Islam’s twisted image

ENOUGH can never be said about Allah. For, “If all the trees on earth were pens and the Ocean (were ink) with seven Oceans behind it to add (its supply) yet would not the Words of Allah be exhausted (in the writing).” (31:27). The same applies to His Message embodied in the Holy Quran.

Yet time evolves. Nothing in the universe is ever at a standstill, but always in perpetual movement. Even the dead do not remain static; they go through a cycle of decay and change of form. Trees turn into carbon in the shape of coal and even diamonds. Flesh, blood and bones become a source of manure. And so forth. “Every day in new splendour doth He shine.” (55:29).

So new words of Allah need to be discovered or the old words recast compatible to the change. If the statement about Allah having “created in pairs all things that the earth produces, ...” (36:36), made in the seventh century of the Christian era, be found fully applicable today, then other averments relating to Islam and its precepts must also be capable of being in sync with the advances and developments in other branches of human affairs.

The need for change is manifest. Islam must march with the time and prove that it is as much for the present and the future as it was for the past. Some people talk about moderating Islam. They labour under the assumption that Islam takes an extreme view of things. Such view is both incorrect and uncharitable, because moderation forms the lynchpin of Islam, which repeatedly exhorts justice and balance (‘adl, meezan and qist) and forbids all forms of excesses.

Islam is under attack today from all sides. Every weapon and every device from the crudest to the most sophisticated and novel is being employed in the onslaught. Such attacks are generated partly by religious revivalism in the Christian world and partly by the Islamic world’s own incapability to stand up to them. Repetition of the precepts that are well known only breeds cynicism.

There is a real crusade raging. The allusion here is not to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq which President George Bush said was a crusade. It refers to the rising religious zeal and revivalism in the West targeting Islam and Muslims. On the physical plane, a mosque is burnt in Amsterdam, another in Adelano (Calif.) where, according to the Associated Press report, “the 1,500-square-foot building of the United Islamic Youth Organization mosque did not even have electricity or gas service.” Evangelicals make fiery speeches against Islam. The rest is done by TV channels and the internet.

Western authors are fuelling religious fervour by reviving memories of the Crusades and glorifying Christian victories over Muslims in bygone days. For example, Hugh Bicheno in his recent book, Crescent and the Cross, relives the story of the “epic” naval Battle of Lepanto in 1571, where the Christian forces of the Holy League inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottomans. The book has been written in the context of 9/11 because, as the author claims, it will have “burrowed deep to revive ancestral memories and fuel atavistic fears.”

On the other hand when Sir Ridley Scott, in his new film, Kingdom of Heaven tried what he calls, “to rectify Western perceptions of Islam, he drew intense flak.” Due to its “faithfulness to the events it portrays such as the abject defeat of Christian forces by the great Muslim warrior, Salahuddin, at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 and its aftermath,” and because it presents Salahuddin in a favourable light, the film received widespread and bitter criticism. And no less a person than Prof Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain’s leading historian of the Crusades, leads the charge, saying the film presents “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristoff on a recent visit to Africa says, “People in this New Christendom are so zealous about their faith that I worry about the risk of new religious wars. In Africa, Christianity and Islam are competing furiously for converts, and in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and especially Sudan, the competition has sometimes led to violent clashes.” A Pentecostal minister in Zambia, the Rev. William Dennis McDonald, told him, “Islam is a threat that is coming.” The minister is also organizing “operation checkmate” to boost Christianity and contain Islam in eastern Zambia, Kristoff reported.

The challenge calls for matching response with similar weapons. If Bernard Lewis, a Jew, can become an authority on Islam and Muslim history, so should Muslim scholars delve into their Scriptures. It is encouraging, however, to note that some Muslims have risen to the occasion. A number of websites have also sprung up which answer the non-Muslim critics. They try to present the true and correct profile of Islam and dispel misperceptions.

