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Terror & Islam: A method of madness
By Rajendra Prabhu
Some young Muslim zealots in Lucknow have decided to bar American, British and Israeli tourists from the great Islamic places in the city, like the Bade Imambara. The reason advanced is that American and British forces have damaged holy places in Najaf in Iraq and that Israelis are killing Palestinians. The UP and Central governments are stated to be concerned as it would give a bad name to Indian tourism if politics and religion gets mixed up with tourism at a time when India is going all out with huge ad campaigns abroad to attract high-spending tourists to this country.
Just keep this in mind: India with all its cultural and ecological wealth gets only three million tourists while China attracts 31 million, Thailand nearly 10 million and even a single city like Singapore, 6.5 million. Even if a tourist spends on an average just 1,000 US dollars, China gets a whopping 31 billion dollars from this industry alone. This is very nearly the same as what we used to earn from our entire export trade in the nineties!
But this is not a question affecting tourism only. The high minded idealism of Lucknow?s Muslim youth could be laudable but why only bar Americans and British? Why not the Pakistanis as some Pakistanis have dropped bombs on other Muslims while they were praying in a mosque in Karachi? Why not the Iranians who in the eighties, stormed the holiest place of Islam in Mecca and spilt blood on its premises and then the Saudis, who countered with slaughtering 300 of these Iranians right there? Why the anger does not boil when one section of Muslims use violence against another section and that too while the victims are in prayer right in mosques?
Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been in focus in the last one month. The latest news from Pakistan is the series of bombings against Shias by unknown other groups in Karachi and counter violence this sparks off. To top it all, there is the attack on the Karachi?s army commander who narrowly escaped with his life. This attack follows in the footsteps of a breakthrough the Pakistani police achieved in tracing the attackers on the life of their President, General Musharraf twice in the last six months. These attackers, who have now been arrested are the same as the ones who plotted to kidnap the American journalist, Daniel Pearl and brutally murder him, according to the Pakistani officials. Their links, these officials have admitted, have been traced to the security apparatus around the President himself. A classic example of the sponsors of evil themselves becoming the victims of the forces they let lose.
When the terror ghost visits its makers for its wages.....
The planned attacks on foreigners, specially Americans, in Saudi Arabia have become more frequent in the last two months, embarrassing the government in Riyadh which claims to be the true defender of the faith.
The planned attacks on foreigners, specially Americans, in Saudi Arabia have become more frequent in the last two months, embarrassing the government in Riyadh which claims to be the true defender of the faith. More so, when the attacks are by those who claim to be still better defenders of the faith. Whether in Pakistan, where one sect of Islam is pouring not just verbal vitriol but fire and brimstone against another sect or in Saudi Arabia, where two opposing contenders for the faith are at proxy war, civil society is greatly worried by these developments. The poison of this religious fundamentalism has spread far and wide. In Britain, France, Germany and Spain, the governments are battling with fundamentalist clerics preaching mayhem against those they dub as unbelievers and apostates, as well as the notorious Al Qaeda “cells” that are planning and executing on an ongoing basis, incidents of mass killing like the one on the metros of Madrid last April. In Britain, the government has ordered extradition of an extremist preacher, Hamza and in Hamburg in Germany, as many as eight Islamic extremists are on trial for plotting mass destruction. Most Western governments are now convinced that activists of extremist Islamic groups using the liberal democracy?s freedom and protection are plotting to destroy the civil society in the name of religion.
“It is not a fight against terrorism, nor against Islam as a religion or civilisation, but rather with Islamo fascism—that is the radically intolerant and anti-modern doctrine that has recently arisen in many parts of the Muslim world,” writes one of the foremost Western thinkers of our times, Prof. Francis Fukuyama, author of such seminal works like Last Man and the End of History. (Newsweek, December 17, 2001).
Fukuyama points out that “this new form of radical Islam is immensely appealing because it purports to explain the loss of values and cultural disorientation that the modernisation process itself has engendered.”
Such radicalism that is targeting modernity has its terrible outgrowths. It is now widely accepted in Western countries battling with the threat of Al Qaeda terror map, that it was not Osama bin Laden alone who is the originator of this threat to human civilisation. The environment of terror and barbarity has been traced to Middle East governments that wanted to seek legitimacy in the name of religion. This legitimacy was by claiming to be the best defenders of the faith that justified the brutal ways in which they ruled over their subjects. Radicalism was for them necessary to keep their people in thrall and prolong their rule as long as possible.
