Radical Islam and internal security

07-31-2008, 06:41 AM

IB identifies Pak-based masterminds
http://www.rediff.com///news/2008/jul/30ahd7.htm

Vicky Nanjappa in Bengaluru | July 30, 2008 | 17:40 IST

QUOTEWho carried out the blasts at Ahmedabad and Bengaluru? Investigating agencies say they were masterminded by two Karachi-based men -- Rasool Khan Parti and Mohammad Sufiya Ahmed Patangiya.

The duo, who currently reside at Farahan Arcade Gulistan in Karachi, are originally residents of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. Prior to fleeing to Karachi, the duo were involved in recruitment of youth for jihadi activities in Hyderabad and other parts of the country. They were both allegedly members of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami, but recruited youth mainly from the Students Islamic Movement of India. Both men are wanted by the Gujarat police in connection with the murder of former state minister Haren Pandya.

An Intelligence Bureau officer investigating last week's blasts told rediff.com the duo planned the attacks during a meeting in Kotli, Pakistan, in May.

The investigating agencies have also got information on the manner in which the blasts were executed. They say the entire operation was carried out by Indians, unlike in past instances where Pakistanis or Bangladeshis were used.

Both Parti and Patangiya handpicked Indian youth working in the United Arab Emirates for the operation. This indicates that the youth had been picked well in advance and sent off to the UAE on the pretext of jobs there. This could have been done to avoid coming under the scanner of the Indian police, the officials say. From the UAE they were flown into Dubai from where they were taken to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

The youth were divided in two groups and then trained personally by Patri and Patangiya. They were taught how to prepare bombs and execute the attacks. They called it training in alternate explosions. They were specifically taught how to make bombs using ammonium nitrate and directed to pick up the material locally. The use of RDX was ruled out since it was a problem to smuggle it across the border.

After undergoing training for a month, the youth were flown back to Dubai and then taken to Bangladesh. They were directed to cross over into India through the porous border. Investigating agencies say they took this trouble to avoid the police and security agencies.

Once in India, the two groups split up and undertook the operations in Bengaluru and Ahmedabad separately, although they kept in regular touch. The date and time of the attacks was fixed by Parti.

The police are now trying to ascertain how many members were in each team and also from where they picked up the ammonium nitrate and other material required to make the bombs. The police suspect that the two teams assembled the bombs separately in the cities they attacked.

The Bengaluru police believe that the ammonium nitrate must have been brought into Karnataka from Kerala via Mysore. However, police says the terrorists dumped a part of the consignment about 50 kilometres from Bengaluru as they feared detection. However, they managed to smuggle in enough material to carry out the blasts.

IB sources say they are concerned by the growing number of Indian youth being lured into terror outfits. They say that intercepts from Pakistan indicate that there are many Indian youth outside Parti's home in Karachi daily.

Investigating agencies are also looking into the statements made by SIMI activist Riazuddin Nasir aka Mohammad Ghouse. After his arrest in Karnataka earlier this year had told the police that he had met Parti in Karachi.

**acharya** · 07-31-2008, 11:50 PM

http://www.hoover.org/publications/polic...60936.html

an excerpt...pls read the entire link above:
QUOTEMuslim society, classically, is tribal society. Muhammadâs achievement was to meld the desert tribes of Arabia into an irresistible force for the spread of Islam. To this day, in fact, tribal identity remains politically relevant, not only in the arid territories of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, but even in settled Muslim states like Iraq. This is a distinctive characteristic of social life in the Middle East. Historically, it is unusual for states and tribes to coexist for long within a single territory, and rare as well for tribal peoples to found dynasties (as they have throughout Muslim history). In Europe, for example, the German, Celtic, and Gothic tribes that overran a collapsing Roman Empire quickly lost their tribal identities. The same fate awaited the great tribal dynasties that conquered ancient China. But in the Middle East, tribal identity persists.

Middle Eastern tribes are organized into what anthropologists call âsegmentary lineage systems.â Simply put, segmentary lineages allow a society to operate strictly on the basis of kinship ties, without the need for a central government. If a man is attacked, for example, heâll be defended not by police, but by members of his lineage, who will be pitted against the lineage-mates of his foe. And what if a man is attacked by one of his own lineage mates? In that case, his lineage will simply break apart (segment), and those most closely related to him will be opposed to those most closely related to his attacker. The system works through an almost infinite capacity for either segmentation or unity. Tribes can easily be split by internal disputes, yet can just as easily combine in the face of an alien enemy.

Muhammadâs achievement was to unify the tribes of Arabia under the banner of Islam, in the process replicating and extending to Islam itself the tribal ethos of militance and pride. By creating a kind of tribal feud between all of Islam and the outside world of infidels, Muhammad was able to launch a successful military campaign that unified and deployed the existing tribal structure against the enemy. In later battles against the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, tribal regiments united by bonds of kinship maintained a cohesion that state-employed mercenary armies could not. The Muslims swept the field.

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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWYyM...DY0MTA0MGM0YmY=

Marriage and the Terror War
Better learn up on your anthropology if you want to understand the war.

