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| | Salaams,
Sorry about my delay in responding to any
comments or questions...as I am leaving day after tommorrow for England
and haven't packed anything yet! :S
But before my vacation I
just wanted to paste some articles from the Toronto star (Toronto's
local newspaper) that I thought were pretty good.
Here are the 2 links to the articles...and i've also pasted them below...
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1155937810425&call_pageid=970599119419
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1155765011266&call_pageid=970599119419&col=Columnist969907621513
Sara.
Israel's failed mission in Lebanon
Aug. 17, 2006. 01:00 AM
HAROON SIDDIQUI
It
seems everyone has won the war in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its backers,
Iran and Syria, have claimed victory. So have Israel and the United
States. That was to be expected.
Far more instructive is the
pathetic sight of the president of the world's largest power feeling
the need to compete in a propaganda war with the leader of a terrorist
militia.
George W. Bush is boasting, as he is prone to when
things go horribly wrong, that the latest ruins of his making represent
yet another glorious frontier on the road to redemption.
Israel
has indeed destroyed part of the Hezbollah stockpile of rockets and
missiles, killed dozens of guerrillas, driven away the rest from the
border areas, and opened the way for the Lebanese army to patrol a
buffer zone, with a multinational force. But Israel has not won.
Nor
has the U.S. Both stand discredited in the eyes of much of the world.
So are the two Western leaders who blindly backed this venture, Tony
Blair and Stephen Harper.
Hezbollah is far from finished after
the 34-day onslaught, the second longest Arab-Israeli war. It can claim
that mighty Israel is not invincible, and that there are limits to
military power, as the U.S. discovered in Iraq.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah lives.
This
war began with the Israeli air force dropping tons of bombs on a site
where he was said to be. He wasn't, just as Saddam Hussein wasn't in
the bunker the American cruise missiles hit as the opening salvo of the
2003 Iraq war.
Some day, Nasrallah may be caught, as Saddam was.
Or he may be assassinated by Israel, as was his predecessor, in 1992.
But that may not make much difference. As veteran Israeli peace
activist Uri Avnery wrote recently:
"Our army has killed, among
others, Hezbollah leader Abbas Mussawi, PLO Number 2 Abu Jihad, as well
as Sheik Ahmad Yassin and other Hamas leaders ... The place of Mussawi
was filled by Nasrallah, who is far more able. Sheikh Yassin was
succeeded by far more radical leaders. Instead of Arafat, we got Hamas."
If one aim of the war on Shiite Lebanon was to turn the Shiites against Hezbollah, the war has had the opposite effect.
They
are voting with their feet, returning to the ruined south, despite
Israeli warnings against it. Their cars and caravans are festooned with
Hezbollah flags and Nasrallah's pictures. Surveying the ruins of their
former abodes amid the stench of dead bodies, they are blaming Israel
and the United States, not Hezbollah.
If another aim was to turn
Lebanon's minority Christians, Druze and Sunni Muslims against the
Shiites, that, too, has had an unanticipated result. Churches and
non-Shiite neighbourhoods sheltered fleeing Shiite refugees, breaking
age-old communal silos.
Not only that, but the patriarch of the
Maronite Catholics, the most pro-Western of the Lebanese factions, met
the leaders of other Christian denominations, as well as Sunnis and
Shiites, and issued a joint statement condemning Israeli "aggression"
and hailing the "resistance, mainly led by Hezbollah."
The
popularity of Hezbollah and Nasrallah has spread across the Arab,
indeed the Muslim, world. Both are hailed even in U.S.-occupied Iraq,
whose U.S.-nurtured prime minister was among the first to condemn the
war on Lebanon.
Seeing the popular trend, Saudi Arabia, Egypt
and Jordan, which had rightly criticized Hezbollah's adventurism
against Israel, have fallen silent.
Meanwhile, the two Israeli
soldiers that Hezbollah had captured and for whose freedom the war was
ostensibly waged are still missing.
Grand declarations that
Israel and the United States would never negotiate with a terrorist
group seem lost in talks with Hezbollah's go-between, Nabih Berri, the
Shiite speaker of the Lebanese parliament.
As for the UN
resolution that brought about the ceasefire, it is not clear how the
call for the disarming of Hezbollah is to be achieved any more than a
2004 resolution demanding exactly that.
