of this nuclear annihilation and the Soviet entry into the Pacific war, Japan presented its proclamation of unconditional surrender to the Allies on August 15.

In 1939, the Manhattan Project - eerily evoking associations with 9/11 referred to as “another Manhattan” by Bin Laden in October 2004 - was convened by the American administration to develop the first nuclear bomb, with its original intended target Nazi Germany. After the first nuclear test in the New Mexico desert on July 16 1945, the project’s supervising scientist, Dr Robert Oppenheimer exclaimed - repeated a chilling phrase from the sacred Hindu text, The Bhagavad-Gita - “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The words of the Hindu deity, Shiva, the verse is preceded by the condition that “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One.” Few knew then that the sun would be unleashed twice in the land of its rising.

Oppenheimer was not the only one to recall divine wrath. When the newly-inaugurated President Harry Truman was informed of the successful test, he immediately took the decision allowing its use, and wrote in his diary: “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was also Biblical in his reflection, likening the explosions at the time to the “Second Coming in Wrath.”

However, by July 1945, the war in Germany had ceased, but continued in the Pacific. Long-range B-29 bombers systematically fire-bombed 66 of Japan’s largest cities and killed as many as 900,000 civilians - many times the combined total of both nuclear death tolls. By firebombing cities, Professor David Kennedy of Stanford University argues, “the US had already crossed a terrifying

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moral threshold when it accepted the targeting of civilians as a legitimate instrument of warfare”, and one with devastating contemporary implications. The US Airforce deliberately excluded firebombing Hiroshima, Kokura and Nagasaki, but still the Japanese military refused to surrender. When considering policy options, it was suggested that an American invasion of Japan would result in a million casualties - a figure later admitted to being plucked out of thin air. One of the factors which contributed to the US decision to drop the bomb was that the Japanese had embraced Shinto-derived kamikaze - “divine wind” - suicide attacks, in their willingness to die for Imperial Japan. The Japanese Navy used both one and twoman piloted torpedoes called kaitens on suicide missions, and found them highly effective. In the Battle of Okinawa, April 1945, some 2,000 kamikaze rammed fully-fuelled fighter planes into more than 300 ships, killing 5,000 Americans in the most costly naval battle in US history. The kamikaze campaign contributed to the US decision.

Despite Japan seeking peace talks on August 3, 1945 and despite being advised by some of his top aides of the void of genuine necessity, President Truman decided that the bomb must be used, in revenge for Pearl Harbour. He in turn succeeded in initiating the Cold War and inauspiciously began “The American Century”.

Clausewitz’s second instrument of international relations was to be deployed: War. The deliberate policy of not firebombing the three cities now began to make sense: American military planners wished to study the effects of the atom bomb in the field. Two would be targeted, and the third be left alone except in the case of a contingency.

In August 1945, the American warplane, “Enola Gay”, flew westwards to Tinian Island, off the coast of Japan, to be based there to fly to Hiroshima with its load. On 6 August, the weather above Tinian Island was typical for the Pacific: clear skies and the sun shining much in the same way as it does at every other Ground Zero.

Before embarking on “Enola Gay”, its commander, Paul Tebbits, was given half a dozen cyanide pills so that he and his crew could take their own lives if they fell into Japanese hands, evoking the same spirit of Japanese seppuku, “honourable suicide” which gave birth to kamikazes and their latter-day hellish incarnations.

When the uranium bomb was unleashed on Hiroshima, the fire-

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During August 2005, there were increasing and unverified reports that “American Hiroshima”, the codename for a nuclear attack mission on US soil, allegedly gleaned from al-Qaeda documents and the interrogations of captured operatives, was scheduled to occur on the sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima. It did not occur, but the motive and intent remains. Humanity’s nightmare continues whilst the present US administration pursues the development of a new type of bomb, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, designed to blast underground targets, like the alleged clandestine nuclear facilities of Khan’s former clients, Iran and Korea.

ball at its core was 4000° C. Those who saw the blast from a distance marvelled at its beauty, the scintillating wash of blue, yellow, peach and salmon pink across the sky. It was a momentary distraction before its worldly reality manifested in the infamous mushroom cloud.

The heat rays of the blast left the shadows of its victims on concrete and metal.

Anyone in the open air was instantly vapourised, turned to carbon - the whispers of thousands of lives being annihilated in a split second. Three days later, Kokura was in sight.

Kokura was the second Japanese city to be targeted by the Americans. The plane was heading in its direction on August 9, but rain, as fate decreed, forced the mission to divert its course to Nagasaki. The plutonium bomb was unleashed. In its aftermath, and with some commanders still refusing to yield, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito abandoned his divine status, and unconditionally surrendered to the Allies.

Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, said in his memoirs that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender”.Oppenheimer concurred. In November 1945, he said that the bomb had been dropped on an “essentially defeated enemy”.

On the sixtieth anniversary of both bombings, each city held ceremonies to remember the victims, calling for nuclear disarmament and world peace. Today, the world has seven states with nuclear-power capability: Russia, USA, UK, France, China, India and Pakistan. Israel has not publicly admitted to possessing sophisticated, deliverable nuclear weapons, and North Korea has already says it possesses them. Of those states invited to attend to the memorial services, only China and Russia sent diplomats.

When the BBC television documentary, Islamic Bomb, was aired in 1979, based on a book by Herbert Krosney and Steven Weisman, and of another by D.K. Paliy and P.K.S. Namboodiri, few genuinely envisaged the reality of such a weapon, either by state or nonstate actors. The rantings of Evangelist Dr Joseph Adam Pearson, oft-quoted in Islamic propagation material, was seen as a sentimental antidote: “People who worry that nuclear weaponry will one day fall in the hands of the Arabs fail to realize that the Islamic bomb has been dropped already: it fell the day Muhammad was born.”

Such sentiments did not prevent countries like Pakistan and Libya trying to acquire nuclear capability. It was the eventually non-Arabs who acquired such weapons. In 1998 Pakistan succeeded in matching neighbouring India’s first nuclear test, becoming the first Muslim-majority country to publicly demonstrate its nuclear power status. At the time, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson offered his assessment of a state acquiring nuclear power, stating that nuclear bombs were, de facto, forbidden according to Islam due to their immense capacity for indiscriminate destruction and their hellish

‘fire-power', for as Prophet Muhammad said, “No one should punish with fire, except for the Lord of Fire.”

The “Islamic Bomb” remained the myth that it ever was, until it became the “The Lucrative Bomb” when Pakistani nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, was placed under house arrest in 2004 for selling Pakistani nuclear technology and designs to a variety of clients including Libya, Iran and North Korea. But the global nuclear souk had other buyers too. Non-state actors, like Islamist terrorist groups, also tried to get, leveraging the dollar and dinar, wishing to acquire nuclear capability for their own ends.

From October 1996, Osama Bin Laden was publicly evoking the memory of the Nuclear Holocaust, in comparison to the suffering Iraq, stating that the Americans deliberately dropped the 1945 bombs “in a premeditated manner”. In November 2002, Bin Laden declared, “You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war.”

As for the acquisition of nuclear weapons, in December 1998, Bin Laden considered it “a religious duty” and by November 2001, he said that “If America used chemical and nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent.” Such claims cannot be verified. Furthermore, Islamist terrorists’ embrace of suicide terrorism means that such weapons would be easier to detonate.

In 1946, Oppenheimer had presciently warned a Senate committee of the coming nightmare. Testifying about the possibility of an atomic suitcase bomb being smuggled into an American city he said, “Of course, it could be done and people could destroy New York.” During August 2005, there were increasing and unverified reports that “American Hiroshima”, the codename for a nuclear attack mission on US soil, allegedly gleaned from al-Qaeda documents and the interrogations of captured operatives, was scheduled to occur on the sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima. It did not occur, but the motive and intent remains. Humanity’s nightmare continues whilst the present US administration pursues the development of a new type of bomb, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, designed to blast underground targets, like the alleged clandestine nuclear facilities of Khan’s former clients, Iran and Korea.

In his landmark fatwa, Defending the Transgressed, the Malaysian jurist Shaykh Muhammad al-Akiti demonstrates that, according to Islamic ethics and jurisprudence of jihad, the deliberate targeting of civilians and suicide attacks - in all contexts - are both forbidden in Islam. In so doing, it recalls the fire-bombings of 66 Japanese cities, the use of kaitens in the Battle of Okinawa, suicide bombers in London, the American Hiroshima, and the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Man neglects the Divine in perceiving His Wrath, but should at least restrain himself in his nihilism to his fellow man. !

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An Ummah The weeks after the london bombings of 7/7, the most deadly to strike the capital since the Second World War, have seen testing times for British Muslims, writes Yahya Birt.The challenge ahead is to focus our sense of moral purpose to tackle extremism, protect our freedoms, and work towards a long-term strategy of intellectual and civic engagement.

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e struggle under a threefold burden. Like others, we nervously rang family and friends to find out if they were all right. The mangled and twisted frame of the familiar double-decker bus and the unseen horror in the Tube tunnels below London’s streets signalled a new and bloody era. We learnt with shock that our own community had produced Britain’s first home-grown suicide bombers, seemingly integrated British lads. Our feelings of moral outrage were tempered by profound disquiet that this had been carried out in the name of our religion. Finally, we have felt the consequences, the most fearsome part of which has not been the six hundred per cent rise in faith hate crimes in London during the first four weeks, but a lurch towards draconian legislation amid talk of the failure of British multiculturalism from across the political spectrum.

Number 10 launched a tough strategy on 5 August, which mirrors steps pioneered by the French in the mid-1990s, the Americans after 9/11 and the Spanish after the Madrid bombings. The proposed measures include new powers of deportation of foreign nationals on the grounds of formenting terrorism and involvement with proscribed extremist bookshops, organisations, websites and networks; powers to close extrem-

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ist mosques; widening the grounds to ban extremist groups; the banning of Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun’s successor groups; stripping citizenship from naturalized British citizens engaged in extremism; a new offence of glorifying terrorism in Britain and abroad; and the extension of existing control orders, using a form of house arrest, to include British nationals. The new deportation powers would require derogation from the Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment, in order the guarantee the rights of deportees in some ten Muslim countries of origin, which have so far not agreed to uphold them, with the exception of Jordan.

The police presence permeates an enervated London, the merits and demerits of racial profiling are openly discussed, and the new shoot-to-kill policy is based on Sri Lankan and Israeli tactics. The Home Office Minister, Hazel Blears, caught in the midst of local consultations with Muslims, is suddenly to head a commission to examine “insufficiently integrated” communities, suggesting the rebranding of minorities along ethnic lines in the style of the American melting pot. Plans are mooted to charge extremist Muslim preachers under the Treason Act of 1351, the first time it would have been applied since World War Two. The London attacks and their aftermath are the greatest challenge to have faced British Muslims, the precise challenge being to reject charges of collective guilt while taking up our share of responsibility. There has been much heartfelt condemnation of the attacks as might have been expected from Muslim community and religious leaders. But it is obvious to all that our older generation of leaders is out of touch with febrile and confused sentiment apparent among many young Muslims after 7/7. Anger, denial and fantastic conspiracy theories are rife, but community elders rarely know how to direct these sentiments in constructive directions. As for their religious responsibilities, British Muslims should seek to tackle extremism, to uphold and assist in the promotion of public safety while protecting the freedoms of all British citizens, to exonerate those who are falsely accused or unfairly treated, and to improve community relations. These teachings imply a delicate balancing act which promotes a precautious but constructive engagement with the security agenda founded on the belief that preserving freedoms in a time of crisis will do more to ensure our security than hasty new measures; freedom and security need not be instinctively placed in mutual opposition with each

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of Purpose other as Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty has argued.

One matter is absolutely clear in the impassioned debate after 7/7 among young Muslims: they will not accept the silencing of their political voice through a spurious culpability by association. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, as they see it, lies precisely at the centre of their current disaffection. If it is indeed true to say that global jihadist puritanism was the unwanted progeny of the Cold War’s last great conflict-byproxy in Afghanistan against the Soviets, Iraq has nonetheless also opened up a whole new front in the “war on terror” that did not previously exist, as was argued in a recent report by the establishment think tank, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. It is particularly relevant in that the continuing “war on terror” has invalidated the “covenant of security” the extremist fringe believed they enjoyed in Britain, which underpinned the logic of Londonistan’s very existence.

Thus, the Prime Minister, vulnerable over Iraq, has found it increasingly difficult to deny that Iraq has been an aggravating political factor. However the point is that after the attacks, while two-thirds of the British public saw Iraq as heightening the risk of terrorism in the UK, the Prime Minister received his second-highest personal approval rating since 1997. This indicates that the British public saw the threats of Saddam and of radical terrorism, falsely justified in the name of Islam, as separate, and secondly, that Blair is broadly trusted to take on the post-7/7 threat, unlike the Spanish after Madrid who promptly voted José Maria Aznar out of office. Besides personal conviction on these matters, two political factors have emboldened the Prime Minister to pursue a tougher stand and take on the liberal legal establishment, human rights activists, a more precautious Home Office, and pretty much the entirety of the British Muslim community’s leadership. Firstly, Blair was encouraged by the robust stance of the four-man delegation of Labour Muslim MPs led by Shahid Malik on 13 July. Secondly the wide public trust in Blair’s capability to defend Britain against this threat has allowed Number 10 to set the security agenda in its own terms, advised by the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, whose tough approach has always been endorsed by the Prime Minister. It is in this shift of public opinion that the “rules of the game” have changed.

Furthermore, unfashionable as it might be to make the observation, Tony Blair was right to argue that the London suicide bombings have no moral connection with Iraq. The immediate challenge for Muslims is to isolate extremist elements by

returning to the ethical and moral foundations of our religion, and to argue calmly for peaceful democratic means of protest.

Already in places like London and Birmingham, there are hopeful signs that a younger generation of opinion formers like Salma Yaqoob of the Respect Party or Abu Muntasir of JIMAS are reaching out effectively to those who feel radically disaffected by offering viable alternatives.

In the short run, a full debate will be needed, to which the input of religious leaders will be vital, on the suspect theology that spreads intolerance and hatred. A vital component in this regard will be to tackle the rise of takfirism, the rationale behind the rise of violent cults that see all other Muslims as expendable apostates. In this regard, British Muslims could look to build upon the Amman protocol of July 2005, endorsed by major Sunni and Shiite scholars of the Arab world, recognising eight orthodox schools of Islamic law. There are already encouraging signs that Islamic scholars and younger community leaders are disregarding old sectarian boundaries to make common cause against extremism. The old guard amongst whom petty rivalry and sectarianism remain predominant has not yet embraced this new entente.

Another key issue is the need to reclaim the high standards of ethical conduct in the jihad tradition, which, while upholding the right to self-defence, protects the innocent and condemns terrorist tactics. How is it that suicide bombing, first used and justified in the Muslim world by Hezbollah in 1983, inspired by the example of the Marxist Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, has become the preferred tactic of resistance in the name of Islam, used in no less than 26 countries around the world, with Britain unfortunately being only the latest example? Is the Muslim world in danger of becoming the West’s Gaza Strip, and the West, the Muslim world’s Israel, by which the nameless and unnumbered casualties of American airpower are re-invoked by desperate acts of revenge, spreading Middle-Eastern-style fear and insecurity to the Western metropolis?

In holding the balance between freedom and security as British citizens, not just as British Muslims, it is our public duty to ask some constructive but searching questions about the new agenda. We should ask if the treatment of deportees can really be guaranteed as the government has failed many times after 9/11 to get the agreement of Muslim nations? Is it not shorttermist to merely export the problem of terrorism? Why is it deemed an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the Q - NEWS

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new shoot-to-kill policy that further innocent lives may be lost, even after the death of a Brazilian electrician tragically mistaken for a suicide bomber? Does not the closing of a place of worship potentially stigmatise the whole congregation as extremist rather than dealing with a problematic preacher? With the pro-

In the British context, however, the condemnation of terrorism, and indeed the constructive criticism of anti-terrorism measures, should not be allowed to halt the serious working through of issues around identity, belonging and citizenship by cosmopolitan Muslim Britons aware too of their religious soli-

Are we to be a tribal ummah, prepared for the sake of unity to defend Muslims, right or wrong, to ignore Muslim-on-Muslim violence, or become oblivious to general human suffering and pain? posal to extend control orders to British suspect extremists, do we not have a new form of internment, a policy that in Northern Ireland bolstered support for the IRA? Particular concerns centre around free speech. In the new post-7/7 atmosphere, how would any “incitement to religious hatred” legislation be applied? Or for that matter “glorifying terrorist acts"? Would this for instance cover any number of examples involving struggles for self-determination in the Muslim world? What might be the consequences for political asylum seekers if new proscribed speech-acts or activities may result in rapid deportation? How will the process of proscription of designated extremist bookshops, websites, centres and networks be held up to proper scrutiny? Can we name any nonviolent political organisation that has been banned since the Second World War despite the challenges of the Cold War and Irish Republicanism? If not, why is Hizb ut-Tahrir being singled out now?

