Islamism - 4

03-27-2006, 12:58 AM

QUOTEDream talaq turns nightmare

PTI / Siliguri

A Muslim couple in Jalpaiguri district have been ordered by local religious leaders to separate as the husband allegedly uttered talaq three times in his sleep.

While the couple, who have three children, refused to obey the order since there was no discord between them, the community leaders are adamant that they must separate or face a "social boycott".

Aftab Ansari and Sohela have been married for the past 11 years. However, on the night of December 20 last year, Aftab allegedly uttered talaq three times in his sleep after a tiff with his wife.

The matter came to light when Sohela discussed it with her close friends and soon it reached the ears of the Muslim leaders.

The leaders, quoting the shari'ah, ruled that the talaq has to be implemented and if it is not acceptable, the only alternative was temporary separation for 100 days during which the wife will live at her father's house and spend a night with another man.

She can remarry her husband only after the man has given her talaq. As the couple were unwilling to accept the verdict, the matter went to the family counselling centre at Falakata police station.

The counselling centre, attended by judges of the Alipurduar sub-divisional court, discussed the problem in detail on Saturday, but failed to find a solution.

The additional district session judge (second track), Muhammad Abdul Jalil, has directed the general secretary of the Anjuman Committee to settle the issue, sources in the counselling centre said.



I think we need a STUPID MUSLIM banner like the Stupid Pakis one <!--emo& Confused

tupid--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/pakee.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='pakee.gif' />

03-27-2006, 02:58 AM

QUOTEThe leaders, quoting the shari'ah, ruled that the talaq has to be implemented and if it is not acceptable, the only alternative was temporary separation for 100 days during which the wife will live at her father's house and spend a night with another man.

She can remarry her husband only after the man has given her talaq. As the couple were unwilling to accept the verdict, the matter went to the family counselling centre at Falakata police station.

And Califorina text says that Islam provides equal rights to man and woman only Vedic/Hindusim mistreat their woman.

**acharya** · 03-27-2006, 07:59 AM

Islam's Civilized Past â¦ and Uncivilized Present

Kuwait's former oil minister, in this op-ed article from the Arab Times of Kuwait, ponders the question of why, after building one of the world's great civilizations, Muslims are now better known for the attacks of September 11, the beheadings of innocent people, and more criminal acts 'than anyone can count.'

By Ali Al-Baghli, Former Minister of Oil
March 23, 2005
Original Article (English)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Due to the ghastly defeats they have sustained and conflicts among themselves, these days the reputation of the world's Muslims have reached a new low. This reputation is linked to bloody terrorism, accomplished by the bombing of U.S. landmarks on September 11, 2001, which killed thousands of innocent people. The world saw people jumping to their deaths from the upper floors of the Twin Towers to escape being burned alive. We have also seen before television cameras in Afghanistan and Iraq, Muslims show pride in beheading people - ghastly scenes watched by millions of viewers around the world. The criminal acts that link all of us [Muslims] to terrorism are more than anyone can count.

They stretch from Buenos Aires in Argentina to the Bali islands in Indonesia, passing through London, Madrid, Casablanca, Sharm el-Sheik, Al-Khobar and Kuwait. Ultimately, we blame ourselves for these terrorist acts, but tell the world that these crimes were not committed by real Muslims. But at the same time, some admire and take pride in the people who committed these ghastly crimes.

In my earlier articles, I have written about Arabs and Muslims who have disgraced us, but today I write about how other Muslim men altered the face of the civilized world [for the better]. Today, as we look through the kaleidoscope of history, we see how hundreds of years ago, some Muslims changed the face of the world with great inventions. Western civilizations have even improved upon these to make life easier for everyone.

The fair-minded author Paul Vallely, has written an article about 20 discoveries that revolutionized the world [RealVideo]. In his article, he says Muslims changed the face of the world with their "discovery" of coffee and the technology of boiling water (which no one can do without in his daily life), the use of lenses to address defects of the eye, the rules of chess, the invention of soap and techniques for flying, water pumps, quilting techniques, bridge building and the art of construction, which was adopted by ancient Europeans, advanced surgical tools, windmills, inoculations to cure disease, dry ball pens, the numerical system, the principle of eating three meals a day, the manufacture of dyed rugs, the roundness of the earth and the use of gunpowder.

All of these are Islamic and Arabic inventions, but the Europeans improved upon them to reach the current level of superior quality, while the Muslims and Arabs are stuck in the same place. Those who speak in high-pitch voices have only developed ways and tools for killing and terrorism. This is the difference between our civilized past and the uncivilized present.

