Preventing More Lal Masjids

There was a cell phone conversation this morning in Hafsa when the full operation was going on, between one of the fighters on a `point` inside and some TV channel, probably ARY. He said when the MQM delegation arrived last night, they sabotaged the peaceful negotiation. He also said he was content that he was going to die.

A man certain to die is not likely to tell a lie.

Re: # 48

Dear Saima Shah,

I liked your post # 48 because you point to the centrality of religion. # 36, by bluegaze highlights the problem of the leftist. That problem, in the context of our sub-continent, arises when one totally abstracts from religion. It is the codes set by myths (or religion if you may) that guide the lives of most in our region. Communication with people at large has to use religion as a medium to a large degree. We are not westerners and we have lost our materialistic interpretations a long time back in history, whether we like it or not.

A liberal cannot accept the blood-bath in Lal Masjid, given that many who pleaded for restraint were poor people who had relatives inside. You put it very well when you say that:

``At the heart of this divide is a justice and power issue. There is resentment and anger towards the well-off. It comes out as an issue between what is Islamic and what is un Islamic.``

But, unfortunately, the way things have turned out liberals may have to side with the killer dictator. They have to do their DUTY like Arjun in the Mahabharata. Irrespective of what hamid and manto are saying here, they know that the unrestrained bravado of the dictator was not moral.

But there is a way out. The CJ movement against the dictator has to challenge the dictator`s Lal Masjid actions on legal grounds. Legal grounds as provided for by the present Constitution of Pakistan. The Supreme Court, a couple of days back, had asked for restraint. The question posed by the CJ movement to the dictator should be very simple:

``Did you, Mr. Dictator, have a legal order to enter Lal Masjid?``

Re: # 48

saimashah,

``Once again, the lack of knowledge among Muslims about Islam/history and people of Islam, is to blame. `

........ so you are suggesting that we should teach more islamiyat and islamic history in our schools ? .............. and who would set the curriculum for this kinder and gentler islam ?....... i suggest the us state department - what do you think ?

Dear Dr Hoodbhoy

Thanks for this thought provoking analysis for the reasoning behind misogyny in Pakistan. I differ with you regarding the following:

1. At the heart of this divide is a justice and power issue. There is resentment and anger towards the well-off. It comes out as an issue between what is Islamic and what is un Islamic, but at the heart of it is severe anger at how society`s elites live vs. the less well off. They have oversimplified it to mean that people who appear westernized are more successful than those who do not appear westernized. This is a mis interpretation of facts and stems from the complete lack of information about their own history.
2. Ignorance about the truth wrt. Islamic history and women`s freedom and role.
3. Misinterpretation that the prophet and followers were anti women`s freedom.


The only solution is a re-investigation of history and recasting of what it means to be Muslim. Unfortunately, the media has been unable to meet the challenge effectively. Once again, the lack of knowledge among Muslims about Islam/history and people of Islam, is to blame. Again, the blasphemy laws don`t help, they stifle open debate. Just a little fresh air has revealed such terrible skeletons in the cupboard, imagine if the lies were all exposed? The emotional reaction to the lies that have been told to Muslims for decades would shake the foundations of this country.

#36 by bluegaze,

The original Islam`s theory is heavily communist i.e. no ultimate ownership of land or wealth, with the difference it is bestowed with Allah instead of the State. I.e. before Usman, which is why he was besieged and killed.

I think the burkha jihadi wasn`t trying to escape. He was trying to slip out and meet his handlers. Once he was arrested by a cop too low down the food chain to be in on the conspiracy, the paki government had to take him in.

#42 by zeemax on July 10, 2007 1:37pm PT

Yes Zee. The delivery of mobile phone is done with an ulterior motive but not with an honest intention to negotiate.

I am baffled by the conflicting reports and therefore tried to read/see the news beyond the script coz I was following the events since the Operation was started.

Maulana Ghazi insurance was the company of women and children.

Mush govt`s comfort in the Operation is the complete blackout of the way the the 100+ inmates were killed. A mere statistic would NOT emote well with us but the real coverage of deaths would. We REALLY dont know the TRUE statistics of deaths, unfortuntely & how many were collateral deaths in taking the main head of Ghazi.

