Geelani and US must realise terrorists are not true Muslims (Sunday Guardian)

By M.D. Nalapat

Police officers watch over pro-Bin Laden protesters during a demonstration led by radical cleric Anjem Choudary, outside the US embassy in London on Friday. AP/PTI lthough Syed Ali Shah Geelani may disagree, the fact is that Osama bin Laden forfeited his claim to being a Muslim by engaging in activities contrary to the tenets revealed to Prophet Muhammad. However, rather than confirming this fact, the US action in "giving a proper Muslim burial" to Bin Laden (albeit at sea) is among the many steps taken by that country to legitimise Bin Laden and other terrorists as members of the Islamic Ummah. If the Muslim world has seen a steady flow of recruits to terror organisations across the globe, including in India, one reason has been the consistent US narrative that Wahhabism represents the "pure" form of Islam, in contrast presumably to Sufism (which in the view of this columnist, adheres far more closely to the tolerance and compassion that suffuses the Quran). A reading of history would show that the golden age of Islam occurred precisely when locations where the faith was dominant became oases of learning and multi-faith harmony. The Jewish populations of the globe were, for example, far safer in Muslim-majority than in Christian-majority countries. Indeed, Wahhabism spread across the globe since the 1980s, fuelled by the petrodollars made available by ruling elites in the Gulf Cooperation Council states who were apprehensive of a repeat of Iran in their own countries. During this time, and despite their immense God-given wealth, innovation and initiative have been largely absent in the petrodollar states. Within the region, Israel accounts for nine times more patents and twice as many book titles as all the GCC countries combined, a sorry result for a people that for a time were among the most advanced in the world. { US action in “giving a proper Muslim burial” to Bin Laden (albeit at sea) is among the many steps taken by that country to legitimise Bin Laden and other terrorists as members of the Islamic Ummah. After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the local Muslim community in Mumbai refused to allow the terrorists who had been killed during the operation to be buried in local graveyards, pointing out — correctly — that they no longer qualified as Muslims. Each time the religious factor is brought into a discussion on terrorism, such as in the case of the rituals carried out on the remains of Osama bin Laden, those who claim to be waging a "War on Terror" blur the distinction between practicing Muslims (or those who follow the precepts of the Quran) and apostates such as Bin Laden, who use Islam as a cloak for actions that are wholly contrary to its spirit. Unfortunately for the Muslim world, the "liberal" elites in the US and the EU seem unwilling to admit that Wahhabism and its cousin, Khomeinism are in no way related to Islam, but are in fact separate faiths. Fortunately for the world, after decades of pandering to Wahhabism by the Sudairy branch of the Al Saud ruling family of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah has worked hard since 2005 to bring the practice of Islam back to the moderate precepts that characterised the golden age of the faith. Apart from the error of considering Bin Laden and others of his ilk to be Muslims, the Obama administration has distanced itself from the democratic ethos of transparency by concealing most important details of the 2 May operation that resulted in the death of the Yemeni. The public have a right to know the truth about that day, even if it is that the man was shot down in cold blood. By covering up the reality, the Obama administration has created a vacuum that in time may get filled by fanciful accounts of the last moments of Bin Laden, including stories that he escaped alive. The best way of stilling such speculation would have been to release at least a portion of the tapes witnessed by President Obama and others in the White House situation room. Or does the US administration believe that its own people — not to mention the rest of the world — do not deserve the privilege of knowing the facts, and need to be kept in a state of ignorance, the way the lower castes were in India in past eras?

Will Turkey succumb to Wahabbism? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Wahabbism, the radical Islam currently advancing around the globe, originated in the 18th century as a philosophy designed to counter the moderate, syncretic Islam that was the heart of Turkey's culture, and which the Ottoman Empire had disseminated among its principalities, including those in the Arabian Peninsula.

Quick to sense the potential of the new faith in weaning away regional loyalties from the Ottomans, Britain early on became a backer of the creed, thus ensuring its rise to dominance within the Arabian Peninsula by the dawn of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1980s it spread to much of the rest of the Muslim world.

Today, because of the unstinted financial support of its principal adherents, Wahabbism has become the fastest-growing faith on the planet. It has succeeded in taking over many of the institutions, as well as the physical infrastructure, of the Sunni branch of Islam. Even within the Shiite branch, it has found in the Khomeinists an ideological twin that since 1979 has controlled the largest country in the region, Iran.

Thus far, only Turkey has remained immune to its relentless advance, steeped as that country was in the Sufi traditions that underpin its culture.

Turkey is the only country in the Muslim-majority world – since the Mongol invasions of the continent nearly nine centuries ago – to have conquered territory in Europe. The memory of this still makes a majority of Europeans flinch from accepting this entirely deserving country into the European Union.

