UmmahPulse

2011 - A Review

2012-01-04T22:33:00.001Z

The turn of the years in the Gregorian calender has always been a traditional time for reflection and the making of idealistic pledges and resolutions. This group introspection is the natural conclusion of the midwinter solstice that sees the vast majority of the British public unrepentantly gorging themselves on the richest of British cuisine, in the stifling confines of overheated double glazed houses, surrounded by frenzied children in a ferment of sugared up delirium.

The only respite is an escape to the Boxing Day sales where one can be pulled, pushed and crushed whilst simultaneously grabbing random items off shelves in a desperate stockpiling free-for-all as if one was amassing a hoard in anticipation of a zombie apocalypse. The penultimate event in this culinary and emotional roller-coaster is an all-night alcohol fuelled bender. On the 1st of January, when bleary eyes groggily open and slowly chronicle the aftermath of the holiday - the bulging waistline, the depleted bank account, the awkward memories of the office Christmas party - it is little wonder that a certain amount of soul-searching goes on.

For Muslims whose year runs from Muharram to Dhul Hijjah; and in whom self-questioning reflection should be a way of life rather than an annual event, the turn of the years should be no more than an administrative speed-bump on the highway of life. It does however provide an opportunity to stop and see how far we have come in the past year, as well as allow us the opportunity to identify the possible trends for the coming year. In this vein UmmahPulse presents its yearly round up of the news - not by any means an exhaustive list but rather the events that struck a chord with our writers and made an impact.

The Iraq War - a View by Numbers
Jamal Anderson

This year Obama announced the withdrawal of the remaining American troops from Iraq. Thousands of soldiers left Iraq in 2011 after a war that was started in March 2003 by the Bush administration. With undoubtedly many more statistics to come, we have taken a look back at the Iraq war - from the false claims made to take a nation to war, to the amount that was spent and lost during the war, to finally the consequences of the war.

237 - Minimum number of misleading statements on Iraq made by the Bush Administration's top officials since March 2002 (Committee of government reform Washington D.C).

0 - the number of weapons of mass destruction discovered, which can be deployed in 45 minutes.

As for the money:

$802billion - estimates of how much the US will have spent on funding the war by the end of fiscal year 2011.

$3 trillion (£1.2tn) - What Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes put the true cost at once additional impacts on the US budget and economy were taken into account.

$6.6 billion - the amount of U.S. taxpayers' money Lost and Reported Stolen. The money was earmarked for Iraq reconstruction. On June 14, 2011 Special Inspector General for Iraq reconstruction Stuart Bowen called it "the largest theft of funds in national history." (Source - CBS News) Last known holder of the $6.6 billion lost: the U.S. government.

$1.4 billion - Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported.

$20 billion - Amount paid to KBR, a former Halliburton division, to supply U.S. military in Iraq with food, fuel, housing and other items

$3.2 billion - Portion of the $20 billion paid to KBR that Pentagon auditors deem "questionable".

$20.2 billion - U.S. Annual Air-Conditioning Cost in Iraq and Afghanistan - (Source - NPR)

$15.098 trillion - US gross debt in 2011.

And the results of all this?

3.6: Factor by which an Iraqi in 2006 was more likely to die than in the last year of the Saddam regime.

120: Factor by which the cause of death was more likely to be violence.

3/4: Portion of Baghdad residents in 2007 who had a family member or friend wounded or killed since 2003.

32,226: Number of US Troops Wounded, 20% of which have serious brain or spinal injuries. (Total excludes psychological injuries.)

30%: Percentage of US Troops who develop serious mental health problems within 3 to 4 months of returning home

179 - The number of UK servicemen and women who have lost their lives, 136 were killed in action.

4487 - number of US soldiers who have has lost their lives, according to the latest figures from the US Department of Defense.

200 - The minimum number of extraordinary renditions that the United States has made since 2006.

8 - The minimum number of detainees who were tortured to death in U.S. custody. Gitmo is still open despite election promises and the Baghram theatre of torture continues to operate.

50,000 - 600,000 - estimates of the civilian death toll. A UN issued report dated Sept 20, 2006 stated that Iraqi civilian casualties have been significantly under-reported. Casualties are reported at 50,000 to over 100,000, but may be much higher. Some informed estimates place Iraqi civilian casualties at over 600,000.

180,000: Number of private contractors operating in Iraq. [Human Rights First, Private Security Contractors at War] - so Americans still continue to have an armed presence in Iraq. Did someone say withdrawal?

Pakistan
Wazir Uddin

A novelist could not imagine the intrigue and suspense that defined events that unfolded in Pakistan. The political drama is punctuated with:

The killing of Osama bin Laden in a garrison town of Abottobad and dumping his body in the sea.
The apprehension and subsequent release of US spy Raymond Davis; revealing the massive number of CIA and other quasi-military organisations operating in Pakistan.
The 'Memo-gate scandal': which is set to expose the incumbent government of calling on the US government to intervene in Pakistani politics to contain the military so as to preserve its own rule, a rule that has led to governance becoming a by-word for corruption.
The incumbent government, led by the late Benazir Bhutto's widower, enters into alliance with an opposition party that Benazir Bhutto named as being likely to be involved in an assassination attempt on her - the so called 'Qaatil' league (PML-Q).
Widespread collapse of state-run enterprises such as the coal, steel, rail and airline industries. This is paralleled with a deeply embedded crisis in the country’s economy.
US drone attacks were responsible for killing hundreds and injuring thousands more in Pakistan in a covert war that reflects a nascent new form of warfare in the new millenium.
The so far failing attempts to socially engineer the post-colonial sentiments that are emerging in Pakistani society by that erstwhile British 'Kaala Sahib' Majid Nawaz through his 'Khudi' movement. Recall that the Khudi movement is an ideal-type Rand Orgnisation 'moderate muslim network' that emerged from the Quilliam foundation in the UK.

This all in the name of democracy and a particularly shameless attempt at silencing any dissent in the face of these crises as anti-democratic.

What then for 2012?

The phenomenal political gains by the ex-cricketer Imran Khan - most recently the joining of senior politicians, from the countries leading parties, into Khan's Tehreek-e-Insaf. A useful vehicle for diverting mass unrest to a manageable post-colonial outcome or a solution to Pakistan’s many problems?
A strategic realignment of Pakistan with China in an attempt to secure itself against an increasingly dominant US-Indian alliance. Though this alignment would be led by the Pakistani military, the 'democratic' government has already shown it is willing to ally with the US hegemon if this means preserving its rule. Will this bring the country to the brink of another military take-over?
Most likely the near 180 million population will continue to suffer from the increasing deterioration of energy supplies, education and health services while its political and feudal elite will continue to build palaces across Europe. Any chance of a 'Pakistani Spring' seems to be unlikely while the people are steeped in nationalistic, linguistic, feudal and sectarian scripts.

Our hope is in Allah (SWT) alone and it is only by His Mercy that the situation will change. Earthquakes and flooding are signs for us all, natural calamities are frequent where there is much corruption. Corruption is to divert from obedience to Him.

Debt-Based Growth?
Muhammad Tahir

"Interest (Riba), no matter how bountiful it may become, ultimately results in poverty." (ibn Majah, Ahmad, Mustadrak)

The statements of the Blessed Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) reflect the Divine Wisdom with which he was inspired - they give us insights into the Divine Order to which all of Creation must submit. The above statement, however, could have just as easily been uttered by a student of economics (or a citizen of Greece, or Iceland, or Ireland....you get the idea). 2011 brought the latest round of a financial crisis which actually has been unfolding continuously since 2007 - the year the bottom finally fell out of the sub-prime loans market.

You remember that one - loans being given to people with no hope of ever repaying them. In 2007 the lenders were bailed out, in 2008, the big banks which repackaged and resold those loans were bailed out (who in turn used the bailout cash to pay back their friends at other banks), and in 2011, the rot seeped deeper, infecting entire countries that had borrowed to invest in schemes that were never worth half what the speculators had hoped. In the meantime, the bankers got extremely rich, and nothing changed - the rules and regulations which allowed this to go on and on were left essentially untouched (not to mention the bankers' bonuses).

It is important to appreciate that the "economic prosperity" that has been enjoyed in the Industrialized World over the last 15-20 years has been almost completely driven by the expansion of credit. This is the great lie of measuring "progress" by how much the economy grows every year: Johnny goes to the bank and borrows a dollar. He uses that dollar to buy a new house. The builder uses that same dollar to buy a new car. The economy just grew by three dollars. Meanwhile, Johny defaults on his loan and the bank would rather demolish his house than maintain it. To make matters worse, there was never a real dollar in the first place - the bank created it out of thin air. How long can this go on? We might just find out in 2012.

The Highway of Postmodernism
Karima Hamdan

I often wonder how certain years are to be remembered. What tag line will be attached to them in order to call them up from memory in later times? For example, in the US 1965 will be remembered by the Watt Riots and the catch phrase "Burn baby burn" which was chanted by African American rioters as they set fire to looted shops. Equally, ask any Briton of a certain age about 1979 and the words "The winter of our discontent" will probably feature in their answer.

Sadly it seems that 2011, despite being chock full of extraordinary events, heartbreaking calamities and singular oddities will probably have no inscription on its tombstone. No epithet or epitaph, but perhaps a hasty tweet along the lines of "goin 2 protest bout rampant neoliberalism's FXs on world economy but went shopping instead LOL".

Forget Islamo-fascism, Dhimmitude or indeed any other ludicrous portmanteau so beloved of maniacal wild-eyed Muslim-hating zealots that frequent the "Have your say" pages of the internet. No, the self-immolation of western thought and culture will not be at the hands of Islam but will rather be laid at the door of this X-Factor generation's need to continuously express their innermost thoughts in under 140 characters whilst simultaneously selling their soul for the next Nike trainer.

This stark reality became readily apparent in 2011 as London burned and was looted, not by hoards of marauding Visigoths but rather its own disenfranchised, uneducated, underclass, immersed in their own individualism and emboldened by their amorality. And as these rioters looted shoes and flat screen TVs and depressingly left bookshops untouched, the City of London looted the rest of the country - ensuring that this bleak recession will cause a generational decline in living standards and decades of hardship and deprivation.

But does any of this matter? Of course not! It only matters that Wills and Kate finally got hitched. And didn’t she look lovely in her dress, and didn't he look handsome in his uniform and watching them wave at the crowds made us all happy and fulfilled - and the potholes in the roads, the over-crowded schools, the underfunded hospitals, the closed post offices, the playground equipment fallen into disrepair, the infirm elderly shivering alone at home covered in their own urine and filth, simply didn't matter anymore because Awww.....they kissed on the balcony.....isn't that sweet? And like true dung-covered, turnip-eating peasants, we celebrated even harder because our monarch gave us the day off.

At every turn we are lulled into a continual comatose stupor in front of which every media outlet is feeding us contentment. And just like battery-fed chickens, we passively swallow whatever is put in front of us without ever questioning its source or its veracity even though the facts are usually hidden in plain sight. Sadly, we reserve our questioning for that part of our life whose source is beyond reproach - our deen.

At UmmahPulse we seek to expose this decline and hope and pray that in the coming year we all stop being such torpid automatons lulled by LOLs and insensible to our intellectually sluggish oblivion. We pray that we stop buying-in wholesale to the lie that true freedom and enlightenment resides with those that turn away from or deconstruct their deen, and see those who do this for what they truly are - roadkill on the highway of postmodernism.

The Arab Spring
Kamal Nuruddeen

This year saw the addition of a new season to the four we would normally expect. In between a damp, dreary English winter and a searing, dry Californian summer, we had the Arab spring - fresh, invigorating and promising great, hope-infused things to come. As the domino effect of one western-backed, totalitarian regime crumbling after another seemed to gain unstoppable momentum, it seemed for a naive few moments as if the Muslim world was really changing.

At the time, UmmahPulse cautioned against assuming things at face value. The popular narrative - of an evil regime being overthrown by sheer people power to be replaced by a progressive, democratic government that respects human rights - did not fit the stark facts. In both Tunisia and Egypt (both held up as icons of the Arab Spring), the incumbent power structures that existed before the revolution are still in place almost a year on. Faces have changed, but that is small comfort to the men and women being beaten and tortured by the same security apparatus as before.

So what will the next year bring at a time of great turmoil in the Middle East? Of course, no one can know for sure but in this complex world of competing interests and cynical politics, any simple fairytale explanation of world events is likely to be hopelessly romantic. Nice Mr Obama will not banish those nasty, hurtful regimes as long as they prove useful to him.

The real world is messy, the sort of messiness that leaves a lot of dead people in its wake. Yet we pray for Allah to make the coming year one of peace for our war-weary and oppressed Muslim brothers and sisters - even as we recognise that Allah will help us only when we turn to Him for help rather than any worldly power.

Palestine 2011
Abdullah Saleh

2011 has seen the political landscape change dramatically across the Middle East. In Palestine, many things have stayed the same: the indiscriminate killings of innocent Palestinians continue on a daily basis; Palestinians who have lived in their homes for generations are being evicted weekly and replaced by Zionists who hang Israeli flags to rub coarse salt into old and tired wounds. The settlements increase amidst international condemnation and the struggle of the Palestinians especially in Gaza gets worse day by day. The recent attacks on ancient mosques are a real sign of the hatred which still exists.

What has changed is public support for the Palestinian cause. Following the UN report into the Gaza Flotilla incident on the Mavi Marmara where it found that Israel had used "excessive and unreasonable" force, Turkey immediately expelled the Israeli ambassador and cut military ties with Israel.

The Palestinian Authority submitted their application to the UN for permanent membership in the UN council. Although this will do little for Palestinians on the ground, it did bring a few things to light: the overwhelming support of the international community to admit Palestine as a permanent member and the amount of effort (and sweat) President Obama used to try to stop the Palestinian Authority from submitting their application. His speech was so close to the Zionist rhetoric, one could have mistaken where he was reading from. Obama's opposition to the Palestinian state is another one of his many U-turns; a year earlier, he gave a speech to the UN stating that within a year, there would be a Palestinian state.

Palestine successfully became a member of UNESCO in October by an overwhelming majority. More interesting is that the United States announced soon after that it would be cutting funds to UNESCO. I am definitely starting to see a pattern! The Barack Obama and Sarkozy microphone incident showed what the international leaders think of the Israeli prime minister and the daily conversations that President Obama has with Tel Aviv; I am sure this and the strength of the Jewish lobby in America is strongly driving his agenda.

On the ground, Hamas and Fatah have agreed to unite to support the cause of the Palestinian people, which included Hamas participating in their first PLO meeting. The Israeli prime minister has unsurprisingly stated that he will not deal with a party linked to Hamas. You can guess what Washington will soon be saying.

For the Muslims, we must continue to remember our brothers and sisters in Palestine in our prayers. We must make each other aware of the importance of Palestine in a Muslim's belief and the injustice which takes place each and every day. The mainstream media will present a warped image of what is happening and I pray that UmmahPulse can take a lead on presenting what is actually happening on the ground.

Finally, although there is some cause for hope, we should ultimately have hope in Allah SWT, who has the power and strength to change the condition of the people. No person, no organisation and no international power will yield true change.

Not Connecting the Dots: Killing in the Name of Israel
Muhammad Tahir

You have to wonder what would have happened if "Ahmad Barakat" had bombed the local Marks and Spencer before heading to a youth rally put on by Christians for Israel, massacring several dozen unarmed teenagers who had just received the Foreign Minister, who had pledged support for Zionism. Do you think people would be avoiding the topic of anti-Semitism - or beating to death the threat of violent Islamic extremism?

And yet, that's exactly what happened in Norway this summer. First Anders Breivik bombs the main offices of the Norwegian National Oil Company after it announces that it is withdrawing support for several Israeli companies involved in construction on occupied Palestinian land. Then he heads to a Norwegian Labour Party youth wing rally (see photo) where the day before, the government's Foreign Minister had confirmed the government's willingness to recognize an independent Palestinian state. Not to mention Breivik submits a 1500 page manifesto supporting Zionism, mentioning Israel 364 times.

And yet the mainstream press only mentions the Breivik-Israel connection in passing, if at all. The Norway shooting definitely gets UP's vote for 2011's most willful attempt to not connect the dots.

Reformation
Kamal Nuruddeen

2011 has been another year of reformation attempts at the core of Islam - some wild and fanciful, others a little more subtle. All have been bold in their folly; the proposition of trying to improve on Allah’s religion for our time and context has all the pompous audacity of an artist demanding that the Sun change its colour so as to fit in with the hues of his latest landscape masterpiece.

Still, folly is not a commodity in short supply and we have seen numerous reformers ply their trade in doubt and obfuscation. We have also seen new organisations and foundations launch with great fanfare (and not a little government-funded petty cash to smooth their way), only to end up cast into the dustbin of history. (Who has heard anything lately of the Sufi Muslim Council, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Inspire, Quilliam Foundation?) We have also seen evolutionary absurdities and attempts to kick off a new Muslim haskalah.

In the coming year, we can be fairly sure of a gaggle of new projects and initiatives to cajole, corral, confuse and coerce ordinary Muslims into aligning themselves with a western Islam (read western-sponsored Islam) "liberated" from the tradition of centuries of piety, devotion to Allah, sacrifice of wealth and self by men and women of real iman.

So keep your eyes peeled for newcomers and old faces in new guises with new tricks - it'll be like Springwatch but a few shades more sinister.

UmmahPulse: Keeping it Real
Muhammad Tahir

"Oppression will be darknesses on the Day of Judgment" - Hadith of the Prophet (Peace and Blessings be upon Him) reported in Sahih Bukhārī.

"Don't shoot, don't shoot, what did I do to you?" - last reported words of Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

While indeed, the Arab Spring may not have been quite the revolution that many first envisioned, it still reminded the world that Muslims remain a people of remarkable bravery and resolve. Before dragging their despotic leader from a sewage drain, Libyans had to face his thugs, mercenaries and heavy weapons.

In facing the tanks and clubs of their oppressors, Muslims reminded the world that they will not tolerate injustice forever. Essential in this process is the reminder of what is right and what is wrong. While there are many who criticize UmmahPulse for sniping from the sidelines, in a world obscured by the spin of Fox and Murdoch, the pull-no punches, tell-it-like-it-is voice of UmmahPulse is more important than ever.

To those Muslims who may occasionally feel the pinch of a UP reality check, our intention is not for you to withdraw from the work of Deen, but to realize that the duty to advise and remind is a responsibility we take very seriously at UmmahPulse:

"A believer is a mirror for a believer, and a believer is the brother of a believer; he safeguards him from destruction and protects him in his absence." (Abū Dāwūd, Tirmidhī, Bukhārī, Al-Adab al- Mufrad)

Dark Clouds, Dark Energy and Stark Realities of Ignorance
by Husain Al-Qadi

Among the top ten 2011 science stories chosen by the world famous Michio Kaku for his year end round up were: "Wacky Weather... 2011 was haunted by the specter of '100-year storms', i.e. 100-year flooding, 100-year heat spells, 100-year droughts, 100-year forest fires, etc."; the Fukushima Tsunami "...the horrendous news that there were three simultaneous meltdowns at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, in March, sparked by a gigantic 9.0 earthquake and a monstrous tsunami. It was recently revealed that the accident was much more severe than previously thought. The uranium core of Unit 1 completely liquefied (the first time this has ever happened) and melted right through the vessel and into the containment, almost setting off a China Syndrome-type disaster (where the core melts down, theoretically all the way to the other side of the planet)."; Giant Black Holes "...Black holes, once considered science fiction, now appear all around the universe. Astronomers recently identified the biggest black holes of all time, one weighing in at over 20 billion suns in mass. Our own Milky Way galaxy has a black hole with about 3 million times the mass of the sun." and Dark Energy "...The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 went to three astronomers who have discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing down, and that a mysterious 'dark energy' may be responsible. This is embarrassing, since only a few decades ago, it was widely believed that the universe was mainly made of atoms. Now, we realize that 73 percent of the matter/energy comes from dark energy (the invisible energy of the vacuum), 23 percent from dark matter (invisible matter that surrounds the Milky Way Galaxy), 4 percent from stars, and just a paltry .03 percent from higher elements which comprise our body and the planets."

So basically, we have little to no understanding of what makes up 96% of the matter/energy of the Universe...

Allah Almighty says:

"...And mankind have not been given of knowledge except a little." (al-Qur'an 17:85)

"Or [they are] like darknesses within an unfathomable sea which is covered by waves, upon which are waves, over which are clouds of darknesses, layer upon layer. When one puts out his hand [therein], he can hardly see it. And he to whom Allah has not granted light - for him there is no light." (al-Qur’an 24:40)

"O People of the Scripture, there has come to you Our Messenger making clear to you much of what you used to conceal of the Scripture and overlooking much. There has come to you from Allah a light and a clear Book. By which Allah guides those who pursue His pleasure to the ways of peace and brings them out from darknesses into the light, by His permission, and guides them to a straight path." (al-Qur'an 5:15-16)

"And when Allah intends for a people destruction, there is no repelling it. And there is not for them besides Him any patron. It is He who shows you lightning, [causing] fear and aspiration, and generates the heavy clouds. And the thunder exalts [Allah] with praise of Him - and the angels [as well] from fear of Him - and He sends thunderbolts and strikes therewith whom He wills while they dispute about Allah; and He is severe in assault." (al-Qur'an 13:11-12)

For the Love of Allah

2011-12-22T22:12:00.000Z

Written by Rafiq Ali

The Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alaihi wasallam) is reported to have said that "He who loves Allah should love me and he who loves me should love my Sahabah (Companions) and he who loves my Companions should love the Quran and he who loves the Quran should love the Masajid (Mosques)..." (Al-Qurtubi fi Tafsirihi wa Ibn Adi fi al-Kamil li al-Du'afa).

Consider, for a moment, a person or object that you love: your beloved child, your house which you have saved and saved to purchase and personalise, a photo which captures treasured memories. Consider now the emotions that would flow through your heart - and I pray that you do not find yourself in this position - if you were to find these items abused, vandalised and burnt.

If you are able to conjure up these hypothetical emotions, then know that Muslims across the globe are feeling these emotions of hurt and outrage at the actions of Israeli settlers. These settlers are not content on violating international law through the construction of a growing number of settlements on Palestinian land. They are not content with their abuse of Palestinian citizens. They have now gone further in articulating their hatred towards Muslims through the desecration of the houses of Allah and attacks on those areas that house the graves of our beloved Sahabah (may Allah be pleased with them).

Israeli settlers targeted the 12th Century Nebi Akasha Masjid in Jerusalem. Since Israel's war of 1948, Muslims have been prevented from using it as a masjid and, more recently, Israeli authorities have taken over the masjid and converted it into a municipal storage facility. This was a calculated move; the settlers were clearly aware of the significance of the Nebi Akasha Masjid. Built in the 12th century, the masjid is named after the sahabi Akasha Bin Mohsin (may Allah be pleased with him) as it was built on the site of his grave. Inside the masjid, there are three graves, believed to be those of some of Salahuddin's commanders who were martyred while regaining Jerusalem in 1187.

Settlers attacked the Nebi Akasha Masjid on Wednesday morning. They desecrated it with graffiti defaming Islam and Arabs, including insults aimed at our beloved Prophet (sallallahu alaihi wasallam). The settlers then attempted to set the masjid ablaze.

The words "price tag" were also sprayed on the walls, prompting commentators to link the desecration of the masjid to a wave of attacks by Jewish settlers and right-wing extremists in response to what they see as the Israeli government's attempt to restrict settlement-building.

This attack on the house of Allah resonates deeply with Muslims. It is not, and cannot be seen, as a one off attack on what is dear to Muslims. Rather it fits into the long and relentless pattern of attacks by settlers, and others holding extremist views, against people of other faith in Israel. For example, the number of attacks on the blessed Masjid Al-Aqsa alone now number over 100. The Zionist movement is not discreet in regards to its plans to build a temple at the site of Masjid Al-Aqsa and these attacks do not go unnoticed.

This recent violent and insulting attack has taken place under the watch of Netanyahu's Likud party. Its significance has caused voices in the UN to speak up. France seems to have continued its flow of more transparent communication in respect to Israel, with a joint statement from France, Germany, Britain and Portugal stating they were "dismayed by these wholly negative developments" and calling on the Israeli government to halt attacks on mosques and Palestinians by extremist settlers. "We condemn the disturbing escalation of violence by settlers, including the burning of the Nebi Akasha mosque in west Jerusalem and the Burqa mosque in the West Bank. It is clear that these deliberately provocative attacks on places of worship were designed to aggravate tensions."

The voices from within the UN have encouraged Netanyahu to offer some hollow words of future change. He labelled the attack as "intolerable" and instructed security forces to "act aggressively" against those responsible.

Netanyahu's words add insult to injury and bring to mind the words of the French Prime Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who described Netanyahu to Obama as "a liar". Does Netanyahu really believe that the world is unable to differentiate between his hollow words and his policy priorities?

Those who have been following events in Israel will be acutely aware of the systematic changes Netanyahu has been enacting; changes that will worry any individual who has hopes for peace or real democracy in Israel. Legislative moves by the Israeli government in this direction include attempts to block foreign funding for dovish non-profit groups, lowering the threshold for politicians to file libel suits against the media and, presumably to ensure legal decisions go in the "right" direction, a shift of control of Supreme Court appointments from an independent panel to parliament. Israeli citizens, fearing for their own future and the future of generations to come, have come onto the streets to protest against these changes. Protesters clashed with police on Tuesday evening in front of the headquarters of the ruling Likud party, blocking King George Street in the centre of the city. Police responded to the protesters with pepper spray. The protesters had marched from a demonstration of about 2,000 people held earlier in the evening at the square of the Habima Theater.

The international community, however, continues with its deafening silence. One is left dumbstruck when contrasting these legislative changes being pushed through by Netanyahu, despite the complaints of Israelis, to those changes being simultaneously forced down the throats of the Arab world as part of an international cry for "real democracy".

This international silence persists despite a growing voice of concern within Israel. Danny Zaken, the head of the Israeli journalists' association, recently commented on the "wave of legislation and other measures against a free press in Israel that very much worries anyone who cares about Israeli democracy". This followed the closure of All for Peace, an Israeli-Palestinian radio station, at the command of Netanyahu's Likud party. The radio station seems to have upset the Israeli government through its attempt to use the media to play a positive role in resolving the conflict. It currently reaches over 33,000 listeners.

The reasons put forward by the Israeli government for closing down the radio station seem somewhat confused. Danny Danon, a member of Likud, said the radio station was shut down following his claim that it "incited" against Israel. Danon described the station as a "radical leftist" institution that "must not be allowed to broadcast to the broader public". Israel's communication ministry, headed by a Likud cabinet minister, said in a statement that the station's Hebrew-language broadcasts inside Israel were "economically damaging local radio franchisees." It did not mention the issue of incitement.

The anxiety against the right-wing views of Netanyahu are also causing senior politicians to speak up. Netanyahu's recent support of a ban on the use of loudspeakers in masajid across Israel was met with some common sense questions by deputy prime minister, Dan Meridor, who said there was no need for such a law and that it would only escalate tensions.

Michael Eitan, minister for the improvement of government services, described the ban as a pretext for those wishing to legislate against Muslims. The ban was proposed by MK Anastassia Michaeli. In response to her, Eitan said "If the desire was to combat sound, then a law against sound in all areas should be introduced, but the MK proposing the bill wants to combat religion. I met with her and she tried selling it to me as an environmental law. I said to her, 'Look me in the eyes. You are not interested in the environment, but in Islam.'"

Nentanyahu's glaring hypocrisy is further demonstrated through worry statistics on death. A 10-year study showed that a disproportionate number of non-Jewish citizens of Israel are killed in the country's traffic accidents. A neglect of road infrastructure in non-Jewish areas over a prolonged period of time is now resulting in the unnecessary loss of life. The official State Controller's report showed that while the number of Jews killed in traffic accidents dropped by 26% between 2006-2010, for non-Jews it rose by 18% during the same period of time. Perhaps the controllers of purse strings in Israel believe the cost saving is worth the loss of non-Jewish life.

Commentators are also increasingly voicing their concern at the behaviour and influence of the ultra-Orthodox political parties in Israel. Recently, Foreign Affairs commented on Israel's bunker mentality demonstrating how these extremist groups have leveraged Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to transform Israeli politics and move the country to becoming an "increasingly cynical, despondent, and illiberal place".

Divisions between the left and right have been exploited by the ultra-Orthodox parties, who are instrumental in driving forward the expanding settlement agenda, in order to move themselves into the position of "kingmakers" and win preferential treatment from ruling parties such as economic subsidies for their constituents. This real threat must be addressed if politics in Israel is to move in a positive direction that protects all of its citizens regardless of religion, and away from the current position of supporting extremist groups that are known to terrorise Muslim citizens.

International support for citizens being abused by their governments has rung loud and clear in the context of the Arab Springs. As people demonstrated against the draconian measures and violence perpetrated against them, directly or through groups loyal to the regime, countries across the globe vocalised their support for the people on the streets, sometimes evening sending in their own troops to help them. Where is the international support for the citizens of Israel?

One practical step we can take in response to the emerging situation in Israel is to voice our concerns, for both Muslim and non-Muslim Israelis, to our local MPs. As Israel steps up its abuse of Muslims and their heritage sites, we should not stay silent. As Netanyahu pushes forward legislative changes designed to transfer power from the people to the draconian state, we should be clear in our opposition to his plans. Though the voices of the international community are weak for fear of speaking out against Israel, our voices should continue to be heard, loud and clear.

May Allah give us the ability to truly feel the pain and hurt that should be entering our hearts as we hear of the abuse of our fellow Muslims and the houses of Allah. We ultimately turn to Him for help as He is the best of Helpers.

Will the Real Evil Empire Please Step Forward?

2011-12-10T22:06:00.001Z

Written by Karima Hamdan

It has changed lives, uplifted individuals, touched just about every person in the western world in just a few short decades. Some may say that it is best known for its more controversial aspects: the ubiquitous black clad figure, its face hidden; the people driven to war by this ideology; as for its charms: the universality of its call, its deep sense of justice, its call to a better way.

I am, of course, referring to Star Wars.

Before they mined Unobtainium on Pandora; before resistance to the Borg was futile; before Harry Potter snatched his first snitch; there was Star Wars. I cannot think of another film that has been analysed, re-analysed and probably over-analysed in modern history. For Muslims of a certain age, for whom the 1980s and 90s signify a pimply epoch in their teenage existence, Star Wars seems to particularly resonate.

At the heart of what makes Star Wars special is the richness of the back story - especially that of the Jedi religion. In the cramped university digs of Muslim students throughout the western world, it was often at the nub of cola and pizza-fuelled in-depth discussions that lasted well into the night, with the topic more often than not being the strange sameness of the whole Jedi raison d’etre to several aspects of Islamic philosophy. Whether it was at a superficial level pointing out that the Jedi outfitters seemed to have raided a jellabia shop; or whether it was pointing out that the whole master-paduwan dynamic was very alim-talib in its setup; or whether it was the enthusiastic discovery that Yoda's unique speech pattern matched exactly the way sentences are structured in Arabic.

That was until, of course, George Lucas ruined it all with his ill-advised 3-part prequel which appeared to have blown its whole budget on CGI - leaving the script to be written gratis by a creative writing class of a run-down community college located in one of the shabbier suburbs of Scunthorpe or Middlesbrough made up of high school drop-outs who seemingly have learned English as a second or perhaps third language. The result: randomly linked together cliched platitudes, woodenly delivered by a series of irritating characters. Even more jarring was the mis-casting of Natalie Portman as the freedom and justice loving politician Padmé Amidala. Portman, who calls "The Only Democracy in the Middle East" home, often defends her country against any criticism of euphemistically named "reprisal attacks" launched from helicopter gunships and tanks usually against stone-throwing children in flip-flops. Lucas would have been better off casting her as the evil Senator Palpatine whose Machiavellian machinations, heartless repression of freedom and mindless brutality would have at least allowed Portman to play to her strengths.