By Stanley Kurtz
QUOTEWhy is the United States engaged in a war against Islamic terrorists? The Left blames the war on American foreign policy, while the Right holds that America is being scapegoated for the Muslim Middle Eastâs own failure to modernize. In his controversial new book, The Enemy at Home, conservative social critic Dinesh DâSouza rejects both of these explanations. Islam is perfectly compatible with modernity, argues DâSouza. The real root of the terror war, says DâSouza, is that, like many other traditional peoples throughout the world, Muslims are being shocked into anti-Western radicalism by the decadent post-Sixties culture nowadays aggressively spread across the globe by the secular Left.

In âWar of Cultures,â I take issue with DâSouza, arguing that the contemporary cultural Left merely aggravates a profound and already-existing conflict between Islamic society and modernity â a clash between tradition and modernity more thorough-going and prone to violence than in any other part of the globe. DâSouzaâs theme of cultural incitement, rightly understood, I argue, points toward a deeper incompatibility between Islamic society and the demands of modern life â an incompatibility that has a great deal to do with the widespread Middle Eastern practice of cousin marriage. If this is so, then we are led to take up the fundamental question of the causes of the terror war in a new light.

The distinguished historian Bernard Lewis and political scientist Samuel Huntington have together popularized the notion that Muslims are scapegoating the West because of an underlying incompatibility between Islamic society and modernity. Lewis roots this incompatibility in the Muslim seclusion of women and also in the failure of Islam to separate church and state. Yet, in âRoot Causes,â I show that the Muslim seclusion of women, and even characteristically Muslim church-state relations, are part and parcel of a distinctive kinship structure built around a preference for the marriage of cousins. Huntington highlights the significance of these âtraditional clan ties,â while saying relatively little about their actual content.

In this first in a series of essays on Muslim cousin-marriage, I want to begin to make the case that Muslim kinship structure is an unexamined key to the war on terror. While the character of Islam itself is unquestionably one of the critical forces driving our global conflict, the nature of Islamic kinship and social structure is at least as important a factor â although this latter cluster of issues has received relatively little attention in public debate. Understanding the role of Middle Eastern kinship and social structure in driving the war not only throws light on the weaknesses of arguments like DâSouzaâs, it may also help us devise a new long-term strategy for victory in the war on terror.

Self-Sealing Society

Think of the culture of the Muslim Middle East as âself-sealing.â Muslim society has a deep-lying bias toward in-group solidarity, the negative face of which manifests itself in a series of powerful mechanisms for preventing, coercing, or punishing those who would break with or undermine the in-group and its customs. This bias toward in-group solidarity serves to shelter Muslim society from interaction with the forces of modernity, and also explains why Muslim immigrants so often fail to assimilate. Of course, no society can function without some sort of âin-group solidarity.â Yet the Muslim world is truly distinctive on this score. When it comes to the core principles of kinship, Muslim practices strengthen and protect the integrity and continuity of the in-group in a way that sets the Middle East apart from every other society in the world. To appreciate this fact, weâve first got to understand some fundamental things about the nature of kinship.

For the greater part of human history, nearly every society has been organized into units based on kin ties. Modern life greatly reduces the significance of these ties, since capitalism tends to allocate jobs based on ability (instead of who your father is), while democracies apply laws, and assign benefits, on the principle of equal citizenship (not birth). By contrast, in most traditional societies, a manâs security, health, prosperity, and religious standing all depend, first and foremost, on his relatives. So to understand the kinship structure of a traditional society is to make sense of a good deal of life there. Unfortunately, our contemporary thinned-out notion of kinship has made it tough to recognize just how profoundly societies are shaped by variations in marriage practices. Thatâs why weâre far more comfortable making sense of the war on terror through the lens of a familiar phenomenon like religion, than in the light of something alien, like cousin marriage.

The anthropological study of kinship is famously abstruse, even for many anthropologists. The terminology can be eye-glazing, and as Iâve been arguing, itâs tough for modern Americans to believe that the problem of who-marries-whom can actually make much social difference. Suffice it to say that generations of anthropologists who actually travel to non-Western societies keep coming back impressed by how important the question of kinship is. As Iâll detail in a future piece, British scholars have lately discovered just how critical cousin marriage is for understanding the problem of Muslim assimilation in Europe. If the study of kinship can be exotic, difficult, and puzzling, so is the problem of modern Muslim rage. These problems, I argue, are related. So fasten your seatbelts. For the sake of making sense of Americaâs number one challenge, weâre about to take a plunge into the famously abstruse topic of kinship.

Short Course in Kinship

In the late nineteenth century, British anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor developed the founding insight of the modern study of kinship. Tylor cited exogamy, or âmarrying out,â as the key to human social progress. In Tylorâs scenario, early human groups, in danger of killing each other off through inveterate competition, discovered intermarriage as the path to social peace. Women who were related to one clan as sisters and to another clan as wives tended to discourage feuds between otherwise competing groups. As Tylor famously put it: âAgain and again in the worldâs history, savage tribes must have had plainly before their minds the simple practical alternative between marrying-out and being killed out.â And for Tylor, âcross cousin marriage,â a particular form of cousin marriage favored by many âprimitiveâ societies, was the earliest and most fundamental form of clan exogamy â or âmarrying out.â

So what exactly is âcross cousin marriageâ? Well, in anthropological parlance, descendants of same-sex siblings are âparallel cousins,â while descendants of opposite-sex siblings are âcross cousins.â That is, if a man marries his motherâs brotherâs daughter, he is marrying a cross cousin. If, on the other hand, a man marries his fatherâs brotherâs daughter, he is marrying his parallel cousin.