But no writings and no speeches can be effective unless there is a real effort among Muslim to prove them by their actions. It will no more do to parrot the claim that Islam is a complete code of life. It must be demonstrated to be so and compatible with today’s demands. The need, as Ali Shariati said, is to bring the Quran back from the graveyard to the living people. So long its purpose has been principally to be recited for the cure of the sick and the salvation of the dead. It should now be applied to real life.

It is not moderation that is needed, but modernity; not in its western connotation but according to the Muslim worldview. This is not an alien idea when we recall that Islam is no dogma or superstition. It appeals to “reason,” to people of wisdom and vision. (ulil albab and ulil absar).

Eavesdropping on history

PRESIDENT Richard M. Nixon suffered from the ultimate form of paranoia — he eavesdropped on himself. Not content with keeping a meticulous written record of his presidency — perhaps the most exhaustively documented of any US president — he installed a voice activated taping system in February 1971, first in his Oval Office within the White House, and then at in the Cabinet Room, Camp David and on the White House telephones.

His overt purpose was to supplement what scribes had written after each event with a recording of each significant event as it was occurring. History would not be read as much as replayed.

Nixon’s ingenuity proved to be his undoing. The very tapes that he had planned would provide irrefutable evidence of his capability as a world leader and confound his critics became an impeachable indictment of his moral insolvency and a fatal weapon in the hands of his political foes.

The transcripts of presidential conversations, made public during the Watergate hearings in 1973-74 that ultimately brought down his presidency, revealed a flawed, foul-mouthed individual who controlled the world’s most powerful country but could not control his own tongue. The published transcripts — perforated with excisions marked ‘expletive deleted’ — left readers in those demure days speculating about the missing obscenities.

The patient has now been rewarded; those obscenities have been revealed, as has coincidentally the name of Mr Mark Felt, once Nixon’s deputy chief at the FBI, as ‘Deep Throat’ — the hitherto secret source of confidential leaks on Watergate to the two journalists of The Washington Post.

In June this year, the Historian’s Office of the US State Department issued a fresh volume of official documents of Nixon’s presidency. The latest release focuses on the 1971 South Asian Crisis (a euphemism for the war between India and Pakistan over East Pakistan/Bangladesh), supplemented by a companion electronic volume. Unlike previous volumes, these two include transcripts of conversations that President Nixon, Dr Henry Kissinger and other aides had with world leaders and ambassadors on foreign policy issues that engaged them all during that tortuous period.

Reading the records today in their raw, uncensored frankness, one can now understand why Nixon fought so ferociously to withhold them from public view, and why Dr Kissinger sought to protect his own reputation by donating his papers to the Library of Congress (while retaining control over them), and then asserting his right even up to the level of the US Supreme Court to the transcripts of his telephone calls while in office. The case he lost has become history’s gain. The reputation he worked so hard to gain in the eyes of the world as a modern Metternich may well be his next loss.

Once, Dr Kissinger upbraided an aide for using a four-letter word. He should have followed his own prescription. But then doctors rarely do. Instead, Kissinger echoed Nixon’s profanities, often sharpening their edge. When, in July 1971, Nixon described the Indians as a “slippery, treacherous people”, Kissinger not only agreed, out he called them “insufferably arrogant.” And again, when Nixon referred to Mrs Indira Gandhi after their meeting on November 4, 1971, as “an old witch” and more viciously as a ‘bitch’, Kissinger concurred, adding that ‘the Indians are bastards anyway.’

Unwittingly maintaining a balance, Nixon applied an equally derogatory epithet to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, describing him as “a demagogue”, an “elitist SOB.” The only Pakistani for whom Nixon had less pungent words was President Yahya Khan — “not always smart politically but a decent man.” Nixon thought that “Yahya and his group would never win any prizes for high IQs or for the subtlety of their political comprehension.”

Kissinger found Nixon’s weakness for Yahya discomfiting. Privately he confided to Kenneth Keating, US ambassador to India at the time: “In all honesty, the president has a special feeling for President Yahya. One cannot make a policy on that basis, but it is a fact of life.”

This ‘special feeling’ translated itself into the famous tilt that Nixon and, at his behest, Kissinger made during the 1971 crisis, against, as Kissinger told Mr Bhutto, “our public opinion, against our whole bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.”