Lucas, however, is not content with just producing awful prequels, he also has a penchant for continually tinkering with the original movies and every few years releases a newer version with a couple of cut scenes as well as extras added onto the original script. What has drawn out the ire of its fans is that in his latest tinkering, George Lucas has altered the famous scene towards the end of "Return of the Jedi".

To Star Wars fans it is the crux of the whole vein of morality that runs through the Star Wars universe - Darth Vader, the chief protagonist, when confronted by his own son's torture at the hands of his master, the uber-baddie Emperor, switches sides and throws the Emperor into a conveniently placed reactor core - the location of which I can't believe the Death Star's "'elf-n-safety" officer approved of.

George Lucas, unsure of the twitter generation's ability to follow the twists and turns of the story that can be easily understood by the average 5 year old, has now overlaid the scene with a wailing "Nooooooo" issuing forth from Vader's plastic mask so that the viewers quite clearly understand when his change of heart occurred.

The body politic of Star Wars fans were outraged. It was tacky, jarring and just so obvious. Lucas argued that because Vader's mask obscures his entire face including his eyes, he was just making sure everyone "got it". "Entirely unnecessary", the fanboys countered. Everyone who watched the story could see his anguish, his inner conflict, his ultimate decision from his body language, no eyes or face or voice needed. I entirely agree and wonder if anyone has ever asked a Star Wars geek what their position is on the usual "barrier to communication" argument that is used against the niqab...but that's another discussion for another day!

But Lucas' tinkering aside, Vader's change of heart highlights a truism that runs deep in the human psyche - at times of great stress people's true nature manifests itself. And it appears this truism isn't limited to conflicted ex-Jedi warriors with respiratory problems. Indeed one doesn't need to go back a long long time ago or in fact travel to a galaxy far far away to see the real nature of the beast manifesting itself at an individual level, a group level and even at a national level. In Darth Vader's case it was an outwardly evil man eschewing his wicked ways to become good; but in real life it is often the opposite.

When discussing nation states that exude the greatest amount of rhetoric about freedom and justice - the USA springs to mind with the greatest alacrity. From the "Star Spangled Banner" exhortation that it is the "land of the free" to the Pledge of Allegiance's assertion that the republic stood for "liberty and justice for all"; to that type of Hollywood action movie whose final scene always seems to have the hero emerging bloodied but triumphant from some alarming looking wreckage in order to deliver a cloying soliloquy on freedom and justice with the US flag fluttering in the background and a grand cinematic score swelling to a crescendo; the US certainly talks the talk when it comes to freedom and individual liberty. However, at times of stress it seems that this talk seems to be more artifice than actuality.

Just look at the Occupy Wall street movement. When one usually reads accounts of injured civilians, beaten-up poets, shot protesters, destroyed libraries, censored press and arrested journalists, and a government and police service openly defending these outrages, the reportage usually originates in a western-backed dictatorship ruled over by a tyrant with idiosyncratic facial hair wearing a shiny suit. But no, these where the facts on the ground when police clashed with the Occupy Movement protesters in the US these last couple of weeks.

Regardless of how coherent their message is or how much we agree with them it is difficult to come to terms with this new reality where entirely peaceful protesters have been met with such extreme levels of violence and brutality by the state.

After one gets over the unforgettable image of a pepper-sprayed 84-year-old protester or the response one reporter got when she protested that she was "from the press" (the reply? "Not tonight"); or indeed the fact that the US Department of Homeland Security briefed 18 separate mayors on how to "suppress" the protests, one realises that the true nature of the US political will is revealed.

It also exposes the true character of champagne intellectuals who become so outraged when Muslims are offended by insulting cartoons of our blessed Prophet (sallallahu 'alaihi wasallam). As Muslims were informed by the more sanctimonious types from the freedom of speech brigade that ‘we don't agree with what they are saying, but we will protect their right to say it", one wonders why they were not out standing, arms akimbo, in front of lines of riot police in order to protect the Occupy protesters.

The response of many was to hunker down in their abstruse intellectual bunkers whilst polishing up that old chestnut that it is capitalism that allowed these protesters to protest in the first place. Or in the case of Salman Rushdie turn up for a photo shoot whilst promoting their latest film/book then retire to emit tweets of outrage from the safety of their iPads. Or, as the writers of the cartoon South Park did, heap scorn on the movement, which is an interesting response considering the volume at which they emitted their howls of protest when the Cartoon Network censored their lacklustre episode in which they insulted our beloved Prophet (sallallahu 'alaihi wasallam).

Or indeed, take Melanie Philips (please someone...take Melanie Philips...to a galaxy far, far away) - the doyen of the incoherent mob, the high priestess of the bug-eyed bigot; who routinely declares free speech to be dead - usually in response to Muslims having the temerity to stand up for their rights; is now declaring that free speech - supposedly having made a back-from-the-grave recovery is not only not dead, but alive and well and being abused by the Occupy movement.

Away from the tents, the home-made signs, and the pepper sprays, we see others having their own Darth Vader moment, namely one Sayeeda Warsi, Chair of the Conservative Party and first Muslim woman in the Cabinet.

When she turned up to her first day of work wearing a shalwar kheemez, she was something of a novelty and I hold my hands up and admit that I for one had high hopes that by sheer chance an idealistic politician had managed to find her way into a position of power. Once or twice in the early days of the government, Baroness Warsi spoke out for Muslims in the UK but found herself comprehensively slapped down with growing calls for her resignation.

She has since gone distinctly quiet in the last few months despite there being several high profile issues affecting British Muslims. I suspect that she has finally realised that she is in such a high profile role not as an agent for change but rather as an alibi along the lines of "Some of my best friends are Muslims" for a Party that is proving itself to be no friend of Islam. I am sure she would argue that a high profile party mascot is better than nothing but I would suggest that as well as being the Tory's best brown buddy, she is also a fig leaf to cover over the ugliness of specific anti-Muslim legislation formulated and promoted by Islamophobic cabinet ministers (like Michael Gove) with the actual power and intent to make the lives of British Muslims very uncomfortable indeed.

Warsi has not gone completely silent. In a recent Guardian interview Warsi appears to make takfir (declaring someone not to be a Muslim) against Anjum Choudry.

Choudry's recent escapades have included threatening to demonstrate during the two minute silence on Rememberance Day (he didn’t show up), threatening to demonstrate during a military parade in Wooton Bassett (he didn’t show up), threatening to declare a "sharia law" zone in East London as a bridgehead for a future Islamic Emirate (he didn't do it...are we detecting a pattern yet?) and finally having his small gang MAC (Muslims Against Crusaders) banned by Teresa May.

Every statement issued by the media savvy Choudry is seized upon by a salivating press scrum and propelled to the headlines instead of being reported more accurately as a deliberately provocative statement made by the head of an organisation of about 5-10 people who by their past record won't actually carry through their threats. It is the equivalent of Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys interviewing every societal misfit wandering the high street wearing a sandwich board declaring the end to be nigh.

Choudry, who is probably beyond thrilled at the amount of media time he has been getting, was not available for any comment as he was probably otherwise engaged trying to think up another unlikely sounding acronym for his soon to be relaunched organisation. May I humbly offer my own suggestion as to what MAC aka Islam4UK aka Al Muhajiroun aka Al Ghuraaba should be renamed and relaunched as: Muslims Obviously Rejuvenating Our Newspaper Sales - I for one would dearly love Choudry et al to proudly stand under the M.O.R.O.N.S banner at their next public event. If that doesn't suit them how about "Imbeciles Desiring (an) Intentionally Outrageous Talking Shop" (I.D.I.O.T.S), or the more sensible Irritating Gang Not Observably Representative Either (I.G.N.O.R.E).

Choudry's grandstanding is a useful device for two groups of people. The first is the most obvious - he has a parasite-host type relationship with anti-Muslim bigots. The second are those who use Choudry to taint any discourse about issues surrounding Islam. For example, Choudry criticises Afghan and Iraqi war crimes by British soldiers and so anyone else doing the same will become his instant ally in the simplistic black and white 30 second soundbite world of the media.

The second group of people are those attempting to reform Islam - like BMSD (British Muslims for Secular Democracy) and ISB (Islamic Society of Britain). Now, before the members of ISB come onto this site to write long protestations declaring their hurt and upset at this "unfounded" accusation, I would refer them back to their PlainIslam.com website (now made infinitely more ridiculous by the addition of a disclaimer which only highlights the deep rifts which are appearing in that organisation). These groups gain instant legitimacy by positioning themselves against Choudry so that they can declare themselves to be the alternative to his incendiary bombast.

What they haven't realised is that they are not the solution to any issues, on the contrary, they are alongside Choudry as simply another problem that British Muslims have to deal with.

Sayeeda Warsi used the Choudry imagery in an attempt to place herself somehow at the heart of British Islam. She should not have bothered. If she doesn't experience her own Darth Vader moment and metaphorically toss the whole Neocon agenda of the cabinet down an allegorical central reactor core, she will be remembered as the first Muslim woman to preside over the demonisation of Muslims in the UK.

Meanwhile in Europe...

The ultimate reversion to one's true nature when the chips are down can also be played out on a group or society level. I have looked on with interest at how the dynamics within Europe have evolved over the course of what initially was a credit crunch, to a sovereign debt crisis, to a recession and then to the final hours of the Euro. The initial brotherly camaraderie that the leaders of Europe had in the face of this adversity evaporated back to the national stereotypes last seen at this level of crudeness in the middle of the last century, with the Greeks once again the poor men of Europe, the Italians just looking flamboyantly out of control - Sarkozy and Merkel's sneers at a joint press conference said it all. It would seem that like Darth Vader the true nature of a people rarely changes... What then do the summer riots say for our Green and Pleasant land?

The truism that one's inner nature, one's true character, one's real self surfaces at times of stress when the layers of social and societal conformity and mental gymnastics are torn away is equally applicable to Muslims. It is obvious to all that the position of Muslims in Western society is ever marginal and precarious; we are seen as the "other" more and more, day by day. Just like in a pressure cooker, the negative perceptions towards Islam are continually building.

For some, the pressure will be unbearable and unlike the loyal Star Wars fans for whom the original trilogy is a Gospel, these Muslims are prepared to remaster or re-imagine the religion and sharia embodied by the best of creation. The depth, beauty and balance of Islam being transformed into sound-bites, slogans and musical verse.

We all have our individual boiling points and how much pressure we can withstand - but the question we all have to consider is that when that crunch point comes, and it will certainly come to all of us, what true nature of ours will come out. Will we be seduced by the dark side or will we see the light?

"Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the Glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light: Allah doth set forth Parables for men: and Allah doth know all things.

"(Lit is such a light) in houses, which Allah hath permitted to be raised to honour; for the celebration in them of His name: in them is He glorified in the mornings and in the evenings, (again and again)―

"By men whom neither traffic nor merchandise can divert from the Remembrance of Allah nor from regular Prayer, nor from the practice of regular Charity: their (only) fear is for the Day when hearts and eyes will be transformed (in a world wholly new)―

"That Allah may reward them according to the best of their deeds, and add even more for them out of His Grace: for Allah doth provide for those whom He will, without measure.

"But the Unbelievers, their deeds are like a mirage in sandy deserts, which the man parched with thirst mistakes for water; until when he comes up to it he finds it to be nothing: but he finds Allah (ever) with him and Allah will pay him his account: and Allah is swift in taking account. Or (the Unbelievers' state) is like the depths of darkness in a vast deep ocean overwhelmed with billow topped by billow, topped by (dark) clouds: depths of darkness one above another: if a man stretches out his hand, he can hardly see it! For any to whom Allah giveth not light there is no light!"
(Al-Quran 24 (Nur):34-39)

Sheep Led by Wolves

2011-11-18T20:38:00.001Z

Written by Karima Hamdan

"At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them"

The implicit tragedy of young men sent out to war, who fought, died and were buried, often under skies much bluer than their own is well appreciated. They are lionised in poetry, literature and more recently in film. They were famously described as lions led by donkeys. They are often characterised as the uncomplaining, valiant youth who stoically gritted their teeth and went to war in order to protect our liberty and freedoms.

One can only imagine what this ‘band of brothers’ must think of us in 2011. We, the politically enfranchised population of a liberal democracy, are by definition the masters of our elected officials. I wonder how many of those who wear a poppy on their lapel have truly considered that if they are to utter the words ‘We will remember them’ with any glimmer of sincerity, then they must first demonstrate that they have remembered them and remembered what they fought and died for. Have we held power to account? Do our elected officials fear the populace, which Thomas Jefferson said indicated liberty, or is it otherwise - where the people fear the government, a situation Jefferson postulated would lead to tyranny?

We are the generation that have presided over the European economic crisis. We have witnessed the birthplace of democracy - Greece - have its elected leader mugged in public at the G20 conference in Munich and instructed to deny his people the right to a referendum, and then be deposed from office and replaced by the former vice-president of the European Central Bank.

Adding to this are the large numbers of EU advisers who have descended on Greece. They are, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray put it, “372 foreign “advisers” moved in to take over Greek ministries, in some cases even sequestering ministers’ offices. They have absolute financial control of budgets and have to approve and sign off spending before money is paid out. In effect, these advisers are now the government of Greece. 28% of these “advisers” are civil servants from other Euro states. The majority are bankers, and executives of private financial institutions, accountancy and consultancy firms.”

Similarly, Italy’s embarrassment of a leader - multi-billionaire media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi - has gone. Happily tolerated by his EU colleagues throughout years of mismanagement, corruption and media manipulation that effectively made him an unaccountable Caesar in modern day Rome, he was efficiently and rapidly replaced by a former EU commissioner once it became clear that as Berlusconi fiddled (and fiddle he did), not just Rome but much of Europe was going to burn.

When these events are viewed alongside pre-election pledges (now in tatters) of an in-out EU referendum that were thundered up and down this green and pleasant land by all three political parties at one time or another in the last five years, democracy appears to be a commodity we forcibly export to other countries rather than an asset destined for domestic use.

The purpose of democratically-elected officials is to represent the will of the people and to be leaders that advocate on behalf of the electorate. One wonders how many measures instituted by the Brussels yes-men will be for the betterment of Greeks and Italians or for the betterment of a wider Europe of which Greece and Italy are treated like regional vassal states whose only function is to provide Europe with olives, pasta and an historical narrative.

I very much doubt that history will remember this generation of British yeomanry as ‘lions led by donkeys’; we would more likely be immortalised as ‘sheep led by wolves’.

This Remembrance Day, a great effort is being made to remember the deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given the reverence which the British populace has for the armed forces, it is sometimes difficult to state that the pain and suffering of war is not limited to those friends and families of dead soldiers. It is pertinent to remember that there is no prescribed day dedicated to the remembrance of those innocent people who died in conflict. In fact, these civilians are ignored twice over. Firstly, by their own puppet governments who are usually too supine to make much of a fuss when those, whose names appear on the cheques, happen to blow up a village or strafe a wedding party. Then they are ignored again and are dismissed as ‘collateral damage’, not even worthy of an official record by those very nations sent to ‘liberate’ them because, as General Tommy Franks said, ‘We don’t do body counts’. As the educated populace of a liberal democracy, whose leaders purport to be our representatives, that ‘we’ of General Franks’ infamous statement includes both you and I in it.

A wider question remains: how did these young men get sent to war in the first place and who was responsible for sending them there? Whilst politicians may wax lyrical about their deep and abiding love for the armed forces, they ultimately are the ones whose cynical political machinations are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of troops as well as thousands of civilians. Just take Hillary Clinton’s recent announcement that Washington was willing to negotiate with Mullah Omar and the Haqqani network. After nine long, bloody years, 2,722 coalition deaths and the 20,000-40,000 civilian deaths that have occurred since Operation Enduring Freedom (quelle ironie!) began, one may well ask why the US could not initially ‘jaw jaw’ instead of being so eager to ‘war war’.

With such shaky logic exposed, one cannot possibly imagine that anyone could believe that it is patriotic to support this government’s war, especially in light of such highlights of government humanity as the sacking of wounded soldiers and the clawing back of a £400 overpayment from a dead soldier’s family. I wonder if Halliburton was ever asked to repay any of the $1 billion it allegedly overcharged for work in Iraq? This sort of illogical reaction must have led to the EDL’s plans to attack the Occupy London protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, resulting in over 170 arrests. The bitter irony is that the inhumane decisions that those multimillionaires against whom Occupy London are protesting have the biggest impact on the working classes whose members constitute most of the EDL. Then again, logic, reason and understanding have never been the EDL’s forte.

Those who trot out the old chestnut, that wealth begets wealth and this system of enmeshed banks, governments and big business is just the way the world naturally runs, need a primer on neoliberalism. Neoliberalism should not be confused with liberalism, which is an ideology that promotes liberty and equal rights and, in Nick Clegg’s case, an inability to adhere to election promises.

Neoliberalism was promoted heavily in the Regan/Thatcher years and Margaret Thatcher’s famous TINA acronym suggested that There Is No Alternative to it. It is also the primary strut to the economic policies of the World Bank and the IMF. It principally revolves around five key ideas:

The rule of the market: this maximises the role of the private sector in determining the political and economic priorities of the country. The logic runs that a happy and free market will generate wealth that will ‘trickle-down’ to the rest of the populace. After 25 years of rampant neoliberalism, Britain’s ‘squeezed middle’ is still waiting for the trickle but is coming to realise that the mythical trickle-down should be renamed the ‘siphon-away’.

Cutting or ‘redirecting’ public expenditure for social services: all in the name of shrinking ‘big government’. Of course, big government makes a sudden return when it comes to bank bailouts and tax subsidies for big business.

Deregulation: which often results in a concurrent decrease in worker’s wages, environmental protection and that much-maligned but very necessary area, health and safety.

Privatisation: involving a car boot sale of state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. From railways to utilities, the postal system and, increasingly, schools and the NHS. Although always carried out in the name of greater efficiency, it usually ends up in a muddle of unaccountability while concentrating more wealth in fewer hands and making the public pay even more for its needs.

Eliminating the concept of ‘community’ and replacing it with ‘individual responsibility’: as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, ‘There is no such thing as society’. 25 years on, she is now right.

One can see how everything from the debt crisis to the London riots has a rootlet that springs from the tree of neoliberalism. What makes today’s situation more acute than in the past, especially as far as Muslims are concerned, is the shackling-on of another ‘ism’ starting with ‘neo’ and that is neoconservativism, which sees a great deal of American, British and European foreign policy directed, not by the needs of their respective interests, but rather by the needs or wants of “The Only Democracy in the Middle East”. This was beautifully highlighted by Sarkozy and Obama’s recent microphone gaffe which saw the Frenchman declaring Netanyahu to be “a liar” whom he couldn’t stand. Obama replied, "You're fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day." Most people don’t even call their mothers every day. It certainly leaves no doubt as to where American policy goals originate, as demonstrated by the US reaction to Palestine’s membership of UNESCO.

The recent Al Jazeera interview with internationally-acclaimed intellectual and philosopher Slavoj Zizek should be compulsory viewing for everyone. He offers up a tightly-argued proposition that is as compelling as it is worrisome. He suggests that the system of neoliberalism died more or less in 2008, with any legislative tweaking of the banking system being merely skin deep. As neoliberalism and democracy have been cosy bedfellows for the better half of a century, democracy finds itself at a crossroads for the first time since World War II:
“The system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy, and now the field is open."

The only other option on the table is the type of authoritarian capitalism that is so effective in China, Singapore and increasingly in India. The inhabitants of Europe have replaced their ideologies, which in the past would have caused them to offer themselves up for a greater good, with what he describes as ‘spiritualised hedonism’. The call to sacrifice oneself for everyone else has been replaced with ‘be true to yourself’ and ‘live a full life’.

For the last fifty years there has been a fine counterbalance between capitalism and nationalism. This balance has broken down and nationalist feeling is now on the rise. This feeling is specifically anti-immigration and, even more specifically, anti-Muslim. Zizek’s massively important and startling point, which in my view should be posted on billboards up and down the UK (let alone Europe), is this:
“Yes I agree with right-wingers [that] European Judeo-Christian legacy is in danger, but they, the false protectors of Europe against Islam, they are the danger. I don’t fear Muslims in Europe, I fear [the] protectors of Europe.”

It is important to note that Zizek is not some kurta-wearing, curry-eating, ‘gone native’ Muslim-apologist who refuses to acknowledge the ‘Islam-isation’ of Europe with sharia laws, burkas and bearded men. Any reader of his previous attempts to deconstruct Islam will see that he has no inherent respect for our religion and, as a staunch atheist, feels that Muslims are basically wasting their time with strange rituals and beliefs. It is therefore very important that he comes to this not as a friend of Islam but rather as a critical observer who has cast his dispassionate eye over our alleged threat to Europe and is entirely unimpressed by the far right rhetoric on the matter.

Zizek’s main point is that the last time Europe was at a crossroads like the was in the 1930s, when fascism filled the political vacuum. At that time, there were many who were willing to make the personal sacrifice for a greater good in order to defeat fascism. He feels that the marriage between democracy and capitalism is dead and wonders who or what will rise to fill this current vacuum.

Zizek also heralded the rise of a new type of ‘ism’ - anti-Semetic Zionism - whereby individuals or organisations on the far right express their admiration for ‘The Only Democracy in the Middle East’ whilst simultaneously holding anti-Semitic views. He quotes from the manifesto of Anders Brevik, who displayed this strange paradox. We here in the UK can also see it manifested in the seig-heiling EDL who, despite waving the blue and white Star of David flags with gusto at their demonstrations, are at their core deeply anti-Semitic (not to mention anti-Muslim). Zizek summarises it thus:

“Jews are a great nation. The narrow Zionist politics are turning them into another land-grabbing nation. The true victims of this catastrophic politics will be the Jews themselves”.

Muslims are being scapegoated throughout Europe as the real and present danger to the shared European Judeo-Christian culture. A narrative has been set up that dictates that the average citizen has to be protected from this threat, usually by curtailing everyone’s freedom and running a perpetual ‘war economy’. We are corralled by adverse media stories into accepting the only 'logical' way out presented to us by them: that the only way for Muslims to be acceptable in Europe is by reworking the usul al-fiqh of our religion in order to accommodate it into western existential liberal philosophy.

The Last Post has sounded on the marriage between democracy and neoliberal economics. A new form of far right nationalism, fed on a steady diet of anti-Muslim rhetoric, appears to be taking its place. One wonders if there remain some people like those mentioned in Binyon’s famous poem ‘For the Fallen’:

Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted.

Or is the time now ripe for the fruition of this statement by Bertrand de Jouvenel?

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

Palestinians Gain Full Membership of UNESCO

2011-11-12T22:43:00.001Z

Written by Wazir Uddin

It is presumed in almost all international forums that the US will act as a mouthpiece for Israeli sentiments, even if by doing so it directly contradicts America's own national interests and legitimacy. This was extensively argued by leading American academics Mearsheimer and Walt in their book entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" in 2007.

This phenomenon was again evident in the response to the Palestinians being successfully voted in by states to become the 195th full member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - UNESCO. "The vote was carried by 107 votes in favour of admission and 14 votes against, with 52 abstentions". Interestingly, the previous member to be voted in to UNESCO was the newly recognised South Sudan, though the dynamics were of course different both because of the natural resources that its lands contain and the international alienation of the regime in Sudan.

The US response of withholding US financial dues to UNESCO as a punitive measure, causing a subsequent appeal and response from the organisation's Director-General Irena Bokova, further evidences how destructive the Israeli lobby is to US interests. The UNESCO Director-General highlights how a key aspect of US foreign policy, the building of a global consent towards its hegemonic world order through cultural and educational projects, will be directly undermined by the withholding of these funds. The US has effectively undermined its non-militaristic interventions in Tunisia, Afghanistan, Iraq and many other theatres of conflict, which includes the so-called Arab Spring, indicating its almost complete subservience to the Israeli state.

It doesn't require much "joining of the dots" to claim that the Israeli lobby in the U.K. would also have deployed its influence over our elected government, explaining the latter's decision to abstain from the vote. What was interesting was the inadvertent broadcasting of a conversation between the American President Obama and President Sarkozy of France at the G20 summit in Cannes last week, in which Sarkozy expressed his feelings towards Netanyahu (calling Israel's Prime Minister a liar). Despite the attempts by some of the media to spin the story as the micro-politics or intrigue of presidential interactions, the real story was Obama's dismay that France did not notify in advance their intention to vote for Palestinian membership of UNESCO.

Though the Palestinian Authority has made some diplomatic gains, which would also legally constrain the Israelis from attacking historical or cultural sites in the occupied territories were these to be classified as World Heritage sites with UNESCO, this issue should also bring to attention that there is a change in the nature of conflict in the information age. There is increasingly widespread realisation of the oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israelis at a social level that is proving difficult for governments to reverse. This surge in public sentiment across European and to some extent American populations is likely to be what the conflict for a Palestinian state will be decided over.

This can also be seen by the US and UK governments' previous acrimony with UNESCO in regards to the 1984 MacBride report, formally called the New World Information and Communication Order, which called for a "nationalisation" of media to ensure democratic flows of information. Media is the key technological platform over which the powerful will attempt to manufacture consent in the subordinated, and the "undemocratic" outcome of media ownership in the hands of moguls like Murdoch and his ilk indicate how critical this nexus of politics, business and media is in contemporary conflict.

The unintended power that arises from the internet, where communication becomes more horizontal in the sense of individuals becoming not only receivers but also senders of communication, is the most likely platform where states will attempt to most heavily intervene.

The New Religion of Globalised Greed Part 3: Making a Killing on the Stock Market

2011-11-05T23:39:00.000Z

Written by Karima Hamdan

There is a certain type of politeness that is deeply ingrained in our British psyche. In fact, labelling it as "politeness" is being polite in itself. One could more accurately say "linguistically duplicitous", or "factually profligate", or "lacking in verisimilitude" or, indeed, "lying". It is most often heard in eulogies and obituaries when we hear and read phrases like "he was the life and soul of the party" when we actually mean he was a wine-soaked drunk or "not the marrying type", which is code for homosexual. "She was generous with her affections" would translate into "she was a promiscuous Jezebel" and "she didn't suffer fools gladly" in reality would mean a curmudgeonly old grouch who would make Victor Meldrew seem like a ray of sunshine.

The general public are the sombre-faced mourners clutching their hymn sheets at the funeral of European monetary stability and, as the Requiem mass is recited (In the midst of life we are in debt); and the Beatitudes (from the Sermon on the Monetary Union) are read (Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the deficit), we hear eulogised platitudes, glossing over the stark reality of the situation. They range from the trite ("Greek haircuts") to the banal ("credit enhancements"), to the impenetrable ("bank deleveraging") and, despite these efforts, it looks as though this bailout will be buried long before anyone has a chance to toast its memory at the Wake.

We are currently witnessing Greece slowly choking to death. As its citizenry riots and protests on the streets and its parliament vacillates ineffectually, we are treated to insulting stereotypes of Greeks being a nation of ne'er-do-wells, content to sit under a tree on a sun-drenched island overlooking the sapphire-blue Aegean Sea, whilst the rest of us in rainy, cold northern Europe shoulder the burden of Greece's fiscal responsibilities.

As always, the reality is a bit more complicated than the pre-digested caricature regurgitated up by the media for our consumption.

For instance, there has been precious little in the press about the role of financial mega-institution Goldman Sachs in the manufacturing of Greece's current predicament. It has become clear that Goldman Sachs structured a highly questionable transaction with the Greek government, allowing it to borrow billions to prop up a failing economy but keep this hidden from public view as it was labelled a currency deal rather than a loan. This deliberate obfuscation allowed Greece to be accepted into the Eurozone despite its economy being in no fit state to join the single currency. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs trousered $300million in fees to set up the transaction and, in a move that lives up to its label as a blood-crazed vampire squid, it then bet against Greece's collateralised debt obligations. In other words, it lent Greece the money to let it spiral into financial ruin in return for assets such as future landing fees from Greece's airports and future profits from the Greek national lottery, all neatly packaged up into dodgy derivatives.

For Goldman Sachs, this is a win-win situation because if these derivatives proved toxic (i.e. Greece couldn't pay its debts), Goldman would get a pay off from the credit default swaps it had arranged, not to mention lucrative commissions that the bank collects regardless of how the deal works out. It is little wonder that Goldman Sachs was once again circling Greece with yet another dodgy deal in November 2009 based on the future earnings of Greece's health care system. This time it was batted back by Greece's newly-elected Labour government. That however is cold comfort to the Greek people, who have to pay for their government's idiocy with Goldman Sachs by swallowing the Brussels-directed swingeing cuts to public services, pensions and wages, and the liquidation of government assets at rock-bottom prices.

Ruining a sovereign nation's fiscal future is not the only string in Goldman Sach's bow. It was instrumental in the lobbying that went on to deregulate the futures markets by the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission in 1999. Whilst that may sound innocuous enough, it was this law - The Commodity Futures Modernization Act - that led to the rapid growth of speculation on food staples that has been responsible for such diverse events as the current tortilla crisis in Mexico, which has seen corn prices skyrocket causing untold misery to Mexico's poor, and the 2006 world food crisis, which saw 200 million people sink into malnutrition and starvation. There is even credible evidence which suggests that the Arab Spring was triggered by high food prices coupled with unemployment.

Much has been made this week of the birth of the 7 billionth person on the planet. One thing that struck me was that despite the predominance of delightfully tiny newborns, the reportage ranged from the cautiously neutral to the downright negative. One was left with the distinct impression that these little humans, blinking sleepily at the camera, were an unwanted extravagance on a planet that was already full to bursting: an environmental catastrophe ready and waiting to melt an ice cap or kill a polar bear, just as soon as they learned to crawl. One telling fact was that if all the people on the planet were to live in one mega-city with the population density of Paris, then we could all fit into an area the size of France. At least one recent study has debunked the whole overpopulation myth. When seen in the context of the globalised religion of greed, it becomes clear that the problem with the world is not a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa giving birth to her fifth or sixth child but rather the utterly remorseless greed and gimlet-eyed self-interest of a relative handful of bankers, businessmen and politicians who have ceased wanting their share of the pie and have become fixated on the whole pie as well as the pies of future generations.

As highlighted in last week's JumahPulse, the very nature of how governments and large financial institutions interact gives rise to highly intertwined relationships. Indeed, if I wanted to draw attention away from such an obvious and profound affront to democracy, a key device would be the need for a scapegoat on which the whole duplicitous, twisted, convoluted mess could be blamed: a tall order given the breadth and depth of the crisis. If a scapegoat could not be found, then the next best thing would be some sort of highly distinctive minority group, with just the right combination of marginalisation, grievance and otherness so as to trigger a moral panic. After all, it worked so well during the Weimar Republic in post World War I Germany.

Before I am accused of some advanced form of paranoia, let me defend myself by pointing out that large numbers of political and economic commentators have cited the example of the Weimar Republic when discussing the Eurozone crisis.

