Islamic Utopia?

Ref faisaluno #34

[why do you think every two-bit muslim invader from central asia was able to have his way with hindu india for about 700 years?]

Wrong weapons system. Babur had guns, the Indians didn`t.

[.. also why do you think one third of the population of the subcontinent so eagerly adapted a value system so different from that of their ancestors?]

They aren`t adopting that value system now or, for that matter, after 1857. That ought to put an end to the propaganda that conversions were voluntary. You of course have the need to believe that myth; otherwise you will have to face the unpleasant truth that your ancestors were cowards. That also explains why most Pakistanis claim direct descent from Prophet Mohammad, his companions, Genghiz Khan, Taimur Lane, Babur, Aurangzeb, etc.

[also wanted to thank you for giving hope to people like me who would like to see the dismemberment of the indian political union.]

I wish all power to folks like you. It is precisely that thought that resulted in the dismemberment not of India but of Pakistan. With folks like you around, there is still hope for an independent Pakhtoonistan, Sindh and Balochistan.

[the damage you and your bjp allies do to india is far worse than anything inflicted by the pak supported terrorists like maulana azhar .]

Finally, an admission of Pakistan`s complicity in the reign of terror in Kashmir.

[seems to me that the fundos in pakistan as well as the pak army has its strategy upside down. instead of sending terrorist, the pak army should be financing bjp election campaigns and encouraging bjp goons to launch other ayodhias. i for one will certainly be praying for bjp success.]

I would rather have India nuke Mecca and Medina than try to get rid of a couple of decrepit mosques in India.

As for the BJP, so long as the Congress Party is mired in dynastic poitics, educated Indians of all stripes will gladly vote for BJP.

YLH

With your permission I am reproducing that article by Fukuyama and Samin - I hope you will find it of interest and that it will add another facet to your worthy exploration of this subject.
``Islam and modernity: reform through radicalism
Francis Fukuyama & Nadav Samin

The modernisation of Islam is hardly imminent and will not occur without enormous struggle. There are many obstacles, not least the lack of a tradition of secular politics. Nor is it clear that the Muslim world is capable of the necessary realistic self-appraisal

What is going on in the Muslim world? Why does it produce suicide hijackers on the one hand and, on the other, lethargic and haphazardly capitalist societies that have delivered neither economic development nor democracy? A partial answer — because it is limited to the Arab region — can be found in a United Nations “development report” written by a group of Arab intellectuals which concludes that the Arab sector, with its oil wealth, is “richer than it is developed”. Its economies are stagnant, illiteracy is widespread, political freedom is rare and its inhabitants, especially women, are denied basic opportunities.

All the same, it would be a mistake to conceive of the Islamism of Osama Bin Laden and his followers as nothing more than an expression of those failures. The phenomenon of radical Islam is more complicated and its long-term effect on Islamic society may turn out to be more complicated still.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by a group of Muslims whose hatred of America was so all-consuming that they were willing to blow themselves up — setting them apart from earlier generations of terrorists. Where did this zeal, so foreign to modern democratic temperament, come from?

Foolish as it would be to downplay the role of religious factors, it will not do simply to call Bin Laden an Islamic fundamentalist. The Islamism of which he is a symbol and a spokesman is not a movement aimed at restoring some archaic or pristine form of Islamic practice. As a number of observers argue, including the Iranian scholars Ladan and Roya Boroumand in the Journal of Democracy, it is best understood not as a traditional movement, but a very modern one.

Groups such as Al Qaeda, the Boroumands write, owe a debt to 20th-century European doctrines of the extreme right and left. One stream of influence can be traced to Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. From Italy’s fascists he took the idea of unquestioning loyalty to a charismatic leader, modelling the slogan of his paramilitary organisation — “action, obedience, silence” — on Mussolini’s injunction to “believe, obey, fight”. Taking a cue from the Nazis, he placed great emphasis on the Brotherhood’s youth wing and the marriage of the physical and the spiritual, Islam with activism.