Strange Shiite Bedfellows (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- The Shiite branch of Islam is regarded as heresy by followers of Wahhabism, an Islamic school of thought founded in the 18th century by Abdul Wahhab. Extreme adherents of this faith routinely visit violence on Shiites, and every one of its preachers condemns the Shiites as un-Islamic.

However, the 1979 ascendance of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to absolute power in Iran meant the capture of one of the geopolitical pivots of the Shiite world -- the other being Iraq -- by a thinker whose teachings closely resembled the philosophy of Abdul Wahhab, at least in tone.

Wahhab's ideas originally had been designed to counter the influence of Turkish Sufi doctrine over the Arab Bedouin. The Wahhabis enjoyed the support of the British Empire and its successor in international reach, the United States, initially because this alienation from Turkish influence suited their interests.

This backing began to be withdrawn only after Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly nine years after that event, the prying away of Wahhabis from the state structures of key Muslim-majority states has been at best partial, and usually no more than cosmetic. Wahhabism continues to dominate the world of Muslim religious schools and sites by the marginalization of clerics and scholars who subscribe to a moderate -- if not Sufi -- worldview.

Nowhere has this process secured deeper roots than in Pakistan.

Malaysia's 'Endangered' Majority (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi made the worst call of his political career by calling a general election a full year before it was due, believing that international economic uncertainty was likely to send the economy southwards and ethnic tensions were at risk of escaping from the band-aid applied to them.

He therefore decided on a March 2008 poll, but Saturday's loss of 60 of the 199 parliamentary seats that his Barisan Nasional Party had won in 2004 has weakened not only his government but his leadership over a party unhappy with his "bureaucratic" style.

Sadly, the mild-mannered, moderate Badawi is less the culprit than he is the victim of the Malay supremacist policies followed by his party since 1957. These policies have implied that the multiracial, multifaith country's Malay majority of 60 percent was an endangered species in need of protection against the rest of the population, including the one-tenth that are ethnic Indians and one-fifth of Chinese descent.

The "bumiputra" policies followed by Malaysia's rulers since the 1950s have been sharpened over the decades, so that in effect today non-Muslims and non-Malays have a second-class status in the country. As occurred in the Indian mutiny of 1857, it was a question of faith that ignited the Hindu firestorm on Nov. 25, 2007, that led to the present electoral debacle for Badawi -- after Hindu temples were bulldozed to make way for roads, malls and housing sites.

Such contempt for the institutions of their faith sparked anger among the Hindus of Malaysia. Although Muslims of Indian origin kept away from the protests that followed, the 90 percent of the Malaysian Indian community that are Hindu was alienated from the ruling party by the brutal police repression let loose against peaceful protestors in scenes reminiscent of the days of the freedom struggle in India. Several of the protestors were jailed, and many are still in prison on the absurd charge of terrorism.

Will the USS Kitty Hawk cement U.S.-India military ties? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Thanks largely to India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who shared with his leftwing British friends a dislike of the Yanks, the geopolitically senseless alienation between the United States and India continued for five decades after India's independence in 1947.

What seems finally to have convinced the British to leave India was the seepage of loyalty from the Indian component of the armed forces. More than 2 million Indians saw action on the Allied side during World War II. Yet during the war, their loyalty to the Crown was tested by the discriminatory treatment meted out to Indians in the services. British personnel dominated the higher reaches of the military and were given perquisites and privileges far beyond those enjoyed by Indians.

Several thousands of soldiers joined the pro-Axis Indian National Army during the war. Within the ranks of those who remained on the Allied side, there was visible sympathy for those Indian officers and men who switched sides and refused to fight for the British monarchy that denied them the privileges enjoyed by soldiers from the Australian, New Zealand, U.S. and Canadian complements. The possibility of widespread revolts within the armed forces concentrated minds in London and speeded up the withdrawal from India.

India's 'Caste' in the Global Nuclear Network (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — A millennium ago, when Muslim armies began succeeding in defeating their Hindu rivals, such victories came despite the latter's greater opulence. A contributory factor was caste. Only certain "high-born" groups were permitted to bear arms in defense of the state. Their number did not exceed 9 percent of the total population. Had a more equitable social structure been in place, India's history may have been different.

It was only in the 1960s that democratic elections became the instrument through which the "backward castes" were able to claim equal rights with the rest. Ironically, since that time a new caste system has arisen, again one that denies upward mobility to those condemned to second-class, or worse, status. This is the international nuclear order implemented through the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which permanently restricts the right to possess nuclear weapons to only five countries -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China.

Since then, Israel, India, Pakistan and now North Korea have emerged as de facto nuclear weapons states. Of these, Israel has not thus far tested a nuclear weapon, although it has clearly had access to the technology needed to build a stockpile of them. Of the other three, Pakistan and North Korea are both authoritarian states known to have proliferated both nuclear as well as missile technology, and to have secured the know-how for developing both from third countries.