Saudi Arabia?s regime in its own way, the Iranian clerics and Pakistani military rulers in their own way, have been the promoters and sustainers of this radical Islam, analysts have now concluded. What is more horrible is that the victims of this are more among Muslims themselves rather than among other people, though in recent times the others have also been targeted like in the 9/11 incidents in America and the April train bombings in Madrid. According to the Economist, 11 to 12 of the 16 major acts of international terrorism between 1983 and 2000 could be traced to this phenomenon. As Prof. Samuel Huntington, author of the much discussed book Clash of Civilisations, pointed out in the Newsweek of December 17, 2001, “In the mid 1990s, roughly half the ethnic conflicts in the world involved Muslims fighting each other or non Muslims.”
The great tragedy in which what is purported to be for the benefit of Muslims turns out to be something in which Muslims are the worst victims, is seen in the large number of attacks by one sect of Islamic extremists on other Muslims whom they accuse of being apostates, in Pakistan of which the recent attacks on Shias praying in Karachi is just one aspect. “Tribal, religious, ethnic and cultural divisions within the Muslim world stimulate violence between Muslims,” wrote Prof. Huntington.
Most analysts now pinpoint Saudi Arabia?s Ibn Saud ruling establishment as the biggest culprit in the growth of this fundamentalism that threatens other Muslims, even as much as non Muslims. The history of this ruling family clearly leads to the alliance between the radical Islam of the Wahabi type and the Saud family to find legitimacy for itself.
Having established its iron rule over its own people, the regime went ahead in the seventies onwards to spread the same version of Islam in other countries, specially Muslim majority countries and among those communities that had significant Muslim adherents. This was done through a network of charities that supported religious schools in Muslim and non Muslim countries where Wahabi radicalism was taught as the true interpretation of the religion. In addition, Saudis were encouraged to participate in Muslim struggles against others across the world, from Bosnia to Afghanistan. The Economist (September 29, 2001) quoted a Saudi opposition leader based in London as claiming that some 25,000 Saudis were thus encouraged to go abroad to participate in these violent struggles.
“A strong finger of blame for the rise of Islamo fascism must point at Saudi Arabia,” says Prof. Fukuyama. He reveals how the Saudi rulers made huge investments in promoting their brand of Islam as the true faith. He quotes from a tenth class textbook mandated in the schools of Saudi Arabia that insists that Muslims should consider ‘infidels? as their enemies. He reveals also how the Riyadh regime has invested ‘hundreds of millions? in dollars in building schools and mosques in the United States itself “to promulgate their brand of Islam”. The Economist has also pointed out that “although violent fanaticism is just what the (Saudi) government was hoping to avoid, it seems to arise fairly directly from the sort of uncompromising religiosity the government has encouraged.” In Saudi Arabia the ‘religious police? ensures that everyone follows the Islamic injunctions to the letter.
How does Osama bin Laden fit into this picture? There are two views on this. The analysis of history appears to indicate that every revolutionary becomes the victim of his own revolution, like Robespiere was when he led the French revolution. Stalin used the revolution spearheaded by Lenin to seize power and then he legitimised that power and the atrocities that went with it by lining up sycophants, who paraded him as the legitimate heir to Marxism Leninism. Stalin, Mao, and even the North Korean leader, Kim Il-Sung, sought to export revolution— each one of his own brand claiming it to be the right one to be applied in other countries as well. In the process millions died and this was justified by quoting from the Holy Book of Marx or Red Book of Mao.(Our own Naxalites continue to do so even today.) Readers are requested to go through the most detailed 900 page study of the Russian revolution ever published, that by Richard Pipes, professor of history at Harvard, to find out how even Lenin ordered ‘merciless terrorism?.
Quoting documents written in Lenin?s own handwriting, Prof. Pipes says, “On August 8 (1918), Lenin decreed an ‘intensification of the merciless mass terror? against the ‘counter-revolutionary? part of the ‘bourgeoisie? and the ‘merciless extermination of traitors? who used hunger as a weapon.” (This was in the context of seizure of grains from the peasants that led to large scale famine in rural Russia). Stalin followed similar methods as admitted later by Khrushchev himself. What was “counter-revolutionary” for Lenin and Stalin in the then context was ‘infidels? for Osama bin Laden and the Saudi regime in the present context. For Stalin, other revolutionaries and Marxists like Trotsky, Kamanev, Bucharin, etc. were the targets to be ruthlessly eliminated as they differed from his version of Marxist dogma. For Osama bin Laden, the Saudi regime is the target as in his view its version of orthodox Islam is not adequately puritan.
(More on this in the next issue.)
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