The proposal to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir would, if enacted alongside these other measures, drive radicalism further underground, and in a more subtle way, muzzle Muslim political protest through fearful self-censorship. If Hizb ut-Tahrir is not considered by Scotland Yard sources to be part of the terrorist problem, the conclusion is that the ban is political. Inevitable comparisons are being made with the British National Party.

British Muslims might therefore conclude that their politics was being criminalized too, and associated by the official mind with terrorism. The ban tells us something else that is disturbing: that unlike the cohesive movement of Irish Republicanism, in which the political wing had a moderating impact on the IRA, the government’s judgement is that extremist, radical and moderate currents among British Muslims are too disaggregated from each other to justify a strategy of encapsulation. In other words, the government believes that while Hizb ut-Tahrir contributes to a general atmosphere of radicalisation, it cannot recall the extremists from violence anymore than the moderates can. Thus the onus is upon the Party to admit to its confrontational and radicalising role prior to 1996 (when Omar Bakri Mohammed left to found al-Muhajiroun) and to become committed to a preventative strategy in future.

The symbolic weight of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s banning for the Muslim community would probably vitiate the opportunity to promote an intelligence-led approach and thereby squander the widespread goodwill among Muslim communities in the wake of the bombings. What would be left except for heavy policing and therefore further alienation? The effective exclusion thus far of British Muslims from the new security agenda reveals how much the very community most likely to be impacted by these policies is held in distrust and suspicion.

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darity. The question is being asked: can solidarity to the ummah be affirmed as part of British Muslim identity, as a matter of civic conscience rather than of cosmic or geopolitical alterity? It would be fruitless to place loyalties to ummah and nation in political opposition, and therefore to portray this purported dichotomy as an ever-present existential crisis of cultural identity for British Muslims. At a time when national sentiment is eroded by commodification, devolution, Europe, the sheer fact of cultural diversity, globalization, even by a collective failure of the imagination, is it just or fair to expect minority groups to bear disproportionately the burdens of nationhood in moments of crisis like this?

It is precisely this expectation that currently shapes the debate around the integration (often nowadays a euphemism for assimilation) of British Muslims, and it constitutes a political bear-trap. After 7/7, as after 9/11, the problems of our various communities are held to be our own, and these are problems of cultural backwardness. The tropes of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism re-emerge in the form of twenty-first century Islamophobia: they mistreat their women, they illiberally uphold harsh rites and a merciless law, their loyalties are suspect and lie beyond those of the nation-state. These assumptions threaten to overtake official discourse about Muslim integration: Muslims are silenced in this debate, they are more talked about and dissected by others in an endless trial by media.

One could name other culprits, but the current silence of the Commission for Racial Equality-the statutory body tasked with protecting ethnic minority groups from prejudice and discrimination-is scandalous. Trevor Philips’ announcement of the end of multiculturalism after the Madrid bombings has again been taken up by the right, and he recently opined that, despite the devastating picture of Muslim disadvantage in the 2001 Census, the Muslim problem is attitudinal: “too many people in this country live in the old country in their heads” In Trevor’s terms, Muslims “need to create a strong British Muslim identity"-that’s not a problem, except that the role model he stipulates for Muslims still mentally living “back home” is Konnie Huq. How surprising it is that he misses that cornerstone of English liberalism, the personal choice to be different (and not just the same), a fact recognised by Shabina Begum’s defence lawyer, Cherie Booth. It seems that after the CRE failed in 2004 to incorporate the faith strand under the “race umbrella” as part of the proposed Commission for Equality and Human Rights, it has kept away from “faith” issues except in areas where it claims ownership, like “stop and search”, shoot-to-kill or racial profiling, but it has not even said anything on these after 7/7.

The sheer fact of cultural diversity defines modern urban

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Britain, particularly the capital, and so the challenge is to reinvigorate multiculturalism by emphasising civic responsibilities over the entitlements and rights-based approaches of the past.

Another problem is the outdated compartmentalization of policy into foreign and domestic spheres when they so clearly now interpenetrate each other, and in reaction to this blurring of sovereignties and boundaries, political retrenchments-like tribal religion and lumpen nationalism-emerge at a time of crisis as Hamza Yusuf bravely tried to tell British Muslims after 9/11.

Are we to be a tribal ummah, prepared for the sake of unity to defend Muslims, right or wrong, to ignore Muslim-on-Muslim violence, or become oblivious to general human suffering and pain?

How much is this narrowed conception of the ummah, held to ransom by the various expressions of Muslim nationalism, a product of post-caliphatism? In other words, is it a form of nostalgia for the imperial Ottoman model misinterpreted as a unity based on the collective human community of monotheists, with the state re-imagined along the lines of interwar European totalitarianism? Rather it is the case, as Ibn Taymiyah and Shah Wali Allah contended in different ways, that the ummah is a body of purpose based upon the worship of God, upholding values of universal mercy and justice for all of God’s creation, which philosophically allows for the practical recognition of multiple polities within itself, a multiplicity that is in any case an abiding fact of Muslim political history.

This correct attachment to the ummah of purpose does not render the Muslim rootless, unanchored from the nation-state, as the philosopher Roger Scruton has contended, but rather loyalties emerge from the ground up, recognised variously in the principles of moral conduct, social obligation, and contractual and legal obligations. The rights of creation (huquq al-`ibad) encompass family, clan, neighbourhood, city, nation, religious community and humanity, and Muslims are held to be morally and legally responsible for their fulfilment either individually or collectively.

Concomitantly, we are, as Tariq Ramadan has reminded us, a community that bears witnesses to the truth, or ummah alshahadah, to all of humanity, that defends and establishes justice, solidarity and values of honesty, generosity, fraternity and

state is iniquitous, and that a non-assertive secularism comfortable with faith-based activism in the public sphere is preferable to a rigid laĂŻcitĂŠ. In return, new religious communities have been encouraged to undertake a civic engagement cognizant of the common good and are minimally expected to promote mutual respect and tolerance. This dispensation has now been shattered by the bombs; and for such a gross violation of deportment, deportation now looms, as Abdal Hakim Murad predicted some years ago.

The marked weakness of the intellectual contribution by British Muslims to subsidiary debates around multiculturalism, citizenship, foreign policy objectives, civil liberties and security issues has become a critical problem. The nature of Muslim community engagement has largely been driven in the past by a political activism without a strong tradition of cultural and intellectual engagement, and by limited self-critical debate within the community itself. This shortfall will prove all the more telling as the national discussion oscillates between culturalist and chauvinist explanations from the Right, namely that Islam itself is the problem, and the reflex of the Left that disaffection is explained by disadvantage. If that were the case, how could we explain the private school educations of Sajid Badat and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh?

The most important point that British Muslims can make in these secondary debates on issues like multiculturalism is to insist that they cannot be completely redefined by reference to terrorism for the simple reason that whatever the causes of disaffection or disadvantage are among Muslim communities, there is no causal conveyor belt leading automatically to the London attacks. As the abortive attacks of the 21 July demonstrate, we cannot afford to slip into the fallacy that the answers lie with cultural issues among disadvantaged Mirpuri communities in the North. Whose cultural ideosyncracies will next be found to promote Islamist extremism and violence: Somalians, African-Caribbeans or Ethiopians? Problems of disaffection and disadvantage have their own provenance, which are in many ways disconnected with 7/7, and should be addressed as such, but their exploitation by opportunistic advocates of assimilation will in the current climate serve to stifle the Muslim voice, which is essential at present. So in general, the

The marked weakness of the intellectual contribution by British Muslims to subsidiary debates around multiculturalism, citizenship, foreign policy objectives, civil liberties and security issues has become a critical problem. love for all. It is therefore as committed British citizens of good conscience that we may work for the common good by standing by these very principles of bearing witness to the truth, and standing up against injustice in the world and against all forms of chauvinism and self-interest. It is through this renewed vision of citizenship that British Muslims will be able to escape the perils of tribalism, to avoid victimhood and to embrace civic responsibility without surrendering their commitment to truth and justice. This renewed engagement is easily expressed in terms of the multicultural liberal democracy that has characterised Britain in recent times. This country has largely accepted that the non-recognition of cultural diversity by the

response of the Muslim communities should be to add sophistication to the national debate, to humanize it by aiding understanding of their nuanced, lived experience over the past half century in Britain, of better comprehension of the Muslim world and of the true face of their religion.

Any successful long-term strategy has to prefer a battle of theological ideas, an open, constructive debate about background causes, and a collaborative and smart intelligence-led approach to extremism. But the government may disable any such possibility by its speedy recourse to the law, and runs the danger of creating a country where the loss of precious freedoms will not make any British citizens more secure. !

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Something Has Gone

Wrong Further Reading: Defending The Transgressed By Censuring The Reckless Against The Killing of Civilians

by Shaykh Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti www.livingislam.org/maa/dcmm_e.htm Dying to Win:The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert A. Pape.

Random House.

Making Sense of Suicide Missions, edited by Diego Gambetta.

Oxford University Press.

Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs by Farhad Khosrokhavar, translated from the French by David Macey.

Pluto Press Perfect Soldiers:The Hijackers Who They Were,Why They Did It

by Terry McDermott.

HarperCollins The Road to Martyrs’ Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber

by Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg. Oxford University Press.

Suicide Terrorism

by Ami Pedahzur.

Polity Press (Nov 2005).

Dying to Kill:The Allure of Suicide Terror

by Mia Bloom.

Columbia University Press.

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One day after the 7th July bombing, London-based think-tank, Ihsanic Intelligence published a two-year study, The Hijacked Caravan, unequivocally condemning suicide bombings done in the name of Islam. Critics were aplenty. Yasmin al-Mas takes a look at the study and finds it an important scholarly step in challenging the so-called ‘Islamic’ justifications for terror.

he study attempted to fill a void of academic scholarship countering the proliferation of suicide bombings in the name of Islam. Although condemned by Muslims worldwide, the condemnation - in some quarters - was not unequivocal. There were some “exceptional” cases, the most prevalent being that suicide bombings could only be committed in Palestine. What then about other Muslim lands? What about attacks against avowed military and political targets? Or Muslims defending themselves to avoid massacres like Srebrenica?

Did those who oppose suicide bombings among Western Muslims, blinded by their social and economic privilege, simply not understand the plight of Arab Muslims?

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, expressed his difficulty in understanding the position of some eminent scholars in justifying the act.

In conversation with Mark Lawson in December 2004, he said, “Suicide bombing is a real problem, a deeply-rooted problem.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand and I have been in debates with people that I would consider scholars…I cannot, for the

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life of me, understand how some of the Muslim scholars have validated that act.”

The primary al-Qaeda fatwa justifying suicide bombings was said to have been written by Yusuf al-Ayyiri, an al-Qaeda ideologue in Saudi Arabia who was killed in June 2003. The fatwa has been translated into English is widely available online. It contributed to view of many, who took its erroneous citation of Islamic evidences as proof that the practice was not only valid, but meritorious. Consequently, greater evidences from fourteen centuries of the Islamic legal tradition are needed to condemn suicide bombings as a whole.

Previous legal opinions given by Islamic scholars regarding suicide bombings by Islamist terrorists had tended to be blanket statements of approval or condemnation, as opposed to systematic refutation.

What if these acts were shown to an Islamic scholar in 1900, what would he say?

Even a hundred years later, in 2000, many scholars had condemned suicide bombings, but there had not been a single, serious, academically-rigorous and comprehensive refu-

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tation of suicide bombings using the primary sources of Sunni Islam. Two years after 9/11, when a British suicide bomber blew himself up in the name of Islam in Tel Aviv, it seemed that the condemnations were still not getting through.

In its conclusion The Hijacked Caravan states: “The technique of suicide bombing is anathema, antithetical and abhorrent to Sunni Islam. It is considered legally forbidden, constituting a reprehensible innovation in the Islamic tradition, morally an enormity of sin combining suicide and murder and theologically an act which has consequences of eternal damnation.” This was the default position of Sunni Islam in April 1994, prior to the first suicide bombing in the Holy Land.

The study found that suicide terrorism had no precedent in fourteen centuries of Sunni Islamic tradition, and that the tactic had been adopted by Islamist terrorist groups like al-Qaeda from Hindu Marxist terrorist groups like the Tamil Tigers and kamikaze pilots from Japan. Worldwide, in merely three years after 9/11, the number of suicide bombings in the name of Islam had increased three-fold than it had over two decades whilst the number of people killed had doubled. Suicide bombing in the name of Islam had now occurred in 26 countries: Lebanon [1981], Kuwait [1983], Argentina [1992], Panama, Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories [1994], Pakistan, Croatia [1995], Saudi Arabia [1996], Tanzania, Kenya [1998], Yemen, Chechnya [2000], USA, Kashmir, Afghanistan [2001], Tunisia, Indonesia, Algeria [2002], Morocco, Russia, India, Iraq, Turkey [2003], Uzbekistan and Spain [2004] and the United Kingdom [2005].

Furthermore, suicide bombers could never qualify for the status of the rightly

martyred Islamic warriors, shaheed mujahid, as they failed to fulfill two criteria: firstly, that the martyr must be killed by means or weapons other than their own; and secondly, they must not know the precise moment of their own death. Once the edifice for the case of suicide bombing using Islamic evidences had collapsed, the act was discerned to be one combining murder and suicide.

A few weeks after The Hijacked Caravan, Shaykh Mohammad al-Afifi, the Oxford-based Malaysian jurist, published his formidable fatwa condemning suicide bombings and targeting innocent civilians titled Defending the Transgressed. The fatwa’s translation into Arabic and its dissemination amongst eminent scholars in the Arab world who have condoned these acts, is a positive sign of a debate emerging about these issues. He says: “Those who still defend this tactic, invoking blindly a nebulous [jurisprudential] principle that it is justifiable out of [necessity] while ignoring the related strictures, must look long and hard at what they are doing and ask the question: was it absolutely necessary, and if so, why was this not done before 1994, and especially during the earlier wars, most of all during the disasters of 1948 and 1967?”

The Hijacked Caravan also assumed the

position of finding makharij (excuses) for scholars who condoned these acts, including their forced close proximity to oppressive, even heretical, regimes and extenuating circumstances, such as war, relating to where they were in the world. This, in no way, abandoned the position of unequivocal refutation, but it allowed for the dissimulation, inaccuracies and erroneous judgments of Islamic scholars to be reviewed and rectified in the future.

Ultimately, these acts are not from the way of the Prophet - the paragon of human perfection. The study boldly asserts that these are acts he would not only have disapproved of, but condemned unequivocally.

Muslims have not been left without guidance nor without the means to extricate ourselves from our present predicament.

The sunnah is truly the best means by which to do that. When murder and suicide as clear as moonlight are not been called that by the religion which is meant to possess the Criterion of Truth, something has gone wrong. !

The Hijacked Caravan: Refuting Suicide Bombings as Martyrdom Operations is available online at www.ihsanic-intelligence.com

SUICIDE TERROR FACTS About three-quarters of all recorded suicide bombings have occurred since 9/11.

At least 400 suicide bombings have taken place in Iraq alone since the US invasion and occupation began in 2003. In May 2005, there were 90 suicide bombings.

Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II participated in coordinated suicide attacks in the Pacific.

The advent of suicide attacks in the Middle East began in 1983 when a Hezbollah operative drove his truck into the US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 US service members in an attack that remains the deadliest terrorist strike on Americans overseas. Hezbollah would later carry out several dozen more suicide attacks.

3: 4 - The ratio of suicide bomb attacks by Palestinians to those carried out by Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers since 1987.The conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the government, dominated by the Sinhalese majority, began in 1983 and has claimed almost 65,000 lives.

According to Robert A. Pape, the Tamil Tigers group accounted for 76 of the 315 suicide attacks carried out around the world from 1980 through to 2003, compared with 54 for Hamas.

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The X Factor Malcolm X’s contribution to the civil rights struggle both unified and transformed black politics in America. But his developed political strategy was largely informed by his own spiritual re-awakening, inspiring him to pull Black American leaders and organisations together into a common objective.With tensions between British Muslims in the aftermath of 7/7 spilling over onto the news pages, what can we learn from Malcolm’s legacy?

Mohammad Siddique Seddon reflects.

“And if I can die having brought any light, exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America then, all of the credit is due to Allah.