A second European source of Islamism can be traced to Maulana Mawdudi, founder of the Jama’at-i Islami movement in the early 1940s. A journalist well versed in Marxism, he advocated struggle by an Islamic “revolutionary vanguard” [Jama’at al-Saliheen] against the West and traditional Islam. As the Boroumands say, he was perhaps the first to attach the adjective “Islamic” to such distinctively western terms as revolution, state and ideology.

These strands of right and left eventually came together in Sayyid Qutb, who became the Brotherhood’s chief ideologist after the second world war. He called for a monolithic state led by an Islamic party, advocating the use of every violent means necessary. In his classless society, the “selfish individual” of liberal societies would be abolished and the “exploitation of man by man” would end. This, as the Boroumands say, was “Leninism in an Islamist dress”, and is the creed embraced by most present-day Islamists. The Boroumands also conclude that the key attributes of Islamism — “the aestheticisation of death, the glorification of armed force, the worship of martyrdom and ‘faith in the propaganda of the deed’” — have little precedent in Islam but are defining features of modern totalitarianism.

So much for ideology. On the sociological side there is another close parallel between Islamism and the rise of European fascism. Nazism’s roots lay in the rapid industrialisation of central Europe. In a single generation, millions of peasants moved from tightly knit villages to impersonal cities, losing a range of familiar cultural norms and signposts.

This was perhaps the most powerful impetus behind modern nationalism. Deprived of local sources of identity, displaced villagers found new social bonds in language, ethnicity and ultimately in the propaganda of Europe’s extreme right. Though rightwing parties pretended to revive ancient traditions, their doctrines were a mishmash of old symbols and new ideas brought together by up-to-date communications technology.

Islamism has followed a similar path. Over the past few decades, most Muslim societies have undergone a social transformation not unlike that of Europe in the late 19th century. Villagers and tribesmen have moved to urban slums, leaving behind the variegated, often preliterate Islam of the countryside. A puritanical Islamism has filled the void, uniting traditional religious rhetoric with the ideology of revolutionary action.

Some suggest that poverty is the engine of Islamism’s growth but this is not so. Rather, like European fascism, Islamism is bred by rapid social dislocation; its propagandists are often new to the middle or upper classes. Islamism introduces these educated but often lonely people to a larger group of believers to become members of a vibrant, if dangerous and destructive, international community.

Seeing Islamism for what it really is leads us to an important question: could it, like fascism and communism before it, serve inadvertently as a modernising force, paving the way for Muslim societies that can respond constructively to the challenge of the West?

The question is not as absurd as it may sound. Comparisons are especially tricky, but the Bolsheviks succeeded in creating an industrialised, urbanised Russia and Hitler got rid of much of the class stratification that characterised pre-war Germany. Through a tortuous and immensely costly path, both these “isms” cleared away some of the underbrush obstructing the growth of liberal democracy.

There are much safer routes toward modernisation, like those taken by countries such as Korea, Britain or the United States, and less expensive paths to modernity were surely available to Russia and Germany. But one has to deal with what one has and in Islamic cultures there is arguably much more underbrush to be cleared. If Islamism is directed as much against traditional forms of Islam as against the West, could it also be a source of such creative destruction?

There are myriad ways in which Islamic practice and its rigid legal framework have obstructed change. Interest rates are fixed by religious authorities, schooling focuses on rote-learning of religious texts and discourages critical thinking, women are kept out of political and economic life, and so on. Many of these constraints existed in the Judaeo-Christian West and were eliminated only after a long struggle.

They still exist in the Islamic present and can only be removed by political power. Islamism has already shown the capability of doing this, and of accommodating western norms: though Khomeini brought back the chaddar for women, he also reluctantly sanctioned their right to vote.

We should not kid ourselves. The modernisation of Islam is hardly imminent and will not occur without enormous struggle. There are many obstacles, not least the lack of a tradition of secular politics. Nor is it clear that the Muslim world is capable of the necessary realistic self-appraisal.

Many non-western societies have tried the path of violent resistance to the military, economic and cultural power of the West. Only when faced with defeat and domination did China and Japan undertake a serious study of what went wrong. Joining the West when they could not beat it, they adopted various western institutions while retaining a core of their own culture. Social learning has been much slower in Muslim societies.