For those who think the Weimar Republic is perhaps some sort of trendy clothing retailer selling retro-inspired jeans to middle-class hipsters, or some new chain of identikit coffee shops occupying high street sites that used to be post offices, let me enlighten you. The Weimar Republic was the republic that replaced Imperial Germany after World War I. It was characterised by hyperinflation: a rapid erosion of the value of the currency characterised by rocketing prices. Photographs of a person lugging a wheelbarrow full of German marks in order to buy an ounce of gold are famous. As Hitler rose in the German national consciousness as a vocal opposition leader, the Weimar Republic attempted to stabilise its economy and, for a time, looked as though it may succeed. Unfortunately, the 1929 stock-market crash on Wall Street put paid to any such hopes, leading to the Great Depression, as opposed to the Great Recovery. The US banks that had financed the German economy called in their loans and the economy nosedived out of control, with mass unemployment. One can see how the Weimar Republic could be used as a worst case scenario for cash-strapped Europe struggling under her huge debt, with a stagnant economy, burgeoning unemployment and rising inflation, all topped with a number of banks that may well withdraw the funding that is currently supporting the straining girders of the Eurozone economy. When commentators mention the Weimar Republic, they usually end the discussion with its collapse. What happened after its collapse is of particular importance to Muslims, especially those who live in Europe.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi party was a very vocal opposition that gave simplistic but popular solutions to Germany's woes and provided a handy scapegoat on whom all of the Republic's ills could be blamed: die Juden (the Jews). It is interesting to note the time-frame over which the Nazis implemented their extreme anti-Semitism. Everyone knows that the first gas chamber was used in 1941, but what is less well known is that it was only 20 years earlier, in the 1920s, when Nazis first started using the print media to vilify and spread lies and hatred about the Jews. They labelled them as a threat to Europe. They ridiculed their dress and lifestyle. They accused them of being unpatriotic and in particular not supporting the army. They often published salacious accounts of sexual assaults of German women and girls by Jewish men. They characterised them as being a fifth column. They slandered their rabbis, often depicting them hurting children. They were particularly active in their fierce condemnations of the kosher method of slaughter.

Is any of this sounding familiar?

When one reads about the outrageous acts committed by private financial institutions - whether it is the Koch Brothers attempting to wield undue influence over our elected officials or Goldman Sachs gambling with food prices and consequently causing people to starve - one wonders why there is no mass outrage. Of course there is some outrage (the Occupy movement is a case in point) but as for widespread, visceral, swivel-eyed outrage spreading though the general population, if that sort of outrage is sought, then one usually has to look no further than Islam and Muslims. Whether it is Sharia law, or the niqab, or Islamic schools, or insulting cartoons, or our alleged birthrates or birth defects, Muslims tend to be the ones at the epicentre of (usually rather illogical) mass hysterical outrage.

It seems like a classic case of "distraction burglary", a type of crime that sees the unwitting householder have his attention diverted by the criminal whilst another of the gang quietly helps himself to the householder's property. Whilst the general public bristles with offence at the latest "bad Muslim" story, it is being efficiently stripped of its public services, pensions, job security and ultimately its standard of living. And none of it is being done by a niqabi.

At the start of this series, I proposed that this infotainment-laden world has merged into a sentient, globalised being, controlled by corporations, innervated by the media and powered by masses of cells, who are entirely instrumental to this being’s survival whilst at the same time entirely subservient to it. I also said that this behemoth follows a religion and that religion is greed.

It could be said that this is nothing new as greed dates back to time immemorial. This is partially correct. Yes, greed is one of the oldest tricks in the book of our old enemy Shaytaan, and indeed our beloved Messenger (SAW)said:

Anas bin Malik (ra) narrated: The Messenger of Allah (SAW) said, "If the son of Adam had a valley full of gold, he would like to have two, for nothing fills his mouth except dust. And Allah forgives him who repents to Him."
(Sahih Bukhari, Volume 8, Book 76, Number 447)

The difference now is that the inherent greed of humanity has always been counterbalanced by faith in God, a faith that both promises rewards to those who bear great burdens and are patient, and punishment to those bent on their own individual satisfaction at the expense of their fellow men.

The 21st century's literally "hell-bent" individualism has eroded this orthodoxy, disturbing the delicate cantilever of people's desires. Traditionally, a person only wanted what would be acceptable by his own conscience, but this has been replaced by a wildly-oscillating maelstrom of ideas, concerns and expectations that fluctuates with which celebrity is championing which cause, what is the current must-have charity wristband to pontificate about around the office watercooler and which is the latest newly-deceased luminary whose death causes an "unprecedented outpouring of public grief". Until, of course, the next unprecedented outpouring of public grief.

This wafer-thin spiritualism is like an oil slick: a mile wide but an inch deep. It neither helps nor controls those who endorse it. Despite the protestations of notable atheists like Richard Dawkins that the lack of religion transforms an individual from a mindless automaton afraid of fairy tales into a dynamic, informed humanist - oozing empathy from every pore of his body - just glad to be doing his bit for the species before his existence is extinguished into an eternal nothingness punctuated by the occasional meme left behind for posterity (if you're lucky), the evidence of the summer riots against the backdrop of corporate greed contradicts this. What both the bankers and the rioters worked out separately is that if this world is our only existence, then it is utterly illogical to rein in your desires. The distant threat of being caught and punished, whether by a toothless corporate watchdog or a wheezing unfit police officer weighed down by 15kg of riot gear, is no deterrent. This is the unspoken message from both the top and the bottom of society.

When examining this series of JumahPulses which detail the globalised rape of Somalia, the circles of intrigue surrounding government and big business and the global machinations of just one large bank (Goldman Sachs), it is easy to fall prey to a sense of hopelessness. The "elites" seem to have a confederacy of connivance tightly knitted together and it makes one want to reach for the tinfoil hat, change into a comfy turquoise tracksuit and start reading lurid websites about the Illuminati.

This, however, is not the purpose of these articles. Instead of becoming overwhelmed by this tangled web of deceit and intrigue, the believer should instead understand it and from that make more sense of the world around him. When the believer reads some exaggerated account of some tiny aspect of Islam that seems to be causing a wildly disproportionate response, he should understand that the enmity directed against Islam at almost every turn is part of a strategy aimed at distracting people from the true enemies of society whilst concurrently demoralizing and demonising Muslims.

The logic behind the current anti-Muslim media campaign is two-fold. Primarily, it provides the requisite cover for successful "distraction burglary", but it also reflects the profound fear and unease the Neoconservative lobby and, by extension, its various "backers", feel when confronted with Islam. While the intent of this campaign is to suppress and incapacitate Muslims, upon reflection, it is profoundly inspiring, and rather flattering. What is it about us that demands the expenditure of millions of dollars, the organization of think tanks and alliances, and the mobilization of thugs and polemicists? Upon reflection this brings to mind the statement of the believers in the Quran:

"Those to whom it was said: 'Verily, the people have gathered against you, so fear them'. But it had the (paradoxical) result of increasing their faith. They replied: 'Allah is sufficient for us (against them) and the best disposer of affairs."
(Al Imran 3:173)

One should also see the pattern in the events unfolding around us and how they appear to mimic previous events in history. Europe has an unsavory history of turning on religious minorities at times of economic hardship: whether in the form of anti-Jewish pogroms in medieval Europe or the industrialised, media-backed slaughter of the Jews after the fiscal disaster that was the Weimar Republic. European Jews, when confronted by this growing wave of hatred against them, responded in one of two ways. One was to hold on more tightly to the tenets of their religion (this was ridiculed as being backward and insular at the time); the other was to "modernise" Judaism in order to conform it to the society at large. This also needs to be reflected on by Muslims who appear to be diverging in exactly the same way, as we have mentioned in other places.

It is noteworthy that this series of JumahPulses about greed has concluded in the midst of the Hajj season. The once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Makkah by every able Muslim seeks to cure the heart of the disease of self-interest and greed. We can see it in the sa'ee - the passage seven times between the two hills of As-Safa and Al-Marwah, in the footsteps of that most impressive of women, Haajar (the mother of Ismail), who shines like a beacon down the millenia to us as a guide to Muslims everywhere on what it is to have trust and faith in Allah. We can see it in the Jamaraat - the stoning of the Shaytaan which demonstrates our repudiation of the devil and all he stands for just as Ibrahim (upon whom be peace) defied the Shaytaan three times on his way to fulfil the will of Allah and sacrifice that which he loved most.

And we can witness it on the mighty Day of Arafat, where the Muslims of the world beg Allah for forgiveness and greater spiritual strength, fully conscious that, despite all the secret covens, plots and conspiracies the world has to offer, what they are fighting for is fleeting at best:

"Whatever you have (of worldly possessions) will (one day) come to an end, (But) whatever is with Allah will remain forever."
(Sura Nahl)

And whenever we feel our hearts turning when confronted by the excess of this world, we should ponder upon these words of the Almighty:

"Know (and understand well) that, verily, the life of this world is (but) play, amusement, adornment, mutual boasting (vying with one another in material possession and worldly pomp) and mutual rivalry in accumulating wealth and children. In the Hereafter is a dreadful punishment (for the rebellious ones) and (for the people of Faith) will be forgiveness and pleasure from Allah."
(Sura Hadeed)

And finally we should search in our own hearts for any manifestations of this globalised religion of greed as we reflect on this hadith:

Ka'b Bin Malik (may Allah be pleased with him) narrates that Rasulullah (SAW) said:
"Two hungry wolves let loose in a flock of sheep do not cause so much damage to the flock as the love of wealth and vanity causes to one's Deen." (Tirmizi, Darimi)

UmmahPulse would like to wish everyone Eid Mubarak, and we pray that at this time of remembering the sacrifice of Ibrahim (AS), that Allah gives us the faith and strength to sacrifice in His way and not be from amongst those driven by the greed of this world.

9/11 and the Art of Distraction

2011-10-26T22:00:00.001+01:00

Written by Ahmad Ashiqilahi

As my local newspaper dropped through the letter box, I was struck by the different colours that presented themselves – was this a new entrant to the local newspaper offering? On closer inspection, it became clear that this was the same local newspaper but the cover pages were dedicated to a full spread advertisement. Flicking through the "newspaper" it was difficult to find a single page which was not selling a product or service.

This mix of advertising and local news, while annoying, seemed fair. Advertisements were clearly selling a service or product. What is worrying, however, is the constant and deliberate manipulation of "news" to sell ideologies. This hidden marketing is designed by a minority of the population to benefit that same minority group. The bill for this marketing drive, however, is picked up by the average tax payer.

This point is well made in a recent article by Vijay Prashad, Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford. While readers can find the full detail in the article, it is worth highlighting pertinent points here.

The events of 9/11 provided the opportune moment for the Bush administration to pursue the ideology designed when out of power, namely, The Project for the New American Century (1997 – 2006). The Project is not shy about the premise on which it is built:

"The Project for the New American Century is ... dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle."

How their fundamental proposition would be achieved was expanded on in their report Rebuilding America’s Defenses (September 2000). The report argued for a sharp increase in military spending in order that U.S. military power may be used to capture political and physical resources around the world. Why was this needed? As there was a risk that The American Century would be undermined by global government (the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation) and developing powers (namely, China).

Had this report been an extract from the next Harry Potter novel, one would be turning the page with nervous anticipation. However, the document pages of history leave one with quite a different, sickly feeling.

As Bush took control of America, he was quick to appoint the engineers of The Project for the New American Century into his administration. While the supporters of The Project were bold in their views, they were also acutely aware that if they were to realise these aims they would need a strong marketing plan to ensure the masses stayed on side. Did someone say 9/11?

The events of 9/11 were leveraged by the Bush administration to full effect. Marketing gurus would be impressed by how the marketing channel of “news” was used to convince billions around the world of the legitimacy of what was to follow. The U.S was positioned as an innocent bystander attacked by blood-hungry Islamists. The history of U.S atrocities was sidelined to such an extent that anyone mentioning this as a possible reason for the attack was jumped on. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, 9/11 became the distraction whenever uncomfortable information slipped through the tightly controlled media network.

But this article is not just about what has happened. The tragedy of events, caused by the decisions of a selfish minority, are not limited to the millions killed in Iraq or the starving orphans of Afghanistan.

Embarking on military invasions around the world in order to spread American ideology is not cheap. The financial implications of the wild decisions made by this minority group are now becoming clear. As Prashad puts it:

"... the U.S. had to borrow massively to fund the expansion of its military and its use of that military. Between September 11, 2001, and May 2011, the National Priorities Project shows, the U.S. exchequer spent $7.6 trillion in defense and homeland security. This figure is bewildering. The combination of this military spending, the Bush cuts on taxes for the wealthy, the bursting of the asset bubbles (real estate prices) as well as the tremors in Wall Street’s financial casino set the U.S. Treasury into a downward spiral."

And it is the average person on the street who is picking up the bill - not the minority group supporting The Project for the New American Century. The Census Bureau announced in mid-September that there are now 46.2 million people living under the poverty line in America, that is one in six, the highest figure since 1983. Twenty-two per cent of the children in the U.S. live under the poverty line – the highest figure since 1962. Why are these facts not making headline news on a regular basis? Where is the journalistic contribution to address this issue affecting millions of the domestic population of the U.S?

It is clearly time for the events of 9/11 to stop being used as the distraction while the masses are robbed from multiple directions.

Recasting a Neoconservative as a Liberal - the Dark Art of Political Manoeuvring

2011-10-25T22:50:00.002+01:00

Written by Wazir Uddin

David Frum, a prominent Neoconservative, writes and speaks as if he now holds "new thinking" on US domestic and international politics, even recasting himself as a leftie. That politicians use speech purposefully would not be much of a surprise to most of us, but Neoconservative discourse is embedded in a philosophy of deception and lies that treats democracy and society at large with contempt.

Since the debacle of the Iraq war, illegal renditions, torture and Guantanamo Bay the Neoconservative clique, who debunked the establishment-type conservatives from the Republican Party after 9/11, have suffered from a legitimacy crisis in public opinion. This group of Straussian politicians that grabbed the strings of power are culpable for the death and misery of millions around the globe. In this article it is argued that these students of Leo Strauss (1899-1973) are defined by the politics of lies and deceptions that continues to this day in the declining US power.

A fundamental belief "of Strauss's ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals. The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many." (Drury, 2003)

Frum, a prominent Neoconservative and one of the de facto architects of the policies pursued by the Bush regime, unbelievably is now attempting to cast himself as a reformed political figure who has ideologically broken away from the Republican Party and its "extremists". This is another attempt to peddle a ‘noble lie’ in an attempt to manoeuvre back into a position of power within Washington. In a recent interview he makes a double move of undermining the current US administration while also recasting himself as reformed by basing his critique on pragmatic grounds. He argues that Obama has essentially failed due to administrative reasons: the "President has to be effective, and he has to use the instrumentalities of presidential power".

The Neoconservatives were of course masters at being instrumental in their usurping of the US state and the subsequent deployment of its massive military power to conduct illegal wars around the world. Unprecedented violence and destruction was visited upon Muslim societies in pursuit of the Neoconservative agenda of changing the balance of power in the Middle East in favour of Israel.

Knowledge of another key axiom of the Neoconservatives would reveal that being out of power is to be persecuted due to the deeply held notion that "justice" is merely defined by the "interests" of the stronger over the weaker, and hence the relentless political struggle to achieve power.

"Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato (alias Thrasymachus) that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice. Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli (see, for example, his Natural Right and History, p. 106). This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration [reference to the Bush government] in the United States.... The effect of Strauss's teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms." (Drury, 2003)

It is due to this philosophical grounding that taking Frum or his fellow Neoconservative clique, on both sides of the Atlantic, on face value would be a massive error of judgement.

Justice, in stark contrast to the Straussian conception, can only be served by these Neoconservative politicians facing an international tribunal for waging illegal wars and human rights violations, a demand that liberal voices are particularly muted over. The litmus test of a reformed Neoconservative would have to be a voluntary confession at the Hague.

The New Religion of Globalised Greed Part 2: Circles of Influence

2011-10-25T01:12:00.000+01:00

Written by Karima Hamdan

While this week the career of Tory Defence Secretary, Dr Liam Fox, fizzled faster than a neutrino travelling beyond the speed of light, the main point was (as usual) missed entirely by the media. Whilst the tabloids were fixated on finding the most ridiculous headline with the word "fox" in it (Fox Hunt, Fantastic Mr Fox, Out Foxed, etc), the more respectable broadsheets tied themselves into linguistic knots trying to come up with a way to question Fox’s sexuality without appearing homophobic. However, where one did find evidence of incisive, investigative journalism, it appeared only to be trying to unearth details about luxury hotels and first class travel, as everyone assumed that this was another bog standard "MPs' snouts in troughs" type of scandal.

By midweek, the lightbulb had slowly begun to flicker over the heads of the editors of the Guardian and the Independent as the realisation dawned on them that the relationship between Adam Werritty, a 2:2 graduate in public policy from Edinburgh University, and Dr Liam Fox, a GP-turned-Thatcherite Conservative 16 years his senior, is entirely a smokescreen for a wider issue.

The issue is of course influence: who wields it and who falls under its spell.

The Need for Influence

One of the hallmarks of a liberal democracy - along with free speech, a free press and universal suffrage - is a free and fair political process that is transparent, accountable and functions within a system of checks and balances. The question that remains is how does this idealised democratic utopia fit in with today’s intertwined ‘twitter-verse’, with its status updates and perpetual drip-feed media which overwhelms us with a steady stream of brain candy?

In last week's JumahPulse, I proposed the existence of a new globalised being, whose corporate controllers use this constant stream to subliminally reinforce their own agenda while justifying the privilege of a tiny elite to dictate everything from the price of bread to the next global menace against which war must be waged. George Orwell would be proud.

The influence of this "being" or "organism" pulsates along its nerves from the opulent minority in the centre, diverted down conduit after conduit until it reaches the cell - the actual powerhouse of the body, individually insignificant but a powerful collective held prisoner by its own submissiveness.

The Invisible Hand

What the newspapers finally realised was that this country's Defence Secretary - a man who is responsible not only for the security of the UK (and the enormous budget that goes with it) but also holds sway over decisions of wars and peace, alliances and enemies - was influenced, advised and perhaps impelled by a cabal of wealthy, influential Neoconservatives who, for the most part, are not even British citizens.

The register of those who had the Fox's ear (so to speak) reads like the Christmas card list of Beelzebub. Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Banks and Big Neocons all had unprecedented access to our elected official. It was mostly channelled though "Atlantic Bridge", a charity that Adam Werritty ran out of Fox's parliamentary office. Its main purpose was to forge links between right-wing Neocons from the Tea Party movement in the US to right-wing Neocons within the UK Tory Party. On its board were Michael Gove, George Osborne, Chris Grayling and William Hague with Margaret Thatcher as patron. It counted on the support of prominent older Conservatives, including another former PM, John Major, as well as Michael Ancram and Michael Howard.

Whether it was the £25,000 that US drug giant Pfizer paid David Cameron's press secretary to work as the "sole employee" of the charity, or events sponsored by failed bank Lehman Brothers (before it went bust), the grubby fingerprints of the corporate machine are all over this "charity".

Follow the Money

One quote that some journalists are using is the famous remark from the 1974 book on the Watergate scandal All the President's Men, where the informant "Deep Throat" advises the investigative journalist to "follow the money" in order to understand the situation.

If one takes a moment to digest the twisted and circuitous path that "the money" has taken in the case of Atlantic Bridge, it seems like no coincidence that there has been a rapid and widespread appearance of right-wing US Neoconservative ideas in the policy decisions of Tory ministers: be it the stealth privatisation of education and the NHS or the expansion of the privatisation of prisons. Almost invariably, these policies serve only to benefit Big Business.

When in 1961 Dwight Eisenhower warned against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex", he probably could not have fathomed a world in which the prime minister of a liberal democracy turns up in countries freshly reeling from revolution with a posse of arms dealers and a sales pitch which goes something like this: "Here are the arms (that you were tortured with) which we sold to your previous dictator. Would you like to buy some more?"

Three of the most prominent of Werritty's backers are also leading lights in the funding, whitewashing, and public glorification of "The Only Democracy in the Middle East". One of those three, Poju Zabludowicz, is also the chief funder of BICOM, the Britain Israel Communication and Research Centre, a leading lobby group that last surfaced during Peter Oborne's groundbreaking Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, "Britain's Israel Lobby".

By far and away the most outrageous breach of public trust was the close ties the UK branch of Atlantic Bridge had with the murky backer of its American sister branch. This backer was none other than prominent US lobby group American Legislative Council (ALEC) which, despite the official sounding name, is in reality a group of corporate executives who wine and dine legislators and then present them with pre-drafted "model" legislation.

There appear to be no depths to which ALEC will not stoop in order to further the causes of its clients. This includes its grotesque alliance with huge US tobacco companies (ALEC cast doubt on the science around smoking) and private prison providers, which is the area in which ALEC's most recent controversy lies. ALEC's lobbying was behind some of the most draconian US sentencing laws ever passed, which caused an explosion in the US prison population thereby increasing the business of the private prisons ALEC represented and also giving them access to a vast pool of prison labour. These private prison providers used this labour to replace unionised workers thereby bypassing union regulations as well as decreasing pay. In an incident in 2005, more than 40 million pounds of beef infected with rat faeces processed by inmates were not recalled in order to avoid drawing attention to how many products are made by prison labour.

Just as ALEC bankrolls the US branch of Atlantic Bridge, if we follow the money back one step further we find that ALEC's biggest backers are none other than the Koch brothers. These two brothers - Charles and David - are the owners of the US's second-largest private company, Koch Industries, a vast private energy conglomerate with an annual revenue of about $98 billion.

The Koch brothers are also the major funders of the Tea Party; and they make their views on Muslims and Islam perfectly clear as they are also behind the wildly Islamophobic documentary "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West". This was distributed to 28 million people as a free DVD insert in newspapers in key US "swing states" in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election in an attempt to create a threatening climate of fear within the electorate. When this link between the Tea Party and the Koch brothers is understood, one can then put into context the blossoming relationship that the Tea Party has with the English Defence League.

Chair of the Conservative Party, Sayeeda Warsi, has been conspicuously silent on this matter. It seems strange that as a cabinet minister she has no opinion on such a vast scandal involving her party being caught in flagrante delicto with a blatantly Islamophobic, right-wing, morally corrupt outfit like ALEC. One wonders whether this is because she is just like so many other politicians whose motives for holding office oscillate between personal gain and self-promotion. Or perhaps I am being too harsh on our sister Sayeeda. Perhaps she is in no position to make her voice heard. If this is so, then she should reflect on the the appropriateness of the title "Chair of the Conservative Party", a chair being an inanimate object, left in the background and entirely ignored - until it is inevitably sat on. Once again, I call on her either to make her voice heard on behalf of the Muslims of the UK as the highest-ranking Muslim politician in the Land or, if she finds her position untenable, to leave, as she is only giving legitimacy to the anti-Muslim agenda of this government.

Bankers Like a Party

Everyone likes a party and bankers are no different. They have a party they like and it is the Conservative Party. A study by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism has found that a combination of hedge fund managers, private equity moguls and City bankers were responsible for over 50% or £11.4m of the Conservative Party's annual income. This level of financial support from the City has doubled under David Cameron.

I am sure that bankers, being such deeply altruistic people wedded to a profession that values morality above all else, would expect no return for their money. Therefore it is no doubt merely a coincidence that the banks, despite a great deal of bluster, have been given an extraordinarily easy ride by the Conservative Party in the face of the worst economic downturn the UK has seen for decades. First, there was the limp-wristed deal agreed by George Osborne on bank bonuses which was described as "extraordinarily wrong" by a Lib Dem frontbencher who resigned in disgust over it; then there was "Project Merlin", a deal which meant the banks would lend more money to small- and medium-sized business in order to boost the economy which, within 3 months of its announcement, was failing to meet any of its targets. Now we have "QE2" - Quantitative Easing 2 - whereby the Bank of England will print £75bn more money and - stop me if you have heard this one before - hand it over to the banks.

Whilst we are waiting for QE2 to set sail towards the large monetary Bermuda Triangle that lurks in the square mile, it is worthwhile reflecting on the consequences of QE1, which saw the injection of £200bn into the markets in 2009-10. Recent research has found that instead of this money "trickling down" to the Average Joe and thus benefiting the economy, the banks actually used it to speculate on commodities such as oil and food, boosting prices, pushing up inflation and making life even harder for cash-strapped consumers. In fact, two years after this measure was implemented, UK workers are earning less than they did at the depths of the recession: real wages have fallen by £4bn, whereas profits are up by £11bn.

But we cannot blame all this country's ills on an unsavoury relationship between the Conservative Party and banks. Upon closer examination, there are a whole host of unsavoury relationships ranging from William Hague's personal intervention on behalf of two separate oil companies (both Tory party donors) who refused to pay £175 million in tax to the Ugandan government, to the ongoing conduct of the Inland Revenue, which saw HMRC forgive Goldman Sachs £10m and Vodafone £4.75bn in tax revenue. Suffice it to say that the one million people due for a nasty surprise this week when they are informed of their tax underpayment cannot look forward to such favoured treatment.

A Blinkered Media

Quite ridiculously, the Independent crowed last week about how the Fox episode demonstrated that the UK's media holds politicians to account. What it failed to report was that the whole Atlantic Bridge fiasco was not unearthed by any journalist but rather by a blogger who became suspicious of it and went about his own investigations before reporting it to the Charity Commission which, two years later, released a report which was seized on by the Guardian. One wonders how many other equally furtive fake charities and think-tanks, backed by equally furtive individuals, exert undue influence over our elected officials. How many are out there that the media simply ignores? Unwilling or unable to investigate, most media outlets are probably too busy writing polemics about the "real" threat to liberal democracy: the niqab or minarets or Islamic schools.

In another example of lazy journalism: instead of researching the genesis of the idea of abolishing aspects of the Human Rights Act which so shocked the world at the Tory Party Conference recently, the media's focus was firmly locked or blinkered on a story about a cat.

Last week, when I set out to write about the famine in the Horn of Africa, I was staggered by the breadth and scale - not to mention bare-faced audacity - of the crimes committed by the international community in Somalia. Similarly, this week, I had intended to include an overview of the economic manipulations carried out by financial institutions like Goldman Sachs which impact food prices and political stability throughout the world. However, I was stopped in my tracks by the circles of influence that encompass the government and appear to be influencing policy.

All Roads Lead to Jerusalem?

There is the - as yet unexplored - issue of the influence exerted upon our Defence Secretary by "The Only Democracy in the Middle East". At least one former ambassador as well as the Guardian reported that MOD, Cabinet Office and FCO officials, along with the military, are speaking openly about the Mossad being the quiet influence on Werritty. It was soon after this disclosure that the notoriously thick-skinned Fox who, until that point had seemed to be digging himself in for the long haul, resigned suddenly. As one may expect in these situations, the official report of the Cabinet Office did not delve into these matters.

Another matter that appears to be disappearing rapidly down the rabbit hole is the role, in Atlantic Bridge, of the Chancellor and the Secretaries of State for Education and Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Messrs Osborne, Gove and Hague were all on its advisory board and yet no one appears to be asking what influence they were subjected to during their time there.

On Wednesday the Prime Minister was asked in Parliament to give an assurance that legislation would be introduced to ensure that the sources of funding for these so-called lobbying "think-tanks" be disclosed. His response was half-hearted to say the least, because he knows that they have been going out of their way to conceal the real sources of their funding. George Monbiot noted in his aptly titled article "Think of a Tank" that "'free market thinktanks' and their secret funders are a threat to democracy."

Influence and Me?

What is the response of a Muslim when faced with this all-encompassing hegemony of influence that is directed out of this globalised fiend? One can choose to react in a variety of ways. One option is the way of the rioters: seeing the corruption that surrounds them, they become corrupt themselves thinking that, if the powerful can get away with it, why can't they? Another response is that of those in denial: seeing the powerful nature of their enemies, they sink into a resigned stupor, paralysed by apathy, left to mutter about "Jewish conspiracies". Another possibility is the retort of the outraged: a passionate call to protest that slowly fizzles out with the growing realisation that they have no considered answer to the status quo that doesn't involve waving banners. This usually concludes with the protagonist sloping back home when the novelty has worn off attempting to console himself with the hollow comfort that "at least he did something"... before switching the TV back on to catch up on The X Factor.

I would suggest that the best response is that of believers. They refuse to give up their beliefs in the face of corruption, nor do they give in to despair or heady but directionless activism as both these ways lead to an eventual immersion back into this fleeting world and the pursuit of the gilt-edged trinkets and toys that distract us from reality.

The believers realise that they can never be slaves to this system because they are already slaves to The One. The believers look at the world and see not a glittering prize that needs to be captured above all else, but rather a bridge that needs to be crossed on their way to their ultimate goal. The believers are not fooled by the platitudes and promises of men. They reflect upon such men's circles of influence and know that these are directionless pursuits by directionless people. They know that the only influence worth having is that of our leader, the blessed Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alaihi wa sallam). Above all, the believers know that whilst the powerful may feel that they are the ultimate deciders of our fate, that responsibility is Allah's alone.

"And (then unbelievers) plotted and planned, and Allah too planned, and Allah is the best of planners."
(Al Quran 3:54)

Evolutionary Science

2011-10-23T23:54:00.000+01:00

Written by Kamal Nuruddeen

At the cutting edge of science, there are frequent moments when cherished theories and established assumptions are overturned by glaring new facts or exposed inconsistencies. Scientific journals in all fields are full of duelling researchers and academics debating the merits of various ideas and slaughtering many a sacred cow. Of course, this is a perspective that the general public does not see. For them, science is presented as a body of cut-and-dry facts and indisputable laws. Scientific proof is supposedly the means to delivering absolute certainty about our world.

Occasionally, there occurs within the scientific community an event so traumatic that it is felt by wider society. When a theory regarded as fundamental to our understanding of the world is challenged by new discoveries, we find scientists in disarray and society at large bemused by how something that has been scientifically proven turns out to be incorrect.

This is exactly what has happened as recent experimental findings seem to cast doubt on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The Theory of Relativity is so fundamental to physics that even the researchers who presented these shocking results were at pains to make clear that the likeliest explanation would be an oversight in their experiment rather than a flaw in the theory.

Although it seems that there may well be an explanation that conforms to the physics textbooks, it still remains that for a time, physicists were willing to question the fundamentals of their beliefs and countenance the possibility that they may have been wrong for the past one hundred years.

Implicit in the reaction of physicists is an admission that science by its very nature is fluid: ideas come and go; hypotheses are proven one moment and disproven the next; basic assumptions are questioned and challenged. Science is a snapshot in time of our understanding of the universe, of Allah's creation and our understanding will inevitably change. If we build our worldview on science - and seek to validate our beliefs in accordance with it - we are building on shifting sand.

As the "neutrinos break speed-of-light barrier" affair is being played out, one thing to note has been the way many physicists have been able to openly question Einstein's ideas without fear of vilification. Contrast this with the infinitely more dogmatic stance of another branch of science: evolutionary biology. Any dissenting ideas that challenge evolution are treated akin to heresies - with the heretics castigated by the priests that guard this dogma.

We should bear in mind the evolutionary - even revolutionary - nature of scientific advancement at a time when some Muslims seem content to modify Muslim beliefs and aqeedah to align them with current scientific thinking. Will aqeedah need to be continually modified to keep pace with the latest theories?

Scientific facts are arrived at through the best endeavours of the limited human mind, and as such must be subservient to revealed knowledge which is imparted to us by Allah, the Perfect Creator, through His chosen messengers. Whilst Evolution and Relativity will one day crumble apart, the Quran will always remain intact.

The New Religion of Globalised Greed Part 1: Somalia - the Man-made Famine

2011-10-15T01:56:00.000+01:00

Written by Karima Hamdan

The Reign of Corporate Imperialism

If one were to correlate the level of media attention with the importance of the subject matter at hand, it would be easy to conclude that the death of one slightly black man in Hollywood is more significant - by several orders of magnitude - than the deaths of close to 1 million black people in the Horn of Africa. And the supposed miscarriage of justice surrounding one American woman in Europe is imbued with more essential meaning than the grave injustices perpetrated by one American financial institution on Europe.