Only the mistakes have been mine.” El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Malcolm X As Home Office Minister Hazel Blears leaps energetically from one British Muslim locale to another in a government public relations exercise aimed at both rebuilding deteriorating links with Muslim minorities and visibly manifest its ability to ‘manage’ Britain’s problematic Islamic community, many observers claim that existing Muslim representations directly inter-facing with government and its agencies have largely failed to identify and prioritise the community’s escalating local and regional problems. Critics say Muslim leaders have instead placed too much emphasis on international Muslim politics or transnational identity-related issues. The combined results and cumulative affects of government mismanagement and community leadership ineptitude have been both tragic and disastrous for the entire nation, witnessed in the murder of innocent people in barbaric acts of senseless terrorism.

Confused and misguided young British Muslims who vented their irrational and chaotic angst at both their fellow citizens and themselves committed a psychotic act rooted in a crass and desperate nihilism.

In the aftermath we are all seeking to understand what the determining factors were that germinated such wanton hatred and violence. Needless to say that finger-pointing and ‘witch-hunting’ will not provide any meaningful answers but instead will create even more intra-community divides.

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If Malcolm X’s life can offer any guidance to British Muslims in their present predicament it might be that unity of purpose is not only currently tantamount but ultimately the noblest fight. In striving to change the injustices and discrimination faced by AfricanAmericans Malcolm X made the ultimate sacrifice but his struggle was morally just and the social changes he desired were universally beneficial. Even more importantly, in Malcolm X’s jihad against oppression, racial discrimination, social exclusion and the denial of civil and human rights he - unlike his murderers - did not become the oppressor or the aggressor.

Malcolm once compared the opposing political positions of AfricanAmerican community leaders during the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s to that of the “field Negro” and the “house Negro”. The field Negro was the plantation slave who dressed in rags and toiled in the cotton fields under the merciless whip hand of the despised master.

The house Negro on the other hand, was dressed in the image of his master and lived in the sartorial splendour of the colonial house on the hill. Needless to say, that the field Negro hated the master whereas the house Negro worshipped and emulated him. In his stark analogy Malcolm X alluded to Hegel’s theory of the independence and dependence of self-consciousness which was equated with human lordship and bondage. Black consciousness and selfdefinition were problems that both muted African-American identity politics and seriously impeded any meaningful progress in the civil rights movement. Malcolm X branded Black leaders who had internalised their “house Negro” status as “Uncle Toms”. This extremely derogatory term was directly

borrowed from the grotesque portrayals of subjugated and submissive Black characters in popular American film and literature, particularly exampled in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Ironically, Stowe’s book is credited with helping to end the U.S. slave trade whilst at the same time creating the commonly held stereotypes of African-Americans. Malcolm X employed this term because he felt it best described many of the AfricanAmerican leaders’ ‘privileged’ positions and their gross betrayal of the struggles and sufferings of their community.

“America’s negroes - especially older negroes - are too indelibly soaked in Christianity’s double standard of oppression.” - The Autobiography of Malcolm X. As a Muslim, Malcolm X was not afraid to speak the truth as he saw it.

However, as his understanding of Islam and political philosophy developed he realised that unity of purpose, beyond representation and leadership squabbles, was paramount to the AfricanAmerican civil rights cause. He also realised that any factionalism and infighting within the Black community only served state and government interests by helping to perpetuate a colonial and imperial strategy of divide and rule.

Instead, Malcolm publicly cooperated with other Black leaders and organisations, while reserving his criticisms and objections for his private councils aimed at implementing effective change and positive strategies in order to unify the Black movements in America. It is interesting to note that when Malcolm harboured separatist and partisan ideologies propagated by the Nation of Islam, of which he as a very vocal and prominent member, he was neither a threat to Black leaders and their feuding organi-

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sations or the American government.

However, when Malcolm’s Islamic beliefs and political ideology changed after his Hajj experience, his all-embracing unified approach to the AfricanAmerican struggle threatened both the established Black leaders and the American government.

“You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.” - The Autobiography of Malcolm X Malcolm’s jihad eventually cost him his life but his cause was not lost and the African-American community went from strength to strength inspired by the Organisation of African-American Unity that he established.

If Muslims are to learn from the life of Malcolm X, they should understand that when a minority group faces persecution, discrimination and oppression, these evils, although initially limited to the few, are eventually extended to the whole community. British Muslims, therefore, need to be immediately aware and realise that now is not the time to grab each other by the throat! Instead, they must grab each other by the hand and agree to disagree, putting their ideological, political, philosophical and theological difference aside so that they may move forward together, collectively and synchronously - as one body. The urgent need for Muslim unity is not merely an idealistic rallying cry born out of a misplaced utopian Islamic universalism. Nor is it simply a distraction designed to belie the reality that there are internal problems which the British Muslim community must address.

Rather, without consolidating unity of purpose, the Muslim community cannot fight the increasing injustices it appears destined to face nor can it critically and rationally resolve intra-community problems. If it fails to come together to address these issues, it may instead be made to yield to inappropriate and imposed government solutions which will fundamentally undermine the whole community. This is because the government’s ‘problem solving’ of the British Muslim community could be used as an opportunity to further devalue their citizen status by eroding their civil liberties and human rights.

However, beyond the self-emanating

problems of the British Muslim community no one should overlook the fact that faulted government foreign policies, the absence of any meaningful development and investment in large sections of the British Muslim community and the current targeted and discriminatory ‘knee jerk’ legislation have further inflamed existing tensions already underpinned by racism, social exclusion and disenfranchisement. In addressing the injustices he faced Malcolm X was unambiguous about what he believed was socially correct and religiously right. In a speech given in Detroit just eight days before his assassination he said: “Before I get involved in anything nowadays, I have to straighten out my position, which is clear. I am not a racist in any form whatsoever. I don’t believe in any form of racism. I don’t believe in any form of discrimination or segregation. I believe in Islam. I’m a Muslim, and there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim.”

Are British Muslims brave enough and bold enough to follow Malcolm’s lead? !

The urgent need for Muslim unity is not merely an idealistic rallying cry born out of a misplaced utopian Islamic universalism. Nor is it simply a distraction designed to belie the reality that there are internal problems which the British Muslim community must address.

Rather, without consolidating unity of purpose, the Muslim community cannot fight the increasing injustices it appears destined to face nor can it critically and rationally resolve intracommunity problems.

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“

“My Soul

is not yours to

Possess

Robin Soans has been accused of being an apologist for “people’s wickedness”.Yet, even after the London bombings he is unbowed. His brilliant and controversial new play, Talking to Terrorists, challenges audiences to understand the motivations of those who murder for a cause. He spoke to Abdul-Rehman Malik about why terrorists aren’t psychopaths, the lure of resistance and the ideological war that is threatening us all.

eople are bright but blocked.” It’s an extraordinary phrase the psychologist in the play uses to help us understand the kind of people who engage in terrorism. Some of these people were blocked which was why they could be exploited. Somewhere in their lives, they felt frustration with the world as it is.

There is an interesting line in the play where Alex Hanson, the character of the army colonel in Sierra Leone, asks who really is responsible for terrorism. It’s not just the person who carries it out, but the person who first thought it was a good idea.

There is an awareness that these four young men who blew themselves up on 7/7 are responsible, but less so than the people who first convinced them it was a good idea to perpetrate their acts; the people who trained them and gave them a plan. What is not being asked is why did this person think it was a good idea. If Tony Blair says “uproot this ideology of evil”, well it will simply be replaced by another root. The real solution is to try and remedy the root and make it grow in a different way.

The world is caught in an ideological battle. Enormous forces have locked horns and nobody is willing to budge an inch.

That leads to people getting caught in the cross fire. Of all the phrases that haunt me in the play is Terry Waite saying, “I could stand in the face of my captors and say ‘you

“P

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tried to break my body you haven’t, you have tried to break my mind but you haven’t, but my soul is not yours to possess'". In effect that is exactly what is being said by them. You can invade my country but my soul is not yours to possess. We live in a world where people want to possess each other’s souls.

I spoke to Anthony Sampson a week before he died, and he said “...don’t think America’s ambition is just economic. No, it’s expansionist and imperialist. They want to inflict their way of thinking on as many people as they possibly can.” That’s what empires do. It strikes me that Waite is right: there are many people in the world saying that “my soul is not yours to posses”. The real clash in the world lies in the fact that people are resisting what America is telling them to do.

I thought that after 9/11, which was so apocalyptic, the world would surely take a step back and we would reconsider what we were doing to each other. I thought there would be a greater awareness of the importance of global harmony. Instead, there has been a greater surge of American imperialism and the more you bolster intransigence and polarise the situation the less likely a solution is going to be found and the more innocent people will get mangled. I have resisted the idea of the war on terror as I thought it was a convenient phrase to keep

the domestic population cowed. I think there is war but it isn’t against terror. It’s an ideological war.

In preparing for the play, we went to meet the former head of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade who is in exile in Ireland.

We finally agreed to meet up in a shopping mall, but the woman setting up our meeting had to go and I said, standing in a place where hundreds of people were walking by, “Well then, how will I recognise him?” She said, “You will recognise him. You will certainly recognise him because his grief is riven into his face.”

I watched people coming up the escalator and I immediately knew it was him. His grief was indeed, riven into his face. He was a young man but looked like he was 170.

His was a life that met frustration and opposition at every level. He had been hunted and he had been the hunter. It was like the humanity had been squeezed out of him.

And that speech he does at the end of the first half when he does a litany of his family, who he can never see again, had me in tears because there is something evocative and moving about people reciting names.

He was an extraordinary man and the line from The Messiah summed him up: “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

When another character in the play says “Sometimes I’m 15 and sometimes I am 200”, she means that sometimes she’s the

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little girl who didn’t have a childhood or a proper family and sometimes she’s the ‘adult’ who, at the age of 13 was inflicting unspeakable torture on others.

It is not in the least unnerving to sit with people who have killed others. You see survival is very powerful in making someone charismatic. All the people I have interviewed should have been killed many times over. The Kurdish PKK fighter whose story is featured in the play was in a shoot-out with Turkish soldiers and when he got back to the military police station he had nine bullet holes in his anorak and not one of them had hit his body. Then he was in prison and tortured for 21 years. Terrible beatings until the whole floor of the cell was running with his blood. The corpses of his colleagues were put around him in his cell.

He faced terrible electric shock treatments… unspeakable torture and he should be dead a few hundred times over and there you are having a cup of tea with him and giving him a hug because you have a shared humanity between you. I can understand how he got there.

I am always being accused of being an apologist for people’s wickedness. In some ways I am an apologist, because I believe there are reasons why these things happen.

It is very clear in the play why these things happen. The five people who ended up as people of violence have been pushed there by something that blocked up every other avenue in their lives. If you are an eight year old girl being beaten by your father every night - that’s the reason why you are in the middle of the road at midnight, because you ran away from being killed. She is desperate for some kind of care and attention and suddenly a group of soldiers come out and show that affection and say ‘we will be your new parents'. Of course you will follow. It is telling that Ali, the

“How will I recognise him?”

She said, “You will recognise him because his grief is riven into his face.” True enough, I recognised him. He was a young man but looked like he was 170. It was like the humanity had been squeezed out of him.

PKK fighter, said that they had a farm in the Turkish mountains. The Turkish government cut off subsidies so they had to move into the town, nine of them living in one small room. In school he was put in the corner of the classroom and no one, not even the teacher spoke to him. If you are a bright, sensitive, intelligent and aspirational young man and at the age of ten you are treated like that, then that treatment is going to push you into some kind of action.

You start to link up with people who are living in similar hellish conditions and you start to give yourself a reason to live. As Martin Snodden (a member of the UVF in Northern Ireland) put it, his entire society was crumbling, with friends and family being evicted one by one, people being shot.

Of course under those circumstances we would form organisations to resist.

I don’t think it makes any difference whether they were born here or not. It’s to do with faith and ideology. It could be solved quickly if people took a step back, but we are not and thus, are making things worse. People will not accept someone else’s point of view by force. To resist is natural.

Sometimes, that’s called terrorism.

Sometimes, it’s called nobility. If it’s for you, it is nobility, but if it’s against you, then it is terrorism. Terrorists aren’t psychopaths.

These men are very intelligent, educated and thinking. They see through the immediate problem to the global problem, which they think they are fighting.

Talking is the prerequisite to dealing with terrorism. It is more constructive than bombing and invading. How are you going to persuade nations to draw back by bombing the Underground or flying planes through buildings? It will do nothing. It won’t make your voice heard in a way that will be constructive and help the situation.

Many say there is something in human nature that is inherently violent. Well of course there is, we have evolved from animals and are capable of animalistic behaviour. We all have a greedy, selfish side to us but we tend not to use it. We have the capacity for violence but we tend not to use it. If we feel the only option left is violence, then we use it. Craig Murray’s story in the play is about the atrocious human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, where people saw their families tortured right in front of them. Well if that was me, I would be militant in five seconds. There comes a stage where injustice is so vast and overwhelming that you topple into militancy. Those who deny this are deluded.

London is the greatest city in the world because there are so many people from so many different communities living in relative harmony. Enoch Powell’s vision of rivers of blood never materialised. You have the odd squib of violence here and there but that’s usually to do with disenfranchised youth. Amongst liberal people the current situation will evoke a great deal of sympathy for Muslims. We will try and find fault but it can’t be the fault of the entire Muslim community.

I do grieve for these four young men who had so much of their lives ahead of them. What a waste of life. I worry about the people they left behind, such as their parents. Who is caring and worrying about them? All these terrible actions will do is confirm for Britain and America that they are doing the right thing. Maybe it will promote more debate, but we are in a mess and we will always be in a mess if greed and imperialism remain rife in the world.

There is a human side to all this and that’s the province of theatre. Philosophers, political analysts, journalists - they look at the cerebral side of things. Paul Taylor said, in The Independent, that the purpose of theatre is not to come up with solutions but state the problem more clearly. !

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Call for Papers for International Conference Citizenship, Security and Democracy Istanbul, Turkey. Friday, 1st September - Sunday, 3rd September 2006 The Association of Muslim Social Scientists (UK) and Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (Turkey) in conjunction with

The Association of Muslim Social Scientists (USA) The Association of Muslim Social Scientists (France) Patron: The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) The time for an international gathering of Muslim social scientists is at present a necessity. Global political upheavals have created an insatiable demand for studies, information and analysis of Islam and Muslims. The Muslim social scientist is not only being asked to be academic, objective and dispassionate about critical issues related to the Muslim experience, faith, culture and philosophy, but is also being called upon to “represent” a community misrepresented in monolithic terms.

The inherent diversity of the Muslim experience across regional, national, ethnic, theological and social divides defies the homogenising logic of mass media, popular culture, and governmental politics.

The events of 9/11 in the US and 7/7 in the UK have created within circles of Muslim social scientists, especially in North America and Europe, an opportunity for research to explore the Muslim experience in multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary ways. We need now to create overlapping, synergistic discourse that will both examine the Muslim experience, and provide the necessary research, analysis and understanding to those who wish to enact social change. Social scientists must be acutely aware of the role they play in the future development of Muslim communities in the West and beyond.

In this conference, we will begin to build a network of social scientists who understand the utility, applicability and importance of such research.

The notion of citizenship and security as they relate to democracy and freedom lie at the heart of discourses centred around the presence of significant Muslim communities in the

West. In addressing these themes, we will consider these terms in their broadest way. The issue of ‘citizenship’ can represent a confluence of identities - legal, political, social, religious and spiritual. ‘Security', in comparison, has legislative, policy, political, economic, theological and social implications, but can also be used to examine human rights, trust relations, community cohesion, social exclusion, and marginalization. The new critical tendencies on the capacity of ‘democracy’ to safeguard the human rights of minorities and collective identities give us a framework for understanding and gauging the status of a pluralistic cultural identity. Further, if anything, the presence of significant Muslim minorities and the emergence of new Islamic discourses regarding modernity have begun to challenge the restrictive and exclusive notions of culture. We need to question ‘for whom’ these rights are.

Muslim social scientists need, therefore, to develop evidencebased and policy-oriented research that delineates and represents issues of concern to Muslims in current social and foreign policies. This conference then, welcomes papers that are forward-looking and provide the basis for conceptual, critical and strategic thinking for the future.

Turkey is an ideal location to host this conference. Sitting along the presumed ‘fault-line’ between ‘East and West', ‘Christendom and Islam’ and given its unique status as the only Muslim-majority country being able to make a case for inclusion in Europe, Turkey’s internal and external struggles will provide a challenging and creative locus and a significant historical backdrop for a conference of Muslim social scientists.

Papers are invited along the following themes: 1) Citizenship: New Paradigms and Challenges ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Challenges of plural citizenship.

Status of minorities in multicultural societies in a transnational world.

Transnational Muslim organisations Political participation of Muslims in Europe and USA Muslim women citizenship, empowerment, and discrimination.

From tolerance to recognition: The processes of integration within the integrity of collective identities.

Faith and secularism.

Muslim youth: Experiences, realities and challenges.