Maybe the resolution is
meant only as the fig leaf to end an undertaking that could no longer
be sustained. If Hezbollah had miscalculated how strongly Israel would
react, perhaps Israel ended up miscalculating even more.
Anthony
Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Affairs in
Washington said before the ceasefire was brokered that "Israel's
miscalculations have been so serious that its only hope for victory is
to have the U.S. and the international community do for it what it
cannot do militarily, which is to defeat Hezbollah."
These
doubts are reflected in the sturdy debate in Israel itself. After an
initial closing of ranks and an expression of broad support for the
war, a majority of Israelis now believe that none or few of the war's
aims have been achieved.
Questions have been raised about the
changing goals and tactics (from a purely air war to an air-plus-ground
war; a limited troop deployment to a major one; the need for a small
buffer zone to a bigger one); about the gaps in intelligence on
Hezbollah (its stockpiles of arms, and its warren of tunnels and
caves); and about the promised knockout punch that never came.
Politicians and the military are trading blame.
All
this must be hard to swallow for those, like Harper, who blindly backed
this war. Some are comforting themselves with the notion that while the
morning after the war looks too horrible to contemplate, the "morning
after the morning" may bring the dawn of a new day.
That's what they have been saying about Iraq — for three years.
Haroon Siddiqui writes Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca.
Additional articles by Haroon Siddiqui
The Muslim malaise
Aug. 20, 2006. 07:03 AM
HAROON SIDDIQUI
He who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.
— Prophet Muhammad
Contrary
to the popular belief that the West is under siege from Muslim
terrorists, it is Muslims who have become the biggest victims of the
attacks of September 11, 2001, as inconceivable as that would have
seemed in the aftermath of the murder of 2,900 Americans. Since then,
between 34,000 and 100,000 Iraqis have been killed by the Americans or
the insurgents. Nobody knows how many have been killed in Afghanistan.
In the spots hit by terrorists — from London and Madrid to Amman,
Istanbul, Riyadh and Jeddah, through Karachi to Bali and Jakarta — more
Muslims have been killed and injured than non-Muslims.
None of
this is to say that Muslims do not have problems that they must
address. They do. But the problems are not quite what many in the West
make them out to be.
One of the strangest aspects of the
post-9/11 world is that, despite all the talk about Muslim terrorism,
there is hardly any exploration of the complex causes of Muslim rage.
Muslims are in a state of crisis, but their most daunting problems are
not religious. They are geopolitical, economic and social — problems
that have caused widespread Muslim despair and, in some cases,
militancy, both of which are expressed in the religious terminology
that Muslim masses relate to.
Most Muslims live in the
developing world, much of it colonized by Western powers as recently as
50 years ago. Not all Muslim shortcomings emanate from colonialism and
neo-imperialism, but several do.
As part of the spoils of the
First World War, Britain and France helped themselves to much of the
Ottoman Empire, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and what is now Israel,
Jordan and the Palestine Authority. In later years, they and other
European colonial powers created artificial states such as Kuwait and
Nigeria. Or they divided peoples and nations along sectarian lines,
such as bifurcating India in 1947 into Muslim Pakistan and largely
Hindu India. In more recent years, the United States has maintained
repressive proxy regimes in the Middle East to stifle public
anti-Israeli sentiments, keep control of oil and maintain a captive
market for armaments.
While the past casts a long shadow over
Muslims, it is the present that haunts them. Hundreds of millions live
in zones of conflict, precisely in the areas of European and American
meddling, past and present — U.S.-occupied Iraq, U.S.-controlled
Afghanistan, the Israeli Occupied Territories, and Kashmir, the
disputed Muslim state on the border of India and Pakistan in the
foothills of the Himalayas. Only the Russian war on Muslim Chechnya is
not related to the history of Western machinations, but even that has
had the tacit support of the Bush administration. These conflicts,
along with the economic sanctions on Iraq, have killed an estimated 1.3
million Muslims in the last 15 years alone. Why are we surprised that
Muslims are up in arms?
In addition, nearly 400 million Muslims
live under authoritarian despots, many of them Western puppets, whose
corruption and incompetence have left their people in economic and
social shambles.
It is against this backdrop that one must look
at the current malaise of Muslims and their increasing emotional
reliance on their faith.
Economic Woes
The total GDP of
the 56 members of the Islamic Conference, representing more than a
quarter of the world's population, is less than 5 per cent of the
world's economy. Their trade represents 7 per cent of global trade,
even though more than two-thirds of the world's oil and gas lie under
Muslim lands.