That tilt, though, was less for Pakistan, even West Pakistan, but for the person of Yahya, whom Nixon supported for his role as the furtive intermediary between the US and Communist China. A month before Kissinger flew from Islamabad to Beijing on his first secret visit in July 1971, Nixon told Keating: “It is important to buoy up Yahya for at least a month while Pakistan served as a gateway to China.”

The recently released documents reveal how Nixon used his still-green friendship with the People’s Republic of China to apply pressure on India, first to alleviate the deteriorating situation in East Pakistan, and when that was clearly about to fall, to prevent India from dismembering West Pakistan. Nixon wanted the Chinese to make some overt move that would frighten the Indians. “We can’t do this without the Chinese helping us. As I look at this, the Chinese have to move to that damn border. The Indians have to get a little scared.” By December 10, Nixon’s anxiety became acute: “All they have to do is to move something...move a division...move some trucks. Fly some planes.” When allies like the Shah of Iran declined to assist Pakistan with US supplied aircraft for fear of reprisals by the USSR, on December 12, 1971, Nixon, Kissinger and General Alexander Haig (Kissinger’s deputy) met in the Oval office to discuss options, including whether the Chinese would move against India, and if so, would the Russians move against them. Kissinger told Nixon that if the Russians move against them, and then the US did nothing, “we’ll be finished.” Nixon asked: “So what do we do if the Soviets move against them? Start lobbing nuclear weapons in...?” Kissinger responded, “If the Russians get away with facing down the Chinese and if the Indians get away with licking the Pakistanis, what we are now having is the final — we may be looking down the gun barrel.”

After authorizing Kissinger to assure the Chinese that if the Russians attacked them, the US would come to the aid of Communist China, Nixon ordered the USS Enterprise into Bay of Bengal as a warning to the Russians as much as to their acolytes, the Indians.

As a final decisive measure to re-assert US’s role as a superpower godfather, Nixon disclosed to the Russians the written assurance President John F. Kennedy had issued on February 2, 1962, to President Ayub Khan. It read: “The Government of the United States reaffirms previous assurances to the Government of Pakistan that it will come to Pakistan’s assistance in the event of aggression from India against Pakistan.”

With this ace left behind by his arch-opponent Kennedy, Nixon trumped the equivalent clause India had relied upon vis-a-vis the Soviet Union under the Twenty Year Treaty of Friendship Mrs Gandhi signed with Gromyko in August 1971.

Nevertheless, Nixon felt a residual sense of failure. While he had been able to save West Pakistan, he felt hamstrung by US public opinion, Congressional opposition and the State Department’s own bias towards India. He had not been able to do what the Russians had managed — to go “not only where the power is but where power can be delivered.”

After the Indo-Pak ceasefire brokered by Nixon had come into force, on December 23, Kissinger and William Rogers (who, even though Secretary of State, had been excluded from the war games) confronted each other, over the phone. Rogers contended that Kennedy’s aide memoire did not commit the US to go to war in the event that Pakistan was attacked by India. “You can’t circumvent the constitution,” Rogers warned him.

Kissinger replied testily: “I am not trying to circumvent the constitution. I am trying to maintain a minimum credibility which is almost impossible in the light of this niggling.” Rogers remained unmoved: “Oh, come on. This is no niggling or haggling”... What I am saying is whether we have a commitment to come to the defence of Pakistan in a military way in the event of a military attack. The answer is no.”

Quite separately, on the very same day, another official — John Scali — burst into the room of Bob Haldeman, Assistant to President Nixon. Haldeman’s dairy entry reads: ‘he [Scali] is convinced that Henry has practically taken leave of his senses. That he is lying to the press, lying to the Secretary, and, worst of all, lying to the President, particularly on India-Pakistan’.

No wonder, Nixon and Kissinger, fiercely protective of their self-crafted images, endeavoured to have such telling transcripts interred, like music under Aurangzeb, so deep that their voices could never be heard.