Islamic ethics across multiple cultures in a global environment.

European models of unity: cultural and political challenges.

Turkey’s cultural identity and EU membership.

2) Security, Violence and Peace ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Security, Integration and Muslim minorities.

Alternatives to violence: Dissent in civil society.

Communities’ conflict and coexistence.

Security and Islamophobia.

Terrorism and extremism in Muslim societies.

Violence : transnational and national.

State violence and urban violence Islamophobia in the Muslim World?

3) Democracy, democratisation: Prospects for Civil Society ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Unity without unification in future cross-cultural society.

Models for peace in fundamental texts of faiths and cultures.

Muslim scholars in the West: prospects for renewal and mediation.

Imagining a Europe with Turkey.

Revival and reform in a fragmented Muslim world Europe and the Middle East: Historical and strategic issues.

The Nation-state and its Future.

The experience (s) of democracy in Muslim countries.

Democracy and democratisation : Imposition or persuasion?

Deadlines: Abstracts: February 1st 2006 Papers: June 15th 2006

Submissions: Submission of abstracts (150 words) to be sent to: From Turkey: setavtr@gmail.com, From the Arab World: confamss@yahoo.com From North and South America: conferences@amss.net From Europe and the Rest of the World: csd@amssuk.com Please supply a short biographical profile (150 words) with your abstract.

Conference Languages:

Turkish, English

COVER

“

The Prophet said “This religion will be carried in every generation by the most balanced people.They will refute the misquotations of the extremists and the plagiarisms of the nullifiers and the interpretations of the zealots.” Before revelation the Prophet hated zealotry and after revelation came to him he destroyed all the rules associated with it.

”

After the London bombings, Muslim communities have been told that they need to challenge extremism and zealotry in their midst.Well, argues Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, it is not too much Islam that is the problem, but too little. In this exclusive excerpt from an address at London’s Friends House, he calls on British Muslims to reject calls for a reformation, come to terms with the true meaning of jihad and struggle for a truly just society.

JUST ENOUGH RELIGION TO

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here are increasingly more Muslims living outside the traditional lands of Islam and yet many Muslim still operate under the false assumption that the world is divided into dar-alIslam (the abode of Islam) and dar-al-harb (the abode of war). They think that dar-alIslam is ruled by a Caliph and that it is in a perpetual state of war with dar-al-harb. That has not been the case for centuries. During the time of the Abbasids the ulama developed a category referred to as dar-al-sulh (abode of peace) to designate countries with whom Muslims had treaties and whose people were not aggressing against them.

Among the Shafi’i jurists for example, dar-al-Islam is interpreted to be anywhere you can practice Islam safely even if the leader is a nonMuslim. Some of our early scholars do say that living in lands other than Islam was disliked and even forbidden. Others however, argued that if you were allowed to practice your faith (free from religious persecution) it was an obligation to be in these countries otherwise no one would be a witness to Islam.

This is our classical jurisprudence and we can take from it what is closest to our reality.

Instead, there is a cry now for a reformation of Islam and yet, the deviations we witness today are manifestations of reformation. I say, we don’t need a reformation. What we need instead is a Council of Trent. The Council of Trent was an attempt at counter-reformation. The Catholics were determined to affirm their tradition because they were afraid that revelation would be interpreted by common people and this in fact led to some of the bloodiest conflicts in their history. We are seeing the same pattern repeat itself in the Islamic tradition. I have a problem with people who try to interpret the verses of the Quran when they don’t even know Arabic grammar. In an alarming number of cases this has led to the shedding of innocent blood.

Muslims must stop the shedding of innocent blood. It is an obligation by shariah. If your brother is strapping on a bomb, you better inform somebody and if he is talking about it, then it’s a serious problem and we have an obligation to address the problem.

I do not believe terrorism will disappear any time soon, but Islamic terrorism will wane like all falsehood. It will come to an end. We must prevent our youth from being attracted to the very seductive element inherent in all this.

We have to help them understand that when anger comes into their heart, revelation separates itself. Anger is not a rung on the spiritual ladder. The Prophet did not get angry. The scholars say it is human to get angry but they also warn that it can possess us. The Prophet, upon him be peace and blessings, told us that Shaytan flows in the blood of the children of Adam

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“

and interestingly, Dostoevsky wrote a book called The Possessed which is a book about terrorism.

Violence is indeed a human problem. George Bush says his favourite philosopher is Jesus and if Jesus couldn’t get rid of evil then I doubt George Bush will be able to do it. I have a problem with people who say their objective is “getting rid of the evildoers.” First, nobody has done it in the past and second, those ridding the world of evildoers also do evil.

The violence of the 20th century is a testimony to the fact that the absence of religion is as much a problem as the presence of religion. I would argue it is worse today because of the demise of religious values in public life.

There are some who say that if the people of religion had the kind of military technology we have today, they would use it. I don’t believe that is true. Islam prevented Muslims from poisoning wells and by analogy I hold that chemical warfare is prohibited. I believe nuclear weapons are a complete anathema in traditional Islamic thought.

The Quran says, ‘Don’t take the kafir as protectors.’ There are many verses that say that but there is one verse that says ‘unless you have a reason to do so.’ In non-Muslim lands, you are obliged to follow the law. If you don’t like the law then you need to move.The most common response is to say there is no place to make hijrah. Allah says the world is vast. If people don’t want to live here they should go and live in certain Muslim lands and see how long they last before this country starts looking more like dar al-Islam.

”

ome Muslims believe that war is a good thing, that wonderful virtues are associated with war. That is not the philosophy of Islam. Allah says “He prevented you from harming them and them from harming you.” This verse pertains to the treaty of Hudaybiyyah where the Muslims and their enemies were on the brink of war. In this treaty, the Prophet compromised on everything that the disbelievers objected to including removing the words “Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” The Prophet used to supplicate after every prayer, “O Allah you are peace, and from you comes peace, and to you goes back peace. Cause me to live in peace.” The Prophet came to end cycles of violence. You too can break that cycle by working for peace with immense effort. The Prophet said “The one who sells arms during civil strife is damned to hell.”

The Gospel says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The Quran says let the people of the Gospel apply the Gospel. That is similarly true for the Muslims - you have nothing until you apply the Quran. How can Muslims say to the People of the Book, “Don’t go to extremes in your religion” when we are suffering from extremism in our deen?

Some people argue that humiliation breeds extremism. Bin Laden said, “We have been living in humiliation for 80 years.”

My response to Bin Laden is that the Quran says, “When calamities came to you and you were afflicted the likes of twice of what you inflicted on the Quraysh, you said how did this happen. Say it is from your own selves. Whoever finds good, let him praise Allah. But whoever finds other than good, let him blame none other but himself.” If Muslims want to know why

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they are humiliated let them look at what we have done to reach this level. Ask yourselves tough questions about our community and stop pointing fingers at other people.

Where are the terrorists coming from? Well I can identify three problems that are providing fertile ground for the terrorists. The first is earth, the second is the seed and the third is water. By earth, I mean the social conditions we find ourselves in: poverty, disease, oppression. The seed is the human heart. We were created with a potential to be cruel and to cause harm to others but the Quran says, “On that Day (of Reckoning), nothing will benefit a human being but a pure heart.” A pure heart is not agitated and troubled. And finally, water is akin to ideology.

Each one is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to explain the cause of terrorism. However, the three together make a deadly combination and we therefore, have to address all three.

The most important issue we need to address in regards to ideology is jihad. Jihad is a part of Islam and cannot be denied, but we must condemn false interpretations of jihad. The Prophet said, “This religion will be carried in every generation by the most balanced people. They will refute the misquotations of the extremists and the plagiarisms of the nullifiers and the interpretations of the zealots.” The “nullifiers” are those who lie against the Prophet. The “zealots” and the ignorant ones go together in meaning in the Arabic language. In other words, Jahiliyya was the age of zealotry. Before receiving Allah’s revelation, the Prophet hated zealotry and after revelation, he destroyed all the rules associated with it.

We have to fight the false interpretations of jihad with everything we have. The onus is on our community and not the British Government. In fact, if we left it up to the government they would probably make it worse. Islam believes that the greatest blessing after faith is security. The government and Scotland Yard are doing the work of angels as long as they are protecting our security within this country. But, like every institution, there is corruption. We oppose corruption but not when they protect, serve and defend the public will. When Muslims and non-Muslims get in trouble they still call 999.

The second thing we have to change is our understanding of Al-wala wal-bara. In some places, people are taught that alwala (allegiance to any thing other than Islam) nullifies faith, making a person a kafir or a disbeliever. This is true in terms of creed but it is not true in politics and social issues. Hatib bin Amr, one of the companions who fought at Badr, betrayed the Prophet to the Quraysh on the eve of the conquest of Makkah. When the other companions heard of it they wanted to chop his head off. Umar declared to the Prophet that Hatib was a hypocrite. Note, he did not say he was a disbeliever.

When the Prophet asked Hatib to explain his action he said, “I’m a weak man and my son is in Makkah and I was scared that they would harm my son so I did it to

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protect him.” The Prophet said “I accept that from you.” That’s the mercy of the Messenger. Hatib associated himself (wala) with Quraysh but his heart was in Islam.

The Quran says “Don’t take the kafir as protectors.” There are many verses that say that but there is one verse that says, “unless you have a reason to do so.” For instance, in nonMuslim lands, you are obliged to follow the law. If you don’t like the law then you need to move. The most common response is to say there is no place to make hijrah. Allah says the world is vast. If people don’t want to live here they should go and live in certain Muslim lands and see how long they last before this country starts looking more like ‘dar al-Islam.’ slam says that the truth of this religion will manifest and one of the greatest truths of this religion is the equality of the people of Adam. This is something that people have died for. We have to honour the social martyrs of this civilisation because we are enjoying the fruits of their labour and if we don’t work to complete the task that was started by so many of these great souls, we do them a great disservice.

Take for example, freedom of speech which includes the freedom to criticise the government. Benjamin Franklin said, “People that are willing to give up their liberty for their security deserve neither liberty nor security.” I would rather live with the possibility of dying from the stupid act of a crazed lunatic than to lose what makes it worthwhile to be alive. I was taught “give me liberty or give me death.” All men and women desire to be free. It is from God. We want to be free to be slaves of God and the only way you can be slaves of God is to enter into that contract with absolute and utter freedom.

Therefore, we must support the people who are trying to change society for the better. In the West we say, “That warms my heart.” We need to warm the Western hearts up to Islam. I don’t like the term Islamophobia because a phobia is an irrational fear. I think many people have instead a rational fear of Islam and Muslims in that they have valid reasons to be worried. But I believe the Muslim communities in the West are in the labour pains of something that is going to be very immense.

It is the birth of the new world. The ideas that prevail today were the dreams of the philosophers in the ancient world.

This is Allah’s earth and we are guests. He invited us all here. We cannot say who should be here and who shouldn’t.

We have to tolerate each other. And like Jonathan Swift said, “We have just enough religion to hate one another but not enough religion to love one another.” And I say to the British government that it is not too much Islam that is the problem, it is too little. !

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The Prophet used to supplicate after every prayer, ‘O Allah you are peace, and from you comes peace, and to you goes back peace. Cause me to live in peace.’ The Prophet came to end cycles of violence.You too can break that cycle by working for peace with immense effort.

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The above is excerpted from a speech delivered by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf at Friends House, London at an event organised by Q-News on 15 September 2005, and attended by 1300 people.

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A Diabolical Responsibility Former MI5 operative David Shayler’s whistleblowing landed him in jail, but his criticism of British intelligence is still as sharp and controversial as ever. In the aftermath of the London bombings, he spoke to Sonia Malik about the competence of the security services, the “diabolical” impact of the Iraq war and why it’s time to scrap the MI5 and MI6.

It’s hard to believe that the security services knew nothing about an operation as sophisticated as 7/7.

Shaylor: It’s not so much that they ignored the threat. They were aware but there was a greater failure in getting prior intelligence about the attack by using human agents who would have been more effective than the use of artificial means. Also, recent legislation has been particularly counter-productive and has contributed to making Muslims feel targeted, especially in cases where many people have been detained or imprisoned without proper trial. Also, the 2001 Act makes it an offence not to report knowledge of any terrorist activity, which has put people in a very difficult position. Knee-jerk legislation that is passed in response to such threats simply provides a breeding ground for more terrorism.

Apart from this, there is the impediment of being unable to use material from tapping telephone lines as evidence in courts, unlike so many other democracies who are unhindered by such rules. If the security services are allowed to monitor public activity in this way then they should be able to put forward intelligence found in this manner as evidence in a court of law. I remember how frustrating this was from my own personal experiences in 1991, when we were dealing with an IRA case, and a suspect was released because the evidence was inadmissible. If they know someone is going to commit this sort of atrocity but don’t have evidence that can be used in court, that person is free to go and carry out such bombings.

How do you feel about the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian man who was shot eight times after being mistaken for a suicide bomber?

Shaylor: The way this case was handled is very suspect. It goes to show the problem with our intelligence services. That man happened to be in the same block of flats that other terrorists lived in. But there are hundreds of people living in such flats; it doesn’t mean that they are all suspects. The current

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successes in the arrests and raids that have taken place have been driven by SO13, the anti-terrorist squad who work with postincident evidential material. Therefore, these have been a result of good police work and not good intelligence work.

In the 1990s, despite the bombings that had taken place at the World Trade Centre, thousands of Al-Qaeda associates were allowed into the country. Incidents had also taken place in France and the French authorities warned MI5 about this but they still let them in. These associates knew they were being watched but nevertheless managed to infiltrate marginalised communities in areas like Bradford and brainwash young people. The intelligence authorities who made those decisions back then still very likely hold positions within the security services today.

Back in 1996, when MI5 funded Al-Qaeda in a plot against Colonel Gaddafi, no one took my evidence about that.

When I first became aware of the situation I used to think that it was incompetence but I now I think it was strategic. They needed to create an Islamic extremist threat in Britain because with the Cold War was gone and an IRA declared a cease-fire. They needed something else to necessitate their function.

What is the way forward?

Shaylor: We need whole scale reform of our whole intelligence set-up over all 45 or so branches. We need to have a separate counter-terrorist agency and need to abolish the MI5 and MI6, which are no longer required. Also, we need to create a distinction between the gathering of intelligence material and its assessment. They are both very different roles which require different treatment and people with different competences. Interpersonal skills are very important. In order to recruit a would-be terrorist you have to build a rapport with them.

The MI5 assesses its own security function which is a blatant conflict of interest because they can exaggerate or play down whatever suits them. Not only this, but the separate agencies don’t trust each other and

are obsessive about their own secrecy. This lack of trust exists because MI5 and MI6 employ different types of people. MI6 seem to think that they are James Bonds and consider MI5 to be just a bunch of bureaucrats.

So they are constantly wary of each using material against the other or leaking things to the press.

But we need to have accountability on the part of MI5. In the same way that representatives of other bodies and organisations go on television and explain themselves after a disaster or accident, the Head of MI5 should be issuing statements. We are one of the few democracies in the world without Parliamentary oversight over our intelligence services. We only have an internal committee which just serves as windowdressing. The whole thing is indicative of state secrecy in general, along with lack of accountability of government officials and lack of transparency of government.

How do you see the situation developing in the near future?

Shaylor: Things are going to get worse before they get better. There is a clear message in this: we should pull out of Iraq. I don’t believe that this is submitting to the demands of terrorists because we would merely be re-aligning ourselves with international law and stop putting our soldiers and the British public at unnecessary risk.

Tony Blair faces a diabolical responsibility for what has happened in London. The view that the terrorists are evil and that Blair and Bush are good is very simplistic, especially since thousands of more people have been killed on the instructions of the latter.

Since 7/7, Britain has been on high alert but we have still been attacked. We were just lucky that the detonators didn’t go off n 21st July. The way to stop terrorism is to not create enemies in the first place. The situation is heading for melt down. Iran is now accused of developing nuclear weapons and it is ironic how in a bid to protect itself it may very likely end up becoming a target like Iraq. !

Photographer: Fareena Alam.

A Just Faith Those who enquire about the basics of Islam are usually told about the “five pillars” of the religion.These relate to faith and to practice, but at a deeper level it might be said that there are two truly great pillars which support the whole edifice of faith, writes Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton.These are peace and justice.

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here can be no enduring peace without justice. The very word Islam comes from the same verbal root as salam meaning “peace” and, since the religion is based upon total submission to the will of God, Muslims believe that real peace is out of reach unless it is based upon this submission within the universal order. They believe equally that there can be no real justice except as an aspect of submission to the source of all that is just and well ordered.

Although God in Himself is beyond comprehension or analysis, the Quran gives us hints as to His true nature through what are sometimes called “the 99 names” and one of

these is al-Adl, “the Just”. Another of these names is alMuqsid, “the Dispenser of Justice” or “He who gives to each thing its due”.