The standard of living in Muslim nations is
abysmal even in the oil-rich regions, because of unconscionable gaps
between the rulers and the ruled. A quarter of impoverished Pakistan's
budget goes to the military. Most of the $2 billion a year of American
aid given to Egypt as a reward for peace with Israel goes to the
Egyptian military.
The most undemocratic Muslim states, which also happen to be the closest allies of the U.S., are the most economically backward.
The
Arab nations, with a combined population of 280 million, muster a total
GDP less than that of Spain. The rate of illiteracy among Arabs is 43
per cent, worse than that of much poorer nations. Half of Arab women
are illiterate, representing two-thirds of the 65 million Arabs who
cannot read or write. About 10 million Arab children are not in school.
The most-educated Arabs live abroad, their talents untapped, unlike
those of the Chinese and Indian diasporas, who have played significant
roles in jump-starting the economies of their native lands.
A
disproportionate percentage of the world's youth are Muslim. Half of
Saudi Arabia's and a third of Iran's populations are younger than 20.
There are few jobs for them. "Young and unemployed" is a phenomenon
common to many Muslim nations.
A majority of the world's 12
million to 15 million refugees are Muslims, fleeing poverty and
oppression. Europe's 20 million Muslims suffer high unemployment and
poverty, especially in Germany and France. It was inevitable that many
Muslims would find comfort in Islam.
Islamic Resurgence
Fundamentalism
has been on the rise, and not just in Islam. There has been a parallel
rise in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, with its
inevitable political fallout — in the Israeli settler movement in the
Occupied Territories, the politicization of the American conservative
right (culminating in the election and re-election of George W. Bush),
the rise to power of the Hindu nationalists in India, the Sikh
separatist movement in the Punjab in India, and the aggressive
nationalism of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.
That many Muslims
have become "fundamentalist" does not mean that they are all fanatic
and militant. Nor is the Muslim condition fully explained by the use of
petro-dollars. First, Arab financial support for Islamic institutions
around the world is still no match for the resources available for
Christian global missionary or Zionist political work. Second, and more
to the point, the rise of Islam is not confined to areas of Arab
financial influence; it is a worldwide phenomenon.
Mosques are
full. The use of the hijab (headscarf ) is on the rise. Madrassahs
(religious schools) are packed. Zakat (Islamic charity) is at record
levels, especially where governments have failed to provide essential
services. In Egypt, much of the health care, emergency care and
education are provided by the Muslim Brotherhood, in the Occupied
Territories by Hamas, in Pakistan and elsewhere by groups that may be
far less political but are no less Islamic.
With state
institutions riddled with corruption and nepotism, some of the most
talented Muslims, both rich and poor, have abandoned the official arena
and retreated into the non-governmental domain of Islamic civil society.
The
empty public sphere has been filled with firebrands — ill-tutored and
ill-informed clergy or populist politicians who rally the masses with
calls for jihad (struggle) for sundry causes. The greater the
injustices in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israeli Occupied Territories,
Chechnya or elsewhere, the greater the public support for those calling
for jihad. Jihad has also proven to be good business for many a mullah
(Muslim priest) who has become rich or influential, or both, preaching
it. Meanwhile, unelected governments lack the legitimacy and confidence
to challenge the militant clerics, and fluctuate between ruthlessly
repressing them and trying to out-Islamize them.
To divert
domestic anger abroad, many governments also allow and sometimes
encourage the radicals to rant at the U.S. and rave at Israel, or just
at Jews. Sometimes even the elected leaders join in, as has Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmedinijad, denying the Holocaust and calling for
Israel to be "wiped off the map."
In reality, most Muslim states
are powerless to address the international crises that their publics
want addressed. They have neither the military nor the economic and
political clout to matter much to the U.S., the only power that counts
these days. Or, as in the case of Egypt, Jordan, and the oil-rich Arab
oligarchies, they are themselves dependent on Washington for their own
survival.
`Muslims have developed a complex. They think they won't
be heard if they don't shout. Every statement
is like a war'
Sharifa Zuriah
Founder, Sisters in Islam
Feeling
abandoned, the Muslim masses find comfort in religion. The Palestinian
resistance to Israeli occupation was a secular struggle before it
became "Islamic." The same was true of the Lebanese resistance to the
Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and also of the Chechen
resistance to Russian repression.