Maulana Ghazi`s insurance was the company of women and children.

There are many hues here.

The presence of the most wanted jihadi terrorist in the comany of the ex-PM reminds us of the phrase (abt the Mush govt):

`running with the hares and hunting with the hounds`.

mr hoodhboy - i very much appreciate your insightful analysis. the main problem i perceive with pakistani society (speaking as a member of the pakistani diaspora in the uk) is that people have too much time on their hands are always meddling in other people`s affairs. instead of concerting their efforts towards progress and hard work they look elsewhere and want to bring religion into absolutely every debate. success is possible in pakistan but it requires risk taking and hard sweat - the afghan refugees can vouch for that. instead pakistanis (the majority of them are stuck in fantasy land of bollywood movies and and ritual prayers to get them to janat, intermixed with that is getting a distant uncle to get u a promotion and finding a religious fault with your neighbours or just finding fault - that includes the men!) why cant pakistanis just live and let live and stop thinking they are the custodians of Islam for all humanity. my heart felt prayers are for pakistani society to mature and take itself (each and every one) seriously and be responsible for oneself first so that it can work towards building a strong civic society in every sense of the word. pakistanis are too obsessed with morality and want to police human thought, they fail to see the punishments they distribute are themselves crimes and are damaging the fabric of pakistani society. there are more mature and humane ways to go about improving pakistani society holistically, but because some people need the crutch of islam to justify everything, the holistic approach is probably not going to be embraced because some people just cant think outside the box; and that is mentally damaging for the nation at large.

cchoboom various

Dada welcome back....Now i understand why everbody was missing you.

Standard & Poor`s lowers Pak ratings

ERUM ZAIDI
KARACHI - The Standard & Poor’s, the US-Based ratings services downgraded PakistanÆs foreign and local currency ratings stance to stable from positive on Tuesday owing to growing concerns over the country’s worsening security environment and the risk of potential fiscal slippages.
The Standard & Poor said that it affirmed its ‘B+/B’ foreign currency and ‘BB/B’ local currency sovereign credit ratings on the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Agost Benard Standard & Poor’s credit analyst said in report that Pakistan’s political and security situation has deteriorated markedly in recent months. This period of increased uncertainty has been marked by violent social unrest relating to the removal of the country’s chief justice, Islamabad’s Red Mosque siege, and the latest assassination attempt on President Musharraf’s life addingááthe move back to a stable outlook reflects the diminished probability of a ratings upgrade in the near future.

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Manto # 44

Of course we know that, Manto :)

GT was suggesting that a real line in the sand has been drawn between liberals and Islamists. And that is probably true. But wanted to signal to GT that (1) it will take a little time to know where that new line is, and since, GT, I assumed, was an Indian, (2) that lines drawn within Pakistan may not (as they need not) look quite the same when viewed from India or outside. AS nationalists both of us respect the concept of a nation enough to recognize that important distinction.

---

GT, great to witness a new GT who takes sides!

Should you decide to remain a liberal and a secularist, and wish to offer moral/material support, my personal preference, for whatever little it is worth, would be to stay with Manto/HP combo here. Among political parties, MQM too would have been a choice for a secularist and a liberal, but don`t know if other Pakistanis can work with them...

Anyways, dear scholar, a friendly welcome to the world of imperfect solutions to decidedly very complex problems. :) :)

Re: # 60

Amazing... bash poor Jinnah who warned people like Gandhi against extremist forces again and again ... but don`t mention a word about Gandhi who encouraged Mullah fascists. Lets blame the shias and ahmadis and Ismailis and Barelvis (i.e. ``Children of TNT`` or ``Children of Hate blah blah) for Wahabi extremism even though they warned against it again and again... but lets not mention the machiavellian monster Gandhi who released the Wahabi extremism into South Asian Politics.