A Terrifying Burden The Quran praises those who always act “in the light of truth” and tells us: “Perfected are the words of your Lord in truth and justice”. It tells us also: “Behold, God enjoins justice and good actions and generosity to our fellows...", and it comQ - NEWS

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mands us never to let hatred lead us into deviating from justice: “Be just! That is closest to God consciousness”. This, of course, applies to all believers who must fear divine justice if subjective factors or personal emotions lead them to deviate from the path of justice which is also the path of Islam, but it weighs heavily upon those who are required to adjudicate in disputes or to give judgement.

There were cases in the early history of the religion when men whom the ruler intended to appoint as judges fled from court rather than assume this terrifying responsibility. We read of one, who did accept the burden, that his whole body trembled when he was called upon to give judgement, believing that a single mistake might carry with it the threat of damnation. The divine Judge stands over the human judge, observing all that he does, and human justice, even at its best, can never be more than a poor imitation of divine Justice.

The Prophet Muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him, himself when he was called upon to adjudicate in civil matters warned the litigants that one of them might be more eloquent in putting his case than the other and thereby achieve an unjust settlement. “In such a case,” said Muhammad, “I will have given him a portion of hellfire”. This is clearly a grave matter indicating that those who seek justice must themselves practise it without deviation even to their own hurt.

Under all and any circumstances a victory which is contrary to justice is a poisoned chalice.

deserve no higher praise than to be described as “wise”, participating, as it were, in “the wisdom of Solomon”. Wisdom is as much a quality of character as an attribute of the mind. It has nothing to do with erudition which, however extensive, is necessarily limited in scope. A learned man can still be a fool when he steps outside the area of his expertise. The wise man is protected by his insight from folly - although not always from minor errors in the worldly context - because he possesses an inner yardstick by which to assess the situations he encounters. For the Muslim this yardstick is the Quran together with the example of the Prophet and their reflection in the human heart. There is no higher aim for the Muslim than the cultivation of what is described as a “sound heart”. From the sound heart comes sound judgement. The same is true of sound governance and, in Islam, this implies “ruling between” in accordance with wisdom rather than “ruling over”.

The Quran always emphasises that Muhammad, though endowed with the fullness of wisdom, was only “flesh and blood”, capable like other men of error except when inspired from above, but it was his mission not only to convey with meticulous accuracy the revelation which descended upon him but also to offer the supreme example of what it meant to follow in his personal and his public life the full implications of the revelation no less meticulously. When he was dying and came for the last time to the mosque in Medina he said to the assembled people: “If there is anyone among you whom I have caused to be flogged unjustly, here is my back. Strike in your turn. If I have damaged the reputation of any among you, let him do the same to mine. To any I may have injured, here is my purse… It is better to blush in this world than in the hereafter”. A man claimed a small debt and was promptly paid.

Injustice destroys harmony and upsets balance thereby provoking disorder.The Muslim is commanded to give primacy to prayer throughout his life and, in all that he does, to remember God. It is true that people can maintain prayer and remembrance under all conditions, even in the midst of chaos, but the fact remains that spiritual life prospers and flourishes when it has a firm platform from which the ascent to the knowledge of God and the love of God can take off.

Wisdom and the Sound Heart Of special significance too is the relationship between justice and wisdom in the Arabic language. The words hukm, “judgement”, and hikmah, “wisdom” come from the same root, and al-Hakim (the “All-Wise") is another of the names of God in the Quran.

In the Christian tradition St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that, among all human pursuits, “the pursuit of wisdom is more perfect, more noble, more full of joy” than any other human enterprise. The Muslim might amend this slightly by emphasising that one cannot “pursue” wisdom as one might a rare butterfly since it is a divine quality and out of reach of the human seeker as such. It is for us to lay ourselves open to this gracious gift by making ourselves fit and ready to receive it.

It is commonly said that justice is or should be “blind”, in other words rigidly objective, but a judge is required to possess the quality of insight in the most profound sense and can

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The Danger of Disorder Why is justice so important in Islam? The core article of faith is the oneness of God, reflected in the unity of His creation in its totality. This unity is reflected in harmony and balance. Injustice destroys harmony and upsets balance thereby provoking disorder. The Muslim is commanded to give primacy to prayer throughout his life and, in all that he does, to remember God. It is true that people can maintain prayer and remembrance under all conditions, even in the midst of chaos, but the fact remains that spiritual life prospers and flourishes when it has a stable base, a firm platform from which the ascent to the knowledge of God and the love of God can, as it

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were, take off.

A disordered society compounded of danger and distractions, unjust and troubled, provides no such security. The man who has to watch his back all the time is diverted from the remembrance of God as is the one who has suffered injustice and must struggle to eliminate feelings of anger and resentment. Moreover injustice fractures the brotherhood and sisterhood of the believers which is an essential element in an Islamic society. Above and beyond this is the simple fact that He who is called “the Just” commands justice both in society and in every aspect of human relations. Since, in Islam, all things are inter-connected - this is an aspect of unity - it might even be said that every act of injustice jars on the cosmos as a whole like a discordant note in a piece of music. Islam is a very realistic religion and the Quran itself recognises the reality of human weakness. Those who are injured are permitted to take retaliation but they are reminded at every turn that it is better to forgive and to seek reconciliation.

Muslims are commanded to return good for evil, thus breaking the vicious circle of animosity; “to do good to those who have injured us” in the words of one of the classical commentators on the Quran, but this requires human qualities which are by no means universal although they were characteristic of Muhammad.

In his dealings with the pagans who tried by every means to destroy him and his community Muhammad exemplified the rule of forgiveness and reconciliation, forgiving even the most vicious of his enemies when he finally re-entered Mecca in triumph, providing them with gifts so that their hard hearts might be softened and peace prevail after the years of conflict.

Justice might have required their punishment, but there is no contradiction here since there is more than one way to achieve balance which, after all, is the ultimate objective of justice.

tion is clear since a good action or, for that matter, a good character has a quality of beauty which, in its turn, is related to the idea of harmony, just proportion and therefore of justice as such. It is worth noting that the English word “fair” means both just and beautiful. The Arabic verb ‘adala, from the same root as ‘adl (Justice), is usually translated as “to proportion”, “to create in symmetry” or “to be equitable”. Here again we have the idea of harmony which is dependent upon justice.

Muslim thinkers have always been interested in the science of numbers and their significance, and each letter of the Arabic alphabet has a particular number attached to it. Words derived from the root ayn, dal, lam, including adl, occur 28 times in the Quran, and, as it happens, there are 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. These are related to the 28 “mansions of the moon” which determine the Muslim calendar. This may seem somewhat esoteric but, in the Islamic perspective, there are no chance coincidences and, for Muslims, it is further proof of the universal harmony which is the pattern of creation and a sign that everything makes sense when it is closely examined.

In the Quran, which is for all Muslims the directly revealed Word of God, He says: “We sent down the Book and the Balance so that mankind might uphold justice”. Here again the idea of balance occurs, linked directly with the revelation itself. The “scales of justice” are set up and our actions are to be weighed in perfect equity. Regarding the Last Judgement, we read in the Quran: “That day mankind will issue forth in scattered groups to be shown their deeds, and whoso does an atom’s weight of good will see it then and whoso does an atom’s weight of ill will see it then”.

Actions which may appear to us completely trivial are cast into the balance, but good and ill are not alike in weight. The Quran tells us also that a good action, however small in itself, will be rewarded many times its own weight whereas the crimes or sins we may have committed will weigh no more and no less than what they are as such. It might even be said that the scales are themselves weighted in favour of the good and since God is the source of all that is good, all that is beautiful, all that is harmonious, this is in the nature of things.

So far as human justice is concerned, the Prophet counselled all those who are obliged to sit in judgement over their fellows to “avert penalties by doubts” and this is clearly in accordance with the requirement of the British legal system that guilt must be proved “beyond reasonable doubt”. In the present age, at least in the West, the notion of justice and, in particular, of rights has taken on a colouring that is specifically modern. People are unwilling to accept that misfortunes are a

When the Prophet Muhammad was dying and came for the last time to the mosque in Medina he said to the assembled people: “If there is anyone among you whom I have caused to be flogged unjustly, here is my back. Strike in your turn. If I have damaged the reputation of any among you, let him do the same to mine.To any I may have injured, here is my purse… It is better to blush in this world than in the hereafter”.

A man claimed a small debt and was promptly paid.

Seeking Harmony and Balance Islam describes itself as “the middle way”, a religion of moderation in everything except the love and worship of God. Muhammad condemned extremism with the greatest severity and today’s Muslims have a greater need to be reminded of this than ever before as they do of his saying that “anger burns up good deeds just as fire burns up dry wood”.

Extremism and anger are both of them ugly in their manifestations. In one of his inspired sayings the Prophet said: “God is beautiful; He loves beauty”. It is significant that the Arabic word ahsan means both “good” and “beautiful”. The connec-

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can only be made if we detach ourselves from our emotions and from all subjectivism.

This, of course, is an ideal not easily attainable but what matters is that the Crying Out for a Fair Share ideal stands clear of personEarlier generations in the al entanglements, is respectWest were taught the virtue of ed and is seen as the goal for resignation, as are Muslims still which the good man should to this day. The cry, “it’s so aim. History recounts that, unfair!” is heard now on every during one of the battles in side and the subjective convicdefence of the Muslim comtion that one has suffered injusmunity in Medina, the tice or that one’s rights have been Prophet’s son-in-law Ali, infringed is a source of bitterness engaged in combat with one and unhappiness. The Muslim, of the pagans, brought his while he must uphold justice so enemy to his knees and was far as he can, has no right to such about to strike the killing self-indulgence or to suppose blow when the man spat in that he can be judge in his own his face. Ali sheathed his case. To complain against destiny sword, knowing that to is, in effect, to enter a complaint strike out of personal anger against Him who holds all desrather than as an act of distinies in His hand and whose juspassionate justice would be tice is beyond questioning. Here a sin. certain Quranic verses are particSo justice is a basic prinularly apposite: “And surely We ciple of Islam since it has its will try you with something of roots in God Himself. To fear and hunger and the loss of the secular jurist who sees it wealth and lives and crops. But Tree outside the grave of Addas in Taif. Photographer: Fareena Alam as an end in itself this may give good news to the steadfast seem an alien concept but who say, when misfortune strikes Islam is a God-centred Faith which never permits anything to them: ‘Truly we belong to God and truly to Him we return'. be detached from its divine source, al-Haqq, one of the “99 These are they upon whom are blessings from their Lord and Names”, which means “The Truth” but can also be translatmercy. Such are the rightly guided”. ed as “The Real”, ultimate Reality itself. There is therefore a Life’s vicissitudes test our mettle and reveal what we truly principle which over-masters justice and this is Rahmah, are. The notion of “fair shares” can be dangerous since few Mercy. According to another of the Prophet’s inspired sayings: people today are ready to accept that what life has given them “When God completed the creation He wrote the following, is indeed fair. In the Islamic perspective ultimate justice puts which is with Him above His Throne - My Mercy takes preceeverything in its appropriate place, whether high or low, and dence over my Wrath”. this is to be accepted since there is no place from which the Justice is, in a sense, a manifestation of Wrath unless it is ascent to the Creator - “seeking the Face of his Lord Most tempered by Mercy. All but one of the chapters of the Quran High” - may not be undertaken. This, rather than wealth or opens with the words: “In the name of God, the Merciful, the good fortune, is the priority of the Muslim who aims to fulfil Dispenser of Mercy”, and, among Muslims, these same words the purpose of his life. initiate all human actions. It is said that the instrument of creClearly the question of balance arises once again: on the ation was the “breath of the Merciful” and therefore that exisone hand the obligation to strive for justice in this world, on tence itself is a mercy for which we have a duty to be grateful. the other to accept the injustices which are woven into our Indeed, ingratitude and unbelief are almost synonymous in the earthly life in a spirit of resignation. Circumstances dictate Islamic perspective. which of these alternatives is appropriate. The story is told of Believers are warned again and again that if they hope for a merchant in Muslim Spain who, when told that his ship had mercy from their Lord - as all must - then they have to show sunk with all his goods aboard, looked down for a moment mercy to their fellows and to “every creature that has a living before exclaiming: “Praise be to God!". Later a man came to heart” including the beasts and the birds. “God gives a reward tell him that the ship had been saved. Once again he looked for gentleness which He will never give for harshness”, said down before exclaiming: “Praise be to God!". He was asked the Prophet. It is clear that, for the Muslim, there is a powerwhy he had looked down. “I wanted,” he said, “To be sure ful restraint upon justice if justice is understood merely as a that my heart was untroubled”. weighing of relevant facts and that is why the human judge, Equanimity is a basic virtue in Islam. Here, perhaps, there fallible and himself in need of mercy, trembles when he gives is a clue to the reconciliation of the alternatives with which we judgement. are so often faced - to take up arms against the injustice we In Islam mercy always has the last word. ! have suffered or to accept it with resignation. The right choice part of life and not necessarily the fault of someone else or of the system.

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Who’s Taking The

BLAME?

Now that we have imams in Britain standing up and publicly condemning terrorist acts as anti-Muslim and against the teachings in the Quran, Calvin White wonders if pressure might be put on Christian leaders to take a similar stand. ontrary to what some might like tion. They were even counselled by to insist, Christianity is not the their secular allies not to resort to the religion of “an eye for an eye” but it is carnage. Where was the equal pressure the religion of Jesus, who refined from the Christian leadership? those earlier directions and distilled Interesting, isn’t it, that Muslim the ten commandments into two. One fanatics use the idea of holy jihad and was to “love thy neighbour as thyrewards in paradise to recruit their self.” Pretty definitive isn’t it? As is the dupes into terrible acts of destruction, edict of turning the other cheek. and in Christian circles there is the Jesus expected to be betrayed. He solemn assembling for prayer and expected to be arrested by the authoriseeking of blessings for the troops and ties. There was no exhortations to preleaders in their mission of war. pare for battle. There was no bloody Interesting, isn’t it, that polling attempt to stop the proceedings. clearly indicates the Christian right in Even as Jesus was brutalized while America is emphatically against bad carrying his own crucifixion cross and In this time when Christianity language on TV and in the movies, horbeing nailed onto the timbers, there

by Janet Jackson’s bare nipple is on the rise all over America, rified was no violent counterforce from his but drawn with considerable relish to when there is a growing surge violence in the same media. disciples. Not even an outcry.

No matter where one reads in the The additional galling irony of in extolling Christian values, accounts of Jesus, the only conclusion Jesus being emblazoned on the forewhy is it that when the born- heads of those in command of the one can come to is that Jesus was about love. again Bush says it’s better to sharpest swords is that Jesus was also So where are the Christian leaders all about intelligence. He was all about fight “them” over there than deeper understanding, about using when it comes to violent actions by our Western leaders? Where are the insight and keenness of mind to solve on American soil, no televangelists, who every Sunday take problems. Think of how the Pharisees concerted group of leaders over the airwaves to trumpet the mestried to trick him by holding up differsage of Jesus, when it comes to taking ent sections of the law to trip him up. stands up and yells that he’s on bunker busting bombs and mass His disciples picking corn, for got it wrong? carnage? instance, and thus working, on the Where are they when it comes to Sabbath. Jesus answered that the the death penalty prevalent in the majority of American states?

Sabbath was for man and not the other way around. There was When President George Bush insists that billions of dollars the adulteress brought before him to be stoned; he responded need to continue flowing to the war effort in Iraq which leads that any without sin might cast the first stone. to more American body bags and Iraqi graves, why is there no What kind of insight have Bush and Blair employed? What outcry? Why don’t the Christian leaders stand up and challenge intelligence, what deeper understanding is demonstrated by the those decisions, and passionately assert that Jesus would have tactic of blast and shoot with as much technologically sought another way of solving the problems? advanced weaponry as is available?

In this time when Christianity is on the rise all over What compassion, what recognition of common humanity America, when there is a growing surge in extolling Christian is shown when the biggest concern is how to pad the soldiers values, why is it that when the born-again Bush says it’s better with as much body Kevlar and the humvees with as much to fight “them” over there than on American soil, no concertarmour as possible so they can kill all the easier without casued group of leaders stands up and yells that he’s got it wrong? alties - and thus retain the support of the home front.

Like Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also born again.

How do our current religious leaders think Jesus would Yet, their combined leadership has been responsible for react to the concept of collateral damage? ! excruciating death and injury to innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Calvin White is a freelance commentator and poet who lives They both claim a righteousness in their policies of destrucin British Columbia, Canada.

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Location, location, location In the mean streets Shaytan rides the young minds Whilst the Imams’ comb their beards And the parents sleep, dreaming dreams of the displaced As seen on TV at last, A country within a country.

