Subject: pervez hoodbhoy in dawn
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 00:31:14 +1100


Muslims and the West

By Pervez Hoodbhoy

http://www.dawn.com/2001/12/10/op.htm

America has exacted blood revenge for the Twin Towers. A million Afghans
have fled US bombs into the cold wastelands and face starvation. B-52s have
blown the Taliban to bits and changed Mullah Omar's roar of defiance into a
pitiful squeak for surrender. Osama bin Laden is on the run (he may be dead
by the time this article reaches the reader). But even as the champagne pops
in the White House, America remains fearful - for good reason.

Subsequent to September 11 we have all begun to live in a different, more
dangerous world. Now is the time to ask why. Like clinical pathologists, we
need to scientifically examine the sickness of human behaviour impelling
terrorists to fly airliners filled with passengers into skyscrapers. We also
need to understand why millions celebrate as others die.

In the absence of such an understanding there remains only the medieval
therapy of exorcism; for the strong to literally beat the devil out of the
weak. Indeed, the Grand Exorcist - disdainful of international law and the
growing nervousness of even its close allies - prepares a new hit list of
other Muslim countries needing therapy: Iraq, Somalia, and Libya. We shall
kill at will, is the message.

This will not work. Terrorism does not have a military solution. Soon - I
fear perhaps very soon - there will be still stronger, more dramatic proof.
In the modern age, technological possibilities to wreak enormous destruction
are limitless. Anger, when intense enough, makes small stateless groups, and
even individuals, extremely dangerous.

Anger is ubiquitous in the Islamic world today. Allow me to share a small
personal experience. On September 12 I had a seminar scheduled at the
department of physics in my university in Islamabad, part of a weekly
seminar for physics students on topics outside of physics. Though
traumatized by events, I could not cancel the seminar because sixty people
had already arrived, so I said, "We will have our seminar today on a new
subject: on yesterday's terrorist attacks".

The response was negative, some were mindlessly rejoicing the attacks. One
student said, "You can't call this terrorism." Another said, "Are you only
worried because it is Americans who have died?" It took two hours of
sustained, impassioned, argumentation to convince the students that the
brutal killing of ordinary people, who had nothing to do with the policies
of the United States, was an atrocity. I suppose that millions of Muslim
students the world over felt as mine did, but probably heard no
counter-arguments.

If the world is to be spared what future historians may call the "Century of
Terror", we will have to chart the perilous course between the Scylla of
American imperial arrogance and the Charybdis of Islamic religious
fanaticism. Through these waters, we must steer by a distant star towards a
careful, reasoned, democratic, humanistic, and secular future. Else,
shipwreck is certain.

"Why do they hate us?", asks George W. Bush. This rhetorical question
betrays the pathetic ignorance of most Americans about the world around
them. Moreover, its claim to an injured innocence cannot withstand even the
most cursory examination of US history. For almost forty years, this
"naiveti and self-righteousness" has been challenged most determinedly by
Noam Chomsky. As early as 1967, he pointed that the idea that "our" motives
are pure and "our" actions benign is "nothing new in American intellectual
history - or, for that matter, in the general history of imperialist
apologia".

Muslim leaders have mirrored America's claim and have asked the same
question of the West. They have had little to say about September 11 that
makes sense to people outside their communities. Although they speak
endlessly on rules of personal hygiene and "halal" or "haram", they cannot
even tell us whether or not the suicide bombers violated Islamic laws.
According to the Virginia-based (and largely Saudi-funded) Fiqh Council's
chairman, Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani, "this kind of question needs a lot of
research and we don't have that in our budget."

Fearful of backlash, most leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada,
and Europe have responded in predictable ways to the Twin Towers atrocity.
This has essentially two parts: first, that Islam is a religion of peace;
and second, that Islam was hijacked by fanatics on September 11, 2001. They
are wrong on both counts.

First, Islam - like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion -
is not about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about absolute
belief in its own superiority and the divine right to impose itself upon
others. In medieval times, both the Crusades and the Jihads were soaked in
blood. Today, Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics in the US
and kill doctors; Muslim fundamentalists wage their sectarian wars against
each other; Jewish settlers holding the Old Testament in one hand, and Uzis
in the other, burn olive orchards and drive Palestinians off their ancestral
land; Hindus in India demolish ancient mosques and burn down churches; Sri
Lankan Buddhists slaughter Tamil separatists.

The second assertion is even further off the mark. Even if Islam had, in
some metaphorical sense, been hijacked, that event did not occur on
September 11, 2001. It happened around the 13th century. A quick look around
us readily shows Islam has yet to recover from the trauma of those times.