Thankfuly history has been recorded for people to know the truth:


Achyuth Patwardhan, one of the Socialist stalwarts in the Congress, has given a remarkably candid and self critical analysis of the Congress Party vis-a-vis Khilafat: `It is, however, useful to recognise our share of this error of misdirection. To begin with, I am convinced that looking back upon the course of development of the freedom movement, THE `HIMALAYAN ERROR` of Gandhiji`s leadership was the support he extended on behalf of the Congress and the Indian people to the Khilafat Movement at the end of the World War I. This has proved to be a disastrous error which has brought in its wake a series of harmful consequences. On merits, it was a thoroughly reactionary step. The Khilafat was totally unworthy of support of the Progressive Muslims. Kemel Pasha established this solid fact by abolition of the Khilafat. The abolition of the Khilafat was widely welcomed by enlightened Muslim opinion the world over and Kemel was an undoubted hero of all young Muslims straining against Imperialist domination. But apart from the fact that Khilafat was an unworthy reactionary cause, Mahatma Gandhi had to align himself with a sectarian revivalist Muslim Leadership of clerics and maulvis. He was thus unwittingly responsible for jettisoning sane, secular, modernist leadership among the Muslims of India and foisting upon the Indian Muslims a theocratic orthodoxy of the Maulvis. Maulana Mohammed Ali`s speeches read today appear strangely incoherent and out of tune with the spirit of secular political freedom. The Congress Movement which released the forces of religious liberalism and reform among the Hindus, and evoked a rational scientific outlook, placed the Muslims of India under the spell of orthodoxy and religious superstition by their support to the Khilafat leadership. Rationalist leaders like Jinnah were rebuffed by this attitude of Congress and Gandhi. This is the background of the psychological rift between Congress and the Muslim League`.

and

`Since the Khilafat agitation, things have changed and it has been one of the many injuries inflicted on India by the encouragement of the Khilafat crusade, that the inner Muslim feeling of hatred against `unbelievers` has sprung up, naked and unashamed, as in years gone by`.

and

A terrible and gruesome fallout of the disastrous Khilafat experiment of Mahatma Gandhi was the Moplah Rebellion in Malabar District in 1921. According to the Report of the ENQUIRY COMMITTEE OF SERVANTS OF INDIA SOCIETY, the number of Hindus murdered by Moplah Muslims was 1500, the number of Hindus forcibly converted 20,000 and the value of property looted about Rs three crore. When the national and local leaders appealed to the virulently anti-Hindu Moplah Muslims in the name of Mahatma Gandhi to follow the ways of peace and non-violence, they replied bluntly with Islamic fervour: `GANDHI IS A KAFIR, HOW CAN HE BE OUR LEADER?` Dr Anne Besant declared: `The Moplah Muslim marauders murdered and plundered abundantly, killed or drove away all Hindus who would not apostatize. Somewhere about 100,000 people were driven from their homes with nothing but the clothes they had on, stripped of everything`. She also accused all the Khilafat religious preachers for all this terrible atrocities. J Campbell, chief of the Intelligence Department, Government of India, held the Khilafat leaders squarely responsible for inciting racial hatred resulting in Moplah carnage.

http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/2208ss1.htm

Mahatma Gandhi`s attempt to harness the feeling for the cause of national independence backfired and led to the uprising in Kerala known as the Moplah Rebellion. It took the British several months to put it down at the cost of thousands of lives.



Moplahs were very much part of the grand Khilafat Movement that Gandhi was spearheading and Gandhi kept apologising for them


The Dravidian Moplahs had directed their revolt with class venom against some Aryan high-caste Hindus with property as well as Britishers: Brahmanical elements tried to use that to spark a crisis in Hindu-Muslim relations all over India. Gandhi tried to hold a balance: like the U.S. press and the Negro nationalists who read it he stressed that the Moplah uprising could be made part of a united drive for independence by Indians of all sects.But he was also aware of the pan-Islamic dimension: in a December 1921 call to the British to suspend their attacks against the Moplahs, he was to observe that the Moplahs saw themselves as fighting for a religion with methods they considered religious: Yogesh Chadha, Rediscovering Gandhi (London: Century 1997) p. 254.


And lets not forget the Tehreek-e-Hijrat Fatwa that Gandhi`s right hand man Azad gave to Muslims which gave Muslims two options ``JEHAD`` or ``HIJRAT``.