Yes, this sort of terminological arcana has been the bane of generations of anthropology students. But let me put my larger point in the form of a threat: Sit still for this brief basic account of anthropological kinship theory...or lose the war on terror.

All right, letâs say we have a society made up of clans organized by descent through the father. (Imagine a grander version of your own fatherâs family line, or something like the Hatfields and McCoys.) In any given clan, the men all trace their descent from a common male ancestor. In such a society, a rule or preference for cross-cousin marriage would create a systematic form of exogamy. In other words, if every man in a patrilineal, clan-based society were to marry his motherâs brotherâs daughter, every man would be marrying someone from a different clan. (For example, if you were to marry your own motherâs brotherâs child, you would be marrying someone from outside of your fatherâs family line.) Since every manâs mother in our imaginary society is born into a different patriclan than his own, when a man marries the daughter of his motherâs brother (i.e., his cross cousin) he is renewing an alliance with another patriclan (i.e. his motherâs birth clan) by bringing a woman from his motherâs birth clan into his own clan as a wife, just as his father did before him.

On the other hand, in a society made up of competing patriclans, a rule or preference for parallel-cousin marriage would have exactly the opposite effect. Parallel-cousin marriage would seal each and every clan off from all of the others. If, say, every man in a society made up of patrilineal clans was to marry his fatherâs brotherâs daughter, every man would be married to a descendent of his own birth clan. (For example, if you were to marry your own fatherâs brotherâs child, you would be marrying someone from within your fatherâs family line.) That would be a very strong form of endogamy, or âmarrying in,â which, according to Tylor, would encourage social isolation, cultural stasis, rivalry, and high levels of conflict between clans.

Although modern social anthropologists largely jettisoned the speculative historical reconstructions favored by nineteenth-century scholars like Tylor, they held onto Tylorâs central insights into the political significance of exogamy and cousin marriage. For example, building on Tylor, the great modern anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argued that the incest taboo was the foundation of human social life. By prohibiting sexual ties among close relatives, Levi-Strauss claimed, the incest taboo effectively forces human beings to create alliances with strangers, through marriage. The prevalence of cousin marriage in many traditional cultures seemed to contradict this claim for the significance and function of the incest taboo. Yet Levi-Straussâs brilliant, Tylor-inspired, analysis of the many political alliance systems created by cross-cousin marriage proved that even societies that encouraged the marriage of close cousins were in fact practicing a form of exogamous alliance-building. In the wake of Levi-Straussâs achievement, some anthropologists even returned, in a more sophisticated mode, to Tylorâs original historical thesis, suggesting that the early discovery of exogamous marriage may have played a critical role in the evolution of modern human beings. (See Robin Foxâs Kinship and Marriage and The Red Lamp of Incest.)

Well, maybe exogamy played a central role in human evolution, or maybe it didnât. However theoretically sophisticated, those sorts of historical reconstructions are nearly as speculative today as they were in the nineteenth century. In any case, early history aside, there is a critical flaw in Levi-Straussâs theory of contemporary human kinship. Levi-Strauss did indeed show that the widespread practice of cross-cousin marriage confirms, rather than contradicts, the leading role of exogamy in human social life. Unfortunately, Levi-Strauss almost entirely failed to deal with the single great exception to his rule. Although the vast majority of societies with a preference for close-cousin marriage favor the marriage of cross cousins, a significant minority of such societies favor the marriage of parallel cousins.

And as weâve already seen, parallel-cousin marriage has an effect precisely the opposite of the alliance-building interchange encouraged by cross-cousin marriage â and praised by Tylor and Levi-Strauss. Instead of encouraging cultural exchange, forging alliances, and mitigating tensions among competing groups, parallel-cousin marriage tends to wall off groups from one another and to encourage conflict between and among them. However strong the urge among anthropologists to identify the cooperative advantages of exogamy as a core characteristic of human nature itself, the hard fact of the matter is that a significant minority of human societies have chosen to organize themselves according to principles quite the opposite of alliance-based exogamy. Care to hazard guess as to exactly where in the world those societies might be?

While the vast majority of societies that practice cousin marriage favor the marriage of cross cousins, the relatively small number of societies that encourage parallel-cousin marriage can be found in the Islamic cultures of North Africa and west and central Asia. Russian anthropologist Andrey Korotayev has shown that, while the region that practices parallel-cousin marriage does not map perfectly onto the Islamic world as a whole, it does (with some exceptions) closely resemble the territory of the eighth-century Islamic Caliphate â the original Islamic empire. So there is one great exception to the claim that human society â and even human nature itself â are built around the principle of extra-familial marriage. Almost every known contemporary case of preferential parallel-cousin marriage is the result of diffusion from a single source: the original Islamic Caliphate. And while parallel-cousin marriage may not be Islamic in any strict or formal sense (in fact, the practice apparently predates Islam in the region), as Korotayev puts it, âthere seems to be no serious doubt that there is some functional connection between Islam and FBD [fatherâs brotherâs daughter â i.e., parallel cousin] marriage.â Sounds like weâd best find out what that âfunctional connectionâ is.