If the wait for Muslim modernisation is likely to be lengthy, how should the West respond in the short term to the prospect of suicide bombings and weapons of mass destruction? The determined application of military power is certainly part of the answer. European fascism did not fall because of its inherent wickedness, it lost legitimacy when it was crushed on the battlefield. Just as Osama Bin Laden and his cause gained status and support from September 11, so the rout of Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and ongoing American operations against terror are key to dampening Islamist fervour.

But the more important struggle must take place within the Islamic world. For too long, Muslim modernisers have sat in the wings while traditionalists and Islamists battle the centre stage. The great need now is for Muslims to take advantage of the turmoil created by September 11 to promote a more genuinely liberal form of their religion.

There is reason to think that such an opening exists. Though many Muslims favour Islamism in the abstract, the movement has a disastrous record where it is in power. Ordinary Afghans were overjoyed to be liberated from the Taliban and eagerly returned to such simple pleasures as watching cheesy Indian films on long-buried VCRs.

It is the Iranians who, having lived under Islamist rule for the past generation, are most likely to lead the Islamic world out of its impasse. One basic demographic fact works in favour of eventual liberalisation: 70% of Iran’s population is now under the age of 30 and from all reports these young people tend to abhor the Islamic theocracy. Having brought the first Islamist regime to power, Iran would set a powerful example for the Middle East and beyond if it moved towards liberalisation.

In the end it is as important not to overestimate the strength of Islamism as it is fatal to underestimate it. It has little to offer Arabs, much less the rest of the Muslim world. Its glorification of violence has already produced a sharp counter-reaction and — provided it is defeated — its “successes” may yet help pave the way for long-overdue reform. If so, this would certainly not be the first time that the cunning of history has produced so astounding a result.

Francis Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and author of “Our Posthuman Future.” Nadav Samin is a recent SAIS graduate specialising in Middle Eastern studies``

a) Every two-bit and otherwise invader from anywhere including Central Asia was able to have his way on the sub-Continent simply because we were a placid people. It had nothing to do with religion.

b) What is or was so different about the value systems, that could not be put down to evolution?

c) You can send your donations to the BJP on their website.

dost-mittar (#40)

Point about BJP`s antics in India is taken but when you have a neighbor that is constantly playing up the difference between Muslims and Hindus to sustain it`s ideology, it really doesn`t help the Muslims of India, does it?

Another point - the formation of Pakistan may have been courtesy islamic ideals or better price for wheat or healthier stock of human beings or whatever . . . but one reason which surely took the cake was that the really rich/well off feudal landlords on both sides seem to have doubled their holdings by the simple method of dividing their families into two, leaving one half behind and sending the other across.

At least that was the plan.

Then somebody went and invented fundoos . . .

harimau #28

You say:

[quote]
What is wrong with that? You don`t want the Pakistanis getting a dose of what they shoved down Congress`s throat in 1947?
[end-quote]

Do you really think that Advani is able to do ANYTHING to the pakistani
military and mullahs?? NOT AT ALL. He is completely average in that space. Does he have any strategy in that space? NO ! All he does is to hide his failures by saying look at the bad, bad pakis.

Has training for indian police improved? Have our intelligence systems become better? NO !

Instead, it is the indian minoritities who are getting a second dose of what Jinnah inflicted on all of us in 1947. In other words, the guys you and I went to school and college with, the Salmans and Mustaq`s, the Peters and Javeds, they now fear for their property, family and even their lives. Is that good for India???

Subtlety and steadfastness is needed to deal with the military-mullah rulers of Pakistan. There is a need to speak to the educated and rational people of Pakistan and draw them closer to similar people in India. There is a need to win hearts and minds. Do you really think that the mindless jingoism of Advani and Modi are achieving this??

[quote]
Hindu grievances are NOT fantastic theories. They are true and a direct result of the systematic oppression of Hindus by Muslim rulers. The fact that not a single Hindu temple of antiquity stands in Northern India should be testament to the savagery of the Muslim rulers. Despite your North Indian surname, you seem not to have noticed anything out of the ordinary in North India compared to the South.
[end-quote]

Not only am I an North Indian hindu, my mother is a hindu from J&K with extensive family in the area. And yes, many of my relatives have had to leave their homes due to ``freedom`` brought there by jihadis. So dont patronize me with talk about hindu suffering!!!