Mr Rove’s leak

THE uproar over Karl Rove’s involvement in the leak of a CIA agent’s identity makes this the third consecutive Washington summer to feature a tempest over what should have been a long-forgotten visit to the African nation of Niger by retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

There are serious questions about Mr Rove’s behaviour, as well as his misleading public accounting for it during the past two years. Certainly, the revelation that Mr Rove discussed Mr Wilson’s wife with at least one reporter undermines the White House’s highhanded pronouncements that it was “just totally ridiculous” to think that Mr Rove had anything to do with the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity.

But much is still unknown, and Democratic demands that Mr Rove be fired immediately seem premature given the murky state of the evidence. While we await more facts, it’s worth remembering some from the previous episodes of this strange story — including a few that have been mangled or forgotten.

Mr Wilson made his trip in 2002 to look into reports that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. A year later, he publicly surfaced and loudly proclaimed that the Bush administration should have known that its conclusion that Iraq had sought such supplies, included in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address, was wrong. He said he had debunked that theory and that his report had circulated at the highest levels of government.

One year after that, reports by two official investigations — Britain’s Butler Commission and the Senate intelligence committee — demonstrated that Mr Wilson’s portrayal of himself as a whistle-blower was unwarranted. It turned out his report to the CIA had not altered, and may even have strengthened, the agency’s conclusion that Iraq had explored uranium purchases from Niger.

Moreover, his account had not reached Vice President Cheney or any other senior official. According to the Butler Commission, led by an independent jurist, the assertion about African uranium included in Mr Bush’s State of the Union speech was “well-founded.”

That brings us to this year’s dust-up, which concerns whether Mr Rove or other administration officials should be held culpable for leaking to journalists the fact that Mr Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

Reporters were told that Ms. Plame recommended Mr Wilson for the Niger trip — a fact denied by Mr Wilson but subsequently confirmed by the Senate investigation.

— The Washington Post

Fallout of London blasts

THE reverberations of London blasts would be heard for a long time and its fallout will impact gravely on the policies and politics, not only of the region but beyond. These blasts have thrown the terrorism debate into a sharp focus. The feeling that war on terror is being won has been rudely shattered. It has revived the debate on the origin and nature of this scourge and need for a global strategy to fight it.

The initial reaction of British Prime Minister Blair was restrained and measured. He distanced the bombings from Islam, which he described as a ‘faith of peace, reconciliation and tolerance’. However, the public outrage that expressed itself in acts of vandalism against mosques and the Muslim community in Britain seems to have changed his earlier sober thinking. His references lately to “Islamist terrorists and their evil ideology” shows how easy it is to lose perspective and get carried away by the prevalent bias and prejudice against Islam.

The fact that the suicide bombers were Muslims and of Pakistani origin, though born and bred in the UK has again put Pakistan in the spotlight. The irony is that instead of recognizing Pakistan’s role in combating terrorism and the great sacrifices it has made in the process, Pakistan has been routinely blamed as a sanctuary and nursery of such misguided youth and thus indirectly responsible for the London carnage.

The reports that the suicide bombers visited Pakistan and attended a madressah for four months has led to hysterical reaction and Muslim seminaries are once again the target. It is said that jihadi indoctrination is preached by these madressahs. Without a shred of evidence these institutions are being demonized. The investigation teams are scouting in different cities making arrests in their frantic efforts to find the “missing link”.

Despite his Herculean efforts to stamp out radicalism and militancy, President Musharraf is being reviled for not doing enough. Ill-informed and bigoted analysts are busy churning out scary reports about the dangerous and widespread terrorist network in Pakistan and President Musharraf’s failure, rather duplicity, of not delivering on his promises.

A typical reaction is by Washington Post accusing Gen Musharraf of inaction if not bad faith. “His military government never implemented any programme to register the madressahs, follow their financing or control their curricula”. In a sweeping judgment, the paper holds President Musharraf guilty of duplicity, as evident from religious parties having “prominent and powerful roles in Musharraf’s political structure.”