...Proves the Rule
Once you give up the idea that every human society depends in some fundamental way on the practice of marrying out, itâs fairly easy to see the other side of the coin. If in-marriage stifles cultural development and change by walling society off from outside influences, then strong endogamy also has the corresponding benefits of heightening social cohesion and preserving cultural continuity. That is precisely the argument of Kansas State University anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer, who notes that parallel-cousin marriage among Pakistanis in Great Britain tends to reinforce cultural continuity in Muslim immigrant communities. Ottenheimerâs study, Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage, was published in 1996, several years before it became apparent that reinforcing the âcultural continuityâ of immigrant Muslim communities in Britain might have a down side. (See especially chapter 7.)

Determined to puncture the American âmythâ that cousin marriage poses any sort of problem, Ottenheimer explains that the bans on cousin marriage adopted by many American states between the 1840s and the 1920s were the product of a biased and decidedly non-multicultural nation. As Ottenheimer sees it, given the foolish determination of our forbears to assimilate immigrants, Americans used intermarriage (a modern form of exogamy) as a tool to help break up ethnic communities and encourage a sense of national unity. Laws against cousin marriage fit right into that strategy, helping to break down in-grown traditional cultures and encouraging a shared sense of American identity (even if America never faced anything quite as in-grown as Muslim parallel-cousin marriage). Multiculturalist that he is, Ottenheimer prefers the âcultural continuityâ fostered by parallel-cousin marriage among British Pakistani Muslims â a continuity facilitated by Europeâs permissive marriage laws â to Americaâs tradition of immigrant assimilation.

Ottenheimer has a point. Tylor and Levi-Strauss were mistaken to identify the functional gains of exogamy with human nature itself. The pattern of social adaptation, developmental flexibility, and relative peace achieved through intermarriage isnât the only social game in town. Although a strongly in-marrying society may sacrifice these advantages, functionally speaking, intense social solidarity and unbreakable cultural continuity are the powerful payoffs received in return for the rejection of exogamy. Of course, the fly in this ointment (invisible to Ottenheimer in 1996) is painfully obvious today: Intense social solidarity and unbreakable cultural continuity in immigrant Muslim communities (and in the Middle East itself) are exactly what have been getting us into trouble. This means that any a long-term strategy for winning the war on terror will have to undercut, counter-balance, or reverse the functional âadvantagesâ (cultural stasis and isolation) accruing to Muslim society through the ongoing practice of parallel-cousin marriage.

So the one great exception to the anthropological maxim that human advancement and peace require a certain minimal level of exogamy turns out to prove the rule. Islamic society has found a way to turn a uniquely intense form of in-marriage to its advantage (if advantage is defined strictly in terms of cultural survival, rather than adaptive change). Unfortunately, from the perspective of the rest of the world, the cultural stasis and isolation promoted by Muslim parallel-cousin marriage is now a serious problem.

We still need to discover the âfunctional connectionâ between Middle Eastern parallel cousin marriage and Islam. Find that link, I argue, and you will see what stands between the Muslim world and modernization. Grasp the connection between Islam and Middle Eastern kinship, and youâll have a far better chance of devising a long-term strategy for winning the war on terror. These are the questions weâll pursue in Part II of âMarriage and the Terror War.â

**acharya** · 07-31-2008, 11:52 PM

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2RhZ...GMzZTE3ZDllZmM=


Marriage and the Terror War, Part II
Protecting the honor of the family; protecting the honor of Islam.

By Stanley Kurtz
QUOTEFor the greater part of human history, almost every society has been structured around the bonds of marriage and kinship. A manâs security, health, prosperity, and religious standing all traditionally depended on his relatives. We moderns continue to marry and trace our descent through our parents, especially our fathers. Yet in comparison to societies in other times and places, the bonds of kinship are now thin and watery things.

The Muslim world is different. Guided by powerful cultural rules and preferences, Muslims commonly arrange the marriages of their children. A Muslim familyâs economic well-being, social standing, and much else typically depend upon those arrangements, and as we learned in âMarriage and the Terror War,â large sections of the Muslim world prefer to arrange marriages between âparallel cousins,â cousins who are members of the same paternal family line.

In the first part of this piece, I showed that, on a world scale, the radical form of in-marriage represented by the union of parallel cousins is highly unusual. Parallel-cousin marriage is confined almost exclusively to the region once ruled by the original eighth-century Islamic empire, and this involuted form of marriage stands in sharp contrast to the relative value placed on out-marriage, inter-group alliance, and interchange favored by almost every other culture in the world.

Anthropologists once identified exogamy â the tendency to form alliances with strangers by âmarrying outâ â as a core component of human nature. Of course, every society identifies boundaries outside of which legitimate marriage cannot take place. Nonetheless, within those boundaries, most societies frown on close marriages within existing family lines, and this sets a nearly universal value on the practice of alliance and interchange between insiders and outsiders.