Similarly, domestic critics of
authoritarian regimes have found a hospitable home in the mosque. Islam
being their last zone of comfort, most Muslims react strongly —
sometimes irrationally and violently — when their faith or their
Prophet is mocked or criticized, as the world witnessed during the
Danish cartoon crisis. They react the way the angry disenfranchised do
— hurling themselves into the streets, shouting themselves hoarse and
destroying property, without much concern for the consequences, and
engendering even more hostility in the West toward Muslims and Islam.
But, as the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King famously
said, riots are the voice of the voiceless.
Muslims have
developed a "siege mentality, which is what the screaming, dogmatic and
atavistic clerics" appeal to, says Chandra Muzaffar, Malaysian Muslim
human rights activist. As he was telling me this in Kuala Lumpur in
2005, Sharifa Zuriah, a founder of Sisters in Islam, an advocacy group
for Malaysian Muslim women, intervened: "Muslims have developed a
complex. They think they won't be heard if they don't shout. Every
statement is like a war."
Then there is real war, the war of terrorism.
Terrorism's Fallout
"That
a majority of Al Qaeda are Muslims is not to say that a majority of
Muslims are Al Qaeda, or subscribe to its tenets," Stephen Schulhofer,
professor of law at New York University, told me in 2003. But it is
also true that most terrorists these days are Muslims. That may only be
a function of the times we live in — yesterday's terrorists came from
other religions and tomorrow's may hail from some other. Still,
terrorism has forced a debate among Muslims, who are divided into two
camps. One side says that Muslims should no more have to apologize for
their extremists than Christians, Jews or Hindus or anybody else, and
that doing so only confirms the collective guilt being placed on
Muslims. The other side believes that as long as some Muslims are
blowing up civilians in suicide bombings, slitting the throats of
hostages and committing other grisly acts, it is the duty of all
Muslims to speak out and challenge the murderers' warped theology.
The
latter view has prevailed. Terrorism — suicide bombings in particular—
has been widely condemned. Just because an overwhelming majority of
Muslims condemn Osama bin Laden and other extremists, however, does not
mean that they feel any less for Muslims in Iraq or Palestine. Or that
the internal debate that he has forced on Muslims is new. Throughout
their 1,400-year history, Muslims have argued and quarrelled over
various interpretations of the Qur'an and religious traditions.
But
it is a sign of the times that the most extreme interpretation of the
Qur'an appeals to Muslim masses these days, and that far too many
clerics are attacking Christians and Jews and delivering
fire-and-brimstone sermons full of the imagery of war and martyrdom.
This is contrary to the message of the Qur'an — Do not argue with the
followers of earlier revelation other than in the most kindly manner
(29:46) — and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad: "Do not consider
me better than Moses," and, "I am closest of all people to Jesus, son
of Mary."
For all the emphasis that today's clerics put on the
Prophet's war record, he spent a total of less than a week in actual
battle in the 23 years of his prophethood. He advised his followers to
"be moderate in religious matters, for excess caused the destruction of
earlier communities." A moderate himself, he smiled often, spoke softly
and delivered brief sermons. "The Prophet disliked ranting and raving,"
wrote Imam Bukhari, the ninth-century Islamic scholar of the Prophet's
sayings. Ayesha, the Prophet's wife, reported that "he spoke so few
words that you could count them." His most famous speech, during the
Haj pilgrimage in AD 632, which laid down an entire covenant, was less
than 2,800 words.
Muhammad was respectful of Christians and
Jews. Hearing the news that the king of Ethiopia had died, he told his
followers, "A righteous man has died today; so stand up and pray for
your brother." When a Christian delegation came to Medina, he invited
them to conduct their service in the mosque, saying, "This is a place
consecrated to God." When Saffiyah, one of his wives, complained that
she was taunted for her Jewish origins, he told her, "Say unto them,
`my father is Aaron, and my uncle is Moses.'"
Yet angry Muslims,
not unlike African Americans not too long ago, pay little heed to
voices of moderation. This is partly a reflection of the fact that
there is no central religious authority in Islam. Only the minority
Shiites have a religious hierarchy of ayatollahs, who instruct
followers on religious and sometimes political matters. The majority
Sunnis do not have the equivalent of the Pope or the Archbishop of
Canterbury. A central tenet of their faith is that there is no
intermediary between the believer and God. This makes for great
democracy — everyone is free to issue a fatwa (religious ruling) and
everyone else is free to ignore it. But the "fatwa chaos" does create
confusion — among non-Muslims, who are spooked by the red-hot rhetoric,
and also among Muslims, who are left wondering about the "right
answers" to some of the most pressing issues of the day.