The Muslim Ulema, thinkers and activists called for the boycott of foreign goods and non-cooperation with the British government. Meetings were organised in order to rally the masses to support these issues. The meetings were organised under the banner of Mo’tamar al-Ansar (The Workers Conference) and various newspapers such as Al-Hilal of Maualana Abul Kalam Azad and The Comrade of Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar. Both Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad and Maulana Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar were put behind bars for publishing anti-British articles in their newspapers. The latter spent four years in prison between 1911 and 1915CE.


The allegiance of the Muslim intelligentsia of India at that to the Khilafah is unquestionable. Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad summed up their view when he wrote in his newspaper al-Hilal on 6th November 1912 that the Ottoman Sultans possessed the only sword which Muslims had for their protection. Insofar as the “caliphate was essentially a religious integration of the shari’a”, it became “necessary by revelation, is of God’s institution and that obedience to its authority is farz, or positively commanded”.


The Khilafat Movement


In September 1919, Maulana Muhammad Ali and his brother Shaukat Ali, together with Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, and Hasrat Mohani, started a new organization, the Khilafat Movement (1919-1924). Their avowed aim was to use whatever leverage they had to protect the Khilafah. They organized Khilafat Conferences in several northern Indian cities. It is noticeable that the scholars and activists that were part of the Khilafat movement came from different schools of thought and backgrounds, for example Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was known to be a ‘ghayr taqleedi’ (non-taqleedi – who believed Taqleed to Mazahib is prohibited) and Maulana Mahmood Hasan was Deobandi who are followers of the Hanafi Mazhab yet they were united in the objective of working for the maintenance of the Khilafah.


In 1919, the Bombay Khilafat Committee agreed on two important organisational goals: “first, to urge the retention of the temporal powers of the Sultan of Turkey as Caliph, and second to ensure his continued suzerainty over the Islamic holy places.”

Delivering the presidential address at the Calcutta meeting of the Bengal Provincial Khilafat Conference in 1920, Maulana Azad discussed the importance of Khilafah he declared, “the purpose of this institution was to organise and lead the Muslim community in the right path, to establish justice, to bring about peace, and to spread God’s word in the world. For all this it was absolutely necessary for the caliph to possess temporal power”. Maulana Azad had no doubt that “without an Imam, their lives were un-Islamic and that they would be damned after death”.


Maulana Azad published a book in 1920 called Masla-e-Khilafat (The Issue of Khilafah), he stated: “Without the Khilafah the existence of Islam is not possible, the Muslims of India with all their effort and power need to work for this”.

In the same book page 176 Maulana Azad said, “There are two types of ahkam shariah, the first is related to the individual like the commands and prohibitions, the fara’id (obligations) and wajibat in order to perfect oneself. The second is not related to the individual but is related to the Ummah, nation, collective obligations and state politics like the conquering of lands, political and economic laws”.

According to Peter Hardy, Maulana Azad believed that, “The Muslim who would separate religion and politics for Muslims is an apostate who works silently”.


The loss of political power in India and the threat posed by a combination of forces to the temporal authority of the caliph, was so worrisome for the leaders of the Muslim community that some of them felt compelled to issue fatwas ‘in favour of migration (hijra)’ from India.


Maulana Abul Kalam Azad issued a fatwa which was published in the daily Ahl-e-Hadith of Amritsar on 30 July 1920. In his fatwa he urged Hijrat from India as an alternative to non-cooperation with the British. (YLH`s note: Was the Hijaz Born Azad a ``Wahabi``... note ``Ahle-Hadith)

Maulana Abdul Bari’s fatwa said, “every Muslim residing here should adopt non-cooperation but if (that is) impossible, should proceed for hijrat”. Maulana Shaukat Ali issued a statement on behalf of the Central Khilafat Committee, “expressing the hope that all dedicated Muslims would stay in India and work for the non-cooperation. Only if it did not succeed would they consider resorting to hijrat”. The impact of the fatwa was electrifying and thousands of Muslims preferred to leave the Dar al harb of India where their religious rights symbolized in the position of the Turkish Caliph was being infringed.


And most amazing was the fact that Gandhi`s encouragement led to Deobandi ulema creating the Jamiat ulema Hind ... which in its numerous forms and heads plagues South Asia even today... and all these groups are spin offs of the same.

.....


Pakistanis buried remnants of Gandhiism and the Cold war in the Red mosque... you can continue to abuse us... but Pakistan will stand stronger now.