Yet the very strong form of endogamy uniquely practiced throughout much of the Muslim world shows that it is possible to construct a human society on the basis of another fundamental strategy. Instead of cultural communication, adaptive development, and mutual trust, this strategy stresses intense in-group solidarity and unbreakable cultural continuity. Understanding the distinctive kinship principles around which Muslims structure their social life may tell us a good deal about why weâre engaged in a war against terror â and what we must do over the long term to win it. In particular, we want to understand the âfunctional connectionâ between the marriage practices prevalent in the Muslim world and Islam itself. How do Muslim religion and social life fit together, and what is it about both that makes the Muslim adjustment to modernity so difficult?

Problem Solved
Recognizing the anomalous nature of parallel-cousin marriage on a worldwide scale, as well as its importance for Muslim society, students of Middle Eastern culture puzzled over the phenomenon for a century. By the mid-1970s, however, anthropologists had grown tired of Muslim parallel-cousin marriage. Some complained that the preoccupation with this single exotic practice was diverting attention from other important forms of marriage and kinship in the Middle East. And increasingly, scholars despaired of making sense of parallel-cousin marriage at all.

The most popular explanation of parallel-cousin marriage treated it as a way of keeping wealth within the family line. And while an economic motive is clearly in play in many cases of parallel-cousin marriage, there are plenty of other instances that have nothing to do with wealth. The economic circumstances of Middle Eastern societies differ widely, yet parallel-cousin marriage is practiced across the region. In some places, the poor prefer parallel-cousin marriage every bit as much as the rich. The more anthropologists learned about these exceptions, the more they were inclined to drop the issue of parallel-cousin marriage as a false or insoluble problem.

Then, in 1989, Czech anthropologist Ladislav Holy published Kinship, Honour, and Solidarity: Cousin Marriage in the Middle East. After a century of unresolved puzzlement, Holy offered an credible general explanation of the Muslim preference for parallel-cousin marriage. Holy showed how cousin marriage serves as a fail-safe protective device to secure collective family honor, and linked the honor-based function of cousin marriage to a broader appreciation of super-charged, in-group solidarity as a social strategy. No society can do without some form of in-group solidarity. But once you understand how Muslims construct society as a collection of counterbalanced, sometimes allied, sometimes feuding, closed-off, and self-sufficient family cells, the problem of Muslim cultural persistence begins to make sense. Holy also allows us to appreciate that the Muslim seclusion of women (another critical barrier to modernization and assimilation) is part and parcel of a larger complex of practices, at the center of which is parallel-cousin marriage. (Unfortunately, Holyâs book is difficult for non-specialists to follow, but see especially pp.110-123. See also a classic 1959 essay making some of these points by R. Murphy and L. Kasden, âThe structure of parallel cousin marriage,â American Anthropologist 61:17-29.)

Holy argues that the high value placed on endogamy sharply sets Muslim society apart from the rest of the world. The loyalties of women who marry within their own family lines remain undivided. Negatively, therefore, parallel-cousin marriage sacrifices the âintegrativeâ advantages of exogamy. Yet in a positive sense, parallel-cousin marriage serves as a powerful tool for preserving the internal solidarity and cultural continuity of the group. True, no real society is, or can be, entirely composed of sealed-off, perpetually in-marrying family lines. Many Muslims do âmarry out,â and economic exchanges and strategically forged marriage alliances counter-balance the tendency of parallel-cousin marriage to divide Muslim society into a series of closed, self-sustaining family cells. Yet Muslim societyâs leading theme is set and reinforced by the preference for parallel-cousin marriage â that theme being the creation of closed-off, secluded, and intensely loyal âsolidarities,â and harsh dealing with any insider who would endanger or desert the charmed circle.

Parallel-cousin marriage is often practiced as a way of keeping wealth within a particular family line. Yet it isnât wealth that turns Muslim families into the ultimate in sealed-off, self-perpetuating in-groups, Holy argues; itâs the other way around. The pre-existing value placed on in-group solidarity dictates that, when serious wealth is in play, it needs to be kept in the family line.

Rather than wealth, Holy argues, the real key to the puzzle of Muslim parallel-cousin marriage is family honor. With all the economic and social diversity in the Middle East, one factor remains constant. Wherever parallel-cousin marriage is practiced, the notion that the honor of the male family-line depends upon the sexual conduct of women is strong. For this reason, a womanâs fatherâs brotherâs son (her parallel cousin) has the right-of-first-refusal in the matter of her marriage. To protect against the possibility of a womanâs shameful marriage (or other dangerous sexual conduct) damaging the honor of the men of her lineage, male relatives have the right to keep her safely within the family line by marrying her off to her parallel cousin.

As Iâll show in a follow-up piece, all of these kinship mechanisms are much at work in Europe today. Muslim immigrants in Europe use cousin marriage to keep wealth within already tight family lines, and to prevent girls from entering âshamefulâ marriages with cultural outsiders. All this serves to reinforce family âsolidarity,â thereby blocking the assimilation of Muslim immigrants into society at large. Weâve all heard about full-body veiling, the seclusion of women, forced marriage, honor killing, and the like. Europe is struggling with the question of how to handle these practices. What weâve missed up to now is the sense in which cousin marriage tends to organize and orchestrate all of these controversial practices, thereby serving as the lynch-pin of a broader pattern of resistance to assimilation and modernization. In effect, parallel-cousin marriage in Europe acts as a social âsealing mechanismâ to block cultural interchange â just as, over a century ago, Sir Edward Tylor theorized it would.