It is indeed a strange world: a world so enmeshed and intertwined that it seems to have coalesced into a new sentient globalised being. At its head is the corpulent corporate behemoth, controlling government strategies, dictating food prices, directing wars and ensuring that its every decision impacts on the lives of each cell in the body. Its veins are the media, pulsing to the 24 hour news cycle and disseminating information out from the centre to the periphery.

Like any organism it has an immune system on patrol, ruthlessly weeding out any cell or substance that doesn’t match its own narrow definition of "self". "You are either with us or against us" is the categorical refrain of the immune system, but in this out-of-control chimera, the immune system has taken on a life of its own, morphing from a defence policy into a disease, attacking its own body in the pursuit of safety and becoming weaker and poorer as a result.

At its heart is a new religion: the religion of globalised greed spreading like a pandemic across the world. No longer the preserve of the elites, this tenacious, rapacious greed now permeates every echelon of society. "Freed" from the bounds of orthodoxy that promoted patient perseverance, the ordinary person has succumbed to the persuasive proselytising of its high priests, thumping their pulpit of individualism, disseminating their tales of blind chance and proclaiming that narrow self-interest is not only logical but also at the core of our biological programming. Its worshippers are to be found in a rich vein of diversity throughout society: locked in acts of devotion as varied as speculating via hedge funds in The City of London and looting small businesses while Tottenham burns around them.

Somalia: Failed State or "Collateral Damage"?

And it has its sacrificial lambs. Unwitting pawns destined to end their lives on its alter of self-interest: the skeletal baby staring out at the world with weary, pain-filled eyes, never understanding why it had to suffer; and the broken-backed old man who, despite a life of sweat and toil, has only rags and an empty stomach to show for it. The Horn of Africa is the current sacrifice just as Iraq and Afghanistan were the burnt offerings of the recent past.

"Hyperbole and hysteria!" the haters would cry.

"Yes, whilst the famine in the Horn of Africa is a tragedy, it's all down to the La Niña effect producing the worst drought in 60 years, the Al-Shabaab militia refusing aid, and perhaps some early effects of global warming; and anyway, it is just the story of yet another feckless African nation filled to the brim with gormless victims, without the wit or will to help themselves and seemingly able only negligently to produce child after child that they are incapable of caring for and expect us, yet again, to pick up the pieces."

How indeed can anyone blame the famine in Somalia on anyone else but the Somalis themselves?

A brief, disinterested trawl through Wikipedia or similar "definitive" modern information sources reveal that Somalia went from being a tribal society to a British colony, then an Italian colony, then a post-colonial dictatorship in the 1960s until it collapsed into an anarchic civil war in 1991, which seems to have endured until now. Surely even the most bleeding-hearted, sandal-wearing, hemp-clad liberal would have to admit, grudgingly, that here is one failed nation that "the West" can't be berated over, as it appears that Somalis are seemingly unable to form a society stable enough to weather the inevitable ups and downs of the climate.

This week is the first of a series of articles exploring this new globalised culture of greed. In this JumahPulse, I will demonstrate that Somalia is far from a lacklustre society of layabouts, but rather Somalis are a people struggling to reach some sort of stability, which at every turn is crushed by a callous coterie of injustice: the war on terror, Europe's inability to deal with its own resurgent criminal underclass and food piracy on such a scale that it simply beggars belief. Not a secret conspiracy but rather a completely open process, visible to anyone with half a mind to investigate it. It is the societal equivalent of a child being savaged by a pack of dogs on the street whilst the dog owners look on, scornfully ridiculing the child's inability to protect itself.

Whilst all of these issues are entirely factual and have occurred in the age of the 24 hour news media, the story has been widely passed by but for a few footnotes here and there.

However, as Aldous Huxley remarked, "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

The War on Terror: Imperialism Rebranded

Many people's perceptions of Somalia have been influenced by the 2002 blockbuster Black Hawk Down, which portrayed the US/UN's disastrous 1992-1995 intervention in Somalia and the resulting Battle of Mogadishu as an entirely altruistic act. George Monbiot does a masterful job of deconstructing that particular star-spangled fantasy in an article that should be made compulsory reading for anyone given to watching tawdry US propaganda. Suffice it to say that in the movie, no mention is made of Somalia's very significant oil reserves, or that the US government was so enmeshed with multinational oil companies that at the time it was using US oil company Conoco's headquarters in Mogadishu as its embassy.

The story of the US and Somalia doesn't end with Black Hawk Down. As the dust settled from the twin towers and the US rolled out its borderless, generational war without end, against such a hitherto unknown type of enemy that it required new alliances, new laws and new morality. This was all guided by George W. Bush's subtle and nuanced foreign policy approach of "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of its people". The Horn of Africa has played a strategic but almost covert role in the war on terror.

From the secret CIA prisons in Mogadishu, to the CIA-run secret detention centre in Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, to the heavily fortified facility at Mogadishu airport where the CIA runs covert snatch and grab raids that kidnap citizens of other countries and enter them into the twilight world of extraordinary rendition, the story of the US in Somalia has been one of misadventure, misery and malign manipulation.

The CIA has been fighting proxy wars by funding one warlord after another and thus adding to, if not creating, the fetid climate of civil unrest and revolt that has embroiled Somalia for decades. It has ignored the advice both of its own experts as well as independent academics who, in as early as 2002, downgraded Somalia’s threat level to the US to negligible, with only the presence of at most 10-12 people in the whole country with any links to Al-Qa'ida. The warlords for their part played a duplicitous game by providing misinformation to the US whilst lining their own pockets with CIA money and weaponry. The fledgling Somali government was entirely sidelined in the whole process and became weaker and more ineffectual as time went on.

The Union of Islamic Courts: Problem or Solution?

Despite this US-backed anarchy, for a brief time in 2006 things seemed to be taking a turn for the better. The Union of Islamic Courts, a disparate group of shari'ah courts supported by local businessmen fed up with the previous decade's anarchy, swept the warlords out of power in quite a remarkable way. The courts started appearing from 2000 onwards, dotted around the country and operating entirely independently, although loosely affiliated with each other. The local militia enforced the rulings of the court, which reduced robberies, drug dealing, prostitution and general lawlessness. Over the course of the next six years, this militia evolved into a fighting force that had effectively conquered most of the country. Thus the rule of law was established, which then resulted in a revolution. This is not the way things usually happen: customarily, a revolution occurs first and it’s only after some flag-waving, statue-toppling and effigy-burning that the protagonists remember that small matter of justice and the rule of law.

The Islamic Courts, with their grassroots federalist structure, formed not only the main judicial system in Somalia but also began providing policing services and built schools and hospitals, not to mention organising a rubbish collection service in Mogadishu, which had not had waste collection services for over a decade. Despite the fact that some courts closed cinemas and banned the recreational drug khat, the Union of Islamic Courts in general enjoyed a groundswell of public support in a country that had known only chaos for so many years.

By December 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts controlled all of Somalia except Baidoa, a town close to the Ethiopian border which housed the US/UN backed opposition, the Transitional Federal Government, defended by Ethiopian troops. After negotiations collapsed between the two parties, Ethiopia invaded Somalia and intense fighting ensued: the current Somali civil war had started. This however was no internal matter. The US was openly supporting the Ethiopian military's invasion of Somalia for a significant time when Somalia was still subject to an international arms embargo, so any such armed intervention, military aid or provision of arms and materials would have been illegal under international law. Suffice it to say this has never been investigated.

To add to this international flavour, several key Ethiopian-backed puppets in this new Somali government were British citizens who, after a heavy week of embezzlement, torture and corruption would fly back to the UK to spend some much needed downtime presumably watching Coronation Street and shopping in Poundland. George Galloway, the then Respect MP, delivered a characteristically firebrand speech on this subject to Parliament in 2008. He also made mention of the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary which detailed the complicity between the puppet government in Somalia and the UK. It makes for compelling, if not deeply disturbing, viewing.

As is often the case with US foreign interventions, alongside the covert military funding comes the overt defamation. In the run up to the Ethiopian invasion, the US Assistant Secretary of State fired this shot at the Union of Islamic Courts:

"The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals, East Africa al-Qaeda cell individuals. The top layer of the court are extremists. They are terrorists. They are killing nuns, they have killed children and they are calling for a jihad."

The killing of nuns refers to an incident outside a Mogadishu hospital in September 2006 where a nun was murdered. This was condemned by the Union of Islamic Courts who made two arrests swiftly afterwards. Despite the absence of any evidence linking the Courts with Al-Qa’ida, Somalia in general, and the Union of Islamic Courts in particular, became synonymous with terrorism. Somalia was even cited in a leaked memo written by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2006, in which he directed his staffers to develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for the increasingly unpopular Iraq war.

"Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.

As well as ratcheting up public fear and anxiety, the rhetoric over Somalia gave the US enough legitimacy in the international media as well as at the UN to overturn provisions of Security Council Resolution 733 in December 2006 (via Resolution 1725), allowing it to intervene militarily. And what an intervention: large scale air strikes, naval operations and the embedding of military personnel with the Ethiopian army. In the months that followed, several thousand civilians died with nearly half a million others fleeing to refugee camps.

On 26 April 2007, Martin Fletcher wrote in The Times about the five days he spent in Mogadishu, during which he canvassed the opinion of many ordinary Somalis:

"People lack water, food and shelter. Cholera has broken out. The sick sometimes have to pay rent even to sit in the shade of trees. Things will get worse with the rains, which have started. Aid agencies say people will soon start dying in large numbers. Some reckon Somalia is facing its biggest humanitarian crisis, worse than in the early 1990s, when the state collapsed amid famine and slaughter. Overwhelmingly, they loathed a government they consider a puppet of the hated Ethiopians."

In the midst of all this, over 200 CIA and FBI agents set up shop in the Sheraton Hotel in Mogadishu and started detaining and interrogating suspects, without charge or trial, in a secret prison somewhere in the city.

Faced with heavy aerial bombardment and overwhelming force, the Union of Islamic Courts was defeated within a few months and the Transitional Federal Government assumed power.

Since then, Somalia has once again suffered turmoil and chaos. As well as receiving CIA funds, former warlords who had been driven out by the Union of Islamic Courts have been given military roles in return for the use of their private militias. The US also seems to have adopted the RAND Corporation approach of endorsing strange Sufi groups as "good Muslims" to be recruited in the war on terror. In Somalia, the Americans are funding the Sufi paramilitary group Ahlu Sunna wa Jama'a despite it having in the past fought alongside the Black Hawk Down bogeyman, Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Ahlu Sunna wa Jama'a now receives arms and training from the Ethiopian military and its London-educated leader, Abdulkadir Moallin Noor, indicated in a recent interview that US intelligence agencies were deeply intertwined with his group.

Al-Shabaab, who had been a minor faction in the Union of Islamic Courts, has surged to the fore in the power vacuum following the defeat of the Union by fighting an insurgency-style rebellion against the government. Continuing US drone attacks act as a recruiting sergeant for al-Shabaab, a situation that mirrors that of US drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is recent evidence that al-Shabaab may be moving towards a more guerrilla-style terror campaign which, if true, will only add to the chaos.

A recent UN report on Somalia released in July 2011 makes the following troubling statement:

"The resort to Somali proxy forces by foreign Governments represents a potential return to the 'warlordism' of the 1990s and early 2000s, which has historically proved to be counterproductive."

Madeline Bunting sums it up when she writes in The Guardian:

"[W]hen historians reflect on the early decades of the 21st century Somalia, alongside Afghanistan and Iraq, will be seen as having paid a colossal price in human life as a result of the US war on terror. The deaths in Iraq were brought by bombs, the deaths in Somalia are from hunger: both are a direct consequence of the violent extremism triggered by US aggression." (emphasis added)

Globalised Greed: A Toxic Legacy

The President of Somalia at the time of the UN/US intervention in the 1990s, which ended with the Black Hawk Down incident, was Ali Mahdi Muhammad, a close ally of the UN/US mission. What is less widely known is that, as well as being the fourth president of Somalia, he also has the inglorious distinction of being one of the main causative factors behind Somalia's piracy problems. It was his government that signed a deal with Swiss and Italian firms to use Somalia to dump 10 million tonnes of toxic waste at the bargain basement price of $8 per tonne, which would cost up to $1,000 per tonne in Europe. This was the start of Somalia’s toxic waste legacy.

Since then Somalia, both onshore and offshore, has been the unwilling recipient of Europe and Asia's toxic waste: from toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and mercury, to radioactive waste from hospitals and the poisonous by-products of heavy industry. Waste has been dumped on remote beaches and offshore in disposable leaking barrels. Thousands of people have been affected by this with a rise in birth abnormalities, respiratory infections, mouth ulcers, abdominal haemorrhages and unusual skin infections. There have even been several cases of outright radiation poisoning.

Several European firms have been implicated in this deadly trade, including Swiss company Achair Partners and Italian waste merchant Progresso. Most of these companies are simply "shell" companies set up by others as disinformation and most investigations have simply fizzled out due to an inability to collect evidence in such a chaotic place as Somalia. The origins of some of the radioactive waste found in rusty decaying barrels on Somali beaches have been identified in the last few years. Italian crime cartel the 'Ndrangheta have been implicated in this after one of their own became a turncoat and spoke out against them. The story is one of shocking corruption and greed with former Italian prime minister, Ciriaco De Mita, involved in illegal disposal operations. The secret service, SISMI, was engaged to cover up the connection and other Italian politicians intervened to ensure that Italian peacekeeping troops in Somalia turned a blind eye to the ongoing transportation of waste. The waste itself came from ENEA, Italy's state energy research agency, which paid 'Ndrangheta clans to get rid of 600 drums of toxic and radioactive waste from Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany and the US.

There is a growing body of evidence that, at least in the first instance, the pirates were fishermen who, fed up with being shot at by illegal fishing fleets plundering Somalia's rich harvest of lobster, tuna, sardines and mackerel, formed into a ad-hoc coastguard. A 2006 UN report estimated that foreign fishing fleets, mostly from Japan, China and Korea, stole over $300 million of seafood each year from Somalia's waters. The practice of illegal fishing became so widespread that large stretches of the Somali coastline, which once provided food and a livelihood to entire coastal communities, had become barren of fish. It is ironic that now because of the dangerous nature of Somalia's pirate infested waters, widescale looting of Somalia's resources has ceased and so fish stocks in those areas not affected by toxic waste have increased to such an extent that the average fisherman has increased his catch from $5 a day to over $200. Also, in a development that should make the heart of every capitalist sing with happiness, it appears that piracy is injecting a well-earned economic boost into the local economy, with boom towns growing up on the Somali coast on the back of this new "industry". For this reason the pirates (who often refer to themselves as "coastguards") enjoy a great deal of local support.

In this new religion of greed, morality has become skewed beyond all recognition. An alliance of the planet's richest nations can manipulate, undermine and eventually attack one of the poorest nations causing anarchy, death and untold misery and yet call this attack a "war on terror". Some of the same countries can plunder a nation's fish stocks, or be complicit in dumping toxic waste that kills and maims the poor, and yet the word "pirate" is never used to describe them. Indeed, the same countries will race to pass UN resolutions to condemn piracy and frantically set up navy patrols to control it but find themselves completely unable to control or combat those criminals from their own society who caused the problem in the first place.

When I began writing this JumahPulse, I had assumed that I could mention, briefly, a few dirty deeds carried out by the US in Somalia before swiftly moving on to everyone’s current favourite bloodsport: brutalising bankers. What I hadn't counted on was the sheer volume of criminality, misconduct and villainy that has been perpetrated by the international community on the country and people of Somalia, all of which merited further discussion.

Astoundingly, even a cursory look at the available evidence demonstrates that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

It seems no country in the world is free from the stain of culpability in Somalia's fate: whether they were partners in the war on terror; or had their toxic waste seemingly magicked away by dodgy middlemen for suspiciously negligible sums but lacked the moral fibre to ask any questions; or whether their fishing fleets suddenly brought back bumper harvests of previously rare fish; or whether their UK passport-carrying citizens' day job was as torturer in chief of a puppet regime, propped up by British and American military aid and protected by weapons and armaments from British, American, French, Russian and/or Chinese companies.

In this globalised world of global communication, global government, even global warming, we can add another globalised moniker: the globalised rape of a country.

Enjoying the Benefits, Sharing the Blame

It could be argued that we are complicit in these outrages as we are the educated, informed citizenry of liberal democracies who, in theory, are supposed to hold those in power to account. The reality is that instead of an engaged, enlightened body politic, we are more like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of manure masquerading as news. When a wayward fact does come our way, it is presented as a solitary snippet of information, isolated from any wider context.

As Muslims, we are well-accustomed to some journalists and opinion-makers making very tenuous links between misquoted verses from the Quran here and an out-of-context hadith there in order to demonstrate that violence and hatred are essential qualities of Islam. And yet, here we are with an abundance of hard evidence proving the misdeeds of the international community in Somalia in the form of UN reports, independent evidence, leaked documents, personal testimony and so on. Despite this, there seem to be very few people who are prepared to make the links and demonstrate how this famine is man-made. Why is it that journalists only seem to want to exert themselves and join the dots (or, in Islam's case, get the dots Robert Spencer and Melanie Phillips et al have drawn and join those together) when it comes to demonising Muslims?

This new globalised world has indeed created a new globalised being: a self-absorbed caricature of humanity at its nadir, an invidious and repugnant hellion. Somalia is not an isolated case. We see the tentacles of this tenacious creature extending into every sphere, where we see new adherents to, and new victims of, the religion of greed.

We need to define ourselves as heretics of this new religion of greed. In a world of avarice, we need to give charity. In the midst of selfishness, we need to act selflessly. When presented with cherry-picked facts and simplistic conclusions, we need to be aware of the shallowness of such arguments. Above all, we need to realise that the wealth that makes life so comfortable in the West is the result of a steady stream of dodgy dealings glossed over by saccharine sweet platitudes. All of the conveniences we take for granted depend on their costs being borne by those other than us: cheap energy secured through the support of regimes who ignore their own people's demand to share in the wealth; heavy industries whose toxic by-products are dumped somewhere else; and cheap food, stolen from the hungry to overfeed the corpulent. And, in the quiet of our hearts, we need to ask the uncomfortable question that whether, as Muslims in the West, the lifestyle we "enjoy" is really consistent with our values once we factor in the hidden costs.

In next week's JumahPulse, entitled "The New Religion of Globalised Greed Part 2: Making a Killing on the Stock Market", I will insha'Allah be examining the role of hedge funds and large financial institutions in everything from the Arab Spring, Mexico's tortilla "crisis", the Greek debt and this summer's riots in England.

Biased FBI Training – Islamophobic Brainwashing

2011-10-12T22:23:00.001+01:00

Written by Jamal Anderson

US reports and work by CAIR recently identified anti-Muslim propaganda is be used for FBI counter-terrorism training. Publications written by anti-Muslim writers such as Robert Spencer, who influenced the Norwegian terrorist Anders Brevik, are readily available in book shelves of FBI training centres and their concepts are being taught during FBI counter-terrorism training.

For anyone who could have forgotten the shocking actions of Brevik, he was the gunman who opened fire on the Norwegian Labour Youth Party event and murdered 69 young people and killed a further 10 people through the detonation of a bomb near government buildings. Brevik was strongly influenced by Robert Spencer’s ludicrous theory that people needed to do something to stop the Islamization of the West – otherwise Muslims will be taking over. It is the same drivel pushed by Melanie Phillips: Londonistan and Eurabia (she was also quoted by Brevik). In his "manifesto" Brevik referenced Robert Spencer 64 times and stated that he needed to stop the Islamization of the West. The reason for targeting the Norwegian Labour youth camp? They were campaigning against Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and looking to defend the rights of oppressed Muslims.

Robert Spencer and other pro-Israeli Islamophobes that Brevik quoted, including Pamella Geller, promote the dangerous idea that terrorism is germane in all Muslims – there is no difference between a murderer and a law-abiding Muslim American/British citizen, therefore all Muslims are the enemies of the state and should be legitimate targets, because apparently we are ordered to kill all infidels wherever we find them(!). Robert Spencer and his cronies would like you to think that when any Muslims pop down to the shop to buy a can of cola they might have the urge to kill the cashier if she is less than Muslim. The absurdity of taking things out of context would be funny if the consequences of their rhetoric were not so dangerous. Sadly the results are there for all to see.

In addition to the Islamophobic material, it seems an industry of anti-Muslim FBI trainers has developed, and with little or no vetting they are polluting the minds of FBI officers. Biased training sessions have become public following complaints made by FBI officers and numerous articles by Wired. Examples of the biased training includes:

A document, signed by a local FBI agent and distributed to the class, stated in part: "A careful comparison of Arab/Islamist propaganda and Nazi propaganda reveals the closeness of these links... I would suggest that the current conflicts are a continuation of Nazi policies carried out by Arabs..."
Instructors saying a "true Muslim" had to support or take part in the killing of non-Muslims. The instructor also told the class, according to a handful of attendees, that Muhammad [s.w.s] was an epileptic and the Quran didn't come to him in a series of heavenly visions, but instead was actually part of an epileptic fit.
An instructor was teaching agents not only that Islam was a violent religion, but also was erroneously linking religiosity to terrorism. He said the more religious a Muslim in this country was, the more he should be seen as a potential suspect.

So what is currently being done, now that these findings have come to light? The FBI have said that they will review their training methods. Congress have been questioning the FBI director, Mueller. He claims that such incidents are isolated, although there is evidence to the contrary. There are reported cases since 2006 where FBI intelligence assessments list increased religious fervor among Muslims as a potential indicator of terrorism. All material is allegedly now being checked at their HQ for bias. This admission provides some insight into how little coordination there is between the FBI departments across America. We shall wait and see what will happen.

Dealing with the FBI training situation is however only treating a symptom and not the cause. The cause is quite clear. There are groups of pro-Israeli ‘clerics’ who religiously seek to make ALL Muslims, and by association all people who oppose Israel, legitimate targets. When you trawl the internet forums, it is clear that they have already influenced many people into thinking that attacks on Muslims are justified. The aim of this disease is to get the Christians to fight and kill Muslims, strengthening Israel and making the continued persecution of Palestinian Muslims appear to be justified in occupied Palestinian territories.

Here in Britain we are yet to discover the full extent of similar infiltration of anti-Muslim propaganda in Whitehall but from what we already know the bias towards Israel is so strong that it causes British politicians to act in very strange ways. The latest was the Education Secretary Michael Gove barring school students from attending a Palestinian literary festival. Apparently he wrote some scary letters to the school as one spokesperson for the Department of Education said, "The Secretary of State wrote to a number of schools seeking an assurance that they were not in breach of their duty under section 407 of the Education Act 1996 requiring that where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils, they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views."

Sadly we don't see politicians in Britain rushing for the rule book on "balanced presentation" when the subject is Israel, as in the case of Mr Gove who is always glad to go out on a limb to support Israel, when section 407 of the Education Act 1996 is never mentioned.

Blending In - the First Step to Non-existence?

2011-10-11T22:52:00.002+01:00

Written by Ahmad Ashiqilahi

The masajid of Allah have long been benefiting mankind. From the early construction of the Ka’bah in Makkah, these places of worship have been established so that mankind may remember their Lord and seek closeness to Him. However, their benefit is by no means limited to this central purpose.

The architectural splendour of masajid spread throughout the world is known by many. The Masjid-i Jahān-Numā, commonly known as the Jama Masjid of Delhi was commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal. It lies at the origin of a very busy central street of Old Delhi and delivers a compelling aura with three grand gates, four towers and two 40m-high minarets constructed of strips of red sandstone and white marble. The masjid is about 8000 metres long and 549 metres wide, and its roof is covered with eight domes with repeated stripes of purple and white marble.

Travel to Casablanca and you will find the much visited Hassan II Masjid. This epic landmark is the legacy of the late King Hassan II to Casablanca and modern Morocco. Marble was brought in from Agadir, cedar from the Middle Atlas and granite from Tafraoute. Most of the work was undertaken by master craftsmen producing beautiful tile work, wood carving and stucco moulding. The masjid now provides space for 25,000 worshippers and a further 80,000 in the courtyard. The soaring minaret stands at 200 metres high.

Move to Istanbul and you will find the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, more commonly known as the Blue Mosque due to the blue decorative tiles in its interior. While still used as a mosque, it has also become a popular tourist attraction boasting over 20,000 hand-crafted tiles, 200 intricately designed stained glass windows and a multitude of Quranic verses reminding the visitor of the greatness of Allah.

A central design of these masajid has been the dual combination of minaret and dome, so much so that these are now seen as an architectural marker of a masjid. However, these innocent markers are increasingly coming under pressure as Muslims seek to peacefully build a place to worship their Lord in the West. Why?

Take the example of The Noor Islamic Center in Dublin, Ohio, one of the largest new Islamic worship centres in the U.S. It lacks minarets, and its domes are designed to be understated.

"We went to the architect and explained that we didn't want a building that stood out as a mosque," said Khaled Farag, one of The Noor Islamic Center’s founders.

"We wanted something that would fit into a residential neighbourhood. We wanted an American mosque," Farag said.

Architect Bob Apel says his marching orders were clear.

"They didn't want to impose themselves on everybody else," he said. "They wanted to be part of the community."

This statement is telling. What does it mean to be part of a community? With respect to the services offered, the masjid stands out as being an integral part of its local community. Approximately 2,000 people attend prayers weekly and the masjid hosts a variety of activities including legal and health clinics, weekend classes for children, counselling services and parenting classes, among others. It also holds a weekly "Islam 101" class and tour each Saturday, bringing in members of local churches and synagogues.

To me, such an open approach does not need to "blend" into the background. A Muslim community making a positive contribution to society should not feel that it must mimic the norm, if such a thing could be defined, in order to feel accepted. If we give in to those who object to the visible aspects of Islam they will not stop. Eventually they will begin to claim offence over every aspect of our lives, including even our names. We are already seeing it happening in schools where the first thing the teacher does when a child arrives in kindergarten is to Anglicise the Muslim name. Mohammad become "Mo" or "Ed" and Sumayyah becomes "Sam" or "Sami".

This move to become faceless Muslims is no doubt influenced by the growing islamophobic voices intent on removing all signs of a Muslim – the hijab being just one of their targets.

This is not the time to bow to these loud, ill-conceived voices intent on damaging Islam. Our approach now should be to stay steadfast in our visible signs, from hijab through to minaret, while embellishing these signs with the good character that our beloved Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him) came to teach us. In doing so, we will help to reconnect these signs of Islam to its central message of obedience to Allah and the good that comes with such obedience.

Hiding Behind the Smokescreen of Minority Rights

2011-10-05T22:06:00.000+01:00

Written by Wazir Uddin

The protection of minority rights is an important measure of a decent society; though this is always a negotiated position that needs to be reached between the various minority groups and the majority.

Beyond this incrementally negotiated status quo that emerges in a multicultural society or internationally within a vision of cosmopolitanism, to accept claims by states that they intervene within their own or foreign societies to preserve universal rights would be naïve. History reveals how European powers of the 19th and early 20th century would often invoke the minority rights of various Christian communities as a pretext to applying military and diplomatic pressure on the Ottomans. In the post-modern information age international and national powers seek to undermine Islam through claims of universal values intended to reform and undermine Muslim identity.

An exhibition at the Constitution Club in the Indian capital, Delhi, on the 24th of September by the Ahmadiyya movement - a religious group that emerged in 1889 and in its inception was closely embedded with British rule in India to contain the perceived Muslim threat - is a direct provocation of Muslim sentiments. A core tenet of the Islamic belief is the finality of the last Prophet Muhammad (SAW). This demarcates Muslim identity and the Ahmadiyya movement is based on beliefs which are outside this core tenet.

For the Ahmadiyyas to exhibit the Quran, the revealed text of Islam, and for them to appropriate the Quran is an attempt to provoke Muslim sentiments. Though such provocations have become the norm rather than an exception since the events of 9/11, the need to counter these attempts is required to resist the decline towards an entrenched Islamophobia that has gripped the world in an unfolding meta-narrative.

In anticipation of readers thinking that this is a case of intolerance, I will also make it clear at this point that the objection being made here is the claim by Ahmadiyyas that they are Muslim after believing in a prophet after Muhammad (SAW) and also to then appropriate the Quran to their movement.

In the words of Maulana Habibur Rahman Ludhyanvi, Shahi Imam of Punjab:

"We have many times said that the Qadyanis are not Muslims. They don’t believe in Prophet Muhammad and even in the oneness of Allah then how we will tolerate them. If the Qadyani want to do any program in India they should do it on the name of his false prophet Mirza Qadyani. We will not give them permission to use the name of Islam."

The Maulana has articulated the basic objection well; that attempts to use the name of Islam while undermining its beliefs is a question of provocation and an attack on Muslim sentiments. Invoking minority rights in this case is a cynical attempt to present a smokescreen to obscure the motives of the Congress Party and NGOs which sponsored this event.

Beyond Murdoch

2011-07-30T01:19:00.000+01:00

Written by Karima Hamdan

There is a fundamental problem with liberal democracy and liberalism. It isn't the sincerity of its proponents, which is often profound. It isn't the standards of intellectual rigour, which are mostly impressive. And it isn't the commitment to the well-being of its citizens, which is usually genuinely desired. It is none of these.

Rather, it is that whenever an issue is "processed" by it not to be completely liberal in its conception and application, its twin wheels of liberty and equal rights tend to fall off rather quickly.

Usually there is no problem with this and an informal system of "workarounds" is set in place with the net result being that the aberrant behaviour pattern is excused. This is why in the UK, USA and Western Europe we can have a flourishing gangsta rap culture whose beat-boxing high priests are feted superstars, despite promoting a culture which is profoundly homophobic, debases women, glorifies murder, rape and promiscuity, promotes drug and alcohol abuse and elevates the worst excesses of inner city ghetto life into some sort of macabre Elysium. At its nadir, rap music is the ideological strut that props up violent gang-related crime and drug-dealing in order to elevate it from brainless thuggery into a hip and edgy cool counterculture. Even its proponents cannot deny that rap is the background music of so many objectionable and criminal behaviours present in the UK today and it helps define the personalities of those who would embrace that lifestyle.

One wonders when the "Prevent" strategy targeting the culture of rap music will be launched. Will The Notorious B.I.G. be renamed the Considerate N.I.C.E? Will 50 Cent become Flake 99? Will the Wu-Tang Clan be given funny hats, handkerchiefs and bells and forced to Morris Dance whilst simultaneously rapping about the dangers of jaywalking and the immorality of whistling on a Sunday?

The answer is obviously no. Indeed, anyone seriously discussing a ban on certain types of rap music or increasing surveillance on anyone listening to rap music (justified by concerns that they are "vulnerable to gang-related extremism") would be castigated as, at best, an out-of-date fascist ill at odds with the modern world and, at worst, an ignorant xenophobe unable to accept any lifestyle different from his own. Therefore one sees that before anyone has a chance to say "Stop - (Hammer Time!)", the informal workarounds of liberal democracy have kicked in and ring-fenced the aberrant behaviour.

And yet here we are in a post-Prevent world in which doctors and nurses are encouraged to inform on their Muslim patients, teachers are advised to monitor Muslim children and university lecturers are advised to spy on their students. Many Muslims now find themselves labelled as "non-violent extremists" despite being entirely law-abiding citizens. There is now state sponsored ghettoisation of the Muslim community as the government refuses to engage with many of our representatives on any level, preferring instead to broaden New Labour's doomed policy of creating, funding and patronising a series of misfits, quislings and non-entities whom they deem appropriate to be our leaders.

The legitimate space that Muslims inhabit in civil society is shrinking and what room we have left is becoming increasingly constrained by our own discomfiture. It is as though there is an intellectual pincer movement that seeks to socially engineer Islam by defining us in terms of what causes unease and humiliation and so the British Muslim, cheeks aflame with embarrassment and shame, beats a hasty path down the road of compromise and reformation.