03-27-2006, 09:44 AM

QUOTE he says Muslims changed the face of the world with their "discovery" of coffee and the technology of boiling water (which no one can do without in his daily life), the use of lenses to address defects of the eye, the rules of chess, the invention of soap and techniques for flying, water pumps, quilting techniques, bridge building and the art of construction, which was adopted by ancient Europeans, advanced surgical tools, windmills, inoculations to cure disease, dry ball pens, the numerical system, the principle of eating three meals a day, the manufacture of dyed rugs, the roundness of the earth and the use of gunpowder.

The first ball pen or ball point pen was invented in 1938 by Ladislo Biro from Hungary.

Gun Powder was invented by Chinese

Many countries claim to have invented the chess game in some incipient form. The most commonly held view is that chess originated in Sindh. As a matter of fact, the Arabic, Persian, Greek and Spanish words for chess, are all derived from the Sanskrit Chaturanga. The present version of chess played throughout the world is ultimately based on a version of Chaturanga that was played in India around the 6th century CE. It is also believed that the Persians created a more modern version of the game after the Indians. One ancient Persian text refers to Shah Ardashir, who ruled from 224â241 CE, as a master of the game.

Rest I am checking

03-28-2006, 06:05 AM

QUOTE(Mudy @ Mar 27 2006, 09:44 AM)The first ball pen or ball point pen was invented in 1938 by Ladislo Biro from Hungary.

Gun Powder was invented by Chinese

Many countries claim to have invented the chess game in some incipient form. The most commonly held view is that chess originated in Sindh. As a matter of fact, the Arabic, Persian, Greek and Spanish words for chess, are all derived from the Sanskrit Chaturanga. The present version of chess played throughout the world is ultimately based on a version of Chaturanga that was played in India around the 6th century CE. It is also believed that the Persians created a more modern version of the game after the Indians. One ancient Persian text refers to Shah Ardashir, who ruled from 224â241 CE, as a master of the game.

Rest I am checking
[right][snapback]49122[/snapback][/right]


1st filter: How many were invented before 7th century AD? Pre-Islamic Arab inventions don't count <!--emo& Big Grin

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' />.

Known and widely accepted history teaches that the circumference of the Earth was calculated by the Greek Eratosthenes, around the year 240 B.C. Number system came from India (400 BCE) and Arabic numerals are only known to as "Arabic" just because they came to the Europe through Middle East. Romans too are known for building aquaducts (sp?) etc...

Is this Christian Internet? Wot? Not an Islamic one? <!--emo& Tongue

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tongue.gif' />

03-29-2006, 10:04 PM

Under the Scimitar of Damocles

**acharya** · 04-02-2006, 08:41 AM

Sunday, April 02, 2006
Islamic radicalism springs from globalisation of Islam

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: A noted French expert on Islam has said that Europe today is confronted with the âpure products of the westernisation of Islamâ, represented by young Muslims who have no specific territorial or cultural roots.

Olivier Roy told a meeting in a lecture this week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that the ânewâ Muslims come from various fringes and peripheries, both geographical and social. Converts, he added, are to be found in every Al Qaeda cell discovered in the West, including the United States. Quoting from one of his books, he said: âIslamic radicalism is largely the result of the globalisation of Islam, and not just a by product of the crisis in the Middle East.â There are many points common between the 9/11 pilots and the London bombers, he said. They all had a secular background with Western habits until the day of their return or conversion to Islam. These people were âde-territorialisedâ, which means they are not liked to a single country, including the country of their origin.

Roy stressed that the crisis in the Middle East is not a sufficient motivation for becoming radical, as these conflicts are mainly driven by nationalism, not religion. However, Middle East conflicts have a tremendous impact on Muslim public opinion worldwide. In justifying its terrorist attacks in Iraq, Al Qaeda is looking for popularity or at least legitimacy among Muslims.

However, this is largely propaganda as Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are hardly the main motivating factors behind global jihad. He said that it has been argued that Osama Bin Laden was radicalised by the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia, but the fact is that by that time he was already a veteran fighter committed to global jihad. He said that from the beginning, Al Qaeda fighters have been global jihadists. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim Ummah. He asked that if conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of radicalisation, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? It is also interesting, he added, that none of the Islamic terrorists killed or captured so far in the West had been active in any legitimate anti-war movements or even in organised political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. These groups, he stressed, âact local and think globalâ.