No Escape
Letâs return to Dinesh DâSouzaâs novel plan for winning the war on terror. DâSouza wants to isolate the secular Left at home, and Muslim radicals abroad, by forging an alliance between Americaâs Christian conservatives and cultural traditionalists (including peaceful Muslim traditionalists) across the globe. All the worldâs traditional cultures, says DâSouza, while differing on details, share a belief in external moral standards â a belief that sharply contrasts with the expressive individualism and relativism of Americaâs secular Left. As I pointed out in âWar of Cultures,â however, DâSouzaâs focus on what the worldâs traditionalists have in common glosses over immense differences between moral and social systems, thereby telling us little or nothing about why some traditionalists are attacking us, while others are not.

While itâs possible to lump the worldâs âtraditionalistsâ together by contrasting them all with the secular Left, thereâs another and more productive way to cut the cake. Once your subject is the social meaning and function of kinship, the Muslim world stands in stark contrast to every other society in the world â traditional or modern. This contrast, I argue, has everything to do with why Muslim societies have difficulty accommodating modernity, why Muslim immigrants resist assimilation, and why some Muslims are attacking us.

The key âfunctional connectionâ between Middle Eastern marriage practices (which are not religiously dictated, although they are sometimes justified in religious terms) and Islam itself would appear to be the creation and reinforcement of a pervasive cultural tendency to form in-groups with tightly monitored boundaries. A male parallel cousinâs right-of-first-refusal in marriage serves to prevent a woman from threatening lineage honor and solidarity by entering into a low or dishonorable out-marriage. By the same token, as we saw in the case of Afghan convert to Christianity, Abdul Rahman, Islam itself functions as a kind of closed in-group on a grand scale, welcoming converts, yet punishing apostasy with death. Explaining this Muslim practice, DâSouza says that, âApostasy in Islam is less a matter of âwrong beliefsâ or heresy and more a matter of treason, of betraying the Muslim community.â Precisely. Yet DâSouza fails to see that this is the heart of the problem. Instead of serving as a religious creed that individuals are free to accept or reject, Islam itself functions more like a gigantic in-marrying lineage, whose solidarity is threatened by any individual memberâs dishonorable exit. This, in turn, puts us in mind of the case of Salman Rushdie.

However well-known the Rushdie affair may be, we have arguably missed its larger significance. As DâSouza notes, given that sharia law punishes apostasy with death, âKhomeiniâs fatwa against Rushdie was entirely in line with Islamic teaching, and even traditional Muslims could not disagree with the ayatollahâs verdict.â Westerners see the Rushdie case as an attack on free speech, and that it is. More deeply, however, the Rushdie affair was a triumph for the built-in enforcement mechanism that seals off Islam from adaptation to the modern world.

DâSouza gives the example of the Talibanâs notorious execution by stoning of two adulterers. Recently, notes DâSouza, Maulvi Qalamuddin, former head of the Talibanâs Department for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, defended that stoning: âJust two people, thatâs all, and we ended adultery in Kandahar.â By the same token, Ayatollah Khomeini might with justice have said of Salman Rushdie: âJust one writer, thatâs all, and we killed off the possibility of a reformist Islam growing up in Europe.â Rushdie may not have been a religious reformer himself, yet the death sentence pronounced upon him sent out a powerful message to any European Muslim who might be planning to lead a movement for reform.

Compare the Rushdie affair to the development the Conservative and Reform movements within American Judaism, and the parallel rise of American Jewish intermarriage with non-Jews. Judaism, like Islam, was once less a religious creed than a tight community constituted by a set of laws and practices extending into areas well beyond matters of pure âbelief.â Yet without the intense form of lineage endogamy favored by Muslim society, and in the absence of the in-group policing mechanisms found in Islam, Judaism adapted to modernity, and Jews assimilated into American life (arguably to a fault, since Jewish identity is now seriously threatened by intermarriage). To put it simply, early followers of Conservative and Reform Judaism didnât have to worry about being executed for intermarriage or apostasy by angry Orthodox Jews.

So DâSouzaâs notion of a grand coalition of the worldâs religious traditionalists completely glosses over specific cultural characteristics that have blocked any reconciliation between Islam and modernity. DâSouza doesnât directly endorse Islamâs harsh enforcement mechanisms. Instead he argues that the intolerant secularism of the cultural Left is forcing Muslims into an all-or-nothing choice between their harshest traditions, on the one hand, and total repudiation of Islam, on the other.

What DâSouza canât see is that, far more than Americaâs secular Left, it is the distinctive nature of Islam itself, and of Middle Eastern social life generally, that forces this all-or-nothing choice. A non-creedal religion whose jurisdiction extends to vast areas of social life; a communal religious identity that punishes disloyalty with death; and a marriage system that generates (and harshly polices) a pervasive ethos of in-group solidarity: these are the real sources of the all-or-nothing choice between Muslim tradition and modernity. This is why the current alternatives in the Muslim world sometimes seem to be boiling down to an untenable choice between Iranian theocracy, on the one hand, and Turkish secularism, on the other.