Just take the recent media furore regarding cousin marriages within the Muslim community. Whilst it is allowed in Islam, the prevalence of cousin marriages is a feature of a subsection of the Pakistani community in the UK and, when one looks at other Muslim groups like the Arabs or Africans, or indeed the most populated Muslim country on Earth, Indonesia, one sees that this practice is quite rare. Instead of pointing this out, we are treated to a series of insulting stereotypes of an inbred religious community stubbornly producing disabled children due to its mulish ignorance coupled with a desire to sponge off the NHS. Cue then the "made-for-television" community leaders stuttering out platitudes and promising to reform Islam in order to stamp out this aberration.

Again this is seen with Tariq Ramadan's "moratorium" on the hudood punishments. Instead of asking why we should be wasting time debating laws that are highly unlikely to be implemented in our day to day lives (owing to the simple absence of the context required for their implementation), we are instead informed that we will not progress as a community until this issue is dealt with, becoming in the process one man's credibility passport to join the intellectual chatterati of Europe. Now, when questioned about the "medieval barbarity" of Islam, Ramadan no longer has to tie himself into knots of cognitive dissonance defending the shari'ah, but rather can affect a classic Gallic shrug and speak patronisingly about how Islam has to move slowly but surely into the modern world.

Is this just paranoia on my part? A determination to find fault with a political system and mass media culture that has never claimed to be perfect? How could I possibly be cynical in the same week that Rupert and James Murdoch were brought before a parliamentary committee to answer questions relating to News International's complicity in phone hacking and bribery of the police?

Sadly, just as the election of Barack Obama was met with wild jubilation that real change was imminent when the reality was that he was more of the same; just as we were thrilled at the hopes of the Arab spring when, as the Egyptians found out this week, the front man changed but the edifice he stood on didn't; British Muslims will find that it is business as usual in the media and government whether or not there is a Murdoch in News International or a Coulson in Downing Street. John Pilger writing this week in the New Statesman makes this succinct comment:

"Certainly, there is no 'revolution', as reported in the Guardian, which compared the fall of Murdoch with that of the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania in 1989. The over excitement is understandable; Nick Davies's scoop is a great one. Yet the truth is, Britain's system of elite monopoly control of the media rests not on News International alone, but on the Mail and the Guardian and the BBC, perhaps the most influential of all. All share a corporate monoculture that sets the agenda of the 'news', defines acceptable politics by maintaining the fiction of distinctive parties, normalises unpopular wars and guards the limits of 'free speech'. This will be strengthened by the illusion that a 'bad apple' has been 'rooted out'."

This became apparent in the initial reportage of the terrible events in Oslo. Despite it being a completely unclear and fluid situation, there was almost universal agreement that the attacks were carried out by a Muslim. It became almost an echo chamber. The Quilliam Foundation tweeted its wild speculations about cartoon reprinting, the number of F16s Norway has deployed over Libya and even one bizarre tweet that seemed to suggest that Islamists couldn’t tell the difference between various Scandinavian countries; whilst newspapers wrote blogs and articles on the basis of these baseless stabs in the dark. The Sun had it all figured out as soon as the shooting started, judging from its front page; whilst there was a wealth of talking heads populating BBC News 24, such as Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens' son) and Houriya Ahmed (of Douglas Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion) offering up their ill-informed opinions of snippets of information and grainy video footage. There was even a US State Department "terrorism expert" who managed to magic up a fictitious jihadist group "Helpers for the Global Jihad" that had claimed responsibility for the bombing. This was apparently sourced from an "elite jihadist internet forum" to which he had access, where, one imagines, hardcore jihadists like to boast about their acts of terrorism to US State Department officials, who then pass on all the details to the media. And thus wild conjecture, having passed through the digestive tract of prejudiced think-tanks and self promoting "experts" went from a vague "gut feeling" to newsworthy material.

One could almost hear a collective sigh of relief from the British Muslim populace when it became clear that the man accused of the appalling atrocity in Norway was not only not a Muslim but rather a blond-haired, blue-eyed Christian, far right Islamophobe and admirer of the EDL. Despite this, and despite the progressive escalation of violent attacks by people who hold far right views about mosques and Muslims, both in the UK and in Europe, I doubt very much if we will see the same Prevent-style treatment doled out to right-wingers. So there will be no conveyor belt to terrorism for the right wing: at one end being the "non-violent extremists" (presumably Douglas Murray and Michael Gove) starting their inevitable journey to rabid violence and radicalised along the way by "hate-preachers" like Melanie Phillips and Pamela Geller.

This would never happen. In the same way that Roshana Choudary's attempted murder of MP Stephen Timms is never compared to Jared Lee Loughner's shooting of US representative Gabrielle Giffords, Anders Behring Breivik will be cast as a madman rather than a terrorist. His widely mentioned twitter quotation from John Stuart Mill is from the same book "On Liberty" which is ceremonially presented to the leader of the Liberal Democrats as a symbol of office. We will not be told about "On Liberty" being a radicalising influence nor about the "British connection to terror" despite Breivik obviously getting the wrong end of the stick if he felt that the murder of nearly 100 people could be related to this book. Similarly, I don't expect to hear prominent Christians being commanded ritually to denounce Breivik as Muslims are expected to do. Nor will national newspapers castigate them for not disowning and denouncing Breivik fast or fulsomely enough.

Some will say that this is perfectly legitimate. After all, aren't Muslims at the forefront of any terrorism related activity? Well, not according to the EU, whose Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2010 states that in 2009 there were "294 failed, foiled, or successfully executed attacks in six European countries", which is an almost one-third decrease from the total in 2008 and down by almost one-half from the total in 2007. And as for who was responsible for these attacks, it may surprise readers to find out that of 294 attacks in 2009, only one was carried out by Muslims. The vast majority of attacks were perpetrated by sectarian groups like Basque separatists or the IRA. The latter has increased its number of attacks, totalling 124 in 2009, including the murder of two soldiers and a police officer. Interestingly, the IRA has historically received funding, support and general succour from US citizens as well as members of the US government. One of the IRA's most staunch defenders was none other than Peter King, the Republican senator who is chair of the Homeland Security Committee and responsible for the recent McCarthyite hearings in the US.

I seem to have missed the widespread reportage of the downward trend of terrorism in Europe and an expose of the link between US senators and the murder of soldiers and police officers. But, as Pilger puts it, "There is an acrid smell of business as usual."

Similarly in Downing Street, the departure of Andy Coulson and his current headlong fall from grace since his arrest will not change the micro-climate of suspicion and alienation that surrounds British Muslims. The fingerprints all over the Prevent strategy (as well as other anti-Muslim initiatives) are not those of Andy Coulson but rather the work of Education Minister Michael Gove. Husain Al-Qadi of UmmahPulse, in the run up to the 2009 election, wrote insightfully about Gove and the level of influence he enjoyed over the then opposition leader David Cameron. It seems that this influence has if anything increased since the election and now Gove appears to hold sway over the cabinet on issues concerning Islam and Muslims. That is not to say that Michael Gove and News International are not significantly enmeshed. Indeed, Michael Gove is second only to George Osbourne with respect to the number of meetings held with News Corp officials, including six meals with Rupert Murdoch in 2010. This is without mention of his close ties with the Murdoch family’s "fixer", top US lawyer Joel Klein (seen here at the recent Parliamentary hearings sitting directly behind James Murdoch and next to Wendi Deng), who describes Gove as his "hero". Incidentally, Klein appears to be Gove's inspiration for many of his ideas about education, which he seems to have imported wholesale from the US where Klein was a chancellor of the New York City school system. During his tenure, 100 government schools were closed and replaced with a free market system of charter schools which operated outside of public control and with a selective admissions process.

Michael Gove's book "Celsius 7/7", which is openly hostile to Islam (rebranded Islamism so it can be easily denigrated without risk of backlash), was published in 2006 and given as a gift to MPs heading for their summer break as essential holiday reading. Less than five years later, we see its ideas, principles and goals adopted wholesale by the government. This is despite the presence of Sayeeda Warsi in the Cabinet as Chair of the Conservative Party. Even the new Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred, proposed by the government in the last week, will need to demonstrate that it has the will to move beyond jargon and spin and actually deal with the rising tide of Muslim hate crimes in the UK. This will not occur if membership of the group is limited to fusty, out of touch academics, crusading priests and progressive Muslim limousine liberals who all begin their discussion with a common mantra: that unreformed Islam is the problem to be solved. If they want sincerely to tackle anti-Muslim hate crime, instead of just formulating another useless committee and talking us to death about integration, the government needs to rid its own house of "Muslim haters" (such as Messrs Gove et al) and rewrite the language and policy of stigmatising rhetoric that has become the norm for official pronouncements. Only a root and branch clear out will do. Not just some cosmetic pruning, a few impressive sounding committees and another Number 10 Eid Party.

As an aside, Baroness Warsi must realise that she has become completely irrelevant to policy formulation for British Muslims and her personage is only required when wheeled out to deflect criticism that the government is anti-Muslim. The old excuse that it is better to be part of a flawed process to try and improve it rather than have no influence at all, simply doesn't wash because she has been completely unable or unwilling to prevent (or even modify) Prevent. Personal integrity must dictate that at some point a loud, angry, very public resignation is of more worth than continuing meek, private submission.

Does this mean that British Muslims should crack under an immense sense of the inevitable injustice of it all and, like an archetypal recalcitrant teenager, yell about how unfair it all is before stomping off to our bedroom and slamming the door? Obviously not, but we need to know who is agitating against us and what course of action they seem intent on taking. This is especially since the appearance of the EDL's Tommy Robinson on Newsnight following the Oslo attacks when, without the merest hint of contrition that someone with ideologically identical views to him just massacred nearly 100 people, he predicted similar attacks occurring on UK soil within 5 years. The unabashed gall of the man is something to behold, as is his rapidly increasing "slickness" as a media player. Whoever is training him needs to be congratulated for their efficiency. With such startling results, Crufts beckons!

As a minority group, Muslims are not so uniquely unusual or dangerous that our mere presence in society causes a liberal democracy to fracture, thus requiring special laws to be enacted to "deal" with us. Neither, as the events of the last week have demonstrated, are we the only group which has individuals bent on spreading death and destruction. The purpose of comparing the media response to the Oslo massacre with that of a similar act carried out by a Muslim is not for cheap points scoring, or founded in some cynical sense of schadenfreude, but rather to highlight the glaring double standards present in society. Should it not provide food for thought that when some psychopath starts murdering people hundreds or even thousands of miles away, the majority of Muslims in the West, from every walk of life, ethnic group and background remain distracted and perturbed until it is demonstrated that "we" didn't do it, whereupon the sense of relief is profound? Just when did we become such a globally culpable community living under the constant threat of having our way of life mocked and condemned in the national press?

For Muslims in Britain the road ahead has not altered its course, nor has the terrain become any more hospitable. If anything, our trajectory along it has increased apace just as the storm clouds gather overhead. The media’s response to the shootings in Oslo, despite the muzzling of the Murdoch press, has cast into sharp relief what sort of community we are: stigmatised by government strategies, stereotyped by the media, sentenced to have our leadership foisted upon us rather than chosen from among us.

And yet, despite the many and various attempts to embarrass and castigate us into changing our religion, we should have certainty in Islam, the Messenger (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) and the Book and know that to be given Guidance is to be in receipt of the greatest treasure the world has to offer. Ramadan, the greatest month of the year, full of the blessings and mercy of Allah is almost upon us and, as we fast during the long summer days, current events coupled with our thirst and hunger should reinforce the fact that, whilst the path of Allah may not be easy, it is always straight and our duty is to remain resolutely on it despite those that would waylay us.

The bedouins say, "We have believed." Say, "You have not yet believed; but say instead, 'We have submitted,' for faith has not yet entered your hearts. And if you obey Allah and His Messenger, He will not deprive you from your deeds of anything. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful."

The believers are only the ones who have believed in Allah and His Messenger and then doubt not but strive with their properties and their lives in the cause of Allah. It is those who are the truthful.

Say, "Would you acquaint Allah with your religion while Allah knows whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth, and Allah is Knowing of all things?"

They consider it a favour to you that they have accepted Islam. Say, "Do not consider your Islam a favour to me. Rather, Allah has conferred favour upon you that He has guided you to the faith, if you should be truthful.

Indeed, Allah knows the unseen aspects of the heavens and the earth. And Allah is All Seeing of what you do.
(Quran 49:14-18)

A Point of Interest

2011-06-08T23:48:00.000+01:00

Written by Muhammad Tahir

"So I assume in Islamic countries it works this way and poverty is almost non-existent? Are there any role-models that implement what you are suggesting here?

"Sorry, another question:

"Interest, no matter how abundant, ultimately leads to poverty."

"So what do Islamic banks take instead an interest? I assume a fee? How high is this fee or who determines the amount of this fee?"

"Are Islamic organisations not seeking profit?"

Several important questions were raised in response to my previous article about the Grameen Bank which we at UmmahPulse felt were worth exploring in a bit more detail. I would like to thank "Anonymous" for his/her questions, because the answers help clarify some important points with regards to the Islamic financial system in particular as well as the goals and objectives of Islamic law in general.

Before answering Anonymous' specific questions, it is important to note that the current global financial system represents an incredibly corrupt, secretive and unaccountable network which creates money out of nothing, for the enrichment of a few at the expense of the many. Now, that might sound somewhat hyperbolous, but it is accurate. Can you think of any other industry that could directly receive over $700 billion in tax payer monies (not to mention the $12.8 TRILLION which were required to stabilize the economy after it almost collapsed due to unregulated financial dealings by the same banks), and then, after a slap on the wrist, just go right back to business (and bonuses) as usual? I don't know about you, but an interest based financial system that ends up $13 trillion in the hole would pretty much confirm the statement of the Prophet (peace and blessings upon him), that "Interest, no matter how abundant, ultimately leads to poverty."

It is also worth noting that before filing for bankruptcy, General Motors was making more money from its financial services arm than it was from making cars. In fact, up to 90% of GM's profits were derived from various types of loans and financial derivatives - including the type that led to the most recent financial crisis.

Why is this important? It is important because financial services do not create wealth or value - they just leaching off the wealth created by real economic activity. Taking steel and rubber and glass and electrical wiring and turning it into a car which can be sold for two or three times the value of the raw materials is creating wealth. Tilling land, planting seeds and then selling the resultant produce is also an example of creating wealth. Giving someone $100 to start a business and demanding $110 back at the end of the year regardless of the success or failure of the business is just a drag on the real economy. Lending money in return for interest is just a way to solidify the dominance of the owners of capital over the owners of other resources, like land or natural resources or labour. Islam argues that capital is just another input with no position of preference. If one partner puts in a pound of sweat, and the other puts in a pound of gold, then they're partners in success and failure, in the proportions they agree upon (in Islam, this type of contract is known as mudaarabah).

The objective of the Islamic Shari'ah (code of law) is not to create a utopia on earth (which even many Muslims do not comprehend) wherein poverty will never exist. Rather, the economic principles in Islam constitute a divinely inspired system which seeks to minimize the risk of conflict in people's dealings by delineating clear rights and obligations for contracts and relationships while prohibiting certain types of transactions outright. When it comes to the Islamic financial system, Islam recognizes the profit motive, but sets limits within which fair and just dealing should occur. To appreciate the dysfunction of the current financial system, it is enough to say that the current value of financial instruments being traded on the world's stock exchanges outstrip the value of the true economy by many multiples. If the purpose of the financial system is to facilitate trade and investment, does it make sense that the instruments that are supposed to be doing the facilitating are worth more than any possible real trade and investment? Much has been written about the rising cost of food; the real reason the price of food is going up is not a shortage of supply. Indeed in 2008, the world's total arable land amounted to 13,805,153 km², whereas 48,836,976 km² was classified as "agricultural land". That means that less than 1/3 of the world's agricultural potential was actually being tapped. And people are still worried about the earth's population growing from 6 to 9 billion people?

The real economy is not the problem. It is speculation on the global financial markets which is driving up prices such that real people can't afford to buy real food. Meanwhile, commodity traders buy and sell tons of food that they will never physically see or take possession of - a type of transaction which is explicitly forbidden in shari'ah. Since the traders have no interest in actually consuming the commodities they are trading, it is the end consumers - you and me - who suffer when we actually need to eat.

Islam states that real economic activity should generate wealth, and financial instruments should be strictly regulated to facilitate real economic activity only. A farmer needs some money to plant his harvest? He should be hooked up with an investor: the legitimate function of financial markets is to help pair investors with businesses. They can negotiate that the farmer and the investor will each get a certain share of the output of the crop. If the crop fails, the farmer loses his blood and sweat and the investor loses his cash. If there's a bumper harvest, both reap the benefit according to their agreed shares.

What Islamic banks may or may not do in the current context is a separate and vast subject. "Islamic finance" is quite a craze these days and not all of it is necessarily in accordance with the shari'ah. The fact that the likes of Citibank and Goldman Sachs now have Islamic Finance divisions should certainly give one pause for thought. Until there is an Islamic financial system which is completely independent of the conventional system, we will all be covered in the dust of riba, as foretold by the Prophet (may peace and blessing be upon him).

The Sisyphean Task of Rights and Wrongs

2011-05-30T23:47:00.002+01:00

Written by Karima Hamdan

Whenever "women’s rights" and "Islam" or "Muslims" are mentioned in the same sentence, one must resist the almost overwhelming desire to run shrieking from the room in a desperate attempt to avoid being caught up in what appears to be some sort of a science fiction-esque time-loop.

It seems that sometime in the 1970s, the question of Muslim women's rights was first raised, causing a fracture in the space-time continuum which has resulted in a continuous replaying of the same old questions, the same old arguments and the same old stereotypes that can never be settled or solved. Rather, as soon as one feels that the issues have been addressed, everything suddenly flicks back to square one with belligerent questions about wife-beating and forced marriages.

There is almost no other debate that is so circular and repetitious; in other situations, debates are linear and things move on whether we like it or not. Consider the issue of homosexuality: a century ago it was illegal; half a century ago there was almost universal agreement that it was an abhorrent and abnormal behaviour pattern. Yet within the space of a few short decades, we have gay clergy, civil partnerships, and homosexual relationships shown on children's television and anyone who has the audacity to criticise it can expect to become persona non grata, perhaps even receiving a visit from the local constabulary on account of "hate speech". Thus it was that the opinion of the minority group was translated into open acceptance by the wider community.

In respect of Muslim women's rights, there has been neither movement of the debate, nor acceptance of the minority group's view by the community at large. Let us examine the effect the debate has on many a Muslim woman.

One starts off with the enthusiastic Muslimah. She is passionate, eloquent and usually fearsomely well colour-coordinated in her choice of hijab and jilbaab. She delivers heartfelt lectures to packed lecture halls, holds her own with aplomb on interfaith panels and patiently corrects misinformed work colleagues.

One can hear from her about the Islamic legal system, which gave women rights centuries before other systems followed suit, as well as the thousands of female scholars who flourished in the Muslim world. She may then patiently explain the whole Islamic concept of gender equity.

Once she gets warmed up, she may launch into a critique of modern feminism and how it seems to resemble less a philosophical system and more an overly small blanket that inadequately warms the whole person: get women's workplace reform covered but find that children are suffering from a lack of time with their mother in their early lives; hammer out gender equality and find concurrently increasing levels of relationship instability and divorce; bring about the right of women to wear what they want and find that exploitation and objectification pokes out inconveniently.

"There," our perky Muslimah thinks, "job done. Let's move on."

But open a newspaper, turn on the radio or watch the television and one finds that "Groundhog Day" has started once again and it is as if she had never spoken at all. So, off she goes again, with a smile that is slightly forced and shoulders which are beginning to droop until, yet again, at the end of her labours there is no discernible change on the ground.

And so, like Sisyphus, the king punished in Greek mythology to push an immense boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down again, our Muslimah has once more to set her shoulder to the wheel and start all over again.

This intellectual waterboarding constrains our initially perky Muslimah within an argument that floods her senses with images and arguments that label her as a victim, living within the stifling bonds of a religion that hates her. When she has the temerity to speak up on her own behalf, she is ignored and the sound-track loops back to the beginning. It is little wonder that when the issue of Muslim women's rights is raised, the feeling is more like drowning than discussion.

Against this backdrop, some Muslims have begun to echo the language and arguments of those opposed to Islam, a result of the constant narrative in the media which links all the evils visited upon Muslim women by Muslim men with the religion of Islam. This is a view that has now become enshrined as received wisdom, rather than a view based on prejudice, that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and has the faint odour of racism at its heart.

One group echoing arguments in this way is an organisation called Inspire. It is run by three Muslim women whose apparent wish is to "inspire women to organise themselves to support families and social circles". As a group, they seem to have bought completely into the idea that without some sort of government-funded, social life-support system, Muslim women will simply crumble into mute, domestically-abused, chappati-making machines, seasoning their curries with their bitter tears of despair, and folding up and putting away their hopes and dreams along with the carefully ironed socks of their domineering husband.

The website makes frequent mention of the sidelining of Muslim women on account of the "misguided emphasis on their private domestic roles" and there are frequent complaints that a woman’s role as a mother is celebrated by Muslims and within Islam, thereby "laying on the guilt" for those who work. Ask most stay-at-home mothers, Muslim or not, and they would tell you that in today's world it is a rare and beautiful thing to find anyone praising the role of the "housewife", rather than making them feel inadequate that they cannot combine the roles of domestic goddess, high-flying career woman and "supernanny".

As for the idea that there is a deliberate desire to guilt-trip working mothers, it would indicate that the author of these articles, one Sara Khan, has some personal baggage that she has not yet unpacked and if she chooses to work when her children are young, then she should deal with any personal guilt she has without blaming Muslims and Islam.

The first step towards "gender inequality" was made by Allah our Creator when He bestowed upon women the responsibility of bearing children as well as the means by which they are initially fed. The inconvenient reality, whilst it may drive feminists into conniptions of rage, is that there is study after study after study (and I could go on and on) which demonstrates that in their early years, children are best taken care of by their mothers. The comforting reality is that Allah, the Most Merciful, generously repays women for this mammoth task by giving mothers the oft-quoted but little reflected upon gift of "Heaven at their feet" (according to a hadith of the Prophet, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him).

But one gets the impression that reality is not a space that the women at Inspire often inhabit. What is clear from their website, and from interviews they have given, is whilst they may reel off a list of problems that affect our community, they don’t offer a solution but rather an agenda.

The agenda is simple: the ills of the Muslim community can be cured if Muslim women are "empowered". This empowerment comes from jettisoning what they term "ultra-conservative" or "patriarchal readings of Islam". They conflate un-Islamic cultural practices, such as forced marriages, with basic tenets of Islamic practice like hijab. They prop up their aberrant ideas with shaadh (marginal) opinions from a minority of scholars and then use statements like this to muddy the waters:

"Acceptance and reverence was given to the idea of ikhtilaaf (disagreement and diversity). The Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) himself said the disagreement of the Ummah is a source of mercy. Why do Muslims insist on their [sic] being one opinion when clearly this is a lie?"

Inspire seem to think that opinions are like noses: everyone has one and we can do no better than to follow it. But this type of "follow your nose" Islam, stinks like the effluvium of a month old haddock. Whilst our history is replete with scholastic disagreement (and some say that had it not been for the emergence of the four main schools of thought in Sunni Islam, the faith would have disintegrated into hundreds if not thousands of distinct religions), in Islam there are principles and parameters within which opinions are accepted and rejected. These principles and parameters are the usul upon which the vast majority of the Ummah have agreed. Those who tout the hadith paraphrased by Khan above tend to forget other ahadith:

Imam Hakim (1/116) has related a sahih hadith from the Prophet (peace be upon him) in the following words: "My Ummah shall not agree upon error."

Imam al-Tirmidhi (4/2167) reported on the authority of Ibn Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) from the Prophet (may Allah bless him and give him peace), who said: "Verily my Ummah will not agree (or he said the Ummah of Muhammad will not agree) upon error and Allah's hand is over the group, and whoever dissents from them departs to Hell." (see also Mishkat, 1/173)

Inspire use the arguments and tools of those who would attack Islam in order to push forward their agenda. To this end, we see on the Inspire facebook page a video posted on 18 May 2011 (provided by Memri) showing an interview with a elderly shaykh helpfully entitled "How to beat your Muslim wife". For those not familiar with Memri, the acronym stands for the Middle East Media Research Institute, which is a thinly-veiled propaganda vehicle for none other than The Only Democracy in the Middle East. It is run by one Yigal Carmon, who was a colonel in the IDF for 20 years. Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations describes Memri thus:

"Memri's intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible."

Brian Whitaker, writing in the Guardian, also exposes another of Memri's specialisms: mistranslating Arabic in order to show what is being said in the worst possible light. Did the person within the Inspire team who posted such a divisive clip have the whole interview independently translated, or were they simply too busy whining about being misunderstood?

I remain simply astonished that an organisation that wishes to be thought of as being somehow supportive of the Muslim community would stoop so low as to propagate these video clips from such an openly anti-Muslim organisation. I can only assume that Inspire's next stunt would be to invite the EDL's Tommy Robinson or Guramit Singh to address their upcoming conference as they too seem well versed in the ways that Muslims and Islam harm women. An interesting aside is that one of the co-founders of Inspire is Tahmina Saleem who, when she is not forming "strategic networks" and "formulating bespoke services", happens to be Inayat Bunglawala's wife. It is staggering that she would have such a clip up on the Inspire facebook page when Memri has attempted to defame her husband on a number of occasions. Or perhaps this is also a form of Muslim woman's empowerment - promote those who would try to destroy your husband.

Undeterred by its inability to grasp this reality, Inspire has chosen to organise its biggest event yet: a conference in a few days' time called "Speaking in God's Name - Re-examining Gender in Islam". After much harping on about how women are excluded from mosques, there is some unintentional but entirely delicious irony in organising a conference for women with a complete absence of any childcare facilities and choosing a venue within which no children are allowed. It seems that Sara Khan, Tahmina Saleem and Kalsoom Bashir are only willing to "Inspire" women without children or with such cast iron childcare in place that they can fork out the astronomical £175 ticket price, for which there is now no refund available if cancelled.

Advertising material for the event includes statements such as:

"Why is everyone obsessed with the headscarf. It's only a piece of cloth!"
"It is time that men stop dictating to women what they can and cannot do and allow them to live their lives."
"Why does my mosque refuse to allow me to pray inside just because I am a woman?"

These statements reveal a great deal about Inspire. The hijab is obligatory in Islam (according to the vast majority of scholars - both male and female - since the start of Islam), whereas attending the masjid for women is at best a voluntary act. Yet here is Inspire denigrating hijab as a nice but entirely unnecessary gesture whilst upgrading masjid attendance to the status of Custer's last stand at Little Bighorn (with the requisite numbers of rather cross Indians in attendance). It obviously hasn't occurred to them that it seems just a tad hypocritical to be causing such a fuss over what is sunnah (optional) whilst completely discrediting what is fard (obligatory).

As for their declaration regarding men "dictating to" women, I wonder if Mesdames Khan, Saleem and Bashir include our Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wasallam) in this statement because it is via this blessed man (sallallahu alayhi wasallam) that we have been dictated to regarding not only what we can wear, what we can and cannot do but also everything up to and including which shoe we should put on first. Instead of engaging in such childish feminist rhetoric, they should instead realise that a person's gender is entirely irrelevant when the guidance is from Allah.

Other faith groups don't seem to have a problem with living within their religion without a constant commentary enjoining them to reform. Consider also the UK's community of ultra-orthodox or Haredi Jews. With their segregated closed-off communities, sky-rocketing rates of unemployment and housing benefit claims (close to 60%), lack of education, modestly dressed women and high birth rates (averaging 5.9 children per family compared to the UK average of 2.4), one wonders why they don't draw the ire of right wing windbags like Richard Littlejohn and Melanie Phillips. Instead, they are treated as a quaint community with an old fashioned folksy charm – a bit like a Kosher version of the Amish. For them, any discussion about women's rights is rapidly shut down as being anti-Semitic, as this feminist journalist found out to her peril.

No current discussion of Muslim women's rights can be had without reflecting on the rather ironic situation in which a presidential candidate of a country that has recently banned Muslim women's right to wear the niqab (owing to much trumpeted concerns about preserving Muslim women's rights and dignity) has been accused of violating a Muslim woman's rights and dignity in the basest way possible. Whilst many pertinent comparisons can be drawn between the alleged behaviour of the head of the IMF towards poor women and the actual behaviour of the IMF towards poor countries, for me the most interesting development of the whole matter is who actually made the allegation. Monsieur Strauss-Kahn has a history of such behaviour and was labelled with the seemingly honorific title of "le grand séducteur" (the Great Seducer) by some elements of the French press. Just days after the news broke of his arrest, another journalist reported that she too had been molested by this man nine years previously. It is pertinent to note who actually had the courage to stand up to this sexual deviant. Was it the liberated French journalist - educated, well-connected and seemingly unfettered by any alliances with "paternalistic interpretations of a medieval religion"? No. Instead it was the poor, uneducated, (reportedly) hijab-wearing, Muslim woman who valued her dignity sufficiently highly that when it was violated, she refused to allow the perpetrator to go unpunished. Courage, it seems, is not provided by solar photovoltaic cells located in a woman's hair that can only activate when her head is uncovered. Rather, it wells up from a soul firmly connected to its Creator.

Yet, despite this, there seems to be a growing trend among some Muslim women who see their religion not as a lodestone of inner strength that is made more powerful by following the commandments of Allah on issues such as the hijab, but rather as an obstacle course to be navigated around in order to become successful. What they do not realise is a truly empowered Muslim woman is not some elegantly coiffeured über-feminist but rather a woman who truly submits to the will of Allah.

"O you who have believed, enter into Islam completely [and perfectly] and do not follow the footsteps of Satan. Indeed, he is to you a clear enemy." (2:208)

"Has not the time yet come for those who believe that their hearts should soften with humility and submit (to God to strive in His cause) in the face of God's Remembrance (the Qur'an) and what has come down of the truth (the Divine teachings)? And (has not the time yet come) that they should not be like those who were given the Book before? A long time has passed over them (after they received the Book), and so their hearts have hardened; and many among them (have been) transgressors." (57:16)

Grameen Bank Woes

2011-05-14T23:02:00.000+01:00

Written by Muhammad Tahir

"Poverty almost results in disbelief." (Bayhaqi)

"Interest, no matter how abundant it may be, ultimately results in poverty." (Ahmad)

Give loans to the poor so that they can pull themselves out of poverty through entrepreneurship. Who could argue with that? Certainly not Bono, the Clintons, and ultimately the Nobel Prize Committee. And so it was that a plucky economist from Bangladesh named Muhammad Yunus "invented" micro-credit and set the poor of the world onto the road of wealth and affluence.
Unfortunately, things didn't quite work out as planned after Professor Yunus' triumphant valedictory address in Norway. Certainly there were warning signs: an unfortunate colleague of mine who had the pleasure of being seated next to Mr Yunus on a flight while he bragged about how much money he was making; or perhaps the fact that the children of his famous first customer, Sufia Begum, still apparently live in a squalid shack.

As a Muslim (and an economist), there are just so many things wrong with the Grameen concept of microfinance that it is difficult to know where to start. A good place might be Grameen and its founder Professor Yunus' current predicament. Recently cleared of allegations that almost $100 million donated to the Grameen Bank by Norway was instead siphoned off to a for-profit subsidiary for other purposes, Grameen continues to fend off allegations that "micro-credit" doesn’t necessarily translate into "micro-interest rates" with increasing evidence that Grameen was charging annual rates of interest in excess of 30%. The entire movement of micro-credit has come under question as revelations emerge that rates of debt-related suicide have sky-rocketed following the opening of micro-credit facilities in Uttar Pradesh province in India.