âThe Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community. They are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations,â Roy said. He pointed out that their vision of âglobal Ummahâ is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalisation that had made them what they are. Al Qaeda and its consorts offer a narrative of revolt and violence, which appeals to an unmoored youth and gives a religious and political dimension to a youth revolt that could have been expressed in other forms of violence. It is not by chance that jails in the West seem to be as much a recruiting ground as mosques, he said.

Roy said that political radicalisation is only part of the picture. New trends in Islam are overshadowed by violence linked to radical Islam. These changes show that Islam is adapting to the modern world, he said. The same patterns are at work in the radicalisation of the youth and in the emergence of a secularised and even liberal form of Islam, namely the individualisation and âde-culturationâ of religion. He said that the present Islamic fundamentalism is the âbest factor of deculturationâ and hence of secularisation, not because people will become less and less religious, but because the religious space is that of a faith community that feels more and more estranged from the public space. Endeavours to âre-Islamiseâ the society mean that religious zealots consider that they are living in a secular environment. Roy said that the faith community is more and more becoming a âvirtual oneâ, where believers meet in local congregations or in the global space. âVirtual Ummah means a global, non-territorial and abstract community of believers, not linked to any real society. For many unmoored and disenfranchised Muslims, the Internet provides a way to materialise this virtual Ummah,â he said.

Roy said that in Europe, the British policy of multi-culturism and the French policy of assimilation had both failed. Muslims in the West do not push for an ethno-cultural identity, but want to be recognised as a mere faith community. Religion is de-linked with culture. He argued that the West must make âroomâ for Islam as a Western religion among others, not as an expression of an ethno-cultural community. âThis is the real process of secularisation, which has nothing to do with theological reformation, but could entail a theological debate. He said: âPolitical authorities should not look for traditional moderate religious thinkers from the Middle East to appease Western Muslims; nor should they spend subsidies to promote âcivilâ or âliberalâ Islam. They should simply make room for Islam without changing laws, not principles. Genuine pluralism is the best way to avoid confrontation with a Muslim population, itself very diverse, but that could feel coerced into a ghettoised community â¦ State policy should be based on integration and even ânotabilisationâ of Muslims and community leaders on a pluralistic basis. The priority should be to weaken the links with foreign elements by pushing for the ânativisationâ of Islam and for preventing the deepening of the ghetto syndrome, Transparency and democracy should be the aim.â

04-04-2006, 10:56 AM

QUOTEConversion not a personal matter 
Sandhya Jain
Defying conventional wisdom, I find myself in sympathy with the rage of Afghanistan's orthodox clergy at the Karzai regime's succumbing to Western pressure and literally smuggling a Christian convert out of the country, when he was supposed to be under investigation for apostasy. Coming as this does soon after the Dutch cartoons lampooning Prophet Mohammad, the incident must have enhanced the psychological unease in the Islamic world about the motivations of the Christian West.

The matter has serious implications for Islam and other non-Christian civilisations, and deserves dispassionate analysis. The accused, Abdul Rahman, converted to Christianity 16 years ago while employed by an international Christian agency helping Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. This means that as in tsunami-hit Indonesia, Christian missionaries disguised as aid workers are active even in 'friendly' Islamic countries.

Rahman worked for four years in Pakistan, before moving to Germany, where he lived for nine years. On returning to Afghanistan in 2002, he tried to secure custody of his two teenage daughters from his own parents, who refused on account of his changed religion and called the police, resulting in the recent prosecution. Significantly, just before the Taliban regime fell in 2001, it had imprisoned eight Western aid workers for trying to convert Afghans. The concerned NGOs vehemently denied the accusations, but after the workers were rescued by US troops, many admitted the proselytisation charge.

Rahman's prosecution under the post-Taliban constitution brought the wrath of the supposedly secular Christian world upon the government of President Hamid Karzai, proving my contention that secularism is a twin-god of Christianity, a mask to promote the Christian agenda while denying similar freedom to other faiths. So, led by the Vatican and the United States, howls of protest arose from France, Italy, Germany, Britain, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Austria, even NATO (a Western military bloc) and the West-dominated United Nations. Surely the separation of religion and State calls for restraint in promoting the cause of conversion, especially as this entails a nasty determination to eliminate other faiths and impose dominion on other peoples.

But such niceties from never inhibited the West from actively funding conversions with a clear political agenda. Conversion, as East Timor proves, superimposes the economic and political goals of the proselytising nation upon the interests and aspirations of the converted. East Timor's secession from Indonesia gave Australia a free run of the formers' oil reserves; the Afghan narcotics trade currently stands at $2.8 billion.