Its towns of narrow streets; Narrow houses of noise and secrets; Narrow lives of repetition; Frozen in the past.

Here wander the children of the displaced, Dislocated by history and culture From the place of nourishment That helped them to grow, to stand. In prayer.

In orientation from nowhere.

So if a man arrives with a plan, with a map, And pays them attention such as they never had, The lost boys will believe they have a place to go at last, And win approval in the going.

Toward detonation.

Glory, that old seducer, Whispers to them of Paradise.

The words snuffle and slither into their empty skulls, Starved hearts, and nowhere lives.

Said a neighbour in the narrow streets “Out of the blue, innit?”

No. Out of the darkness came their tickets to hell.

Fatima Durdane

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FAITH

Ramadan Counterculture and Soul There is something corrupting about going through a full year without some major interruption in habit that helps us to step outside our cartoon world.

As Ibrahim N. Abusharif explains, Ramadan is such a disturbance.

ach religion has a history. Among the aspects common to most of them is the fact that seasons of fast have long been part of their spiritual regimen. For millennia sages of diverse experiences have offered insights, esoteric and practical, on the benefits associated with voluntary deprivation for a specific time and for a transcending purpose. They have expanded on how the molecular realm of food and drink, for example, connects with the intangible realm of will and choice and of gratitude and conscience, and how certain sublime knowledge comes only to those who have mastered their desires. But nestled among the insights there may also be an indictment especially germane today: apparently, there is something corrupting about going through a full year in this life without some major interruption in habit, a break from conformity, that helps us to step outside our cartoon world. Ramadan, the Muslim season of fast, is such a disturbance.

In one month we’re given the peculiar assignment to defrock the ephemeral world of its authority over us and to reinstate a spiritual bearing that, if unsuppressed, is competent in perceiving where permanence lies and privy to the sham of post-modernism and its strobe-light logic. In contemporary terms, fasting the month of Ramadan is a countercultural movement that confronts an ethos that tries to cancel the interior of religion and discount the importance of rituals in human life.

What the mod-

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Fresh dates fallen from a tree in Madinah.

Photographer: Fareena Alam

ern aspirant does in Ramadan is hardly subtle. In depriving ourselves of food and drink from dawn to dusk, we implicitly defy a despotic marketing imagination that has deputised nearly all of us to serve a culture of ‘buy and dispose and buy more'. This depletes resources, darkens the sky, and melts Arctic glaciers. But it also dulls our sense of the sacred.

We each have a body, a fact we’re constantly reminded of, and a body does have needs, organic and sensual, which we cater to day and night. But to submit to the curriculum of fundamentalist secularists that “body” defines humanity is a dereliction that revealed religion has always warned of.

We are created from the clay of the earth but are also infused with a soul that has no material correlate in this world. Religion has recognised this duality, not as a glitch in our creation, but as a trial. Somewhere in the teachings of all the great ones (including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad), there’s an un-asterisked point: in negotiating the material and spiritual selves, one brushes up against salvation. The choice, they have stressed, comes down to the question: what aspect of our humanity do we devote ourselves to?

For the Muslim, the nurturing of the soul is paramount and is guided by what we offhandedly call in pamphlets the ‘five pillars of Islam', essential rites of worship that have been passed down from the Prophet Muhammad. These pillars start to lose their meaning when we forget a baseline understanding of religion: Islam insists that each of us is born into this world with a pure condition, a state of grace, in fact. While humans may be feeble, sometimes foolish, belligerent, and forgetful, our centre was made uncorrupt. This is equally true for men and women. The rites of worship and the way of life they engender are meant to bring us closer to our original state because it is not confused about God nor indifferent to our role in His world.

Fasting the month of Ramadan is one of these pillars, unique among them, in fact, because, as far as rites go, its very form connects well with the unseen, since the ‘act’ of fasting is about refraining, which is invisible and altogether private. Unlike prayer, pilgrimage, charity, and even the testimony of faith, which involve body, money, or voice, fasting is hidden and is permitted close

FAITH

In contemporary terms, fasting the month of Ramadan is a countercultural movement that confronts an ethos that tries to cancel the interior of religion and discount the importance of rituals in human life.What the modern aspirant does in Ramadan is hardly subtle. In depriving ourselves of food and drink from dawn to dusk, we implicitly defy a despotic marketing imagination that has deputised nearly all of us to serve a culture of ‘buy and dispose and buy more'.This depletes resources, darkens the sky, and melts Arctic glaciers. But it also dulls our sense of the sacred. dwelling with other concealed aspects of the human creation that the consumer of popular culture is scolded to neglect.

As far as time is concerned, Ramadan is the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, but it is also a word with a lexical meaning. It refers to heat, the intense temperatures required to purify a precious metal from alloys mixed with it. The end result is an uncontaminated shine, purified by trial. On this count, Ramadan can be a disrobing experience. It’s a month that can expose the unsavoury alloys that dodged our defences, not the least of which are envy, arrogance, selfishness, pretension, and a general inclination toward the ephemeral and a discounting of what lasts forever.

During this time, our devotions are supposed to help us reclaim the organising principles of revealed religion, which cannot really happen without regaining control over our desires. If the coup is successful, scholars say, then there’s spiritual manumission, a kind of freedom in which we ‘remember'. Interestingly, the Arabic word for ‘humanity', some Arabic linguists have suggested, is related to the Arabic term that means ‘forgetfulness'. What this implies is that the human being’s chief hurdle in his salvation-quest is to actively remember the ultimate drama of life: we have a Maker; our lives are brief and with purpose; we are accountable for what we do; and after our earthly lives, we all shall live again and be brought back to God. The religion project has always sought to help us remember, not something new, but what we all know intuitively. In each of us there is this soul, a spiritual master, originally very close and aware of God. In the tumble of a crowded life, however, we are prone to silence or ignore that spirit. This is especially true when there is subtle pressure to forget our unseen origins. Ramadan mitigates this pressure. The spiritual aspirant is freer to see gain through subtraction: more faith through emptying, eloquence by learning silence, and honour in being humble.

It is an axiom of Islam that matters of salvation and

faith involve choice and effort, everyday. Faith in God and purity of heart do not survive a passive relationship. Godconsciousness is not a state per se, but a course and always so. God by His very nature is forgiving and merciful. He does not need an event in history or violence to forgive.

What He asks of us is to remember Him and have this remembrance honourably expressed in what we do. And in the event of failure, there is recourse in asking for forgiveness, supplicating with a penitent heart that rejects despair.

In the Quran, despair is severely censured and associated with disbelief itself. The reason for this is self-evident: without hope, faith is simply not possible.

I remember a conversation with a zoology professor of mine during my undergraduate days. He said that it is unlikely that creatures deep in the sea have any kind of awareness of what it means to be wet, not even an awareness commensurate to primitive brains. But the irony is not restricted to fish: the greater the immersion the less aware we become of it. There is an observation generally agreed upon among religious folk, that there is indeed an immersion in the fleeting realm, and it’s nearly impossible to escape it without help. It is before our senses, from billboards to broadcasts. And after a while, we’re disabled from even noticing. Ramadan is help, a knock on a door, an invitation to walk out of the cave. !

Ibrahim N. Abusharif is the editor-in-chief of the Starlatch Press, a Chicago-based publishing house.

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Worry Beads In times of stress, when other people reach for aspirins or tranquilisers, the Muslim is likely to reach into his pocket and come up with a string of beads. eads? Beads. Beads of ebony, beads of mother-of-pearl, or amber, cornelian, aloe, coral, date pits, olive wood, glass, ivory, and a thousand other rare and mundane materials, but always either 33 or 99 in number, and always with enough slack in the string so that, as each bead is released by thumband-index finger in its turn, it raps its brother below with an emphatic click. The clicks themselves are wholly without character, but their rhythm and the intervening pauses can express a vast range of meaning: placid boredom, thoughtful meditation, agitated nervousness, measured insolence, mounting impatience, burning hostility, and a full palate of shadings between, for the Muslim’s misbaha, or rosary, is a natural extension of his personality, and a most useful means of getting his point across without actually saying anything.

The misbaha has been performing this vital social function for the Muslims at least as far back as the ninth century, but originally it served the holy purpose of helping the devout remember the number of times a particular prayer or eulogy had been recited and help keep a man’s thoughts away from intemperate thoughts. Coming to the Middle East by way of India, the misbaha was at first probably no more than a handful of seeds or pebbles moved from one small pile to another in the course of devotions. Eventually the counters were strung for convenience, more precious materials were substituted for the simple originals, and lo! - the misbaha was born.

For a device in such common use - many Middle Eastern Muslim men feel undressed without one-uncommonly little is known about it. It is said that the 33-bead misbaha represents, to Christians, the 33 years of Christ’s earthly existence, while

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those of 99 beads represent the 33 years multiplied by the three manifestations of God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Islamic waikas observe that the use of the misbaha began with the Sufis, which employed the beads as a mnemonic device to recall the 99 most beautiful names of Allah, for to Muslims God is “the Merciful, the Compassionate, the King, the Holy, the All-Knowing, the Patient, the Wise, the Venerable, the One, the Giver of Life and Death...."

The 33 and 99-bead misbahas are used today by both Christians and Muslims; whatever distinctions once limited their use to one or the other religion have long since been obliterated by time and cultural diffusion, and their basic form is invariable: both have a carved handle-like piece through which the two ends of the string are threaded and knotted, frequently in an ornamental tuft, and in the 99-bead version the beads are separated into divisions of 33 by the handle and two smaller beads of different design, called imam ("religious leader” in Islam, presumably here having the connotation of that which connects the various parts of the whole).

In past times a third type of misbaha, consisting of 1,000 eggsized beads on a heavy cord, had a place in Egyptian funeral ceremonies, where mourners formed a large circle holding the misbaha and circulating its beads to record the 3,000 repetitions of the Profession of Faith: La ilaha ilia Allah - “There is no god but God.” Available evidence suggests that the rosary of the Roman Catholic Church is a lineal descendant of the Arab misbaha, for it was introduced into western Europe during the thirteenth century after more than two centuries of contact between the Franks and Arabs during the Crusades. The Catholics’ rosary has 50 beads to mark repetitions of the Hail Mary, with five larger beads to count Our Father’s, preserving the enumerative function for which the misbaha was originally elaborated.

The fierce Janissaries, the professional soldier caste of the Ottoman Empire, though Muslims, were forbidden to use the misbaha by their commanders, who believed that the telling of the beads leads to softness through excessive contemplation. But the passage of years has made the former vice a present virtue.

The gentle mind-lulling click of the beads smoothly bridges over long silences that otherwise might become awkward, allows one a few moments of grace to gather his thoughts, and then provides a rhythmical accompaniment to the cadenced sonorities of the Arabic language, a filigree frame for poetic expression, a delicate punctuation for profundities....

True, the captain of industry with his executive-length cigar can achieve a similar orchestration of effects by means of stacatto bursts of fragrant smoke, the twin rituals of trimming the stogie and lighting up, the grandiose gesture that threatens his audience with second-degree burns. But, the Muslim might argue, ticking off his arguments as he clicks off his beads, just think of the advantages of the misbaha: no spilled ashes, no burns on the coffee table, no bad breath, no taking advantage of underpaid Cuban workers, no stained fingers, no yellowed teeth, no tobacconists’ bills, no smoker’s hack, no lung cancer... !

TRAVEL

Seeking prayers

for La Paz

Shaid Latif travels to Bolivia and finds a community of hope and warmth, struggling to establish itself against the odds. irst part of any journey is the intention, and the intention for travelling to Bolivia was borne many months ago. Islam as an infant deen, spread rapidly across the globe, before the age of jet planes, it was spread and strengthened by people like you and I, willing to deny themselves some comfort to travel and work for the pleasure of Allah. The past, of course, cannot be compared with today. The privations and hardships of our ancestors were far greater than we could experience in travelling, so what sacrifice is it to sit ourselves on a boat, plane or train?

So I decided to leave my comfort zone, and seek out communities that might be struggling or in embryonic development, to give them a helping hand. What better, I thought, than to find something in South America, a continent much neglected and often overlooked by Muslims.

I spent months planning, searching the internet and digging up contacts. I tried to develop some understanding of their local conditions, their aspirations, needs and importantly what I could do to assist.

So it was that I found myself travelling through US immigration in Miami, at midnight, on a balmy September night. I had missed my connection to La Paz, so I was put up in a hotel for the next 24 hours. It was now Friday and being thousands of miles from the familiar, I was not confident of finding a local congregation for Jummah prayers.

Not only did I find a wonderful congregation close to Miami airport, but I also met wonderful brothers, principle amongst them Abder Rahman, a Cuban revert. He introduced me to Sofian, of the dynamic AMANA association in Florida. We shared maghrib prayers and some fine Arabic biscuits with soda, as we talked about Islam in the Americas, the great opportunities and the need for dawah.

More importantly, AMANA (www.al-amana.org ) offer a whole host of free materials, including pamphlets and Qurans in Spanish. I put together a package of materials to take with me to Bolivia. Loaded with all these useful publications, I realised the grace of Allah in the missed flight, as these materials were sorely needed.

I waved goodbye to Miami and began the last seven hour leg of my journey to La Paz. The flight was uneventful until, that is, they opened the cabin door on landing. La Paz is situated at an altitude of 12,000 feet above sea level, by comparison wherever you are in the UK, is rarely more that 200 feet above sea level. The air palpably thinner and my immediate “semi-comical” thought was to request an

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oxygen mask and a wheelchair. I managed to get through the airport and was met by Aisha and her brother, of the La Paz Muslim community. The predominant languages in Bolivia are either Spanish or one of the Native (Quechua, Aymara) Indian languages, and no, I had not learned either, another good reason to be grateful for friends meeting me.

We took a 20 minute taxi ride from the flat land on which El Alto airport is situated, down steep sided roads, into the belly of what looked like a giant bowl, filled on all sides by mud and concrete houses and buildings. I was amazed to see people jogging down the long winding road, into the heart of La Paz. Gasping at times for air, I definitely wouldn’t be trying that for a while.

For the next few days I explored the city surveying the land and the mix of peoples with their beautiful clothes and colours. The ethnic mix is 50% Native Indians, 15% Spanish, with the remainder of mixed race. The Native Indians are magnificent people, you can see their strength of character and strong culture, however they tended to be at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. They worked hard to make a living from street peddling, selling handicrafts, and wonderful hand woven Llama wool hats and bags. The people love to smile and all it took was a smile on my behalf or a pleasant gracias to bring out great sunshine, in their beaming faces.

The people tended to be gentle, however, they have gone through recent upheavals, including a near revolution about three months ago. The rich north recently sold off the country’s main energy assets, its gas reserves, and threatened to split from Bolivia with its new found wealth.

This would have been very hard on what is an impoverished country, annual earnings only average £1,400 per person. So the indigenous people rallied from the country-

I waved goodbye to Miami and began the seven hour journey to La Paz.The flight was uneventful until, that is, they opened the cabin door on landing. La Paz is situated at an altitude of 12,000 feet above sea level. My immediate thought was to request an oxygen mask and a wheelchair.

TRAVEL

The people love to smile and all it took was a smile on my behalf or a pleasant gracias to bring out sunshine on their beaming faces.The people tended to be gentle. However, they have gone through many upheavals, including a near revolution about three months ago. I met with the wonderful community of brothers and sisters in La Paz.They are temporarily situated in two rooms, loaned by a Christian lady. I could see the stairs rising up to the rooms, steep and uneven, they looked rather dangerous, particularly for children and the elderly. side, blockaded the parliament of Bolivia and forced the resignation of the president. They insisted there be new elections with a possible reclamation of the natural gas fields, for the benefit of all the peoples, not just the rich.

This was a violent and turbulent time for the country, but thankfully, the police and military were largely restrained.

It was with this backdrop, that I met with the wonderful community of brothers and sisters in La Paz. They are temporarily situated in two rooms, loaned by a Christian lady, may she be rewarded for her kindness. I could see the stairs rising up to the rooms, steep and uneven, they looked rather dangerous, particularly for children and the elderly.

I entered the long carpeted room, which was preceded by exposed wooden floorboards where you removed your shoes. Inside were gathered my brothers and sisters, composed of a mixture of backgrounds, a majority of Native Indians and Spanish reverts joined by some Arab and Asian Muslims - totalling about 40.

My first evening was a wonderful mix of warm smiles, handshakes, hugs, and lots of three-way conversations, English to Spanish, then Spanish back to English again. I shared the very welcome Spanish Qurans, pamphlets, and a large case of hijabs, tasbeehs, perfume, books and calendars.

After prayers we sat down and shared a communal meal, a wonderful mixture of local breads, cheeses, fruit and local tea, it was all the more enjoyable for silently watching the warmth between the members of the community. We discussed England, the state of the ummah, dawah, the growth of the La Paz community, and what we all did professionally. They may be facing hard times, but there is embedded in Bolivian society, a deep rooted drive for education and self improvement.