If we want to change any of this, it will be impossible to restrict ourselves to the study of religious Islam. The âself-sealingâ character of Islam is part and parcel of a broader and more deeply rooted social pattern. And parallel-cousin marriage is more than just an interesting but minor illustration of that broader theme. If thereâs a âself-sealingâ tendency in Muslim social life, cousin marriage is the velcro. In contemporary Europe, perhaps even more than in the Middle East, cousin marriage is at the core of a complex of factors blocking assimilation and driving the war on terror. So I shall take up the question of cousin marriage in Europe in the next in this series of essays.

08-02-2008, 12:13 AM

Kangaroo court 'executes' man for marrying outside religionQUOTEKOLKATA, AUG 1 (PTI)
A Hindu man who married a Muslim girl was beheaded after a kangaroo court ordered his 'execution' at a village in Murshidabad district of West Bengal.

The villagers did not allow the man's hapless wife to approach the police for a fortnight.

The police said today that the girl Munera Bibi from Lakshanpur village met and fell in love with Shailendra Prasad from Bihar while she was working as a maid servant in Mumbai. They got married two and half years ago and the girl is now the mother of a 10-month-old child.

Religion was never a problem for the couple until she came to her own village in the district on July 1 with her husband who concealed his religious identity under the name Munna Sheikh.

But soon the girl's father Ansaria Sheikh became suspicious of his son-in-law's religion on July 14 and reported this to village elders. A 'salishi' (kangaroo court) comprising 22 members summoned Prasad and discovered his true religious identity. He was awarded 'death sentence', sources said.

On July 17 the man's beheaded body was found in a gunny bag in a jute field but as there was no complaint, the police failed to identify the person, the sources said.

Ten days later, the girl, her mother and brother went to Behrampore police station and lodged a formal complaint after which the incident came to light.

The police said three perons have been arrested in this connection.

"We tried to go to the police but the villagers forced us to stay indoors and threatened us with the same fate if we go to the police." the girl said

G.Subramaniam · 08-02-2008, 08:10 AM

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4365020/indian-mujahideen

14 page email

08-03-2008, 05:45 PM

Man set on fire for marrying Muslim girl 
http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14731550
Saturday, 02 August , 2008, 23:05

Kolkata: Close on the heels of the beheading of a man for marrying a girl outside his religion at a village in Murshidabad district, another man was set on fire by his in-laws on Friday at Anarpur in North 24-Parganas district for the same reason.

With severe burns, Arka Banerjee (22), a resident of Barasat's Chowdhurybagan, is now struggling for life in Barasat district hospital, superintendent of police of North 24-Parganas district Supratim Sarkar said here on Saturday.

Arka met Rehana Sultana during frequent trips to Baduria where his uncle stayed. Later they fell in love and got married in 2006 at a marriage registrar's office. Apprehending opposition from his family, Arka rented a house at Haora, away from his parents, and did odd jobs to earn his living.

However, the girl's family members traced the couple to Haora after a year and brought Rehana and her one-year-old son to Anarpur, while Arka was threatened with dire consequence if he returned to Baduria.

Early on Friday, when Arka tried to enter his in-laws' house to get his wife and baby back, he was severely beaten up. Later Rehana's brother Monirul allegedly took out a tin of kerosene, poured it on him and set him on fire.
Some local people later rescued him by pouring water to douse the flames. He was then admitted to a local hospital and subsequently shifted to Barasat district hospital.

Arka's brother in-law Monirul was on Saturday arrested by the police on the basis of a statement by Arka at the hospital bed, the SP said.

G.Subramaniam · 08-04-2008, 06:20 AM

I have wargamed the problem of the IMs very many times

Ultimately, it boils down to east punjab 1947 vs west punjab 1947

This is true for muslims in any non-muslim country
US, UK, Europe, Russia etc

They will breed to critical mass and try to take over
They cannot be re-educated ( not in large numbers anyways )

[edited]

For people like me who are squeamish, the only option is counter-breeding

G.Subramaniam · 08-06-2008, 12:02 PM

http://hindusamhati.blogspot.com/

This is run by Tapan Kumar Ghosh, an ex-RSS pracharak
He quit the RSS since it is too involved in organisation aspects instead of
confronting muslims in the streets of west bengal

**acharya** · 08-06-2008, 12:23 PM

QUOTE(G.Subramaniam @ Aug 3 2008, 12:50 PM)I have wargamed the problem of the IMs very many times

Ultimately, it boils down to east punjab 1947 vs west punjab 1947

This is true for muslims in any non-muslim country
US, UK, Europe, Russia etc

They will breed to critical mass and try to take over
They cannot be re-educated ( not in large numbers anyways )

[edited]

For people like me who are squeamish, the only option is counter-breeding
[right][snapback]85713[/snapback][/right]

Need your email
Sombody wants to contribute to your fund

G.Subramaniam · 08-06-2008, 12:46 PM

QUOTE(acharya @ Aug 6 2008, 12:23 PM)<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(G.Subramaniam @ Aug 3 2008, 12:50 PM)I have wargamed the problem of the IMs very many times

Ultimately, it boils down to east punjab 1947 vs west punjab 1947

This is true for muslims in any non-muslim country
US, UK, Europe, Russia etc

They will breed to critical mass and try to take over
They cannot be re-educated ( not in large numbers anyways )

[edited]

For people like me who are squeamish, the only option is counter-breeding
[right][snapback]85713[/snapback][/right]

Need your email
Sombody wants to contribute to your fund
[right][snapback]85908[/snapback][/right]
</div>

Which Fund?