To return to Rahman, the Karzai regime crumbled quickly. At first the prosecution was halted on the ground that the accused was mentally unstable; he was released for medical scrutiny, and hastily smuggled to Italy, where he received political asylum. The Afghan ulema's impotent rage is symptomatic of modern Islam's sterility in facing the West's imperialistic designs on its terrain. Islam would do well to put its house in order and denounce the jihadi mercenaries serving the geo-strategic goals of the West.

The Indian view on conversions is akin to that of Islam (minus the death penalty for apostasy). As per the lived experience of human societies all over the world, dharma or religion has never been a matter of individual choice. Dharma is primarily and intrinsically integral to family, clan, social and cultural inheritance. All human beings are born into a spiritual tradition and initiated into its customs, philosophy, tenets and taboos from an early age, just as they are given appropriate education or skills by their natal families.

Normally, a person does not choose his dharma in the manner in which he chooses a political party or association on reaching adulthood. Like family name or clan (jati, gotra) identity, the spiritual and cultural heritage is a natal legacy. It can be renounced, like material wealth; but the norm is to pass it on to future generations as a birthright. Every individual, family and social group has the right and duty to revere and protect this legacy and demand it be respected by other human beings and groups. This is a foundational right of society, and the Supreme Court's decision upholding conversion by one spouse to another faith as a legitimate ground for divorce, affirms it. This is logical, because far from being a personal matter, dharma permeates all aspects of life intimately.

Western propaganda that religion is a matter of individual choice is actually a legal subterfuge to checkmate opposition as Christianity undermines rival faiths and "harvests souls" in order to takeover targetted communities and nations. That is why the issue of freedom of religion is couched mainly in pro-missionary terms, as a one-sided right to force the Bible down the throats of pre-selected human targets. To my mind, proselytisation is a grotesque form of psychological and spiritual (often even physical) violence and an abuse of human rights because it denies the targetted community or individual the agency to uphold as meritorious and intrinsically valuable an extant civilisational ethos, with its accompanying gods, morals, ethics, culture and traditions that have been practiced for centuries.

In a world order that claims to be post-colonial, there can be no justification for such invasive appropriation of the ethical agency of other peoples. Evangelism violates the basic premise of equality of all religions, and the United Nations would do well to consider the critical question whether all religions have a right to exist, particularly in the core homelands in which they were born, and in lands where they are currently the principal creed.

Linked to this is the question whether a particular monotheistic faith, one that alone is represented at the United Nations as a State power, enjoys special immunity to insult and annihilate other faiths in their own space. Far from siding with the Christian West, should not the United Nations take action to protect other faiths and cultures from the terrible depredations of this imperialistic political culture?

Evangelical traditions cannot be allowed the license to deny respect and honour to the god(s) and spiritual eminences of a community being targetted for conversion. Indeed, this cussed approach to proselytisation must be viewed as a form of totalitarianism, of mental and psychological subversion of the individual and community. The utterly vulgar call for "harvesting souls" should be designated as a form of immoral human trafficking because the moral autonomy of the community and individual is denied; both are degraded, and hence a crime committed against humanity. Muslim scholars and activists opposed to organised religious conversion, as distinct from an individual personally seeking out another faith, may find the Global Congress on "World Religions after September 11" (Montreal, September 11-15, 2006) an appropriate forum to debate these issues.

A post-colonial world order cannot justify such invasive appropriation of the ethical agency of others, unless we are now witnessing a new imperial order. Non-Christian nations would do well to join hands and petition the United Nations General Assembly for sanctions against organised evangelism in vulnerable communities.

Several member-States have experienced the misuse of charity and aid for promoting conversions, and now even developed societies like Japan are realising the damage done to the native ethos and national culture by mindless imitation of Western mores and adoption of Christian ritual and symbols in their wedding ceremonies. Maybe it is time to demand reparations for the social, psychological and cultural harm done by evangelical imperialists.

Bharatvarsh · 04-04-2006, 09:45 PM

QUOTERahman's prosecution under the post-Taliban constitution brought the wrath of the supposedly secular Christian world upon the government of President Hamid Karzai, proving my contention that secularism is a twin-god of Christianity, a mask to promote the Christian agenda while denying similar freedom to other faiths. So, led by the Vatican and the United States, howls of protest arose from France, Italy, Germany, Britain, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Austria, even NATO (a Western military bloc) and the West-dominated United Nations. Surely the separation of religion and State calls for restraint in promoting the cause of conversion, especially as this entails a nasty determination to eliminate other faiths and impose dominion on other peoples. 
I don't get what Sandhya Jain is trying to say, the Western countries are not prmoting conversion (in this case) but interefering to protect someone's fundamental rights (according to their philosphy and UN's human rights declaration), the reality is that evangelisation is now supposed to be a fundamental right and there is no point in whining about it, Hindus should do the same thing (target Muslims and Christians for conversions) instead of hoping for eternity that Muslims and Christians will stop conversions.