As we all helped to clear the cups and plates from the circle in which we had just ate, some of the sisters were discussing intently with a community elder, Abdel Moumin, something which I couldn’t make out. Then one of the sisters and one of the brothers I had sat with, walked over and sat in front of Abdel Moumin. It transpired that both of

them had been recent visitors to the congregation and had both, that evening, arrived at the decision that they wanted to accept Islam. It was a moving moment, as Abdel Moumin asked them individually, if they understood what they were doing and what they would be saying, and then individually took them through their shahada, public profession of faith.

At the end of the evening I asked their permission to take some photos, and began documenting their situation.

For the next four days I would walk the streets of La Paz, talking to people, photographing buildings, gathering the stories of the jamaat and completing the presentation which is the appeal that can now be viewed on the community’s website: www.islam-el-miraje.imszone.com This is an incredible community of believers. Their attempts to secure government support for a permanent mosque have been unsuccessful, but they continue their outreach activities from their makeshift prayer room. They have organised ‘Islam awareness’ circles for local communities, hosted conferences for other Muslim communities in Bolivia, and have sought to explain their faith on local radio and television stations. They are now trying to raise funds for the first purpose built mosque in La Paz, a city of 2.4 million people.

My journey had lead me here to this small community on the other side of the world. They are all now part of my family. The amazing possibility of all journeys, are truly in the hands of Allah. !

To support the building of La Paz mosque and support the Muslim community in Bolivia, visit www.islam-elmiraje.imszone.com or e-mail islam_el_miraje@hotmail.com, shaidlatif@yahoo.co.uk.

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REVIEW | THEATRE

The Lore of the Rings That Jerusalem was once an exemplary city of co-existence and social cohesion between Jews, Christians and Muslims might be difficult to even contemplate in our troubled contemporary times, but it’s true writes Nadir Nahdi. kay, so it might just be a play but Nathan the Wise gives us a glimpse of what life was or could have been in the good ol’ days. Set in 12th century Jerusalem, during the third crusade, the play is a complex but gripping drama promoting religious tolerance. Written in 1779 by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing the verse play remains one of the greatest pieces of literature in history. At the time the play was written and produced, almost all the intellectuals in Europe were blatantly and openly anti-semitic and attacked any positive portrayal of Jews - quite the opposite of the situation in the Muslim world.

Nathan the Wise is full of twists and turns. It is about a wise Jewish merchant (Nathan), a confused and bigoted and besotted Knight Templar and a magnanimous Muslim ruler (Saladin, of course). Nathan returns from a business trip to hear that his daughter Rachel nearly died in a fire. She survived thanks to the gallant effort of a mysterious Knight Templar. But she has not been the same since - as she has fallen madly in love with her saviour - a man full of prejudice and hatred towards other faiths. The Christian Jihadist, we learn, is partly traumatised by the fact that he owes his life to Saladin - who saved his life because of his uncanny resemblance to the Sultan’s dead brother.

The Templar, of course, falls equally in love with Rachel.

This has the effect of temporarily nullifying any prejudice he has of Jews but soon the intolerance re-surfaces when he finds out that his beloved Rachel was actually born a Christian but brought up as a Jewess by Nathan.

Obsessed by a sense of sacred duty our Christian Jihadist turns to the Patriarch of Jerusalem for advice. He is repelled by the latter’s self-righteousness and inhumanity (the character is drawn quite negatively). The knight then visits Sultan Saladin. When he denounces Nathan, he is rebuked by the Sultan who tells him not to be a Christian at the expense or injury of Jews or Muslims. Nevertheless, the Sultan pledges to bring the lovers together. But the play ends with the revelations that Rachel and the knight are really sister and brother and that their father was the Sultan’s brother.

Rachel’s transformation from “Christian” to “Jew” to “Muslim” within minutes as each secret unfolds is only one of Lessing’s messages on religious tolerance. Saladin, although noble and generous, needs money for his armies and attempts to get it from Nathan by challenging him in an intellectual bet. Nathan is to say which of the three religions of the Book is the true one. Nathan is in a bind: name his own faith and antagonise the Sultan; name Islam and betray his own religion; name Christianity and betray Judaism while also offending the Sultan. Nathan, not called “the Wise” for nothing, escapes the trap by telling the Sultan a story.

It’s of a wealthy merchant with an opal ring that bestows

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Saladin and Sitta. Photographer:Tristram Kenton

the power to be loved by both God and man. The merchant has three sons and foolishly promises each of them, in secret, that he will inherit it. The father, feeling death approaching, commissions a jeweller to make two replicas of the ring. They are so fine that he himself cannot tell them from the original, and he gives the three rings to his sons. After the father’s death, each son claims to have the true ring and with it the privilege of heading the family. They appeal to a judge to settle the dispute. He declares: My counsel is: Accept the matter wholly as it stands.

If each one from his father has his ring, Then let each one believe his ring to be The true one. Possibly the father wished To tolerate no longer in his house The tyranny of just one ring!--And know: That you, all three, he loved; and loved alike; Since two of you he’d not humiliate... Let each strive To match the rest in bringing to the fore The magic of the opal in his ring!

Assist that power with all humility...

And with profound submission to God’s will!

Christianity, Judaism and Islam - the three rings - all possess a wonderful and a terrible power over the hearts of men and women who believe. They have the power to inspire wondrous deeds in the world; beautiful art; heavenly song; and soaring monuments- reflecting the best within humankind. But, as we have seen throughout history, they can also motivate horrendous and monstrous behaviour in the name of God.

REVIEW | FILM

Review: Le Grand Voyage Ismael Ferroukhi’s Muslim road movie is a quiet, sensitive meditation on what divides generations.Abdul-Rehman Malik is moved by the power of its silences and its potential to begin a much needed conversation. e Grand Voyage is the perfect antidote to the reductive, repetitive and frankly boring navel gazing about the gap (or is it chasm) between first and second generation British (or in this case French) Muslims. Few of the pundits who wax righteously about British values and the importance of language, know anything about growing up surrounded by racist violence, economic deprivation and the inevitable culture clash that results when the old and the young stop speaking the same language. Lately, what has passed for expert comment are largely insensitive generalisations - fine for the chattering classes, utterly useless to those who really care about change.

Le Grand Voyage is the kind of film that says more in its 108 minutes than politicians and pundits could say in days.

The story is simple. Reda (the brooding, sensual Nicolas Cazale) is asked by his father (played magnificently by the steely Mohammed Majd) to take him on pilgrimage - by car.

Director Ismael Ferroukhi takes us on a 3000 mile journey, from France - across Europe, Turkey, Jordan and Syria - to Makkah, where we witness the hajj in all its chaotic glory.

Reda and his father live two separate lives, in two separate worlds. The youngest of his father’s brood, Reda has little knowledge of Arabic, or of religious ritual. He lives off of his cellphone and pines constantly for his girlfriend - in short he is hormonal teenager who is reluctant to go with his father anywhere, let alone to Makkah. Why can’t he fly, Reda complains. But oddly enough, (maybe its a sense of guilt) he accepts the task to drive his father to the House of God. This is a film where silence and subtle glances are as important as dialogue. Cazale and Majid dominate the screen and it is because of them this decidedly quirky movie is believable. This is the kind of journey that few of us will ever experience, but that all of us can connect with. It is reminiscent of pilgrimages of centuries ago when all hajjis arrived by land and sea, encountering obstacles, sickness and robbers on the way. Ferroukhi has re-created that kind of experience within contemporary Europe and the Middle East. Reda doesn’t pray or engage in the rites of the hajj, but with every mile he drives closer to Makkah, he too is transformed as much by the journey as by the growing closeness between him and his father.

A deeply affecting and lyrical film, Le Grand Voyage opens a doorway to some difficult conversations. It should be essential viewing in mosques and community centres across the country. After the credits role, the silence between the generations and within families is bound to be broken. The conversation that Reda and his father are never quite able to have is the same conversation that many British Muslims - young and old - are also never quite able to have. As Ferroukhi so eloquently and poetically reminds us, it is that very conversation we must have if we hope to reconcile ourselves to each other and to our modern reality. ! www.legrandvoyage.co.uk

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Rachel and Nathan. Photographer:Tristram Kenton

In the end, however, even the knight, who started out prejudiced against Muslims and Jews, accepts the benign message of the three rings: the universal brotherhood of all men under God. There are some great performances but Michael Pennington’s Nathan is outstanding. Vincent Ebrahim’s Saladin, though, is a let-down. Somehow Ebrahim, a vertically challenged fellow, fails to give justice to the powerful lines of the Muslim Sultan. The costume is great but the charisma and authority are not there. But this seems to be almost the rule in recent attempts to portray the great Muslim warrior: in the recent Kingdom of Heaven an equally smallish and dodgy-looking (from a western-perspective) actor was chosen to play the role of the awesome Saladin.

As a big fan of Saladin, I found it disturbing that he should be played by an actor made famous partly because of an Indian accent (in both The Kumars at 42 and Meet the Magoons). The fact that the other two major protagonists in the play - Nathan the Palestinian Jew and the German Knight Templar - were speaking without any accent betrays the essence of the play by diminishing the powerful message of our shared humanity and the need to be tolerant and inclusive.

Nevertheless, I came away from the play refreshed and optimistic - just what I needed on the eve of the holy month of Ramadan. However, I would have been happier if there were more Muslims in the audience. !

Edward Kemp’s contemporary translation of Nathan the Wise is available from www.nickhernbooks.co.uk.

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SPORTS

Praise the Ashes, Whither Karachi With cricket enjoying a renaissance after England’s Ashes victory, Yasser Chaudhary looks back on a series which united the nation in the aftermath of the terror attacks and looks ahead to England’s tour of Pakistan which has already been marred by politics. here was a certain Lord Robert Harris who served as Governor of the Presidency of Bombay in British India from 1890 to 1894 and was also the second ever person to captain the English cricket team. His governorship in undivided India was notable particularly for his unique approach to the sport of cricket as being a means to unify India’s diverse communities:

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“Whether cricket is going to stay in India there can not be a shadow of a doubt, it has taken hold all over the country, and chokras can be seen playing in every village with any sort of old bat and ball that they can lay hands on. I should hope that it will do something to get over any racial antipathy... it must, I think, bring the several races together more and more, in a spirit of harmony that should be the spirit in which cricket is played... East will always be East, and West, West, but the crease is not a very broad line of demarcation - so narrow, indeed, that it ought to help bring about friendly relations.”

During England’s most brilliant display in this year’s Ashes, we have witnessed the entire country come together in support for the players in a sign of unity and solidarity, especially after the London bombings. England had won back the Ashes and the ownership of the tiny urn that they had conceded to Allan Border’s men 16 years ago, and we have witnessed the emergence of a new wave of England cricket fan which can only be good for the sport..

This Ashes series has seen the coming of age of a formidable all-round England team with a pace attack which can be seen to rival any in world cricket. But are we witnessing the emergence of a new force in world cricket or just a hiatus?

The art of reverse swing is something of a new phenomenon for England following the way in which both Simon Jones and Freddy Flintoff have tormented and bamboozled the Aussie batsmen throughout the summer. However lets not forget what Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis had done for years bringing reverse swing to prominence in the early 1990’s, which brought with it accusations of ball tampering.

But if I was asked to pick out one deficiency in an otherwise brilliant England team it’s their inability to play quality spin bowling. Time and time again we have seen England succumb to the guile of Shane Warne’s sliders and googlies, but this can be directly attributed to England not being able to boast a genuine and quality spinner of their own. Although Ashley Giles has picked up wickets for England he is in no way a match winner. It remains to be seen how England fair on dry pitches in the subcontinent which will give extra assistance to spinners and particularly against the artfulness Danish Kaneria the young Pakistani leggy.

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t press time, the England tour of Pakistan was going ahead despite the devastating earthquake in the north of the country. This is only the latest and most serious of the hurdles that have faced the upcoming showdown. The previous near-debacle was the way the question of the tour itinerary handled by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), and the ridiculous behavior of the English and Wales Cricket Board (ECB).

Things have always been controversial between the two nations ever since Mike Gatting’s infamous tour of 1987-88, to the allegations of ball tampering in 1992 following Wasim and Waqar’s destruction of England’s batsmen.

The central issue was that of Karachi being one of the venues for the three scheduled test matches. In this regard I believe that the PCB should have stood firm on the stance in insisting a test match in Karachi. The PCB proposed that instead of a Test, England plays two back to back one day internationals in Karachi, this was the wrong stance from the onset. The PCB should never have offered an alternative to the test in the city.

The ECB should have been made to explain what their specific concerns were of playing a test in Karachi. Karachi has a particularly rich cricketing heritage but has been allowed to become marginalised.

By offering the alternative of a one day international at Karachi the PCB have tried to take the easy way out in trying to limit their consequential loss. It could be argued that PCB probably felt that had they been adamant on a Test in Karachi they could have jeopardised the entire tour. But I find it highly unlikely, because with Pakistan touring England next summer the ECB would have taken any such a step with a fear of a titfor-tat reprisal. It remained for the PCB to put a case forward concerning security issues affecting cricket worldwide, not just in Pakistan.

Hitherto a lot had also been made of the ECB insisting the inserting a clause in the tour program allowing them to refuse to play at any given venue should they have any security concerns of playing there.

The Pakistani all-rounder Wasim Akram’s recently commented in relation to the England tour of Pakistan. He highlighted the July bombings on the London underground network, “Look at Australia, if they had been playing in Pakistan now instead of England and there was a bomb blast, they would have disappeared within a couple of hours.” This brilliantly brings to prominence the double standards that exist.

What this whole debacle does is set a bad precedent for future visiting teams to be able to dictate their own terms for tour schedules. Following the England series, Pakistan is set to host both India and the Asia Cup tournament from midFebruary. These visiting teams can easily follow suit and object to playing in Karachi.

Karachi is no Harare, but this is another example of how cricket has become enthralled with politics - something that cannot be healthy for the sport. !

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V O X

P O P U L I Alienation Letter of the month

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Since becoming Muslim over 30 years ago I have travelled through a minefield of “shoulds and “should nots”, during all of which I was in a vulnerable position, at risk of being exposed as not knowing enough about Islam to be able to distinguish what was haram or makruh. I have attended halaqas with groups of converts and born Muslims, all vying with each other to be seen as the most devout and knowledgeable. These halaqas were made up of groups of “moderate” women, but over the years I have heard views which I felt uncomfortable listening to but was in no way confident enough to dispute. For example, during Terry Waite’s long incarceration by his kidnappers, one of our group rightly suggested we pray for him. However, this suggestion was firmly put in its place by another member, a convert, who said we shouldn’t pray for him on the grounds that as someone who had come into contact with Islam and had not converted, he was a kafir. Mother Teresa was also mentioned in the same light. These views have been around for a long time among seemingly tolerant, educated people, both converts and born Muslims. All those years of teaching in mosque schools that you do not want to grow up like the “kafir” children, all that selfrighteous discussion in the halaqa that we are better than the “kafirs” - yes, everyone felt proud to have seen the light. Converts puffed out their chests with pride as they said how important it was for their children to mix with the children of other Muslims rather than the children of non-Muslims.

The more they were seen to be condemning Western values, the more they felt they had earned a place in the middle of the “brotherhood” or “sisterhood”. I heard one six year old, a regular mosque school attendant, say “Jesus?!

Ugh, he was a horrible man”.

Obviously she hadn’t been told

this but she must have picked up on the idea that what the Christians believe in is wrong and with her impressionable young mind thought this was what was meant. I have seen young articulate women converts marrying men they didn’t know and maybe met once because they had been told this is the way it should be done. I know one of these marriages was a disaster for the woman. The other had children and was delighted to have boys as potential “soldiers for Islam.” I have witnessed a woman convert who felt it necessary to hide herself behind the settee in order to take part in a mixed discussion group despite wearing full hijab and burqa.

Straight after 7/7 I sat down and drafted a letter to Q-News entitled The chickens are coming home to roost. I never sent it.

I am really looking forward to the Festival of Muslim Cultures.

Contemporary dance? Fantastic, I go at every opportunity. A nonhijabi singing with Jewish klezmer musicians? Wonderful, I attend a folk dance group and we dance to music like that and what a meditative experience it is. But guess what, non-hijabis, of which I am now one, and have been for over 10 years, are prevented from serving on mosque committees. But that’s okay, as I no longer even attend the halaqas - they make me feel so despondent.

Wake up, parents, imams, teachers in mosque schools, and all those quick to want to influence the impressionable minds of children or of new converts eager to fit in. Teach them that there is much in common with messages of different religions and that good people of all religions are basically on the right path. Yes, many mosques will be condemning the awful bombings of 7th July, and professing not to ever preach a message of intolerance, but little insinuations also do a lot of damage.