Tom Friedman, the ultra rightist syndicated columnist, in a scathing commentary decrees that Muslim world “has a jihadist cult in its midst”. It implores them to “really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists, or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent”.

Blair seems to have opted for this prescription. A package of tough measures, including tighter entry and deportation procedures, are being worked out. Press reports indicate that British high commission in Islamabad has rejected 2,000 visa applications pending new visa policy for Pakistanis.

Blair has acknowledged terrorism having deep roots but has repeated the US blunder in not recognizing that the policies of the west and the US are fuelling the deadly rage sweeping across the Muslim world. Instead of recognizing the West’s blind support to Israel, its continued occupation of Palestinian lands and its barbaric repression in occupied territories, and the military occupation and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as the key factors, he has followed Bush’s myopic view that terrorists hate western freedom and way of life and are against democracy and freedom.

It is conveniently overlooked that during the last four years 4,036 Palestinians have been killed, including 620 children, more than 40,000 wounded, 8,000 arrested and 7,500 houses demolished. In Iraq, according to Oxford Research Group, 24,865 civilians were killed during March ‘03 to March ‘05. Ten per cent of those killed were women and children. The casualties in Afghanistan have never been documented, but the scale and intensity of violence leaves no one in doubt as to the enormity of the tragedy.

It is incomprehensible how in the face of these heart-rending facts, Bush or Blair could believe that the terrorist attacks were not an outraged reaction to these atrocities but targeted against “our way of life, civilization and democracy”

Blair has held talks with Muslim leaders in the UK about the “poisonous and perverted misinterpretation of the religion of Islam” on an attempt to mobilize the “moderate and true voice of Islam”. It needs no extraordinary perception to say that such talks are doomed to failure for their inability to address the underlying political and military causes behind acts of terror.

President Musharraf has been under intense US pressure since 9/11 to come hard on religious outfits. He did so at great risk to his own person and Pakistan. The Wana operation alone cost 250 lives of our soldiers and the elimination of more than 600 suspect terrorists. It appears that if the continuing investigations in Pakistan establish even tenuous links with the London blasts, both America and Britain are bound to raise hell.

Pakistan’s relentless efforts against terrorism have paradoxically created an impression that this country is the hotbed of terrorism and the madressahs are the breeding ground of militancy. Lack of adequate understanding of the region, its ethos and culture and highly exaggerated accounts of the Taliban ideology have created a fanciful but alarming image of these religious schools in the West.

In the current climate of fear and revulsion against Muslims and Islam, international pressure may further build up, forcing President Musharraf to discipline and rigidly control, even close down some of these institutions — a highly risky venture for the stability of Pakistan. On the other hand, failure to respond could be equally disastrous.

India is always looking for an opportunity to fish in Pakistan’s troubled waters. Manmohan Singh, in his address to the joint session of the US Congress during his recent US visit, dwelt in considerable detail on the issue of terrorism. While he did not mention Pakistan, it was earlier reported that he carried dossiers of “terrorist infrastructure” financed by Pakistan and operating in Indian held Kashmir and thus a source of instability and violence in the region.

It is a god-send opportunity for India to play upon West’s paranoia that Islamic ideology aims at global domination and that Musharraf has not done his part of the deal in curbing terrorism. It is significant that while the US administration has in the recent past appreciated Pakistan’s efforts to dismantle jihadi bases, it has not conceded that cross-border terrorism has stopped. In fact it has echoed the Indian line that “more needs to be done”

These are portentous times for Pakistan. A high degree of statesmanship is required to grasp the nature of the threat and address the new challenges. The threats would be both covert and overt, and not surprisingly, from both Washington and London. National political cohesion and consensus are the need of the hour. An entente cordiale must be reached with political parties and other stakeholders to face the challenge. We are already a fractured society and cannot afford to have more polarization.

The world of Islam is now most vulnerable and isolated. To meet the growing pressures being in the name of combating terrorism we cannot expect any outside help. Pakistan must evolve a strategy based on unity, to cope with the present crisis by creating sufficient political space and not concede any ground to the West that is inconsistent with our national interests and dignity.

The writer is a former ambassador.