While many have decried the attack against Yunus as a combination of political vendetta on the part of Bangladesh's Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, and sour grapes on the part of those who envied Yunus' Nobel success, the rot underlying Grameen's apparent success runs much deeper. The fact of the matter is that it is not a lack of working capital which is the root cause of poverty in the developing world. To suggest that there is some nebulous untapped store of disposable wealth which poor women can magically tap into by getting a £150 loan to set up a tea stall and become rich is just wishful thinking. It also plays to conservative prejudices which suggest that poverty is a self-inflicted condition which just requires individual effort to escape.

It is much easier for Western governments to throw a bit of cash at micro-credit and some laurels at Muhammad Yunus than to address the serious structural problems that perpetuate developing world poverty. Take for example the ongoing Doha Round of negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) which have largely ground to a halt. One of the main sticking points was the ongoing insistence of wealthy developed countries to have unrestricted access to poor economies in which to dump their agricultural and industrial over-production, effectively smothering domestic industries. At the same time, those same poor countries are denied free access to developed, wealthy markets in which to sell their own output. So basically, it comes down to this: you must take the output of our massive, subsidized, industrialized economies instead of developing any of your own industries. Oh, and here's some money to set up a tea stall, at 30% a year. Hooray for micro-credit! And don't forget to pay off your IMF and World Bank loans too...

Even if none of this shady business had ever come to light, it has been disappointing to note how many progressive Muslim types have jumped onto the micro-credit bandwagon. It has become just another stick with which to beat the behind-the-times "fundos": how backward to decry such an obvious way to lift the poor out of poverty. Indeed, micro-credit has even been touted as an antidote to Islamic extremism - not because it introduces riba into the lives of millions, but because it allows women to become self-employed. Someone was clearly ignorant of the biography of Zainab bint Jahsh, the wife of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) who ran her own business. There is no such prohibition in Islam.

In an age where enthusiasm for Islamic finance is on the rise, it seems counter-intuitive to support a system which instead promotes a vast, financially unsustainable web of loan sharking. While it is true that Grameen borrowers mostly pay back their loans on time, there is ample evidence to show that this is accomplished in many cases by taking further loans from the networks of money lenders that have been operating in most rural economies since the pre-Grameen days.

It would be unfair however to leave it at that, as some would inevitably suggest that Islam has nothing to say on the issue of improving the lot of the poor or providing solutions to the intractable poverty which Muslims, among others, face the world over. Before getting into the detail, it is essential to understand that structural poverty is neither inevitable nor accidental. The true cost of imperialism is not measured in the bombs over Iraq or the Occupied Territories, but rather in the lopsided trade agreements which continue to perpetuate the upper hand in global trade which is enjoyed by the rich industrialized nations.

It is worth remembering that it was Muslims who first developed a robust framework for commercial trade. A brief perusal of even the most basic classical treatise of Hanafi fiqh will reveal detailed discussions on various forms of rental, partnership, financing and liability - none of which involves interest. These concepts continue to provide the basis for commercial law as we know it. In many cases, the descriptions of financial liability found in 1,000 year old Islamic texts appear to have been cut and pasted into the modern context.

This is a legacy which, all too often, Muslims ignore. What remains is Muslims peddling riba to other Muslims, backed by Western money and prestige. We can certainly do better than that. What is required of us is to rediscover our past heritage and ask our scholars to apply it to the modern context. This is not the same as changing Islam to fit the modern context as some pseudo-intellectual Muslims have called for. Even without knowing the details of the Grameen model, we only need the warning of the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wasallam) to steer us clear: "Interest, no matter how abundant, ultimately leads to poverty." But at the same time, faced with crushing poverty and no viable options, it is easy to understand how Muslims continue to fall for such schemes: "Poverty is a condition which can almost lead to disbelief."

Any real solutions to the problems of developing world poverty need to look beyond the condition of the poor. The problem is not a lack of wealth. Of course, most people don't want the poor to remain impoverished, but if it is a choice of their SUV/McMansion/latest iPhone versus someone else's dinner, the choice becomes somewhat problematic. Even Bono, lead singer of U2 and global crusader for international debt forgiveness, balked when asked to pay higher taxes. Bono, if your government isn't going to make its cash from taxing its own financial activity, can you blame them if they continue to prey on the poor to build national wealth? As a member of the EU, Ireland continues to pursue trade policies which disadvantage the poorest of poor nations. The problem mainly lies at the feet of rich nations which prioritize national wealth and the protection of otherwise uncompetitive (but strategically important, such as agriculture) industries over foreign aid and development. This is completely understandable within a global system which equates the advancement of mankind with economic growth. What we need to ask ourselves in the wealthy countries of the world is whether this is the only objective of our civilization?

While Islam encourages trade and development, it does not exist simply to facilitate it. As Muslims, we should recognize the need for financial growth as a means to alleviate poverty, but not to the exclusion of spiritual growth. Will a new car and fresh bedsheets from Harvey Nics really make your life better when the old ones were functioning perfectly well? The anti-consumer movement in the West is remarkably silent when it comes to a real alternative to consumption, which is why it remains on the fringes. Muslims must take the lead in promoting a lifestyle focused not on more and more consumption, but on greater and deeper connection with the Creator. With this in mind, third world poverty becomes less a choice between us and them, and more a reflection of not only our interconnectedness with our neighbours in the global village, but our responsibility to help those who have less.

Ibn 'Abbas told Ibn az-Zubayr, "I heard the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, say, 'A man is not a believer who fills his stomach while his neighbour is hungry.'"

The Politics of Recession

2011-04-24T10:54:00.012+01:00

Written by Karima Hamdan

Last week the President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, gave his own stark assessment of our current worldwide financial prospects when he said the global economy is “one shock away” from a crisis in food supplies and prices. It isn’t just third world nations who are continuing to feel the squeeze: this last fortnight has seen Portugal becoming the latest European nation to require a multi-billion Euro bailout and the economy of Spain is perilously close to meltdown. In the midst of this, China, the world’s second largest economy, is gestating its own inflation and debt time bomb that threatens to scupper any chance of a global recovery. At home, the NHS is facing a Tory-style slash and burn revamp, unemployment is at an all-time high and the gap between rich and poor is widening into a gulf. With crises abounding, it is good to know that as a society we focus in on the really important issues to debate and discuss: whether or not a relatively small group of women covering the lower half of their faces represents the end of western society as we know it.

These are indeed the days of recession politics, where the clever politicians know that if they cannot provide economic security and stability to their populace, then at least they can provide the next best thing: a highly visible scapegoat upon which everything, rationally or irrationally, can blamed.

France’s niqab ban came into force last week, with the Republic excusing this draconian measure as both aiding the emancipation of women as well as protecting French culture. Both of these excuses are patently false. The vast majority of niqab-wearing women not only wear it of their own volition but also with steely resolve, deep-rooted conviction and the sort of quiet bravery that many an invertebrate politician would do well to emulate. If Sarkozy were so concerned with female emancipation he should perhaps do something about the 18,000 women in France’s commercial sex trade, the vast majority of whom have been the victims of sex traffickers.

As far as French culture goes, it is truly unimaginable that fewer than a thousand niqab-wearing women somehow signal the demise of the Republic. The truth be told, France has joined the rest of the world in selling up its culture for a Deluxe Royale with fries. It may be of interest to know that the country that gave the world Michelin stars, haute cuisine, and more smelly cheeses than one could poke a large bin bag at, is the second largest global market for McDonalds fast food (or rather restauration rapide). As well as the large arthrosclerotic place that ‘MacDo’ has found in the French heart, it is interesting to note that when one wanders down the winding streets of many a French town, it is not ‘burqa’-clad women that ones sees, but rather young men with their trousers teetering precariously around their lower hips, wearing baseball caps and looking more like they belong in South Central LA rather than Aix-en-Provence. One wonders whether they will be meted out their own law forcing integration into the Republic. Will their caps and low-slung jeans be forcibly replaced by berets, strings of onions and striped shirts? Of course, it is not Muslims which threaten the Republic’s image and culture, but rather the forces of globalisation, coupled with Sarkozy’s domestic market reforms that replaced lazy French Sundays awaiting the appearance of the rôti de boeuf from the oven with 24/7 US-style shopping malls filled with faceless multinational chains. The hard truth of the matter is that the new law banning the niqab has more to do with the surge in popularity of the far right than any real concerns about women’s emancipation or the preservation of French culture.

The only ‘upside’ of this recent flurry of interest in the niqab is that it keeps employed the small demographic of individuals who would otherwise be joining the world’s lengthening dole cues but for the global media’s insistence on obsessing about Muslims. They are of course those talking heads often irresponsibly labelled by journalists as ‘Islamic experts’ when, in reality, they are little more than self-appointed, media-junkie narcissists.

When one of these Muslim-related media conniptions erupts, whether the topic is niqab, forced marriages, halal meat or poppy burning (and the list goes on) one often sees them jostling for position across various media outlets, attempting to get the greatest coverage of their uninformed opinions in the widest range of content providers. Whether it is an opinion piece in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, or an interview with BBC News 24 or even merely being quoted in the Telegraph, they scramble over each other in their race towards the limelight.

This particular media feeding frenzy saw relative newcomer, Mona El-Tahawy, snaffle a great deal more than 15 minutes of fame as she burbled incongruously about oppressive Arab regimes whilst simultaneously calling for a draconian worldwide ban on the niqab.

Andrew Gilligan, writing in the Telegraph, contented himself with quoting Haras Rafiq of the now defunct Sufi Muslim Council who has reinvented himself as the director of another pointless ‘think tank’, Centri. Gilligan completely misrepresented a rather uncontroversial statement that has been on the MCB website for the last five years, clarifying the Islamic nature of the niqab. So tenuous were the allegations Gilligan made about this ‘chilling statement’ that he didn’t even include a link in his article, lest someone read the actual statement and realise how little Gilligan has learnt since the whole David Kelly affair when he – now, how can I say this politely? – overstated David Kelly’s statements in his reportage. Suffice it to say that Haras Rafiq was more than happy to tag along for the ride, never once questioning Gilligan’s assertions. Whilst Rafiq lapped up the opportunity to tell everyone about his opinions, we were never once told what qualified him to be interviewed as some sort of expert whose view actually means something.

However, by far and away the most ludicrous example of a talking head with no brain attached to it was the interview of Taj Hargey on David Frost’s Al-Jazeera programme.

The simple fact is that Taj Hargey has absolutely no credibility in the eyes of British Muslims. The only reason people even watch his interviews is down to the same perversity of mind that causes some people to peer into the toilet bowl, with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, after a particularly vigorous movement. It was a stomach-churning performance on such an epic scale that one could barely keep one’s eyes off the screen.

Hargey stated that hadith should not be used for the basis of any Islamic rulings. He went on and on about the niqab being a ‘tribal rag’ and the Muslim women who wear it were not being honest about why they did. Even more bizarrely, he then launched into a tirade about how he was going to hold a celebration in order to “burn a burqa” in order to give Muslims “a taste of their own medicine”. The terminology he used was interesting. He appeared to be positioning himself outside of Islam in order to collectively punish Muslims. Some may say that his denial of hadith would also place him outside of the fold of Islam, but that is a different subject altogether.

It is pertinent to remember that Hargey is the theological advisor and trustee of BMSD (British Muslims for Secular Democracy), yet another tedious “Muslim organisation” filled with narcissistic characters who use Islam as a catapult to launch their own vainglorious careers. Whilst BMSD is happy to use Hargey’s deluded ravings as the central strut for their Islamic opinions, it is also desperate to promote itself as a legitimate Muslim group working for the betterment of the community. To this end, one often sees its members elbowing their way onto joint platforms with mainstream Muslim groups, despite having their very own Pastor Terry Jones character in the form of Taj Hargey. BMSD should be ostracised as the pariah it is, rather than allowing it to gain legitimacy via association with other more mainstream Muslim organisations or personalities.

Interestingly, whilst all the controversy about banning the niqab in France was blazing across the news outlets, in London’s Soho, two gay men were thrown out of a pub when their kissing disgusted the landlord. Suffice it to say that there was widespread public hysteria, with a kiss-in protest staged at the pub, Facebook groups organised, Twitter trends tweeting, flash mobs mobilised and an official complaint made to the police. No one seems to have remarked on the contrast between the entirely supportive response these men have received and, at best, the very guarded support given to women wearing the niqab. For homosexuals, their behaviour is an absolute right: not only should it be accepted but it should also be celebrated. For women wearing the niqab, their actions are grudgingly tolerated as a necessary evil if we are to live in a liberal democracy, with even most Muslim commentators hastening to add that they ‘personally disagree’ with the niqab and can understand the furore surrounding it.

By all accounts, it will be several more years before we see an end to the politics of recession which has politicians looking for scapegoats rather than solutions for today’s woes. As the media machines capitalise on this, they will use some from within our own ranks to lend credibility to their unfair criticisms of Islam. These quislings should be seen for what they are: divisive figures whose only desire is to further their own agendas. As well as gravitating towards the media, they cosy up to more mainstream Muslim organisations in order to appear as though they have some sort of mandate from the community they claim to represent. They should not be allowed to do this.

Less common in the media are mainstream Muslim commentators who have a more legitimate right to appear publicly as representatives because they broadly represent the community’s views and in some cases are democratically elected officials. The trap that they should be wary of falling into is capitulating to the uncomfortable sensation when an “awkward issue” from within Islam is focused on and dissected under the harsh media spotlight. Without careful preparation and dexterity, this invariably leads to stumbling apologies about certain aspects of Islam that don’t sit easily with libertarian ideals of a secular society. Instead, a middle route course should be followed, where the conversation is hauled back away from brinkmanship histrionics towards the reality on the ground, which is that Muslims are the imperfect followers of the perfect religion of Islam, and that we are at our best – both for ourselves and for the society we live in – not when we jettison parts of our religion, but when we try to follow the example of the perfect man, our beloved Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wasallam).

Mission Creep: Regime Change and Usul al-Fiqh

2011-04-09T00:30:00.004+01:00

Written by Karima Hamdan

La distance n'y fait rien; il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte.
The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult.

This week I was reminded of the above quote attributed to the Catholic martyr Saint Denis, a third century Bishop of Paris (and, strangely enough, the patron saint of headaches) who, apparently after having been decapitated, collected up his own severed head and walked six miles to the summit of Montmatre, preaching a sermon the entire way.

The quote was mentioned in the recent BBC documentary The Real Sir Humphrey, which shed some light on the inner workings of the civil service. The words apparently feature prominently on a motivational poster of the current cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell. O'Donnell, a devout Catholic who signs his papers with the initials "G.O.D", feels that this encapsulates his ethos of overcoming difficulties. While that may be so, I would extend this truism further and add that once that difficult first step has been achieved, people can be moved a great distance with only minimal extra effort.

Indeed, we are willing to swallow a mountain of unpalatable events just as long as they are dished out to us one small mouthful at a time.

Take the unfolding crisis in Libya, the perfect recipe: a crusty old dictator, a zesty rebel uprising and a strong flavour of democracy. Just add to this a large drizzle of oil.

At the outset, we were told that this was a humanitarian mission to prevent a genocide of the rebels by Gaddafi. The collective revulsion at his actions allowed us to accept that something must be done and the long, drawn out negotiations of the UN Security Council had us wishing for a speedy resolution. Why oh why couldn't they just sort it out and dish us up another feel-good revolution like Egypt and Tunisia? This created need then allowed us readily to accept the proposition that a no-fly zone would be the solution and the Security Council shared our view unanimously. A no-fly zone seemed relatively innocuous: planes patrolling the skies, preventing Gaddafi's air force from bombarding the rebels whilst the whole country rose up against this man and drove him from office. So, job done, the fighter planes took to the skies and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

But no sooner had we sunk back into a restful repose in front of BBC News 24, eagerly awaiting the wall to wall coverage of ecstatic crowds, than we heard that French planes had engaged ground targets and that a "shock and awe" style bombing raid had been carried out by night targeting Tripoli and other Gaddafi strongholds. This was patiently explained to us as a necessary escalation to "take out" vital command and control infrastructure. So back again we settle, popcorn at the ready, on with the Arab spring.

Then came the tanks - their turrets blown off by precision bombs - and the era of the "no-drive zone" ensued. Gaddafi's forces were now being actively engaged by "Allied" planes day and night, clearing the way for the advancing rebels. "Ahhhh," we all thought, "finally Gaddafi is on his way out and then we can cross live to the surging crowds and toppling statues and John Simpson's summary piece to the camera, a carbon copy of the times when he witnessed the 'liberation' of Kabul and Baghdad."

Then came the Gaddafi fight back. The rebels retreated in disarray as their supplies of ammunition waned and the pendulum that has been Libya for the last week swung back in Gaddafi's favour. The prospect of a long drawn out conflict then began to emerge, replacing the mirage of the quick air "intervention" which was supposed to deliver victory within one news cycle.

Then came the comments from President Obama, which were echoed in quick succession by our own David Cameron: they would not rule in or rule out arming the rebels and the provision of arms and training could be realised within the remit of resolution 1973. And, faster than anyone can say "mission creep", the drum-beat of occupation and regime change seems to be growing louder.

However, the phenomenon of mission creep is not limited to ill-thought-out military interventions. I seem to recall that at one time in the dim and distant past, ISB (or The Islamic Society of Britain) was a Muslim organisation whose Islamic credentials were as rock-solid as its sincere commitment to the Ummah.

No more, it would appear.

This year, to coincide with its Islam Awareness Week, ISB has launched a new website called Plain Islam. The website itself is glossy, engaging and easy on the eye. On closer inspection, I must confess to have wondered whether it was some elaborate April Fools' Day joke on the part of ISB, given that April 1st does fall during its Islam Awareness Week. How could ISB put together a website that so clearly states an unambiguous reformist agenda - especially since their supporters were so terribly hurt when UmmahPulse criticised ISB leading lights, like Sarah Joseph, of promoting an agenda of Islamic reformation? We had apparently misquoted, misunderstood, and generally misapprehended her as well as ISB leading scholar Tariq Ramadan.

I looked again at the Plain Islam site just in case I had missed the "irony quotes" or other hints of a prank at play (perhaps "contact us at Pauline.Yorlegg@isb.org.uk") but no, it was a deadly serious manifesto of ISB's beliefs and principles, a mission statement that leaves no room for misinterpretation. Its unashamed reformist agenda is presented in a mature format, with direct links to clear position statements by prominent reformist spokesmen on topics ranging from women to multiculturalism.

Gender Equality

The first article is about gender equality and is penned by none other than the "evolutionary revolutionary" Usama Hasan, who has found, much to his chagrin, that freedom of speech apparently does not give one the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre... or indeed "Ape-like parents" in a crowded mosque.

The article itself is classic Usama: terse, arrogant prose, dismissing generations of scholarship as "simplistic readings of the Quran", coupled with "the common phenomenon of reading the Quran and Hadith out of scriptural and historical context." Usama then offers us his own way out of this apparent quagmire:

"An alternative reading of the Quran and Hadith is given by reformist scholars who approach the subject from a variety of perspectives, including social science, feminism and the perspective of holistic readings."

Any difficulties are ironed out by the understanding that all the supposed misogynistic texts in the Quran are just examples of Allah starting the process towards full gender equality and then obviously (!) forgetting to complete it:

"...the beginning of a process of the liberation of women, not as a fixed end-point that cannot be changed."

Despite there being no support for this point of view in either the Quran or Hadith, Usama feels that once again he has stumbled across the truth of the matter which has evaded the tens of thousands of scholars who have dedicated their lives to the study of the religion throughout the history of Islam. One can detect a common theme linking together Usama's opinions: they fit in nicely with his Copernican-like world view, which places him at the centre of the Islamic universe, with all the scholars mere satellites orbiting around him.

The Nature of Law and Morality

Even more problematic is the article by Khaled Abou El Fadl entitled "The Nature of Law and Morality". In it, El Fadl describes shari'ah and fiqh as follows:

"Sharia is the eternal, immutable, and unchanging law, or Way of truth and justice, as it exists in the mind of God. In essence, Sharia is the ideal law as it ought to be in the Divine realm, and as such it is by definition unknown to human beings on this earth. Thus human beings must strive and struggle to realize Sharia law to the best of their abilities. In contrast, fiqh is the human law - it is the human attempt to reach and fulfill the eternal law as it exists in God's mind. Fiqh, unlike Sharia, is not eternal, immutable, or unchanging. By definition, fiqh is human and therefore, subject to error, alterable, and contingent."

So on one hand we have shari'ah which, in El Fadl's opinion, is in essence unattainable by humans. On the other hand, we have the apparent shifting sands of fiqh, indefinable across any given length of time. And, between the unattainable and the indefinable, we have ISB and the scores of Muslims they seek to confuse with their unfathomable and incomprehensible views on Islam, which never once ask that if Allah (the Exalted) has sent guidance, what would be the point of that guidance being unreachable?

Islam and Science

Even more bizarre is the inclusion of Ziauddin Sardar in the cadre of ISB philosophers at large. Whenever one reads anything Sardar writes about Islam, one gets the distinct impression that at some point in his pointlessly angry life he was publicly embarrassed by one of his backward brown brethren and has never quite recovered from the experience. This incident must act like the nuclear fuel rod at the fractured core of Sardar's own psychological meltdown, providing him with a steady stream of radioactive waste to spew out and poison the surrounding environment.

In the article "Islam and Science", Sardar gnashes his teeth over the lack of Muslim expertise in science today:

"The brutal fact is that Muslims, consciously and deliberately, abandoned scientific inquiry in favour of religious obscurantism and blind imitation."

And the reason for this?

"The driving force behind the scientific spirit of Muslim civilisation was the notion of ijtihad or systematic original thinking, a fundamental component of the worldview of Islam. The religious scholars, a dominant class in Muslim society, feared that continuous and perpetual ijtihad would undermine their power. They were also concerned that scientists and philosophers had a higher prestige in society than religious scholars. So they banded together and closed 'the gates of ijtihad'; the way forward, they suggested, was taqlid, or imitation of the thought and work of earlier generations of scholars. Ostensibly, this was a religious move. But given the fact that Islam is a highly integrated worldview, that in Islam everything is connected to everything else, it had a devastating impact on all forms of inquiry."

What Sardar cannot quite figure out (and therefore ignores), is that when Muslim societies were at their most devout and their most traditional, with all the hallmarks of 'backwardness' including sharia and 'blind imitation', they were also at their most scientifically advanced. Sardar omits to mention another inconvenient fact, namely that those scholars who were apparently so obsessed with their social standing that they engaged in this nefarious ijtihad gate-closure conspiracy, were usually also the same people making the scientific advancements.

But sorry, I forgot who Sardar claims to be! Let us remind ourselves with some choice quotes:

"Unlike the 'Ulama, modernist scholars do not shun the West. In fact they embrace the West in its totality, warts and all. While the traditional scholars sit on the crest of contemporary times perpetually looking back into history, modernist intellectuals place no real value on Muslim tradition and history." (Ziauddin Sardar, Islamic Futures (1985) p.352)

"I suggested that it is not only possible but necessary both for individuals and societies, now and in the future, to rise to higher levels in understanding and realization of Islamic values than those achieved by the Companions of the Prophet or their society. Indeed, the challenge of our time, I argued, was to work out values and norms that were clearly and distinctively better than those worked out by the Companions of the Prophet." (Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise (2005) p.151)

"I had no objection to Rushdie interrogating and severely criticising Islam, even in fiction. Indeed, I had been doing just that most of my own life." (Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise (2004) p.279)

In another place he described the emulation of the Prophet (may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him), that is, to follow the sunnah, as a "fetish". According to him, the way forward was "to question what now goes under the general rubric of shari'ah and to declare that much of Islamic jurisprudence is now dangerously obsolete. To stand up to the absurd notion of an Islam confined by a geographically bound state. The 'gates of ijtihad' have to be thrown wide open so that the basic concepts of Islam can be framed in a broader context. Serious rethinking within Islam is long overdue." (New Internationalist, May 2002)

One can only shake one's head in disbelief that ISB could have ever engaged with such a person, let alone place him at the heart of its flagship project to explain Islam. With Ziauddin Sardar there is no ambiguity, no room for misunderstanding, no squirming out of the stark fact that he has little or no respect for anything remotely recognisable as traditional Islam.

Identity, Muslims and Multiculturalism

In his article on multiculturalism, Tariq Modood calls for greater gender equality in Islam:

"One of the key areas of renewal and reinterpretation has been equality and related concepts. This can be seen in debates about gender equality in which Muslim cultural practices and taken for granted assumptions have been subjected to severe critique through fresh readings of the Quran, the sayings and practice of the Prophet Muhammad and Muslim history, tracing the emergence of conservative and restricted interpretations at moments when other interpretations could and should have been favoured." (Mernissi 1991, Ahmed 1992, Wadud 1999)

The "fresh readings" of the Quran and hadith that Modood refers to are provided by none other than Amina Wadud, Fatima Mernissi, and Leila Ahmad. It is truly astonishing that ISB could be associated with these pseudo-scholars who advocated, amongst other things, women leading prayers, and that the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wasallam) only advocated hijab and niqab following pressure from his companions, despite it going completely against his principles. Now, it is important to note that the opinions of these women are not being used by the ISB in relation to completely unrelated matters, it being "incidental" that they just happen to hold utterly deviant beliefs on gender issues. Rather, ISB is referencing its position statement on the role of gender relations in Islam using the opinions of this trio.

...And Now for a Word From Our Sponsors

The manifesto also contains contributions from three non-Muslim authors. This is interesting because it steps away from the traditionally Islamic viewpoint that imaan is an essential requirement of those who wish to teach Muslims about their own religion, and also because these individuals make no bones about where they are coming from and where they want British Muslims to end up.

Firstly, there is Chris Hewer's article "How the Western mind reads Islam". The entire premise of the article is very revealing. One could ask why it is that a supposedly Muslim organisation is so eager to publish an article on its website that contains statements such as:

"When Europeans look at Islam, they see an integrated religious-political-economic-social system and that rings alarm bells; it reminds them of a system that they moved away from in earlier centuries."

It is also informative that Hewer concludes his article on a discordant and jarring note without any of the customary platitudes about living and learning together. Instead, he ends with this bald statement:

"When Christians think about the Quran, they find it hard to imagine that it can have been 'sent down' from God, especially six hundred years after the time of Jesus, and so they assume that the Prophet must have got it from somewhere else. Again, the Christian view of an ideal human being and 'man of God' is shaped by the life and person of Jesus and so they see contrasting elements in the life of Muhammad as being hard to reconcile: his multiple marriages, his holding political power and being the commander of the army in time of battle."

All this is hardly newsworthy. Are Muslims supposed to be gobsmacked by the revelation that non-Muslims don't think the Quran is the word of God or hold ignorant opinions of our beloved Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wasallam)? What is genuinely interesting is that ISB saw fit to publish this on its 'one stop shop' portal for all things Islamic aimed at Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It seems that injecting doubt rather than dawah is what is on ISB minds.

The contribution from another non-Muslim is equally loaded. Brian Klug places a comforting arm around the shoulders of those Muslims struggling with the "embarrassment" of believing in an All-Powerful Creator. Just as there are some Christians who "muddy the logical waters" by "treating the first chapter of Genesis as though it were a contribution to natural science", Klug seems to suggest that there are some Muslims who have the same "quaint" views of the Quran. The problem, in his view, is with "any totalitarian system of thought, whether religious or secular, traditional or modern. There is no future for a public debate that is stuck in the rut of the past. Nor can today's disagreements be resolved by fighting yesterday's battles."

No discussion about Islamic reformation can ever be had without John Esposito, professor of International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University and director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, fading into view. Esposito's methodology has always been that of promoting greater understanding of Muslims and denouncing Islamophobia, whilst concurrently agitating for Muslims to change their religion. His propaganda is subtly couched in sophisticated arguments and, given that he does speak out against Muslim hate speech, there is a tendency to feel that he speaks for the benefit of Muslims and Islam because, supposedly, "he's a friend of Islam".

The best way of dealing with Messers Hewer, Klug and Esposito is to wish them well on their journeys through life, pray that they are eventually guided aright but never to be deluded into thinking that just because they are selectively apologetic about Western attitudes towards Muslims, they speak the truth about Islam every time they engage with Muslims.

Conclusion

This is the first step, which ISB would probably acknowledge as being difficult for British Muslims to accept. After years of having wafted around the faint aroma of reforming Islam, this is the first mouthful which, if accepted and swallowed, will lead to British Muslims being force-fed a steady diet of a re-worked and re-designed Islam. Then, finally, the mission creep to deconstruct the usul al-fiqh that underpins our religion, undermining over a thousand years of scholarly endeavours, will be realised. This journey of a thousand steps will be completed with the need to "belong" in Western culture satisfied and any feelings of being "the other" banished forever.

Having skirted around the edges for a while, it seems that now some within ISB have taken their first firm steps into an area that will lead them well away from what is safe or their hoped-for destination. Whether we follow them into this arena is now the issue for every one of us. The consequences of such a conscious decision should neither be belittled nor be taken lightly, as the realm into which it leads belongs entirely to another, who is ever vigilant of cross-border incursions:

An-Nu'man ibn Basheer (Radi Allahu anhu) said: I heard the Messenger of Allah (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) saying:

"Surely, the halal (permissible) is clear and the haram (impermissible) is clear and between the two are doubtful unclear matters, of which many of the people do not have knowledge.

So, whoever abstains from the doubtful matters has saved his religion and his honour, and whoever falls into the doubtful matters falls into the haram (impermissible),

just as for the shepherd who lets his flock graze on the border of a protected sanctuary, it is likely that his flock will end up grazing freely therein.

Truly, every king has a protected sanctuary, and Allah's protected sanctuary is His prohibitions.

Verily in the body, there is a morsel of flesh that, if it is sound, then the whole body is set aright; and, if it is corrupt, the whole body is corrupt. It is indeed the heart."

Sahih al-Bukhari and Muslim

The Great Game: Dictators, Democracy and Deception

2011-03-28T23:15:00.004+01:00

Written by Karima Hamdan

This week has seen the situation in Libya become increasingly tense. Following the imposition of a no-fly zone, a Libyan jet has been shot down and the rhetoric on both sides has been escalating. Gaddafi seems increasingly like one of those crazed drunks one sees wandering shambolically through the rundown city centres of former northern mining towns: dishevelled, with peculiar facial hair, and muttering suspiciously to himself until, without warning, he begins to bellow incoherently before shuffling off again.

As Gaddafi stands there, alone and ludicrously defiant, it is easy almost to feel a twinge of pity for him - until, that is, one is reminded of history, which shows him to be an utterly merciless mass murderer. Even in the crowded field of western-backed Middle Eastern despots, he outperforms the others in the "remorseless inhumanity" stakes. During his reign, he has plumbed the depths of depravity, oppressing of his own people and torturing those who dissent in the most unspeakable ways.

Despite adorning himself with the rhetoric of the Intifada, he was the one who expelled 30,000 Palestinian refugees from Libya. Despite attempting to be the personification of the plucky Muslim leader standing up to the west, he has demonstrated that he has no respect for Islam. His Green Book – a contemptible cobbling together of communism and Islam inspired by Chairman Mao's Red Book – is regarded by many ulama to be kufr. Not that this would give Gaddafi pause for thought: there is strong anecdotal evidence that he sent assassins on the Hajj to murder ulama who pronounced fataawa against him, with the assassin carrying out his vile act on the Day of Arafat, the holiest day of the Hajj pilgrimage.

And yet despite this, it is difficult to feel totally at ease with the imposition of the no-fly zone when one hears reports of the crazed colonel sending young, demoralised, troops out to fight, handcuffed to their tanks or in planes without parachutes. Rebels have also reportedly found the bodies of 13 of Gaddafi's soldiers who appeared to have been executed, possibly for defying orders.