**acharya** · 08-06-2008, 07:11 PM

Re conversion

G.Subramaniam · 08-06-2008, 07:54 PM

QUOTE(acharya @ Aug 6 2008, 07:11 PM)Re conversion
[right][snapback]85917[/snapback][/right]


It depends which part of India

For north India
donate to ekal vidyalaya
Each village we adopt reduces the openings to missionaries

For south India
find someone in RSS / VHP tamil nadu
and ask them to locate SV.Badri and donate to SV.Badri

**acharya** · 08-06-2008, 09:33 PM

QUOTE(G.Subramaniam @ Aug 6 2008, 02:24 AM)<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(acharya @ Aug 6 2008, 07:11 PM)Re conversion
[right][snapback]85917[/snapback][/right]


It depends which part of India

For north India
donate to ekal vidyalaya
Each village we adopt reduces the openings to missionaries

For south India
find someone in RSS / VHP tamil nadu
and ask them to locate SV.Badri and donate to SV.Badri
[right][snapback]85925[/snapback][/right]
</div>
I need your email to send some material

G.Subramaniam · 08-07-2008, 05:45 AM

QUOTE(acharya @ Aug 6 2008, 09:33 PM)<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(G.Subramaniam @ Aug 6 2008, 02:24 AM)<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(acharya @ Aug 6 2008, 07:11 PM)Re conversion
[right][snapback]85917[/snapback][/right]


It depends which part of India

For north India
donate to ekal vidyalaya
Each village we adopt reduces the openings to missionaries

For south India
find someone in RSS / VHP tamil nadu
and ask them to locate SV.Badri and donate to SV.Badri
[right][snapback]85925[/snapback][/right]
</div>
I need your email to send some material
[right][snapback]85934[/snapback][/right]
</div>

I have retired from this stuff
so sending me stuff to read is of no use

You can contact SV.Badri directly

G.Subramaniam · 08-07-2008, 05:53 AM

Dalit man elopes with muslim girl
Muslims riot

http://publication.samachar.com/pub_arti...id=2424757

Communities clash over love marriage in Vijaywada
Press Trust of India
Wednesday, August 06, 2008, (Vijayawada)
People belonging to two communities clashed over a love marriage in Vijaywada, leading the police to use batons to disperse them, police said on Wednesday.

The trouble started when a girl, belonging to a minority community, married a municipal sanitation employee against the wishes of her parents.

The girl's parents claimed their daughter was a minor, but the girl became major three days ago and fled with her lover on Monday and married at a temple here.

The incident led to tension and stone pelting between the members of the minority and majority communities. The situation in the area was under control, police added.

**acharya** · 08-10-2008, 03:30 AM

Two Muslims held at Tiruchendur temple

Tiruchendur (PTI): Two Muslims, who had come to pray at the famous Lord Muruga temple here, landed in trouble as they were detained for questioning due to the security alert following the serial blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. The presence of the two came to light when police checked the records of temple cottages on Friday , police said.

However, during questioning Abdul Rahman of Pazhayapettai in Tirunelveli and Mohammad Ali said they had come to offer worship at the temple following an astrologer's advice to ward off 'planetary effects.' The two were later released.

Police confirmed that the two were also related to a top official of the Tamil Nadu government.

G.Subramaniam · 08-13-2008, 08:06 PM

B.Raman on muslim anger

B.Raman has often written that IMs take to terrorism due to muslim anger due
to Ayodhya and Post-Godhra riots

How about Hindu anger, thousands of years of islamic desecrations, riots, massacres, rapes, forced conversions, ethnic cleansings ,etc ?

~~Pandyan~~ · 08-13-2008, 08:46 PM

I have often contended that B. Raman is a useless guy with his crappy analeesheesh. I don't know why people even take him seriously. One of his articles was titled, "Why terrorists attack soft targets".........seriously?

He also suggested that India not disrupt relations with a "friendly country" like Malaysia during the HINDRAF protests since those Hindus were in Malaysia and not Indian citizens. Compare with Russia which will not tolerate harassment of Russian diaspora in FSU states.

ramana · 08-13-2008, 09:37 PM

QUOTE(acharya @ Aug 9 2008, 10:00 PM)
Two Muslims held at Tiruchendur temple

Tiruchendur (PTI): Two Muslims, who had come to pray at the famous Lord Muruga temple here, landed in trouble as they were detained for questioning due to the security alert following the serial blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. The presence of the two came to light when police checked the records of temple cottages on Friday , police said.

However, during questioning Abdul Rahman of Pazhayapettai in Tirunelveli and Mohammad Ali said they had come to offer worship at the temple following an astrologer's advice to ward off 'planetary effects.' The two were later released.

Police confirmed that the two were also related to a top official of the Tamil Nadu government.
[right][snapback]86187[/snapback][/right]


They shouldnt have released the names for they will get targetted by the Islamists. The authorities are very concerned with releasing names of real perpetrators but show no such sensitivity for these two people.

~~Pandyan~~ · 08-13-2008, 10:08 PM

Its plainly obvious that they didn't come to the temple for reasons aforementioned. Tirunelveli is a hub of Islamic terrorist activity as previous events have shown.

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