Why India Will Sit out Iran (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat


Manipal, India — Iran's ongoing effort to master uranium enrichment technology, despite its denials, is likely to lead to a series of surgical U.S. air and missile strikes designed to cripple reprocessing capacity. The risks and rewards of such an action have been extensively detailed; hence the focus here is on a small part of the overall mosaic -- the response of India to such a strike.

Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is solicitous of perceived U.S. interests, and has been working to create an alliance between the world's two biggest democracies, geopolitical logic will dictate that New Delhi will sit out a future Iran conflict, rather than follow its instincts and back the United States.

In evidence that India-Iran strategic ties remain in good standing, the chief of the Iranian Navy, Rear Admiral S. Kouchaki, is on a March 4-9 visit to India, during which he will visit key installations and discuss joint exercises.

The reasons for India to avoid conflict with Iran are primarily four:

First is the Shiite factor. There have been a little over 17,000 Muslim-Hindu clashes since India became independent in 1947, of which less than two hundred involved Shiites and Hindus. Almost all such clashes have been Sunni versus Hindu, and 87 percent of these have been Wahabbi-Hindu, as the more moderate sections of Sunni Muslim society seldom adopt a confrontational posture with their Hindu neighbors.

Religious Supremacists (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Thanks to the extraordinary burst of innovation and enterprise created in the countries of Western Europe during the previous five centuries, the world came under their tutelage. However, those from the region who lacked the characteristics of rationality, resourcefulness and drive that resulted in the west leading the world fell back on the absence of skin pigment to distinguish themselves as superior from the rest of humanity. In this, they were merely following an ancient precedent. For example, the very Sanskrit word for India's 4,000-year old tradition of caste is "varna," meaning: color. Indeed, the Slavic peoples used this characteristic to name the lands in which they resided. Thus, "Russia" means "Land of the Blonde" while "Belarus" goes even further, signifying the "Land of the White Blonds." Small wonder that notions of racial supremacy grew in Western Europe, sometimes even crossing the bounds of color, as for example in much of the European continent during the period when those belonging to the Jewish faith were discriminated against and finally, sought to be eliminated altogether. The Holocaust has been the vilest depth in human history of a deformed social consciousness that survived in the modern era in locations such as the segregated south of the U.S., and countries such as South Africa, where "racial supremacy" was the norm.

Today, neither does segregation exist in the U.S. nor apartheid in South Africa. The notion of racial supremacy has become an international outcast, even though sporadic manifestations of old attitudes linger, as for example in the recent German political formulation, "Kinder statt Inder," which implied that people coming from India were less than human. However, in practically all of western societies, discrimination based on color has practically disappeared, even though there are occasional "glass ceilings" that limit the upward mobility of those with a higher level of cutaneous pigment. Once identified, these are pulled down. The result has been that in advanced western societies such as the U.S. and Israel, those whose ethnicity comes from India have frequently bested others from locations in Europe.While "Race Supremacists" have been under attack from the civilized world, and are either extinct or on the defensive, another brand of hate crime flourishes undisturbed, even in countries that are the allies of the West. This is "Religious Supremacy," the belief that those practicing a particular faith have the same "right" to discriminate against others that "White Supremacists" in the past saw as their God-given privilege to consign the rest to a permanently inferior status. In states governed by religious supremacists, those belonging to other faiths lack the freedoms enjoyed by the privileged. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, those who do not belong to the Wahabbi creed lack the elemental right to build their own houses of worship and to openly pray in them. There are mosques in Israel and the U.S. that have Wahabbist elements in them, but no trace of a synagogue or even a church in Saudi Arabia. In another such country, Pakistan, the legal and electoral system itself discriminates against minorities. While in the past color was the engine of injustice, these days it is creed. What is taking place in countries that discriminate against minorities is as vile as what was seen - and demolished - in the segregated U.S. south or in apartheid-era South Africa.

Indeed, while the United Nations General Assembly has several times discussed apartheid and racism in general, it has thus far been as silent as western and other chancelleries in identifying the discrimination and segregation that takes place in "religious supremacist" countries. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, those who are Shiite, non-Wahabbi Sunni, non-Muslim or women suffer severe discrimination, and are denied the rights that are given to adherents of the Wahabbi creed, who alone are permitted to set up houses of worship and who are given preferential treatment in several ways. This is a "hate crime" as noxious in its logic and effects as racial segregation. Indeed, in that particular country, even Wahabbis do not yet have the right to vote. The entire authority within the state adheres -- naturally -- to close relatives of the founder of the Saudi faith, Abdul Ibn Wahhab. While Khomeinism in Iran is a close cousin of Wahabbism in its world-view, there are Sunni houses of worship in Iran, and even a few synagogues, although in other respects the two countries are alike. In both, an unelected group controls the government, and bases this usurpation of power from the hands of the people on religious grounds. Indeed, Khomeinism is as much a perversion of Shiite Islam as Wahabbism is of Sunni Islam.