However, whilst we can all agree that there would have been an even greater massacre in Benghazi had the no-fly zone not been imposed, there is a wider issue which the West needs to address. For all their talk about protecting the Libyan public from Gaddafi, Britain, the US, France and the other "allies", as some of the more excitable news reporters are dubbing those signatories to UN resolution 1973, did not seem to recall these tender feelings when they were buying Gadaffi's oil and hosting his disreputable personage, tent and all, up and down Europe since he was ushered in from the cold by our own Tony Blair in 2004.

Blair in fact has a very close relationship with the Libyan leader. He used his last official prime ministerial visit to Libya in 2007 to sign an accord for the UK to exchange information about defence structures and technology, and to co-operate "in the training of specialised military units, special forces and border security units". They also agreed to "exchanges of information on NATO and EU military and civil security organisations".

Since leaving office, Blair has cashed in on this special relationship, acting as an advisor to several multinationals involved in relieving Libya of its massive oil resources. Although Blair has denied the claim made by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi that the former prime minister has secured a consultancy role with the £65bn sovereign fund that manages the country's oil wealth, given Blair's altogether fleeting relationship with the finer aspects of veracity, some may take his denial with a substantial pinch of salt.

This history could all be explained away as past wrongs that have now been righted given Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy's apparent commitment to spreading democracy. But with what face can these leaders speak about democracy, when the world knows that the same countries, currently waxing lyrical about Libyan self-determination, were propping up Gaddafi only a few months ago?

Whether it was training and advising the Libyan police (not to mention the police of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – but that's another story) via the National Policing Improvement Agency, or authorising the export of tear gas, crowd-control ammunition, small-arms ammunition, water cannon and door-breaching projectile launchers, Britain was at the vanguard of the retail therapy rehabilitation of Libya. And it wasn't just arms sales. In a deal brokered in 2007 by Tony Blair, BP signed a £560m exploration agreement allowing it to search for oil and gas, offshore and onshore, in a joint venture with the Libya Investment Corporation. In a scrabble to capitalise on the country with the largest oil reserves in Africa, Shell and a gaggle of other European and American oil companies have signed deals to do business with Gaddafi.

Watching Europe capitalise on Libya's virgin markets after European sanctions were lifted in 2004, US multinationals became increasingly anxious that they were missing the boat. A cabal of high profile US companies (including then US Vice President's company, Halliburton) set up the US-Libya Business Association to lobby for US sanctions to be lifted. One of those lobbying was the Prince of Darkness himself, Richard Pearle, a former Reagan-era US Defense Department official and George W. Bush-era chair of the US Defense Policy Board.

According to US political reporter Lauren Rozen, Pearle travelled to Libya to meet with Gaddafi as part of the "Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Gaddafi". Other high profile figures in the delegation included historian Francis Fukuyama, prominent US journalist David Frost, and MIT media lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of the former US deputy secretary of state and director of national intelligence, John Negroponte. Whatever they did, it worked: sanctions were lifted and US multinationals rolled in, a process made all the more easy by Gaddafi privatising 110 state-owned companies – an unusual act for a man who based his revolution on nationalising Libya's oil companies.

Again, Western governments have excused this sort of behaviour with a sheepish shrug and murmured platitudes about lessons learned, but as they publicly declare their admiration for the bravery of the rebels in Benghazi for standing up to a dictator, they remain tucked up cosily in bed with such charming characters as Islam Karimov, President of Uzbekistan.

The West's attraction to Karimov is his strategically important Karshi Khanabad airbase and his status as a solid partner in the War on Terror. This is despite Karimov's love of barbaric punishments for political dissidents, including boiling them alive (warning: link contains graphic images). It is worth noting that to qualify as a political dissident in Uzbekistan, one needs to engage in the wholly anarchic activity of growing a beard or practising Islam in a way that is not sanctioned by the state.

Karimov's government was awarded $500m in aid from the Bush administration in 2002. The SNB (Uzbekistan's security service) received $79m of this sum. However, even though Karimov evicted the US from his airbase with much fanfare in 2005, in 2009 the US again clasped Karimov to their bosom and quietly re-established a presence there.

So given this reality of Western double standards, is it so unnatural for my chest not to swell with with pride when the prime minister gives self-congratulatory speeches about UN Resolution 1973? We are told that "we simply cannot stand back and let a dictator whose people have rejected him, kill his people indiscriminately", when it is perfectly clear that this is exactly what the UK and others are doing with so many other "strategically important" partners in the War on Terror.

What I hope has become apparent is that there is a larger political game at play, the details of which we mere citizens can never be allowed to be privy to.

Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan who resigned in disgust when faced with Karimov's brutal regime, broke the news last week saying, "A senior diplomat in a western mission to the UN in New York, who I have known over ten years and trust, has told me for sure that Hillary Clinton agreed to the cross-border use of troops to crush democracy in the Gulf, as a quid pro quo for the Arab League calling for Western intervention in Libya."

Murray makes the point that the King of Bahrain calling for troops from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait to come into his country and viciously oppress pro-democracy protestors would be like Gaddafi calling in the armies of Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso to attack the rebels in Benghazi. With the US fifth fleet already stationed in Bahrain, it wouldn't be too taxing to arrange a "no-drive zone" around Pearl Square at short notice, but somehow I doubt that there will be a UN Resolution 1974 about Bahrain any time soon.

Noam Chomsky recently wrote in the Guardian: "A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism."

Other Middle East analysts have commented that whilst there is a great deal of rage and fury spouted about these demonstrations, once the figurehead despot is toppled, he is quietly replaced by someone just as bad and, in some cases, even worse.

Patrick Cockburn writing in the Independent opines that "the degree of change is still unclear. Elites that got rid of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt and possibly, in the next few weeks, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, are doing so in order to make sure that uprisings do not turn into real revolutions."

Interestingly, the military operation in Libya has been codenamed "Operation Odyssey Dawn" by the US military, an apparently meaningless name chosen after the random letters O-D were assigned to this mission. Despite some quipping that a more appropriate name could have been "Obvious Disaster", or "Oil Deposits", Odyssey Dawn was nevertheless selected.

The Odyssey is an ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer. It follows the story of Odysseus' (called Ulysses by the Romans) long journey home after the fall of Troy in the Trojan War. I won't relate the whole 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter but it suffices to say that it relates to the tale of a warrior attempting to return home from another war who leads his men into a prolonged adventure in the Mediterranean. One by one they all die, and it takes him a decade to get home. All the while, Odysseus' lot is made more difficult by the machinations of the venal, bickering Greek gods and demigods.

As we watch another "adventure" in the Mediterranean unfold, one can't help but wonder if this modern day Odyssey will follow its ancient namesake: what started out as an apparently simple task may involve many years of wading through quagmire and may be subject to the great game played out behind the scenes by another cohort of modern day false gods and demigods.

Know that the life of this world is but amusement and diversion and adornment and boasting to one another and competition in increase of wealth and children - like the example of a rain whose [resulting] plant growth pleases the tillers; then it dries and you see it turned yellow; then it becomes [scattered] debris. And in the Hereafter is severe punishment and forgiveness from Allah and approval. And what is the worldly life except the enjoyment of delusion?

Race toward forgiveness from your Lord and a Garden whose width is like the width of the heavens and earth, prepared for those who believed in Allah and His messengers. That is the bounty of Allah which He gives to whom He wills, and Allah is the possessor of great bounty.

No disaster strikes upon the earth or among yourselves except that it is in a register before We bring it into being - indeed that, for Allah, is easy -

In order that you not despair over what has eluded you and not exult [in pride] over what He has given you. And Allah does not like everyone self-deluded and boastful -

[Those] who are stingy and enjoin stinginess upon people. And whoever turns away - then indeed, Allah is free of need, the Praiseworthy.
We have already sent Our messengers with clear evidences and sent down with them the Scripture and the balance that the people may maintain [their affairs] in justice. And We sent down iron, wherein is great military might and benefits for the people, so that Allah may make evident those who support Him and His messengers unseen. Indeed, Allah is Powerful and Exalted in Might.

Al-Quran: Surah Hadid, 20-25

Truth and Power

2011-03-21T00:35:00.001Z

Written by Karima Hamdan

It is no coincidence that most revolutions seem to happen in the spring. After a long winter of discontent huddled indoors mulling over past events, the ebullient cavalcade of Allah's bounty that bursts into life within a few short weeks fills the soul with a yearning for betterment and a determination to transform this feeling into a reality.
For those of us looking on at these revolutions from the safety of our western homes, we share the aspirations of many of those rising up against the oppression, corruption and tyranny they face. We feel almost as partners in their struggle, even though this one-sided partnership consists of their blood, sweat and tears with our contribution limited to outrage and tweets.

But consider this: those poor souls struggling to make their voices heard in the Middle East have one distinct advantage over us. When they look around at the interplay that their lives have with their government, they can see the deceit, corruption, manipulation and oppression that goes on. We, however, look around our gilded cage and find ourselves humming along to the background muzak that reassures us that we are free and autonomous beings at liberty, swimming in our democratic ocean of promise.

As Muslims living in the West, we may find our freedom curtailed, not by the crude machinations of semi-coherent despots but rather by the more subtle, insidious and global techniques employed by those politicians who rule over us... and those who rule over the politicians.

As sure as rats congregate around sewers and flies congregate around heaps of dung, whenever global political trends manifest within populist politicians (is there really any other combination?), the News Corp machines swarm into action.

News Corp is of course the family business of the Murdoch family, headed by that wrinkled octogenarian, Rupert Murdoch. Far from being a cuddly pensioner tending his vegetable patch and dreaming of his next trip to Eastbourne, Rupert Murdoch is a multi-billionaire who has met every US president from Truman to Obama and whose media network has been estimated to reach approximately 75% of the world’s population. Heads of state worldwide scurry in indecent haste to pay homage to this modern day robber baron, mindful of Murdoch’s famous quote to politicians: "What'll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of s**t a day?"

Blair obviously accepted the headline a day option when, in 1995, he was flown out first class by Murdoch to meet him at a prestigious resort on an island in Australia's Great Barrier Reef and delivered a Thatcherite speech promising media deregulation. The Sun carried an editorial the next day describing Blair as someone who "has vision [and] speaks our language on morality and family life". Cameron did it in 2008 when he was flown by private jet to Murdoch's 184ft luxury yacht moored off a Greek island for "talks", the content of which he has refused to reveal.

And what about those who stand up to him? Who can forget Neil Kinnock's shock election defeat in 1992 when "It's The Sun Wot Won it" after Kinnock ran on a ticket that included greater media regulation and received his complimentary bucket of effluent a day from the Murdoch press.

As an Australian, Murdoch nurtures the persona of a "little Aussie battler", fighting against the establishment for the good of the common man, imbued with the values of family, patriotism and a "fair go" for all. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was born into a privileged, wealthy family. His father was already a media magnate and he was groomed from a very young age to continue in his footsteps, building up his father's portfolio into an empire which now controls several hundred newspapers and media outlets worldwide. When US media laws prevented Murdoch, as an Australian citizen, from owing any US newspapers, he jettisoned his citizenship and became a US national.

His private life resembles a plot-line from a particularly vulgar Australian soap opera. Despite being an apparently devout Roman Catholic, he is twice divorced and married his current wife, a Chinese TV executive and 38 years his junior, a mere 19 days after his last divorce. He has six children, spanning his three marriages, with the latest one born when he was 73 years old. Historically, Murdoch has pit his children against each other to determine how deserving they are of the family business. When eldest son Lachlan didn't quite cut the mustard as heir apparent, he was unceremoniously dumped and replaced by his younger brother James.

Last week, Murdoch turned 80 and, alongside the birthday cakes and party hats, he received the usual clutch of presents, including a lovely gift courtesy of Her Majesty's Government: the keys to control the national consciousness in the form of a blanket approval to expand his media empire in the UK. After nonchalantly stepping over the still warm corpse of Vince Cable, Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, decided to allow the Murdoch takeover of BSkyB. This is despite a report (subsequently leaked) commissioned by Cable which showed that the takeover will create such a behemoth of an organisation that it would kill media plurality in the UK - a move described as "Britain's Berlusconi moment".

Even putting to one side the issue of media plurality, the mind boggles that, in the midst of the huge phone hacking scandal involving Murdoch's News of the World, News Corp could be handed another media organisation on a plate. It is important to note that the scandal didn't just involve hacking into a few voicemails of some overpaid luvvies, but rather constituted a potentially large and sinister network of corruption running from the gutters of Fleet Street to the top echelons of power in Britain.

The scandal involves private investigators (with the main perpetrator having planted false evidence and having escaped a murder conviction after his trial collapsed on technicalities); corrupt police officers who sold confidential records; a legion of corrupt employees of banks, GP surgeries and government departments who would gather information illegally; a Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who has been accused of misleading Parliament over the scandal and attempting to kill the investigation; MPs warned off pursuing the scandal "or else"; and at the top of this odious tree of corruption we have the twin figures of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, both former editors of the News of the World. The former is Cameron's former director of communication and the latter is chief executive of News International (a News Corp subsidiary) and the PM's neighbour in Oxfordshire. Both Coulson and Brooks were editors at the time these scandals were occurring and both strenuously deny any knowledge of these misdeeds.

It also emerged that, over the Christmas period, David Cameron attended a dinner party at Rebekah Brooks' house. The guest list included James Murdoch, and Andy Coulson. Cameron again refused to reveal the subjects of conversation but hastened to add that neither the BSkyB takeover nor the phone hacking scandal were discussed.

Should we as Muslims be worried about this level of intimacy between the government and the Murdoch family?

There is precious little in the public domain of Murdoch's own thoughts on Muslims and Islam. This is strange given his media outlets seem to report about little else, although it may be symptomatic of the fact that he owns most of the public domain. My research has only uncovered three references. Two come from speeches that he delivered and are carefully worded warnings about Islam and the third, which is probably the most telling, comes from prominent US journalist Michael Wolff, who writes:

"I can attest to the obsession inside of Murdoch's News Corp. about Muslims. I've had conversations with Murdoch in which he, in pseudo-scientific fashion, parses the problem with Muslim intelligence (in brief, they marry their cousins), and conversations with Roger Ailes about the great Islamic plot to bring the terror war to his house in New Jersey. In other words, all this stuff out of News Corp. is the real, unfiltered thing: retro, primitive, weird, reactionary, racist, paranoid, really, really old-guy stuff."

This stance is buttressed by Murdoch's flagship US channel, Fox News, a byword for anti-Muslim hate speech which seems to feed the opinions of Tea Party voters and red neck xenophobes across America. If this model is replicated in the UK, it will make the barely literate, anti-Muslim, rants found in the Daily Express and the Daily Star seem like testimonials for community cohesion. For those thinking that this could never happen here I would remind them that David Cameron is taking active steps to prepare the ground for a Fox News bridgehead into the UK with his plans to further cripple Ofcom, the already toothless communications watchdog, whilst simultaneously hamstringing the BBC's influence and clout. This is further contextualised by the comments of BBC Director General Mark Thompson:

"The BBC and Channel 4 have a history of clearly labelled polemical programmes. But why not entire polemical channels which have got stronger opinions? I find the argument persuasive."

So there we have it. Arguably the most powerful opinion maker on the planet, with appallingly negative views on Islam and Muslims, has been given the green light to completely take over public discourse in the UK. The police have shown themselves to be corruptible by his organisation whilst the government is more than happy to accommodate its every request. Any voices of dissent are quelled by the power, reach and strength of Murdoch’s media mammoth. Is there any hope at all?

And then we see true power.

The world watched in horror as first an earthquake and then a tsunami wiped out vast swathes of one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth. With the connectedness of modern society, we have been real-time witnesses to this Japanese disaster of epic proportions. We saw for ourselves what previously had only been spoken of by shell-shocked survivors, who may have been suspected of hyperbole had they told of giant whirlpools engulfing ships and black tides of destruction racing across farmland overtaking speeding cars and trains.

Just as our time to witness this has come, so will the time for reckoning also come. For everyone.

When the earth is shaken with her (final) earthquake
And the earth throws up her burdens (from within)
When man cries, "What is happening to it?"
On that Day, it will tell all
Because your Lord will inspire it [to do so]
On that Day, people will come forward
In separate groups to be shown their deeds
Whoever has done an atom’s-weight of good will see it
But whoever has done an atom’s-weight of evil will see that.
(Qur'an, 99:1-8)

Conspiracy: Not a Theory But History

2011-02-28T22:58:00.002Z

Written by Husain Al-Qadi

One of the enduring perceptions of Arabs and Muslims in the West is that of a people who fall easy victim to conspiracy theories. Books are written on how the worldview of Muslims is influenced by conspiracy theories and we are often caricatured in fiction and folktales in the West as paranoid reactionaries. As a consequence of this, whenever a Muslim mentions the word "conspiracy", eyes roll even before he is able to finish his sentence and you can almost hear the collective groan of "oh-no-not-that again" echo around the room. This reaction has become so insidious that one can even find Muslims reacting in a similar manner, as I saw among the responses we received to last week's JumahPulse.
My analysis of the unfolding events in the Arab world was dismissed by some as mere "conspiracy theory" and a suggestion was made that I might be belittling the sacrifices made by those who have died in the Egyptian protests.

So for those of you who would have glanced at the title of this article and had your groan, I ask you to bear with me so that I can set the record straight and explain my reasoning, which I did not do last week for fear of the piece becoming too lengthy.

First of all, the innocent Muslims who died in Egypt at the hands of the brutality of the Mubarak regime are undoubtedly martyrs and we pray that Allah accepts their sacrifices and grants their relatives sabran jamilan. The courage and sincerity of their actions cannot be questioned. Hosni Mubarak was a notorious dictator who plundered the country's wealth and oppressed the Egyptian people for decades. Protesting (i.e. speaking the truth) against Egypt's brutal regime (sultanun ja'ir) was, in the words of the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wasallam), afdal al-jihad (one of the best forms of jihad). However, the response from the regime and the apparent outcome of the protests was not, as those who celebrate seem to think, a revolution. Instead, it was a conspiracy and trickery of the most wretched kind.

Of course, no one can deny that there are fictitious stories of conspiracy circulating in gossip circuits and cyberspace but we are equally obliged, as thinking rational beings, to acknowledge that we live in a world where conspiracies do exist, even in the West where four American presidents were assassinated not by accident but by conspiracies. "Watergate", "Iran-gate", "Iraq-gate" were all conspiracies and the full list is too long to detail here.

As for the Muslim world, apart the from the long list of intrigues and "great games" played out against the Arab and Muslim nations during the last two centuries, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration are conspiracies of such magnitude that they continue to cause pain, suffering and anger in the Muslim world even today.

Every day, day after day, these two conspiracies present the consciousness of Muslims with new tragedies and frustrations. These were such notorious conspiracies that the Christian historian George Antonius described them in the following words:

"The Sykes-Picot Agreement is a shocking document. It is not only the product of greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity: it also stands out as a startling piece of double-dealing." (George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p.248, 1939).

The effect of the Balfour Declaration was no less devastating, as the same author explained: "In those parts of the Arab world which were in direct touch with the Allies, the Balfour Declaration created bewilderment and dismay, even among those who were not aware of the exact nature of the British pledges to the Arabs... The news reached Egypt first, where it soon provoked a wave of protest on the part of the Arab leaders congregated in Cairo." (George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p.267).

The latest result of these conspiracies is that Israel, just a few days ago, used the upheaval in the Arab world to fortify its stranglehold on al-Quds al-Sharif (Jerusalem). While the news bulletins are cluttered with reports of events in Libya and elsewhere, Israel has chosen to announce the relocation of three army colleges to East Jerusalem in the hope that it would go unnoticed. Pesky Orientalists often tell Muslims to "get over it" and to stop talking about the Sykes-Picot and Balfour conspiracies but when we have to live with their consequences day after day, decade after decade, it's easier said than done. The scheming and conspiracy-mongering of these "Balfour children" are not contained within the borders of Israel.

Israel and US Planned for Egypt's "Revolution"

In September 2008, the then Minister of Internal Security, Avi Dichter, gave a lecture in Tel Aviv in which he outlined the three scenarios within which Israel and the US were preparing for the transition of power in Egypt.

The first scenario was that the Muslim Brotherhood would take advantage of the deteriorating social and economic situation and install itself into government when strikes and popular uprisings brought the country to a standstill.

The second scenario was that the military would take control and the third was that either of the successors of Mubarak, Omar Suleiman or Jamal Mubarak would take over. However, it was envisaged that the situation would continue to deteriorate and it would be necessary to hold free elections to bring new players to the fore.

Dichter also said that Israel and the US were using all of their assets to monitor, and prepare to manage, these situations. As for scenario one, we now know that someone has convinced the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood not to field a candidate for the presidency and, more astonishingly, they now say that they "would not attempt to gain a majority in parliamentary elections."

With the Muslim Brotherhood placing themselves in a political straitjacket, scenario one is effectively neutralised, which leaves scenarios two and three in play, i.e. Omar Suleiman, the Military and the New Unknowns.

We know that Omar Suleiman was closer to the Israelis than Mubarak himself and a personal torturer for the US. While Mubarak was left on his own to deal with the pressure of the protests, the top-brass of the Egyptian military were out of the country. The people who are now in charge of running Egypt and have just ratified a draft of a new constitution were having discussions in Washington for three days during the protests. A high ranking military delegation, including the Chief of Staff Lt.Gen. Sami Anna, left Cairo for Washington on 24 January 2011. The protests began a day later and the military chiefs did not return to Egypt until 28 January. We do not know what instructions they received in Washington, but it would be hard to believe that the Pentagon officials neglected to mention what had just erupted in Cairo to the Egyptian Chief of Staff sitting across the table.

In Egypt today, while the masses celebrate, the declared state of emergency is still in force. The jails are still filled with political prisoners and the constitution has been rewritten and ratified under the auspices of a military junta that is still providing Mubarak with security as he continues to live in the luxury of the country's premier holiday resort, Sharm Al-Sheikh, while the masses are fed scraps of information about him and his family being prevented from leaving the country. Why would he want to leave such luxury? What kind of a revolution is this when, apart from a few figureheads, the entire regime remains intact and controls the country in a state of emergency?

The Constitution Trap

If one studies the history of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, one will notice that its institutions did not crumble overnight, nor did Kamal Ataturk single-handedly transform Turkish society into an anti-Islam, secular extremist polity. Although Ataturk is responsible for the manifestation of the worst that secularism had to offer in terms of enmity towards Islam, the groundwork for his project was laid well in advance by a network of activists with strong Masonic links. There was a mixture of "races and creed in which Turks predominated and Jews came second, with Ottoman nationals of other races in tow."[i]

These were known as the "Young Turks" and later the Committee for Unity and Progress (CUP). The military revolution on 24 July 1908 was their handiwork. "Constitution drafting" and "constitution defence" was a primary weapon in their arsenal. After forcing the Sultan to accept a constitution, it was easy to discredit him in the eyes of the masses with the charge of being against the constitution. If the Sultan is against the constitution then he has to be wrong because the constitution is always right.

Although he was critical of the failures of CUP's Young Turks, had it not been for the foundations they had laid, Kamal Ataturk could not have gotten away with declaring:

"In the face of knowledge, science, and of the whole extent of radiant civilization, I cannot accept the presence in Turkey's civilized community of people primitive enough to seek material and spiritual benefits in the guidance of sheiks. The Turkish republic cannot be a country of sheiks, dervishes, and disciples. The best, the truest order is the order of civilization. To be a man it is enough to carry out the requirements of civilization. The leaders of dervish orders will understand the truth of my words, and will themselves close down their lodges [tekke] and admit that their disciples have grown up." (Andrew Mango, Ataturk, p.367, 1991)

In Egypt, several groups have begun calling for the constitution to be rewritten and for the abolition of Article 2, which states that "Islam is the Religion of the State. Arabic is its official language, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia)." [ii]

A top judicial official, Hisham al-Bastawisy, is arguing that, "The current constitution is dead and nothing should be used from it."

The first party to be given official recognition after the resignation of Mubarak was the al-Wasat party, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. This party has been arguing for a constitution that allows a Christian to become head of state.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, al-Wasat "seeks to interpret Islamic sharia principles in a manner consistent with the values of a liberal democratic system. Although al-Wasat advocates a political system that is firmly anchored in Islamic law, it also views sharia principles as flexible and wholly compatible with the principles of pluralism and equal citizenship rights." The party's manifesto accepts the right of a Christian to become head of state in a Muslim-majority country. (Courtesy of Wikipedia).

In June 2007, President Bush, speaking at a conference of dissidents in the Czech Republic said: "There are many dissidents who couldn't join us because they are being unjustly imprisoned or held under house arrest. I look forward to the day when a conference like this one could include Alexander Kozulin of Belarus, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, Oscar Elias Biscet of Cuba, Father Nguyen Van Ly of Vietnam, Ayman Nour of Egypt. (Applause.) The daughter of one of these political prisoners is in this room. I would like to say to her, and all the families: I thank you for your courage. I pray for your comfort and strength. And I call for the immediate and unconditional release of your loved ones... I have asked Secretary Rice to send a directive to every U.S. ambassador in an un-free nation: Seek out and meet with activists for democracy. Seek out those who demand human rights." Nour was released on health grounds on 18 February 2009. (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Ayman Nour has special status not only because he has a project to rewrite the constitution but also because he wants to turn Egypt into a fully Westernised society, where religion will be pushed to the margins in favour of Western liberalism. However, he may have to be replaced as he suffered a severe injury to the head from a stone thrown by one of Mubarak's supporters in Tahrir Square.

Amidst calls for the abolition of Article 2, there have been protests by some groups in Egypt to retain Article 2 and the Islamic identity of the country.

The committee appointed by the military seems to have avoided confrontation on this issue by largely ignoring it. However, the liberal Westernised civil society groups are producing their own drafts of an entirely new constitution. Hafez Abou Saeda, head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, said he already had his own draft ready.
Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood has just announced that its political party will be called the "Freedom and Justice Party", which bears more than a passing resemblance to the current Turkish "Justice and Development Party".

I do not know who exactly is influencing the Muslim Brotherhood but one indication comes from an article for the Huffington Post published on 8 February 2011. It is entitled “Democratic Turkey is the Template for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood” and its author, Tariq Ramadan, argues that:

"Only by exchanging ideas, and not by torture and dictatorship, can we find solutions that respect the people's will. Turkey's example should be an inspiration to us observers..."

"Today's Muslim Brotherhood draws these diverse visions together. But the leadership of the movement - those who belong to the founding generation are now very old - no longer fully represents the aspirations of the younger members, who are much more open to the world, anxious to bring about internal reform and fascinated by the Turkish example." (Tariq Ramadan, Huffington Post, 08.02.11)

Perhaps in choosing such a name for its political party, the Muslim Brotherhood is strategically trying to send a signal to the West that it, as Tayyip Erdogan does, will maintain the peace treaty with Israel or that it will also endeavour to become a secular Muslim state like Turkey.

What people seem to forget when thinking about Turkey is the direction, the trajectory. It is a country slowly working its way out of Ataturk’s anti-Islam minefields with the millstone of entry into to the European Union hanging around its neck and tugging it in the other direction. The progress is slow and painful as we have seen with the hijab issue. Though tolerated, it is still illegal to wear hijab in universities and because the decision was made in 2008 by the Constitutional Court to annul the proposal to lift the ban, there is now no possibility to appeal against that verdict. This is just one example of the deeply embedded hatred for Islam that persists from the legacy of Ataturk and the Young Turks.

Indeed, we can see why there have been many Western politicians (e.g. Jack Straw) who are keen to see all Arab countries, especially those bordering Israel, to copy the Turkish model. However, that advice should not be heeded without a full appreciation of the history of conspiracies in Turkish lands and the trajectory of today’s Turkey, which is pointing in a direction away from the Ataturk model and towards Islam. Turkey's trajectory even in foreign policy is slowly moving towards a more pro-Islam position. Egypt and other Arab countries should not be trying to move in the opposite direction, especially since the importance of Islam is still high in the consciousness of the populace of these countries. Listening to Egyptian politicians muse about Turkey as some par excellence model to emulate suggests that there is a big disconnect between their fascination with the West and the reality that surrounds them.

Leadership-less "revolutions", regularly characterised as "the revolution of the youth", coupled with an ardent focus on constitutions and calls for Westernisation have worrying echoes of a tragic era in Ottoman history. Incidentally, Israel has been in existence for 63 years: it still has neither a constitution nor stated borders and no one seems to be asking why.

There is more to it than meets the eye in respect of the events currently unfolding in the Arab world. As the Libyans demonstrate in the streets of Benghazi, believing they are following in the footsteps of an Egyptian revolution, little do they realise that it is they - the Libyan people - who may be having the first real revolution of the century, which the Egyptians and Tunisians may have to follow if they are to free themselves from the shackles of the powers that be.

Conspiracies aimed at those who believe in the finality of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wasallam) and in the perfection of the words of the Quran will continue until the greatest of conspiracies envelops them all.

Allah, the Almighty says in the Quran:

By the sky which returns [rain],

And [by] the earth which cracks open,

Indeed, the Qur'an is a decisive statement,

And it is not amusement

Indeed, they are planning a plan,

But I too am planning a plan.

So allow time for the disbelievers.

Leave them awhile.

(Quran, 86:11-18)

[i] George Antonius, (1939),The Arab Awakening. p.101
[ii] An interesting twist to a similar Article 2 is found in the new Iraqi constitution, which says, "Islam is the official religion of the State and is a foundation source of legislation: A. No law may be enacted that contradicts the established provisions of Islam B. No law may be enacted that contradicts the principles of democracy." (Emphasis added)

Tariq Ramadan and the Oxford Haskalah Attempt

2011-02-18T23:14:00.001Z

Written by Husain Al-Qadi

At a time when momentous events are taking place in the Muslim world, it may puzzle some that we at UmmahPulse are harping on about Haskala and reformation. Well, the truth is that the two are linked in more ways than meet the eye, something that I will come back to later.
Those of you who read the JumahPulses regularly will have noticed that there is an on-going debate in the comments section on the website regarding our recent choice of topics. While some have welcomed our courage in tackling difficult issues to do with reformation, others have accused UmmahPulse of choosing easy targets (e.g. Sarah Joseph) as opposed to towering figures like Tariq Ramadan, who was the inspiration behind the conference held in Oxford called Rethinking Islamic Reform.

The pre-conference hype greatly raised expectations in some circles in respect of the impact they hoped the event would have. As one organiser put it, "It will change the world," and another hopeful chimed in with, "We need more than small talk". In fact, the world media, although present in full force on the night, decided by and large to ignore the conference. Here at UmmahPulse we chose not to cover it because it turned out to be an oversold tempest in a teacup.

However, events in the last few weeks have caused us to reconsider our decision. Apart from the accusations of timidity on the forums, our concerns over the activities of Mr Ramadan were heightened with the airing of a BBC TV programme, in which he issued a fatwa to a confused Muslim couple who used to be leading lights in the Islamic Society of Britain. The fatwa not only contravened major aspects of usūl al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence) but also had the potential to corrupt believers' faith in the fairness of Divine Judgement. He told the couple that they could ignore the explicit verses of the Quran in the interests of "fairness" and grant their daughters and son equal shares in their inheritance. According to Ramadan, this was because the "context had changed" and they could only follow the Quranic injunction (that sons get twice the share of daughters) if the son provided a guarantee that he would take financial responsibility for his sisters for the rest of their lives. In addition, by relying on a hadith that is not applied in the fiqh of inheritance, he made the couple alter unnecessarily their shared ownership of the family home.

We therefore decided to warn people about Mr Ramadan and his deviancy. We knew this would cause a stir in some circles and, judging from some of the comments we have received, it took some people by surprise.