Muslim Apologetics
There
are two kinds of Muslim apologetics. The first is denial: there's
little or nothing wrong with Muslims, when there clearly is. The
second, seen among some Muslims in the West, takes the form of
self-flagellation, of apologizing for their faith or distancing
themselves from it. To wit:
"Yes, the problem is Islam, and we
must fix it." (Why is Islam any more of a problem than any other faith?
And how are they going to fix it?)
"I am a Muslim but I am not a fundamentalist Muslim." (Do Christians say, "I am Christian but not an evangelical Christian?")
"I
am a Muslim but ashamed to call myself one." (Do all Hindus have to
apologize for those few who, in 1992, went on a mosque-ravaging rampage
in India?)
Some of these sentiments may be genuinely held. More
likely, they reflect the immigrant pathology of catering to majority
mores, a new twist on the past practice of immigrants to North America
anglicizing their names.
Such defensiveness aside, Muslims do
suffer from deeper problems. Many are preoccupied with the minutiae of
rituals (Should one wash the bare feet before prayers or do so
symbolically over the socks?) at the expense of the centrality of the
faith, which is fostering peace, justice and compassion, not just for
Muslims but for everyone. Many Muslims are too judgmental of each
other, whereas a central tenet of their faith is that it is up to God
to judge — Your Lord knows best who goes astray (53:30) (also, 6:117,
16:125, 17:94, 28:56, 68:7).
Some Muslims have taken to a
culture of conspiracy theories. Hence the notion that Princess Diana
did not die in an accident but was killed because the British royal
family did not want her to marry Dodi Al Fayed, a Muslim. Or the canard
that Jews working at the World Trade Center had advance notice of 9/11.
There
is too much of a literalist reading of the Qur'an (a trait, ironically,
also adopted by anti-Islamists in the West). There is too little
ijtehad (religious innovation) as called for by Islam to keep believers
in tune with their times. Theological rigidity and narrow-mindedness
have led, among other things, to Sunni hostility toward the minority
Shiites, as seen in the sectarian killings in Pakistan.
Muslims
complain about the West's double standards, yet they have their own.
While they often criticize the United States and Europe for mistreating
Muslims, they rarely speak up against the persecution of non-Muslims by
Muslims. They also show a high tolerance for Muslims killing fellow
Muslims. The Sudanese genocide of the non-Arab Muslims of Darfur drew
mostly silence. The killing of Shiites by the Sunnis in Iraq was
shrugged off as part of the anti-U.S. resistance. The overt and subtle
racism of the oil-rich Arab states toward the millions of their guest
workers goes unmourned.
Muslims do not have much to be proud of
in the contemporary world. So they take comfort in their burgeoning
numbers. At the turn of the millennium in 2000, there were many learned
papers projecting the rise in Muslim population. But if Muslims have
not achieved much at 1.3 billion, they are not likely to at 1.5
billion, either.
To escape the present, many Muslims hark back
to their glorious past: how Islam was a reform movement; how Muslims
led the world in knowledge, in astronomy, chemistry, mathematics,
medicine, natural sciences, philosophy and physics; and how the Islamic
empires were successful primarily because, with some egregious
exceptions, they nurtured the local cultures and respected the
religions of their non-Muslim majority populations. This is why Egypt
and Syria remained non-Muslim under Muslim rule for 300 years and 600
years, respectively, and India always remained majority Hindu.
As
true as all that history is, it is not very helpful today unless
Muslims learn something from it — to value human life; accept each
other's religious differences; respect other faiths; return to their
historic culture of academic excellence, scientific inquiry and
economic self-reliance; and learn to live with differences of opinion
and the periodic rancorous debates that mark democracies.
It may
be unfair to berate ordinary Muslims, given that too many are
struggling to survive, that nearly half live under authoritarian
regimes where they can speak up only on pain of being incarcerated,
tortured or killed, and that they are helpless spectators to the
sufferings of fellow Muslims in an unjust world order. Yet Muslims have
no choice but to confront their challenges, for Allah never changes a
people's state unless they change what's in themselves (13:11). | | | Posted 8/20/2006 9:37 PM - 17 views - 3 comments
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