Where do Muslims stand today? Note that I do not ask about Islam; Islam is
an abstraction. Moulana Abdus Sattar Edhi and Mullah Omar are both followers
of Islam, but the former is overdue for a Nobel peace prize while the other
is a medieval, ignorant, cruel fiend. Edward Said, among others, has
insistently pointed out, Islam carries very different meaning to different
people. It is as heterogeneous as those who believe and practise it. There
is no "true Islam". Therefore it only makes sense to speak of people who
claim that faith.

Today Muslims number one billion, spread over 48 Muslim countries. None of
these has yet evolved a stable democratic political system. In fact, all
Muslim countries are dominated by self-serving corrupt elites who cynically
advance their personal interests and steal resources from their people. No
Muslim country has a viable educational system or a university of
international stature.

Reason too has been waylaid. To take some examples from my own experience.
You will seldom encounter a Muslim name as you flip through scientific
journals, and if you do the chances are that this person lives in the West.
There are a few exceptions: Abdus Salam, together with Steven Weinberg and
Sheldon Glashow, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for the unification
of the weak and electromagnetic forces.

I got to know Salam reasonably well - we even wrote a book preface together.
He was a remarkable man, terribly in love with his country and his religion.
And yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned by his country and excommunicated
from Islam by an act of the Pakistani parliament in 1974. Today the Ahmadi
sect, to which Salam belonged, is considered heretical and harshly
persecuted. (My next-door neighbour, an Ahmadi, was shot in the neck and
hurt and died in my car as I drove him to the hospital. His only fault was
to have been born in the wrong sect.)

Today's sorry situation contrasts starkly with the Islam of yesterday.
Between the 9th and the 13th centuries - the Golden Age of Islam - the only
people doing decent science, philosophy, or medicine were Muslims. For five
straight centuries they alone kept the light of learning ablaze. Muslims not
only preserved ancient learning, they also made substantial innovations and
extensions. The loss of this tradition has proved tragic for Muslim peoples.

Science flourished in the Golden Age of Islam because there was within Islam
a strong rationalist tradition, carried on by a group of Muslim thinkers
known as the Mutazilites. This tradition stressed human free will, strongly
opposing the predestinarians who taught that everything was foreordained and
that humans have no option but surrender everything to Allah. While the
Mutazilites held political power, knowledge grew.

But in the twelfth century Muslim orthodoxy reawakened, spearheaded by the
cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali championed revelation over reason,
predestination over free will. He refuted the possibility of relating cause
to effect, teaching that man cannot know or predict what will happen; God
alone can. He damned mathematics as against Islam, an intoxicant of the mind
that weakened faith.

Held in the vice-like grip of orthodoxy, Islam choked. No longer, as during
the reign of the dynamic caliph Al-Mamun and the great Haroon Al-Rashid,
would Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars gather and work together in the
royal courts. It was the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the
Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd-al Rahman ibn Khaldun,
belonged to the 14th century.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on. The Renaissance brought an
explosion of scientific inquiry in the West. This owed much to Arab
translations and other Muslim contributions, but it was to matter little.
Mercantile capitalism and technological progress drove western countries to
rapidly colonize the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco. Always brutal,
at times genocidal, it changed the shape of the world. It soon became clear,
at least to a part of the Muslim elites, that they were paying a heavy price
for not possessing the analytical tools of modern science and the social and
political values of modern culture - the real source of power of their
colonizers.

To be concluded
-----------------
Time to give up false notions: Muslims and the West

By Pervez Hoodbhoy
http://www.dawn.com/2001/12/11/op.htm

[The following is the remaining part of the article "Muslims and the West".
First part of the article appeared in Monday's issue.]

DESPITE widespread resistance from the orthodox, the logic of modernity
found 19th century Muslim adherents. Modernizers such as Mohammed Abduh and
Rashid Rida of Egypt, Sayyed Ahmad Khan of India, and Jamaluddin Afghani
(who belonged everywhere), wished to adapt Islam to the times, interpret the
Quran in ways consistent with modern science, and discard the Hadith (ways
of the Prophet) in favour of the Qur'an. Others seized on the modern idea of
the nation-state.

It is crucial to note that not a single Muslim nationalist leader of the
20th century was a fundamentalist. Turkey's Kemal Ataturk, Algeria's Ahmed
Ben Bella, Indonesia's Sukarno, Pakistan's Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Egypt's
Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Iran's Mohammed Mosaddeq all sought to organize
their societies on the basis of secular values.

However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonial
nationalist current across the Third World, included the desire to control
and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict with Western
greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain, and later the
United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone willing to collaborate
was preferred, even the ultra-conservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia.
In time, as the cold war pressed in, nationalism became intolerable. In
1953, Mosaddeq of Iran was overthrown in a CIA coup, replaced by Reza Shah
Pahlavi. Britain targeted Nasser. Indonesia's Sukarno was replaced by
Suharto after a bloody coup that left a million dead.

