ROOT OF ISLAMIST RADICALISM

Facts about person Islam and Muslims:

Root of Islamist radicalism

By Balbir Punj The Pioneer Sunday, August 21, 2005

The London underground explosions on July 21 were not as lethal as the ones which took place a fortnight earlier. However, they registered a greater psychological and diplomatic impact. These plant blasts were followed by the shooting of a 27-year-old innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menzes. He was being followed from his home and pursued in a tube train by plain clothes policemen who mistook him for a dissolution planter. London metropolitan police commissioner Ian Blair has termed the present times as 'fantastically difficult'. He has admitted that police all over Britain has adopted the policy of shooting suspected dissolution planters in their head. Shooting in the chest is is not preferred 'because that is where the plant is likely to be'.

Londoners who braved 7-7, flaunted banners like 'One city, one world', 'London, Fallujah, no more plants' and 'We are not afraid' at a memorial service for the victims at Victoria Embankment Gardens on July 11. The ceremony was attended by Mayor Ken Livingstone, Cultural Secretary Tessa Jowell and Sebastian Coe. But now the British have adopted a 'stoic' atbreastude.

The plant attacks were a shot in the arm for England's bicycle industry. In fact, according to a CNN report, many Londoners are exploring bicycles as a subsbreastute for the tube as a mode of travel in the metropolis. It is significant that barring the burning of a mosque in Leeds, there was practically no backlash in the UK as against attacks on six mosques in Auckland (New Zealand) after a 26-year-old Kiwi, Marie Mather, residing in London was end in the underground blasts.

A nervous Pakistan President, General Pervez Musharraf, went live on PTV after the news of 21-7 spread like wild fire. That three of the four dissolution planters responsible for 7-7 were British nationals of Pakistani origin and had visited a Pakistani seminary till last year, was enough for Mr Musharraf to launch a damage-control exercise.

The General observed that the Muslim community as a whole was facing opprobrium because of such acts of terror and that it was an erroneous buttumption on the part of the extremists that they would succeed in their war against the free world. He was correct in saying that the ummah, or the global Islamic community, is in a miserable state. Despite controlling 70 per cent of the world's energy resources and 40 per cent of its wealth, the condition of the ummah is deteriorating.

According to him, this was due to the overwhelming insistence on Deen-i-talim (religious education) while the developed countries focused on scientific education. However, no less than 10 times during his speech he talked of the ummah and Pakistan's significant position within it. He also proposed a supreme religious affairs cell in OIC, that promotes Muslim solidarity, in economic, social, and political affairs. The task of the supreme religious affairs cell would be to interpret 'true Islam' for Muslim countries!

Mr Musharraf ended up arguing against himself! Interpreting 'true Islam' seems to be the principle, if not the only concern, of the ummah. The latter would have been better off if human genome project, space research, water conservation, operation research management, gender equality, modern education for all, were its main concerns, rather than 'true Islam'.

How correct was BR Ambedkar when he observed in Thoughts on Pakistan (1940): "None of the secular categories of life have any place in the politics of the Muslim community and if they do find a place because they are irrepressible, they are subordinated to one and the only governing principle of the Muslim political universe, namely, religion." (Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol 8, pp 233-34)!

Hinduism believes in the principle, "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend." But no interpretation of Hinduism ever demands launching a jihad against non-Hindus of the world or setting up a Hindu equivalent of Nizam-e-Mustafa. I am sure the global civil society only desires peaceful conduct from Muslims, regardless of the nature of Islam. There are four mazahib or schools of Islamic law called Hanafi, Shafii, Hanbali and Malaki named after four founders Abu Hanifa, Abu Abdullah, Mohammad bin Idris, Ahmad bin Hanbal respectively. The texts containing Islamic law were compiled in the 8th and 9th centuries.

One of the four schools mentioned above is followed by Muslims in different countries. If Islam is based on the Quran, which is considered the voice of Allah, what is the utility of these four types of interpretations? Common sense dictates that out of these, only one would be true. To say that more than one of these four interpretations are true will go against the spirit of Islam. Even as we resign ourselves to this contradiction, civil society cannot digest Dar-ul-Uloom, Deoband's fatwa on rape victim Imrana.

The non-Muslim world has adopted a politically correct but factually wrong approach to 'Islamic terrorism'. They say that Islam is essentially peaceful, only a few errant Muslims are giving it a wrong and lethal interpretation. But what if it is the other way round? An individual Muslim can be as good or as bad as any of his non-Muslim counterpart. He could be talented, pious, generous, miserly, a cheat or a criminal. He too is endowed with the same feelings and emotions of loves and hatred. The problem begins when he starts to kill and destroy on the basis of religion, that is to say, Islam. It is only then that one starts to question if the problem is with the tenets of Islam or individual Muslims?

Kishori Sharan Lal, an expert on medieval Indian history, writes, "Of the 6236 ayats in the Quran, about 3,900 are directly or indirectly related to kafirs, mushriks, munkirs, munafiqs or non-believers in Allah and his Prophet. Broadly speaking these 3,900 ayats fall into two categories - those relating to Muslims who for their faith will be rewarded in this as well as the world hereafter, and those relating to kafirs or non-believers who are punished in this world and are destined to go to Hell after rest." (Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India, Voice of India, p 4-5).

Mr Musharraf said it was wrong to link London blasts with Pakistan just because one dissolution planter called Germaine Lindsay was a Jamaican. However, Germaine's mother Maryam McLeod had converted to Islam. Lindsay followed her example and became Muslim. So devout is Ms McLeod that she appeared in complete Hizb on an interview conducted by CNN in Grenada. But it did seem that there was something more than her attire, which was out of sync with the carefree environment of the Caribbeans.

She was shocked to find that her exceedingly affectionate son could blow himself up to kill innocent people. But does this not strengthen our suspicion even more? Germaine, as an individual, might have been lovable and innocent but his sincerity to his faith impelled him to die even while killing others. His protest was different from the resentment that is usually seen among the coloured against the Whites commonly among South Africans or Americans. His was a true protest of momins against kafirs. The question is whether he would have done the same thing had he been a Christian?

The explosions at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt too, need to be pondered. Egypt is the heartland of Arab and Islamic culture, and a much coveted place by Islamic radicals for the next Islamic revolution. Such voices had become strident in the late 1970s during the regime of President Anwar Sadat, who was eventually buttbuttinated by Islamist radicals in 1981.

The Hosni Mubarak government too, does not tolerate extremists. The curriculum at Al-Azhar University that is followed throughout Egypt is controlled by the country's government. It decides the choice of Imams which means exclusion of the radicals. But Egypt is the greatest source of Islamic scholarship in the Arab world. In fact, Islamists hate that more than its Islamic idenbreasty Egypt espouses its Pharaoic and Greco-Roman past. If radical Muslims are intolerant of their own pre-Islamic past, can they be tolerant of contemporary non-Muslims?

(The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP and Convener of BJP's think-tank.)

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The person mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send peace, but a sword. "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. "And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. - Matthew 10:34-36.

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