Khadija Scott-Paul Aberdeen

Muslim Students Firstly, can I congratulate the entire team of people involved at Q-News for the work you are doing. You guys have won my respect and admiration and I wish you success and all the best in the future of this publication, Inshallah. I have just read Fareena Alam’s editorial in a recent edition of Q-News. It is heart-warming to read that someone shares my views about university ‘Islamic societies.’ I have just graduated from Queen Mary College, University of London, where there is a large Islamic society. They often produce leaflets advertising talks on Wednesday afternoons filled with the clichés you mention in your editorial. They seem to obsessively love the word ‘veil.’

I have found that these student Islamic societies, often boasted by sunken-eyed angry looking young Muslims, at university Fresher Fairs as the ‘biggest society at university’ are places you can meet, socialise, network with people of ‘sound deen’ - a sort of refuge from the ‘evils of the rest of society’ or rather society itself.

But it is this very concept of such an insular Islamic society that surely goes against the point of its existance. These people are creating their own microenvironment instead of playing a key role in being part of the university. They are simply extensions of a wider problem in UK Muslim community, a community gripped by fear and insecurity of losing its traditional values when talking about and ‘defining’ Islam, but surrendering the very essence and spirit of Islam with each second. These societies have become ‘alternative lifestyle’ clubs, where you will find the same things as anywhere else on campus but with the addition of rituals and black fancy dress.

My viewpoint is that an Islamic society should embrace all people a sort of spiritual oasis that nonMuslims and Muslims alike can seek refuge in, away from the monotony of student union drinking and chasing the opposite sex.

But as it stands it is simply seen as a group of people who ‘tut-tut’ at everything around them. Why are they there in the first place?

People aren’t stupid. ISOCs can pull the wool over people’s eyes only much by reiterating that ‘Islam is for all races and people’ but they are so inherently antianything-else, a message of isolation resonates around them.

I have been dismayed to find my words fall on deaf ears, often thrown back, with simplistic statements such as, ‘we shouldn’t change to appease people’ but this a reflection of these people’s entrenched beliefs of isolationism.

I, personally have always had a strong emphasis on the spiritual aspects of Islam, however at university I found that ‘true Islam,’ as they see it, has no place for people like me and I must conform to their narrow vision or I am destined for doom. This sort of preaching not only played a role in distancing myself from them but many other Muslim friends, who simply found these people too intense and miserable. It goes without saying that non-Muslims find the ‘society’ as unapproachable.

Shahzad

7/7 Aftershocks I live in Luton, a place with a large Muslim population, and there was shock here when a sister was physically attacked a few weeks ago. Ever since the Madrid bombings, I dreaded the thought of the same thing happening here.

Now that it has, I am not sure for how long I will be able to live here, the country of my birth. My Moroccan wife is pregnant- how safe will they be in the future, and what education/ employment propects they will have? I may be able to go to Morocco, but I’m aware many musims don’t have another option as to where they can live. What troubles me about the 7/7 bombs it is that if I, as an ‘Islamic hardline terrorist’ wanting to inflict that kind of terror, pain and damage, would I choose

Aldgate and Edgware Road, areas with large Muslim populations, as targets? Please keep up the good work! May Allah protect and help us all.

Sean Riaz Perera Luton I’ve received only one comment about my hijab after 7/7. It was the day after Dr. Zaki Badawi’s comments related to women having the choice of taking off their hijabs in these troubled times. I was in queue behind a gentleman at my local supermarket when he asked me what the thing I was wearng on my head was called. I told him. Then he highlighted Dr. Badawi’s comments and said, “You keep yours on, good on you!”

Uzma Asghar I am an atheist who has read QNews for ten years now because I want a harmonious and multicultural Britain and your publication just gets better and better. I used to post my issue to a Stateside friend but now that your magazine is available there she simply subscribes to it herself. This year I have two subscriptions; one was originally intended for her but now I give it away to various people in the British Library who I think might be interested or to disabuse them of the false myths of the supposed, utter rigidity of Islam. In the current political climate I’m pleased that Tariq Ramadan and Irshad Manji are getting mainstream media exposure. I realise that bigots will use their commentary as fuel for their engine of hate, but the sane people of this Island ought to know that there’s a landscape of Islamic thought. Alas, I expect this avenue of BBC openness will constrict after a few months so, funnily enough, these are the good old days for exposure of intelligent discourse. Otherwise, Q-News has to carry the weight, which must get wearying.

By the way, on 7/7, I exited Euston Station and was told to

walk round Tavistock as Euston Road itself was cordoned off. So naturally I took Woburn Street instead and after I turned the corner I heard the explosion.

I’m admittedly sheltered from discrimination myself but make a special point, not an effort at all, to smile at those who are obviously Muslims.

My role here at the British Library is social history curator in the Modern British Collections, which means that in the main I fill in gaps in our holdings and help researchers find what they seek.

As I’m dedicated to multiculturalism I try to acquire and preserve any British publications that document our history. A few months ago I came across Salam: The Islamic Lifestyle Magazine in my local Walthamstow dry cleaners and have asked the Library to chase it up. Surely this is a first for the British community and, alas, as publications come and go, I’m always keen to learn of similar serials, even if (and especially if) they don’t become permanent voices like Q-News. The Library has recently begun preserving snapshot images of public web pages and I’ve suggested those of the Muslim Association of Britain and the British Muslim Forum, as well as the BNP! The Library subscribes to hundreds of electronic resources, which are available onsite here but not freely distributed on the Internet. If I can help you with a research query I’d be very pleased to do so and could merely drop the photocopies off to your office while I’m out on an errand anyway. Please don’t be hesitant in this. Best of luck with your ever-approaching deadlines.

Andy Simons Modern British Collections The British Library London Muslims are scared as much if not more than non-Muslims. On my return journey from Greece recently, my friend and I were sat in the departure lounge. A middle-aged Greek lady looked at our ruck-

sacks and said, “I hope you have nothing in them!” I quickly said, “Of course we do, or we wouldn’t be carrying them with us!” She replied, “Well, you know what I mean.” I replied, “Well no I don’t actually, but let me tell you, I hate those people (terrorists) more than you do; we are more scared of flying than you are.” My friend Ali, was taking a huge water melon back from Greece because they are so sweet. We wanted our family to taste some. Airport security officials made us put the melon through the x-ray machine to ensure we had not hidden anything in it! Funny but stupid!

Qasim & Ali In the immediate aftermath of 7/7 things were far calmer here north of the border than down south.

However, very quickly we started receiving an increasing number of calls to the Amina Muslim Women’s helpline. While there have not been that many physical or even verbal attacks, it seems to be staring and glaring and jokes about rucksacks bags, etc. that are very prevalent. An example is a non-hijab wearing, western dressed “Asian” (her self definition) sister who got on the bus with her small daughter and put her bags in the luggage space. She was told this was not allowed. She sat with her packages on her knees with difficulty and then realised that every white person getting on the bus was allowed to leave their posessons there. Another report is of two young men of Pakistani origin with rucksacks getting on a bus and going upstairs. Minutes later the driver stopped the bus, went upstairs and ordered them off the bus with the whole bus applauding his actions. A sister who wears niqab and lives in a predominantly “white” area says that people cross the road when she comes along pushing her baby in its buggy.

Fariha Thomas Amina - the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre Glasgow

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V O X The impact of 7/7 is not confined to England. One of my professors asked me if I had ever been approached by Al-Qaeda members. Although this never happened and I am loathe to the killing of innocent civilians, this question forced me to reflect. The ignorance about Islam even in the top echelon of western civilised society, is sad, disheartening and unsettling. I told him that the Quran states: "...we decreed for the Children of Israel that anyone who murders any person who had not committed murder or horrendous crimes, it shall be as if he murdered all the people. And anyone who spares a life, it shall be as if he spared the lives of all the people..." [Quran 5:32].

If someone really wants to fight for Islam, there are many ways. A civilised way would be to change public opinion through discussions and campaigning. This is however, a difficult process. Taking these challenges is not a task that they could bear. ‘Patience during tough time’ is not a teaching they learned from the Quran. They have blown themselves up, taking innocent lives with them. Did they ever consider the fact that among the dead were those who protested against the war on terror?

Remember the persecution Hazrat Bilal had to go through. Didn’t he say ‘Ahad', ‘Ahad', when his persecutors placed a heavy stone on his chest and made him lie in the desert sun? There are many people in this world to whom justice and humanity means something and they have spent their entire lives trying to uphold these values.

Mohammad Aman Ullah Switzerland News of the bombings came to me innocently. A power surge causing an explosion, someone said. As I sat in a hospital waiting room, the nurse came out and told us what had happened. One elderly lady gasped. But it was a power surge, I thought naively. As I walked to my car, friend in tow, we passed a shop window displaying the aftermath of not one but four explo-

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P O P U L I sions. This was no accident. An ex-Londoner blurted, “It’s them Taliban. I know them lot, they said they was gonna do this.” I prayed for the victims and hoped the culprits weren’t Muslims.

Displaced youth yearn to belong.

Constant racist graffiti, abuse and behaviour reminds them “this is not your home.” They fall victim to an extreme ideology they never knew existed, packaged as Islam.

The naivety of youth leads many to seek out those who propagate extreme versions of their truth.

Some ask, “Did they even know they were carrying a bomb?” How could they leave a pregnant wife, young children and a family in shock, facing both edges of an inescapable sword? The grief, the blame. If they had known how much pain they would leave behind, would they have thought twice? Had they been told of the change they could make by living?

Mentors are scarce. Activities are not offered to prevent idle hands from finding darker activities.

Funds that could and should be made available are squandered elsewhere. Imams block the way for change in the mosque which see those who question as those who lack faith and the admittance of women as deviance.

On 21st July, more smoke but this time no fire. Londoners question, “Is this how we are supposed to live now?” Young Pakistanis ask, after suffering abuse, “How long am I supposed to put up with this?” A terror ‘suspect’ shot and killed, in front of onlookers. The suspicion apparently justified by his likeness to Indo-Pakistanis. As his family mourn, no apology can ease their pain. As conspiracy theories invade the Internet (most from non-Muslims), blame flies from “extreme Muslims” to the Israeli secret service. Whoever was responsible for the bombings, is no longer (if they ever were) in our control. We only have the power to control our selves, accountable for our own actions.

Every person has a responsibility as clichéd as it sound - to be part of the solution. What if every one

of us relinquishes the blame?

Iram Hassan-Murphy Bristol Subhana’Allah, it is a strange feeling to be both noticed and unnoticed. If I have to buy or ask for something I will be served without even a glance in my direction. Or I will be subjected to the “point, stare and busy away” attitudes, and after seeing me notice, proceed to treat me as the “invisible Muslimah”. Why should we carry the weight of one day’s violence?

Insha’Allah may voices cry loudly above prejudice, Ameen.

Saher Yoo-Foo

BBC Panorama Did you see it!? A powerful Michael Moore style cockumentary with a sequence of dark imagery of scary beardies spewing out “Kill ‘em all Hell!” Though it ended well, with pictures of a few telegenic young Muslims including a pretty young girl with a mobile phone, assuring us that it’s all okay. In order to understand this program you have to come to terms with the following notion: the grassroots base level ‘silent majority’ Muslims are Asians living in low income urban neighbourhoods. They are politically illiterate, generally apathetic and just want a mortgage so that they can move into the suburbs and have a quiet life.

Whirling around above is a penumbra of mad semi-literate, inarticulate fools who claim to represent them. Q-News, as a pretty decent outlet of proMuslim PR have to wage a campaign that remove them from prominence. It’s time we had some people who can speak English representing us.

I’m sorry to bang on about this, but the Panorama show was really traumatic for me and I’m still nursing a few wounds that need urgent attention. Chief among my gripes is the contribution of Taj Hargey who engaged in an utterly scandalous and sordid attack on British Muslims. When asked whether he had heard the word

‘kafir’ mentioned among Muslims, he remarked: “Yes, absolutely, I’ve heard it many, many a time.”

He is then prompted to elaborate on the nature and significance of the term ‘kafir’ and why nonMuslims tend not to hear the term ‘kaafir’ very often in public, he says: “ ...we have a one vocabulary in private and we have another vocabulary for the public domain, and that’s why you don’t hear it because you’re the public domain.”

He is then asked whether Muslims use the word ‘kafir’ in mosques, he answers: “Ad infinitum and ad nauseum, it’s there, it’s with us. We see it from the time you’re a child, you’re given this idea that those people they are kafir, they’re unbelievers. They are not equal to you...You are superior to them because you have the truth...You will go to heaven, they will go to hell.”

In the course of this contribution, Mr Hargey has made the following charges against British Muslims: 1) He has accused us of duplicity in our dealings with non-Muslims.

We alleged say one thing in public and another in private.

2) He has accused us of indoctrinating a sense of superiority in the minds of Muslim kids, and inducing revulsion against the ‘unbelievers’ i.e. non-Muslims.

3) He has given the impression that Muslims are adversarial and arrogant in the manner in which we preach and practise our faith.

All this, he has done solely on the basis of anecdote and hearsay, without a shred of evidence, no caveat, no qualification. If left unchallenged this will do great damage to the esteem in which we are held by our non-Muslim neighbours. On the strength of these words, people will view the Muslims as both hateful and duplicitous.

Q-News, in my eyes the only credible organ of intelligent, erudite Muslim media should raise this issue with Mr Hargey.

Emdad Ur Robb !

WRITE MIND

Although according to the Islamic worldview we are all born naturally pure, little me was born with a hangover and a bad habit.

ABDULLAH BRADFORD

DRUNK AT BIRTH s an indigenous British Muslim, I occasionally find myself in dialogue with fellow Muslims about the ‘binge drinking culture’ that plagues these islands. Of course, binge drinking is not unique to Britain, but it is certainly synonymous with the British, who spend approximately £30bn a year on alcohol (New Statesman, 29 August 2005). All too often, the crassly exploits of young promiscuous lager louts terrorising Mediterranean resorts, from Ayia Napa to Málaga, feature graphically in the gutter press or provide the mundane with sensationalised television viewing. Verily, wherever British tourists and expatriates are found, the binge drinking culture follows. From the extravagant Friday night gatherings at Ryan’s Irish Pub in Accra, West Africa to the ‘bring-your-own’ parties in Saudi Arabia, nowhere is safe from the British tippler, even when superficial prohibitions are in place. In the British compounds of Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi, the expatriate communities of engineers and nurses have clandestinely perfected the ancient art of brewing and distilling. Blotto is achieved with only the most basic of apparatus and ingredients: glass bottle, elastic band, surgical glove, fruit juice and sugar. Even brewing yeast is smuggled into the hallowed Kingdom by the more adventurous.

For the last four years, I’ve lived on a leafy rural campus on the Runnymede Hill in Surrey. Even here in this sublime setting, after dusk the pursuit of knowledge becomes an afterthought in the more rigorously pursued alcohol-induced annihilation. Many of the international students that I chat with are genuinely gobsmacked, once they witness the Neolithic behaviour that emanates from our binge drinking culture. Having never drunk a drop, a 35-year old Malaysian friend of mine just cannot comprehend why people drink alcohol. And when he recently asked me why they drink, I was

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left pondering over my own tormented past with what my wife calls the ‘Devil’s urine'.

Shortly after I was conceived, I fought fervently against an ethanol-induced abortion attempt by courtesy of materfamilias. For my mother, the failure to rid the unwanted fetus resulted in depression and consequently an inebriated gestation period for the both of us. Although in the Islamic worldview we are all born in a state of fitrah - naturally good, pure and free from sin - little me was born with a hangover and a bad habit. Later by the time my fellow classmates where taking their school exams in biology, chemistry and home economics, I was busy practicing my own kind of science in home-brewing. Before long, my early drinking habits were cemented during ten years military service, and then finally at university, I perfected the concealment of my binge drinking.

Unlike the conversion stories of other British Muslims, Yusuf Islam, being a popular case in point, my embracement of Islam did not come from a squeaky-clean brush with the divine, but rather as a consequence of my decadent and immoral past. In my darkest and loneliest hour, with tears in my eyes, I found myself prostrating on a cold marble-tiled floor and pleading to God for deliverance from my meaningless, painful and pitiful existence. But my final liberation from the ‘Devil’s urine’ came sometime later, and surprisingly not as an outcome of the divine example provided by the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, nor was it a result of the Quranic warning about intoxicants (Sura 2:219) and the subsequent Quranic forbiddance (Sura 5:90-91). No, it merely came because new things started to permeate my life - faith, family, knowledge, love, prayer, understanding - and in my new world with meaning, there was simply no longer any place for alcohol or indeed, any remnants from that insidious binge drinking culture. !

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