The reason for the shock is that the image of Mr Ramadan over the last six years has been managed quite well by a diligent network of supporters. They promote him in the Muslim community as a superstar Muslim intellect who is beyond reproach. This, of course, is easy in a media-driven society where anyone can become famous merely for being famous, especially if you have published 20 books (packed with postmodernist mumbo-jumbo) and have a host of academic titles and magazine accolades to your name. These credentials raise you close to sainthood in the eyes of many, particularly if no one in the community raises serious questions.

Tariq Ramadan's meteoric rise to fame in the Muslim community has not been plain sailing. Although he had become the darling of the Western media years ago, the Muslims in the West, as Mr Ramadan himself acknowledges, did not want anything to do with him initially. It was only when his visa to the USA was revoked in 2004, and he was seen as a victim of American oppression, that he earned sympathy and acceptance within Muslim circles. Ironically, he now lectures Muslims on how not to see themselves as victims.

A Refined Campaign to Deconstruct and Reform Islam

Nowadays, Mr Ramadan gives the impression that in the Muslim community it is only those with "highly traditionalist" or "salafi literalist" approaches that disagree with him.[1]

In the early days his message was clear and blunt. The 'ulama (Islamic scholars) were to be ignored, traditional learning (including that taught at al-Azhar) was useless and all the 'ulama in the world were inept because they were people of texts and ignorant of contexts. He was right and everyone else was wrong – and to prove it, all Muslim countries needed to sign up to his global moratorium on hudud (capital punishment) or be forever condemned as backward and barbaric. Obviously, he did not anticipate the ferocity of the response to such bold posturing.

Leaving aside the "traditionalists" and the "salafis", even the so-called moderate scholars came down on him like a ton of bricks. For example, the famous Dr Taha Jaber al-Alwani - who can neither be accused of being unfamiliar with modern contexts (he has been settled in a career in the West since 1983), nor intellectually inept so as to be unable to understand the true meaning of the moratorium - was so outraged at the cheek of Mr Ramadan in issuing such a call that he wrote:

"Fabricating lies against the Muslim nation is unacceptable, be it done by an individual or a group. Moreover, such a fabricator or alleger against the Muslim nation is deemed wrong, regardless of the validity of his point of view. Dr Tariq should have referred such an issue to specialized men of religion and institutions, namely the Muslim jurisprudents and scholars and Islamic fiqh academies, instead of changing the issue into a media topic that preoccupies Muslims. This religion consists of belief and Shari'ah (Islamic Law), and the latter is application of the former. The difference between Shari'ah and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) is that Shari'ah is set by Allah; whereas fiqh is the human comprehension of Shari'ah. In addition, religion has been perfectly completed by the message of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). Thus, religion is not incomplete, neither in belief nor in Shari'ah, that some individual or group comes today to allege that they are going to complete it.

"The success achieved by Shari'ah in forming our culture, mentality, and tradition changed it into part of our identity. So, any trial to separate us and Shari'ah means that there is a plot to efface our identity, culture, and tradition. There is not a believer, believing in Allah, His Messenger and the Last Day, who can support such a plot or claim that we Muslims are in no longer need of Shari'ah. There is a common misconception among some people as regards the comprehensive meaning of Shari`ah – that includes acts of worship, dealings, and morals, and penalties. This made some people, due to their ignorance, refer to Shari'ah as penalties or penal law. This is, in fact, a very limited perception that shows their lack of understanding of both fiqh and Shari'ah... The proposal of deactivating the Islamic legal penalties today is a trial to remove the barriers between liberalism and Muslim man, for the purpose of getting belief and Shari`ah out of his mind... Destruction of Islamic Law (Shari'ah) has always been a target, for our enemies are aware that Shari'ah is the real obstacle in their destructive schemes. So it is by no means acceptable or reasonable that one of the members of the Muslim nation comes today to fabricate allegations that contribute to the demolition of the nation..."[2] (To read the full article and the views of other scholars please visit the comments section of our last JumahPulse.)

There were many other moderate scholars who also severely criticised his action. Their articles condemning him were published on the Islamonline website in 2005 but in the years since, many have mysteriously disappeared from the site. Recent events may offer an explanation.[3]

Traditional Learning

These sharp rebuttals seem to have caused Mr Ramadan to rethink his strategy. In the Oxford conference he went to great lengths to convince the audience of his "Azhari credentials":

"When I went to Egypt to study - because it was not possible and I think also that in the future Western Muslims should have institutions in the West - but I went to Egypt, and I was with scholars. In fact, there is something common in our journey too, to Islamic knowledge. I was born and raised in the west and going back to Egypt for example (it was in Egypt for me), I went to traditional one-to-one courses with scholars, and what I wanted is to get the knowledge, and what we call in the traditional way of teaching ijazaat."

This gives the impression that he sees merit in doing what he did but if one reads his earlier writings, his true feelings about the traditional way of learning are quite the opposite. If fact, he is fascinated with the analysis of the Masonic, neo-Mu'tazilite Muhammad Abduh. In his book, To be a European Muslim, Ramadan quotes extensively from Abduh in his chapter called "Prospects for contemporary Ijtihad":

"The movement, born more that 200 years ago, has provoked consistent disruption with the traditional religious curricula in the great Islamic universities of the Muslim World. Even if the improvements are not visible, one can witness important changes since Muhammad Abduh expressed deep criticism against the 'old, fusty and useless teaching of al-Azhar' for instance. 'If today I have some knowledge that can be mentioned, it is only due to my efforts, during more than ten years, to try to clean up my mind from the dirt and rubbish al-Azhar put into it. So far, I have not been able to reach the cleanliness I wished for'" (Ramadan, T, To Be A European Muslim (1999), p.93).

He tries to gloss over these quotes in the paragraphs that follow but one cannot help but ask why he would quote such vile statements in his book about traditional learning unless he himself has some sympathy with them.

The fact that he now routinely goes to great lengths to convince people of his links with traditional learning form scholars of al-Azhar can only be seen in the light of expediency. Following the shock caused by questions that were raised about his credentials when he called for a moratorium on hudud, it became clear that without such qualifications, no one would listen to him. Therefore the world was offered a half-baked narrative about intensive one-to-one studies with shuyukh at al-Azhar for a period of less than two years.

Arabic Language Incompetence

A basic pre-requisite for the study of advanced texts with shuyukh is proficiency in Arabic, and I do not mean the Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo. In the Arab world, when people say "someone knows Arabic", it means he is competent in fushaa (classical Arabic). Without this, one cannot even begin to grasp the subjects Mr Ramadan has claimed to have studied in great depth at the feet of al-Azhar's senior scholars.

The sad truth is that Mr Ramadan has repeatedly been observed to have little or no expertise in classical Arabic. For example, in the Oxford conference he demonstrated his utter ignorance of the language. Every first year student of Arabic would be able to distinguish between the transitive and intransitive forms of verbs they use. The verb fasada is intransitive and in order to use it in transitively, it must be placed in the form of af'ala (i.e. afsada). This is basic morphology that every student should know. Yet Mr Ramadan appeared completely oblivious to this rule when, in an attempt to quote a hadith, he said, "fasadahaa" to mean "people corrupting the shariah". Such obvious incompetence in the use of basic Arabic while claiming to have studied the complicated texts of usul al-fiqh in Arabic is revealing.

Referring to a Hadith That Does Not Exist

The hadith to which Mr Ramadan was attempting to refer was quoted as the foundation for the entire discussion by the first speaker, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson. The terms din (religion), sunnah (example) and shari'ah (way) have different meanings in Islam. There are ahadith similar to the one mentioned in the conference with the word din and the word sunnah but there is no hadith of the sort mentioned with the word "shari'ah". In other words, I could not find any hadith that says that Allah will send someone at the turn of every century to renovate the shari'ah or that the ghuraba (strangers) will renovate the shari'ah, which is what it appears the speakers were attempting to say.

This is significant because attention to detail in hadith is required of scholars in general but especially when they are attempting to reform or renovate the religion in deviation from received traditions. Each term has specific connotations. There is a big difference between tajdid ("renewal") of din or sunnah and the tajdid of the shari'ah.

Corruption of the din and sunnah predominantly arises from the general public in the form of neglect and carelessness, whereas a corruption of the shari'ah is predominantly linked to the custodians of the shari'ah, that is the 'ulama, who are the inheritors of the prophets.

However, when we look at the prophecies relating to the corruption of the knowledge of the shari'ah, we find the opposite to this scenario. The Knowledge and Guidance will remain protected through divine providence until such time that Allah decides to take it away from the world. He will do so by bringing about the death of 'ulama in whose hearts this Knowledge is preserved. Then the ignorant would be taken as scholars and they would mislead people and be misguided themselves, i.e. having corrupted the shari'ah. When this happens, no human being will have the power to rectify it – not even with all the libraries of the world at his disposal.

Removing the Authority of the 'Ulama

It might seem quite innocent to suggest, as Mr Ramadan did in Oxford, that there is a need to "shift the centre of gravity of authority in Islam". He wants to set up councils to discuss matters of fiqh and usul al-fiqh, where the centre of gravity of authority no longer rests with the 'ulama, which is where Allah and his Prophet (sallallaahu alayhi wasallam) have placed it. He wants the 'ulama to share their position and authority with experts in the fields of contexts, with thinkers and intellectuals. As part of this new structure of authority he also said that "we need sometimes people who are not Muslims," i.e. in the fiqh councils.

Now, let's put this into perspective. Imagine if someone were to say to the judges of this country that there must be a shift in the centre of gravity of their authority and that, from now on, they would have to share their authority with expert witnesses that serve in their courts. They would no longer be able to make independent rulings on the basis of information provided by expert witnesses, rather the witnesses would now have to share in the authority of determining the ruling. The response would be, "Have you taken your medicine today, sonny?"

However, when it comes to Islam and Muslims, we are all too willing to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone posing as a scholar, which is indicative of the level of concern we have for our souls compared with for our physical bodies. We would never allow a man who says he did a two-year crash course in surgery to perform heart surgery on us but with our imaan, it matters not if he is a neo-Mu'tazilite who says:

"I believe we must now return to the sources of the fundamentals of law and jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) and question the original categorizations and methodologies." (Ramadan, T., What I Believe, Oxford University Press (2010), p. 85)

Let us ask ourselves: who were the people who set the foundations of those categorisations and formulated those methodologies? They were the likes of Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Al-Shafi'i. To suggest that Mr Ramadan, or any other televangelist Muslim today, possesses the knowledge and skill to deconstruct the works of Imam Abu Hanifa and Al-Shafi'i is beyond arrogance. It is delusional and whoever chooses to follow such misguidance will have much cause for regret.

Psychological Manipulation

I do not blame people for falling prey to this pretentious charade. It is cleverly done. Mr Ramadan criticised the 'ulama for having no insight into and ignoring the "psychology of fatwa". I think the psychology of his rhetoric deserves some scrutiny. If you sit and listen to a 45 minute lecture in which a lecturer tells the you, the audience, 43 times that what he is saying to you about your religion is "quite important" or "very important", then it is highly likely that you would go away with the impression that this person is indeed "important" to your faith.

This is exactly what Mr Ramadan did in the Oxford conference. In almost each minute of his presentation, the audience was told "this is important" or "this is very important". The other psychological stunt he employed was to over-emphasise the presence of ikhtilafaat (differences of opinion among scholars) to such a degree as to suggest that the concept of ijma' (consensus) is non-existent in Islam.

He also attempted to pre-empt criticisms. "This was not to please the West," he protested repeatedly but he offered no explanation as to why his entire prescription dovetailed perfectly with the wishes and aspirations of Western orientalists. "I do not want to reform Islam", "I am not touching Islam", "I am just touching the minds", he declared, yet his proposal is for a new a structure of authority and a new usul in which the fundamentals of jurisprudence would be deconstructed to conform to the so-called "new modern ethic" which, by and large, is Western.

Conclusion

Changing the laws of inheritance that are unambiguous in the Quran without any justification pushes believers not only beyond the boundaries of halal and haram but also into confusion and doubt at a time when Muslims are being targeted from all angles. It is a time when they need support and fortitude in faith and certainly do not need their faith to be undermined by references to imaginary notions of a “superior universal ethics” positioned over and above Revealed Guidance. Allah says in the Quran:

وَمَا كَانَ لِمُؤْمِنٍ وَلَا مُؤْمِنَةٍ إِذَا قَضَى اللَّـهُ وَرَسُولُهُ أَمْرًا أَن يَكُونَ لَهُمُ الْخِيَرَةُ مِنْ أَمْرِهِمْ ۗ وَمَن
يَعْصِ اللَّـهَ وَرَسُولَهُ فَقَدْ ضَلَّ ضَلَالًا مُّبِينًا

"It is not for a believing man or a believing woman, when Allah and His Messenger have decided a matter, that they should [thereafter] have any opinion or choice in the matter. And whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger has certainly strayed into clear error." (33:36)

The Mu'tazilites were a deviant group of rationalists who appeared in the latter part of the first century of Islam. The core of their deviancy was in prioritising human intellect over and above Revealed Wisdom. Their reappearance in the late 19th Century was influenced by colonialism and Freemasonry.

One need only look at the graph on page 38 of Mr Ramadan’s book, To Be A European Muslim, to see that he has an agenda to continue the work that was started by the Neo-Mu'tazilite activists of the 19th century.

He classifies the period between 1258 and 1870 as a period of "stagnation and decline" for the Muslim world. 1870 onwards he deems to be the period of "reassertion of ijtihad". Muhammad Abduh was born in 1849 and 1871 was the year when Jamal Al-Din al-Afghani entered Egypt. Mr Ramadan's neutral description of his activities is revealing:

"As revealed by Abduh, he [Afghani] developed in his students a practical inclination: he encouraged them to engage in the publication of magazines, to put in motion a current of opinion and to join, like he himself did, the Masonic lodges of French inspiration." (Tariq Ramadan, Aux Sources du Renouveau musulman, D'al-Alfghani a Hassan al-Banna un siecle de reformisme islamique, Paris 1998, p. 54)

After six years in exile from British Egypt (1882-1888), Muhammad Abduh returned to Cairo and soon became Shaykh al-Azhar.

Similarly, Mr Ramadan's six year ban (2004-2010) from the United States also boosted his profile (among Muslims in the West), and whereas it is now proven through several academic studies that Abduh served in the office of al-Azhar as a loyal servant to his Masonic masters[4], we do not know who is behind the scenes of the antics we have so far witnessed from Mr Ramadan. All we know is that when given the chance, he has always remained keen to police the thoughts of Muslims in a way that is comforting and consistent with particular Western sensibilities, even when those thoughts seem pretty banal and entail no adverse consequences for Muslims. The coincidences are numerous and I will leave you with one more example:

For Mr Ramadan, "Muslim countries" may no longer be referred to as "Muslim countries" because that may – God forbid – inadvertently imply the non-existence of minorities in those countries, which is concerning to Westerners. Therefore, all Muslim countries must be re-named "Muslim majority countries", i.e. Muslims are merely a majority but the country cannot be labelled "Muslim". Muslims merely happen to be there in large numbers, whereas to say "Muslim country" could also mean Islamic and that is to be avoided. It is unsurprising that, so far, he has failed to show a similar enthusiasm in demonstrating his creativity to find new demographically-conscious names for Western countries. How about "Muslim minority countries"?

If some people remain inclined to give Mr Ramadan the benefit of the doubt, after all that has been said here, simply because he is the grandson of Hasan Al-Banna (r.a.), then please spare a moment to reflect on the shocking revelation he recently made to the journalist Benjamin Pauker of Foreign Policy Magazine: "I grew up in a very liberal family. I was left alone to decide whether to pray or not to pray" (Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2011). Lineage has no value when one is disconnected from one's heritage. Moreover, he is not the first deviant in the family. His great uncle, Jamal Al-Banna (brother of Hasan Al-Banna), is infamous for his deviant writings and for appearing on Egyptian TV issuing all sorts of errant fiqh rulings on inheritance, criticising 'ulama, delegitimising hijab, promoting free mixing and kissing between the sexes, etc. The difference between him and Mr Ramadan is that in Egypt, Jamal al-Banna, thanks to the diligence of the 'ulama in challenging him, is seen as a delusional Walter Mitty character and ignored by everyone. In Europe however, the nephew's peddling of old Mu'tazilite ideas repackaged in postmodernist mumbo-jumbo is being taken seriously by some as gems of the mujaddid of the century.

Some might say: why can't we just agree to disagree? I would have been a proponent of this approach myself in circumstances other than those in which we find ourselves today. As distant as they may seem, the events in Egypt within the last few weeks are intricately linked to this discussion. Western governments are hoping for a reformation of Islam in the Muslim world and the successes they have witnessed with the likes of Tariq Ramadan and others in the West have raised their hopes and plans to suit. Where, in the past, reforming Islam was merely a dream, nowadays Tariq Ramadan and his followers are examples to be brought to the fore to embolden those who once thought it was impossible. If Egypt, which is at the heart of the Arab world, can be changed then the rest of the Muslim world would be a breeze.

The person the West has prepared for this task Egypt is Dr Ayman Nour, who personifies their aspirations. He possesses all the necessary characteristics and ambitions. From his book, Yawmiyyaat Sahafi Mushagib, published in 2000, one is able to understand why in 2005, while the USA was using Egypt for extraordinary renditions and torture, Condoleezza Rice cancelled a visit to Cairo in protest when Nour was arrested.

The so-called revolution in Egypt was nothing more than a well-managed role rotation to facilitate the entry of the "right kind of people" who will implement large scale "social reform" (which is diplomatic speak for reforming Islamic practices). Such a project requires people with a genuine mandate, something that Mubarak did not possess, so he had to go. This is what is meant by "turning volatility into opportunity for reform". I expect that in the days and months to come, we will see more and more of Ayman Nour and the young activists with ties to the US who will seek to turn Egypt into something that would have made Muhammad Abduh and his Masonic masters very pleased. The vision is of a 21st Century (Egyptian) Ataturk who, with the help of his “young turks” ("young Masrees"), will create a constitution so intensely secular that Islam will have little or no room to breathe, let alone influence policy.

The likes of Tariq Ramadan and all those who are calling for a full scale reformation are implicated in this global onslaught against Islam. They provide succour and encouragement to the people in Western corridors of power who hold ambitions that stretch far beyond "democratic elections".

يُرِيدُونَ أَن يُطْفِئُوا نُورَ اللَّـهِ بِأَفْوَاهِهِمْ وَيَأْبَى اللَّـهُ إِلَّا أَن يُتِمَّ نُورَهُ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ الْكَافِرُونَ

"They want to extinguish the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah refuses except to perfect His light, although the disbelievers dislike it." (Quran 9:32)

ثُمَّ جَعَلْنَاكَ عَلَىٰ شَرِيعَةٍ مِّنَ الْأَمْرِ فَاتَّبِعْهَا وَلَا تَتَّبِعْ أَهْوَاءَ الَّذِينَ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ

Allah says: "Then We placed you on an ordained way (shari'ah) concerning the matter [of religion]; so follow it and do not follow the inclinations of those who do not know." [Quran 45:18]

Imam Abdul Malik al-Juwayni (d. 478 H.) said: "Ijma' is the strap and support of the Shari'ah."

Imam al-Sarakhsi (d. 490 H) said: "One who denies the validity of ijma' seeks to indirectly demolish the religion itself."

Imam Ibrahim ibn Maysarah (d. 132H) said, "Whoever honours an innovator has aided in the destruction of Islam."

Imam al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyad (d. 187H) said, "I met the best of people, all of them people of the sunnah and they used to forbid accompanying the people of innovation."

Imam al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110H) said, "Do not sit with the people of innovation and desires, nor argue with them, nor listen to them."

The Prophet Muhammad (sallallaahu alayhi wasallam) said: "Whoever innovates or accommodates an innovator then upon him is the curse of Allah, His Angels and the whole of mankind." (Bukhari (12/41) and Muslim (9/140)).

According to Time Magazine, Tariq Ramadan is one of the biggest innovators of the 21st Century. We have reason to concur.

[1] - Ramadan, T., (2010) What I believe. Oxford University Press, p. 108
[2] - Unacceptable Allegation By Dr. Taha Jaber Al-`Alwani April 19, 2005 (IslamOnline.net)
[3] - This year, the Islam Online website took a more conservative turn. Its Qatar-based management dismissed most of its Egyptian employees, who had gone on strike. (Financial Times, December 1 2010)
[4] - A. Albert Kudsi-Zadeh, Afghani and Freemasonry in Egypt, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol.92, no.1, 1972; and Karim Wissa, Freemasonry in Egypt 1798-1921, The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin, vol.16, no.2, 1989.

The PM's Speech

2011-02-07T21:47:00.000Z

Written by Karima Hamdan

While alcohol-slurred chants of "E – E – EDL" and anti-Muslim hate speech too foul to reprint here could be heard up and down Luton's town centre streets, another more urbane voice added its plum tones to the cacophony. This weekend British Prime Minister David Cameron gave a landmark speech setting out his vision for British Muslims.
The speech is remarkable for its clarity. Gone are the days when politicians felt that they had to take into consideration the feelings of Muslims. After dispensing the usual disclaimers and caveats that Islam wasn't equivalent to terrorism, Cameron clearly laid out exactly where he felt the problems of British Muslims lie: Islamist extremism.

For those puzzled by what exactly "Islamist Extremism" means, they will be disappointed to learn that being a law-abiding citizen who pays his taxes and minds his own business will not cut it anymore to extricate yourself from this label. The PM has made clear that there is a charter of acceptable thoughts and opinions that British Muslims will have to sign up to in order not to be classified as "Islamist Extremists".

To this end he has said that the state must confront, and not consort with, the non-violent Muslim groups that are ambiguous about British values such as equality of the sexes, democracy and integration. Cameron went on to declare that multiculturalism had failed and accused it of eroding the British national identity and promoting insular communities that fostered terrorism. The pill for this particular ill would be a robust promotion of liberal-democratic values – freedom of speech, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality – and a greater emphasis on shared British cultural attributes, with anyone unwilling to take this course of medication coming up against what Cameron calls "active, muscular liberalism".

On the surface, this seems entirely appropriate. Indeed, how could any law-abiding citizen take issue with the PM promoting democracy and the rule of law? However, there is a layer of ambiguity in the speech that provides cause for concern. By shifting the focus from those groups whose ideologies explicitly advocate violence to the beliefs of those whom the government's paid Muslim pundits argue will inevitably and inexorably turn to violence, the government has made belief in Islamic orthodoxy a punishable sin to be rooted out. Does the government mean to say that it will not engage with any Muslim group or mosque that believes, for example, that homosexuality is a sin? Does it mean that any Muslim school that teaches the differing shares of inheritance to which Muslim men and women are Quranically entitled will be denied government funding? Does it mean that parents who do not wish their child to participate in mixed-sex physical education lessons, music lessons or sexual education lessons are closet terrorists at worst and an enemy of British society and values at best?

If we enquire as to the origin of this thinking, we quickly realise that this is not the impartial stance of a politician willing the best for his people but rather a pre-planned agenda of those with an axe to grind about Islam. Peter Oborne, chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph and one of a minority of journalists in this country that have the moral courage to speak up against the widespread Islamophobia present in the media, provided a telling insight into the background behind the PM's speech. Writing in The Spectator magazine last week, Oborne mentioned that the Tories were divided into two factions over how to "deal" with British Muslims:

"There are two factions, and the strongest can loosely be described as neoconservative. This faction remains an unconditional supporter of the United States of America, continues to defend the Iraq invasion, powerfully admires and in some cases worships Tony Blair, and automatically takes the side of Israel in the middle east.

"This section of the coalition also takes a hard line on domestic security arrangements, supporting control orders and the divisive Prevent strategy for confronting its special interpretation of the Islamic terror threat. Its key cabinet supporters include George Osborne, Liam Fox, Oliver Letwin, Michael Gove (whose book Celsius 7/7 sought to define the domestic war on terror with astonishing success) and, crucially, the home secretary, Theresa May. Baroness Neville-Jones, the one-time Whitehall spook who sits on the fancily named Security Council, is another well-placed though bone-headed supporter."

The other faction is much less powerful with its two main players being Tory party Chairman, Baroness Warsi, and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg who, having quaffed the poisoned chalice of power, has fallen from his heady days when "everyone agreed with Nick" to become the Conservative Party's Lib-Dem fall-guy on everything from tuition fees to NHS reform.

The split has been largely hidden from public view but has come to light most notably when Sayeeda Warsi withdrew, late in the day and without warning, from a planned appearance at the Global Peace and Unity Conference in London last October and then from attending the Doha Debates to defend the right to wear the niqab a few weeks later. Oborne links her withdrawal from the GPU event to a Quilliam Foundation memo circulated at the Home Office that accused the GPU event of having been infiltrated by Islamists and therefore not appropriate for Warsi to attend. Oborne says of the Quilliam Foundation that it has played a vital role in framing the public debate on Islam and exerted a huge behind-the-scenes influence on policy.

This appears to be borne out when one compares the contents of the PM's speech with a Quilliam memo to various government departments, including the Home Office, which we reported on after it was leaked online last year. In it, Quilliam redefined the parameters of what type of Muslim constitutes a "threat" by broadening the definition of "Islamist" to include just about every non-Barelvi, non-Sufi Muslim group and mosque in the UK and further damned them with the following statement:

"The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics."

The rest of the document could almost double as a check-list for the PM's speech. This includes: a change in the use of language, replacing the phrase "Al-Qa'ida inspired violence" with "Islamist inspired violence"; identifying universities and prisons as "hotbeds" of Islamist recruitment; and the blocking of public money and cutting of ties with any group that doesn't share the government’s manifesto of liberal values. There is a strange concordance even down to the analogies used. Where Quilliam asserts that "non-violent Islamists" are to "jihadist Islamists" as the BNP is to far right para-military group Combat 18; the PM speaks of engaging with non-violent Islamists as "turning to a right-wing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement".

When one witnesses the hand of Quilliam moving behind the scenes to determine government policy on British Muslim society, it does not require a leap of faith to conclude that perhaps Quilliam's other recommendations could be adopted wholesale by the government. These include:

That no government department, from the Home Office to the Department of Justice and Scotland Yard to the Department for Education, should meet with any "Islamist" groups – even in secret – for fear of being manipulated or inadvertently influenced by them (!).
Endorsing previous government decisions to ban, from entry into the UK, international Muslim speakers and advising that future bans should include those who believe in "inflammatory" ideas such as the immorality of homosexuality.
Recommending that the Home Office screen all of its employees in case they support or have any sympathy for "Islamism".
The police should only have contact with “Islamist” organisations when gathering intelligence and should not otherwise cooperate with them. Under no circumstances should members of the public be directed to any of these organisations for advice or support.
Identifying universities as "hotbeds of Islamism” and advising that prayer rooms and Islamic societies be monitored; and disallowing any speakers with "Islamist" ideas, such as the immorality of homosexuality, to speak on campus.
The Department of Education was advised to give teachers more training so that they can spot students who express "Islamist" ideas and publicly challenge them without the fear of being labelled Islamophobes. There are also proposals to monitor Muslim schools (including even part-time, after-school, mosque-based teaching, i.e. the maktab system), Muslim teachers and Muslim governors for "Islamist" influences, and teaching Muslim students specifically about "liberal and secular" interpretations of Islam.
Quilliam delves into the world of Muslim prisoners, recommending that they should be monitored for non-violent "Islamist" leanings, and their probation terms linked to this. Needless to say, the authors also suggest that prison visitors and imams should be screened for "Islamist" ideology.

In summary, if the Quilliam foundation has been allowed the level of access and influence that commentators like Peter Oborne postulate, then it will make the Labour government's failed Prevent strategy seem like a Women's Institute position paper on jam-making.

Quilliam's claim to have specialist knowledge and understanding of "Islamism" is rooted in its founders' previous associations with Hizbut-Tahrir (despite allegations that Maajid Nawaz only had a brief and inconsequential acquaintance with a few HT supporters) and the claim has been repeatedly rejected by British Muslims. It has also been shown that Quilliam enjoys little or no support from the average UK Muslim. Despite this, Quilliam has been lavished with over £1 million in funding from the previous government and patronised with access to high ranking government ministers such as the former Secretary of State for Communities, Hazel Blears, and current Minister for Education, Michael Gove.

It appears that the current and previous governments are desperate to swallow the Quilliam mantra that Western policy in the Muslim world has nothing at all to do with increasing the likelihood of terror attacks in Britain and elsewhere. One can hardly blame these ministers for yearning towards Quilliam's version of reality, as it completely exonerates them from responsibility for the fallout of enacting disastrous policies in the Middle East and blindly following US hawks into illegal wars.

But it is a dangerous game. A government policy that specifically cuts ties with an entire community will effectively "kettle" British Muslims into a "pariah's corner", encouraging polarisation, and with no routes open for the government to engage with and influence them. The national interest will not be served by this stance. The only ones set to gain from it are former "Islamists" looking for a government salary and powerful lobbies for foreign powers (such as the "only democracy in the Middle East") keen to silence British Muslim voices speaking out in opposition to their brutality at home.

Needless to say, many of those marching with the EDL in Luton on Saturday were jubilant that David Cameron had "come around to their way of thinking". It simply beggars belief that on the day when that violently anti-Muslim group was holding its "homecoming march" in Luton, David Cameron could give a speech like this and thus hand the far right a propaganda victory, a point highlighted by Inayat Banglawala in an interview with the BBC.

Any policy which rejects dialogue with groups representing huge swathes of the Muslim community, hoping that those people will magically go away, is misguided and shortsighted. The government should not rely on advice dispensed by paid stooges who are openly and heavily influenced by foreign lobbies and who do not reflect British realities. Quilliam's snake oil formula of propagating stereotypes and misconceptions demonstrates its intellectual laziness and should be rejected. One of the few positives to be taken from this mess is that Muslims will learn to become more resourceful and independent-minded once the security blanket of the government's shilling has been stripped away.

This leaves us with the stark reality that the battle within Britain's coalition government - about how to "deal" with Muslims - has been won by those who wish not to address the root causes of terrorism but rather to quietly terraform Islam. It is a shrewd tactical move to silence the voices of Islamic orthodoxy prior to launching a full-on campaign to reform Islam. Given the half-baked, laughable ideas of the reformists, muzzling their critics is the only way for any of their voices to reach the mainstream. How else could you characterise a "new interpretation" of Islamic inheritance that blatantly contradicts the clear instructions of the Quran?

When a serving Prime Minister chooses to align himself with the rhetoric of a violent street movement by delivering a speech in a country which went to war following the failure of "monoculturalism" in 1930s Europe, then one’s mind is inexorably drawn to those events less than a century ago. Given this sea change in domestic policy and the death of our pluralistic society, what should be the strategies of those organisations that were our representatives but which now have been muted? Who will fill this void of "acceptable" Muslim representation?

Cue the proponents of postmodernist Islam: Tariq Ramadan, Usama Hasan, Taj Hargey, Maajid Nawaz. Rejoice, for your time has come! It seems that instead of the normal democratic process, whereby would-be leaders have to demonstrate that they represent their community, the British Ummah has to decide whether we should jettison whole tracts of our religion in order to meekly fall behind these charlatans and shysters.

Prophet Muhammad (sallallaahu alayhi wasallam) warned of time when knowledge would be lost through the death of scholars and "People would then appoint ignorant leaders for themselves who would be consulted in matters of religion and they would give fatawa (rulings) without knowledge, falling into misguidance and misguiding others." (Muslim)

"Whoever is guided is only guided for [the benefit of] his soul. And whoever goes into misguidance does so against his own soul. And no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another. And never would We punish until We have sent a messenger." (Allah Almighty in the Quran, 17:15)