Pressed from outside, corrupt and incompetent from within, secular
governments proved unable to defend national interests or deliver social
justice. They began to frustrate democracy. These failures left a vacuum
which Islamic religious movements grew to fill. After the fall of the Shah,
Iran underwent a bloody revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini. General
Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq ruled Pakistan for eleven hideous years and strove to
Islamize both state and society. In Sudan an Islamic state arose under
Jaafar al-Nimeiry; amputation of hands and limbs became common. Decades ago
the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was the most powerful
Palestinian organization, and largely secular. After its defeat in 1982 in
Beirut, it was largely eclipsed by Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim movement.

The lack of scruple and the pursuit of power by the United States combined
fatally with this tide in the Muslim world in 1979, when the Soviet Union
invaded Afghanistan. With Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq as America's foremost ally,
the CIA advertised for, and openly recruited, Islamic holy warriors from
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive
as its superpower ally and mentor funnelled support to the mujahideen, and
Ronald Reagan feted them on the lawn of White House, lavishing praise on
"brave freedom fighters challenging the Evil Empire".

After the Soviet Union collapsed the United States walked away from an
Afghanistan in shambles, its own mission accomplished. The Taliban emerged;
Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda made Afghanistan their base. Other groups
of holy warriors learned from the Afghan example and took up arms in their
own countries.

At least until September 11, US policy makers were unrepentant. A few years
ago, Carter's U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was asked
by the Paris weekly Nouvel Observateur whether in retrospect, given that
"Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today", US policy might
have been a mistake. Brzezinski retorted: "What is most important to the
history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some
stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the
cold war?"

But Brzezinski's "stirred up Moslems" wanted to change the world; and in
this they were destined to succeed. With this, we conclude our history
primer for the 700 years uptil September 11, 2001.

What should thoughtful people infer from this whole narrative? I think the
inferences are several - and different for different protagonists.

For Muslims, it is time to stop wallowing in self-pity: Muslims are not
helpless victims of conspiracies hatched by an all-powerful, malicious West.
The fact is that the decline of Islamic greatness took place long before the
age of mercantile imperialism. The causes were essentially internal.
Therefore Muslims must introspect, and ask what went wrong.

Muslims must recognize that their societies are far larger, more diverse and
complex than the small homogeneous tribal society in Arabia 1400 hundred
years ago. It is therefore time to renounce the idea that Islam can survive
and prosper only in an Islamic state run according to Islamic "sharia" law.
Muslims need a secular and democratic state that respects religious freedom,
human dignity, and is founded on the principle that power belongs to the
people. This means confronting and rejecting the claim by orthodox Islamic
scholars that in an Islamic state sovereignty does not belong to the people
but, instead, to the viceregents of Allah (Khilafat-al-Arz) or Islamic
jurists (Vilayat-e-Faqih).

Muslims must not look towards the likes of Osama bin Laden; such people have
no real answer and can offer no real positive alternative. To glorify their
terrorism is a hideous mistake - the unremitting slaughter of Shias,
Christians, and Ahmadis in their places of worship in Pakistan, and of other
minorities in other Muslim countries, is proof that all terrorism is not
about the revolt of the dispossessed.

The United States too must confront bitter truths. It is a fact that the
messages of George W. Bush and Tony Blair fall flat while those of Osama bin
Laden, whether he lives or dies, resonate strongly across the Muslim world.
Osama's religious extremism turns off many Muslims, but they find his
political message easy to relate to - stop the dispossession of the
Palestinians, stop propping up corrupt and despotic regimes across the world
just because they serve US interests.

Americans will also have to accept that the United States is past the peak
of its imperial power; the '50s and '60s are gone for good. Its triumphalism
and disdain for international law is creating enemies everywhere, not just
among Muslims. Therefore they must become less arrogant, and more like other
peoples of this world. While the US will remain a superpower for some time
to come, it is inevitably going to become less and less "super".

There are compelling economic and military reasons for this. For example,
China's economy is growing at 7 per cent per year while the US economy is in
recession. India, too, is coming up very rapidly. In military terms,
superiority in the air or in space is no longer enough to ensure security.
In how many countries can US citizens safely walk the streets today?

Our collective survival lies in recognizing that religion is not the
solution; neither is nationalism. Both are divisive, embedding within us
false notions of superiority and arrogant pride that are difficult to erase.
We have but one choice: the path of secular humanism, based upon the
principles of logic and reason. This alone offers the hope of providing
everybody on this globe with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.



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