The question is how to respond to the violence and grievance of the past. The violence of the islamic invasions of North India. The violence of the caste system. The question is how to respond to religous systems that deny humanity to Others.

How should we deal with all of this? Is it through mob violence in the present? Is it thru ``rath yatras`` that involve 100s of deaths? This is no response, this is committing national suicide.

The correct response is the one people like Abdul Kalam has identified. A vision for the future. To bring out the best in every Indian. To ensure that every Indian child is guaranteed an education. Let every village have a ``Shree Ram Pathshala`` in a pucca building with a full-time teacher. Instead of bricks for a ram mandir, collect bricks for new homes for the homeless. Let us have a rath yatra that helps fulfils these endeavours.

You will never hear proposals like these from an Advani, only cunning demagoguery and an unthinking belligerent nationalism!

faisuluno

Glad to see you have the welfare of so many millions in mind.

Pakistanis like you really could not give a damn about the lives of Muslims in India, you just want to sit back in glee at destruction and terror. In fact after the Hindu fascists, people like you are their worst enemies.

Keep dreaming, you freaky necrophiliac, fantasising over death and destruction.

-h-

Harimau:
The problem with the `assertive Hindu` is that most of his assertions have been wrong and damaging to India, but highly profitable for Advani and his party. Leading a mob to illegally destroy Babri Masjid only to absolve himself of any responsibility thereafter is cowardice, not positive assertiveness

dear harimau:

the parade started 400 years before baber moved to india. so not only have hindus shown a proclivity for cowradice as you yourself acknowledge in your post, they have also shown their lack of inteligence for not being able to come up with a weapon that would have prevented them from being subjected to an additional 400 years of foreign domination. also seem to me that your ancestors displayed as much cowradice as my ancestors for putting up with 700 years of muslim occupution (has to be some kind of reccord). the agony of your ancestors would not have lasted that long if they had displayed the same courage and ditermination as that displayed by palestenians and kashmiri freedom fighters.

i for one am very grateful to my ancestors for embracing islam. at least i dont have to go to bed every night thinking about 700 years of shame.

By the way the most of the Pakistani muslims are closer in culture to the Hindu Indians rather than Muslim Arabs. This is so since most Pakistanis are decendants of Hindu converts to Islam.

pmishra2 #47 Those are wise words you have written. The confrontational mentality that you speak out against provides the swamp which feeds the military (and their secret camp followers, namely the religious parties) in pakistan as well as bjp in india. These groups in turn try to keep the swamp festering with their confrontational policies and propoganda. One day these groups will all be put in their place, but at a heavy cost in terms of lost opportunities for peaceful human and economic progress in the subcontinent.

Harimou:

``As for the BJP, so long as the Congress Party is mired in dynastic poitics, educated Indians of all stripes will gladly vote for BJP. ``

which is why I hope and pray that some patriotic ``terrorist`` group wipes out the remnants of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty.

Faisaluno:

``i for one am very grateful to my ancestors for embracing islam. at least i dont have to go to bed every night thinking about 700 years of shame.``

Just like the Polish guards at the Nazi concentration camps? They were ashamed to be victims so they joined the oppressor too.

Harimau:

Dude, you`d fit in better in Nepal than India. It is the only Hindu country on this planet.

“They deserve a Taliban-like government. That would be God`s justice for imposing and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. “
...tsk, tsk...so 9/11 was God’s justice against american citizens for their government’s biased support for israel in the middle east?...

Touche.

re: faisaluno #44


...this is hilarious...each time one of your type gets cornered on arguments of the present, you bark, rather pathetically and out of pitiful desperation, about tales of ``glory`` (more like barbarism) from centuries ago...is that all you got, boy?...despite the licking pakistan has recent in 3 wars of the recent past, you talk a lot of $hit about bravery...and despite pakistan getting circumcised in 1971, you have the gall to talk about dismemberment of india....tsk tsk tsk...