**acharya** · 04-05-2006, 07:37 AM

OPINIONJOURNAL FEDERATION

Islam's Imperial Dreams
Muslim political ambitions aren't a reaction to Western encroachments.

BY EFRAIM KARSH
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

When satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked a worldwide wave of Muslim violence early this year, observers naturally focused on the wanton destruction of Western embassies, businesses, and other institutions. Less attention was paid to the words that often accompanied the riots--words with ominous historical echoes. "Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will regret it," declared Khaled Mash'al, the leader of Hamas, fresh from the Islamist group's sweeping victory in the Palestinian elections:

This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. . . . By Allah, you will be defeated. . . . Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but a fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good.

Among Islamic radicals, such gloating about the prowess and imminent triumph of their "nation" is as commonplace as recitals of the long and bitter catalog of grievances related to the loss of historical Muslim dominion. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly alluded to the collapse of Ottoman power at the end of World War I and, with it, the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate. "What America is tasting now," he declared in the immediate wake of 9/11, "is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated." Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top deputy, has pointed still farther into the past, lamenting "the tragedy of al-Andalus"--that is, the end of Islamic rule in Spain in 1492.

These historical claims are in turn frequently dismissed by Westerners as delusional, a species of mere self-aggrandizement or propaganda. But the Islamists are perfectly serious, and know what they are doing. Their rhetoric has a millennial warrant, both in doctrine and in fact, and taps into a deep undercurrent that has characterized the political culture of Islam from the beginning. Though tempered and qualified in different places and at different times, the Islamic longing for unfettered suzerainty has never disappeared, and has resurfaced in our own day with a vengeance. It goes by the name of empire.

"I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah.' " With these farewell words, the prophet Muhammad summed up the international vision of the faith he brought to the world. As a universal religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal, it is incumbent on all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising "struggle in the path of Allah," or jihad. As the 14th-century historian and philosopher Abdel Rahman ibn Khaldun wrote, "In the Muslim community, the jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Islamic mission and the obligation [to convert] everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force."

As a historical matter, the birth of Islam was inextricably linked with empire. Unlike Christianity and the Christian kingdoms that once existed under or alongside it, Islam has never distinguished between temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad. Having fled from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622 c.e. to become a political and military leader rather than a private preacher, Muhammad spent the last ten years of his life fighting to unify Arabia under his rule. Indeed, he devised the concept of jihad shortly after his migration to Medina as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan caravans. Had it not been for his sudden death, he probably would have expanded his reign well beyond the peninsula.

The Qur'anic revelations during Muhammad's Medina years abound with verses extolling the virtues of jihad, as do the countless sayings and traditions (hadith) attributed to the prophet. Those who participate in this holy pursuit are to be generously rewarded, both in this life and in the afterworld, where they will reside in shaded and ever-green gardens, indulged by pure women. Accordingly, those killed while waging jihad should not be mourned: "Allah has bought from the believers their soul and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the path of Allah; they kill and are killed. . . . So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him; that is the mighty triumph."

But the doctrine's appeal was not just otherworldly. By forbidding fighting and raiding within the community of believers (the umma), Muhammad had deprived the Arabian tribes of a traditional source of livelihood. For a time, the prophet could rely on booty from non-Muslims as a substitute for the lost war spoils, which is why he never went out of his way to convert all of the tribes seeking a place in his Pax Islamica. Yet given his belief in the supremacy of Islam and his relentless commitment to its widest possible dissemination, he could hardly deny conversion to those wishing to undertake it. Once the whole of Arabia had become Muslim, a new source of wealth and an alternative outlet would have to be found for the aggressive energies of the Arabian tribes, and it was, in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant.

Within twelve years of Muhammad's death, a Middle Eastern empire, stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had come into being under the banner of Islam. By the early 8th century, the Muslims had hugely extended their grip to Central Asia and much of the Indian subcontinent, had laid siege to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, and had overrun North Africa and Spain. Had they not been contained in 732 at the famous battle of Poitiers in west central France, they might well have swept deep into northern Europe.

Though sectarianism and civil war divided the Muslim world in the generations after Muhammad, the basic dynamic of Islam remained expansionist. The short-lived Umayyad dynasty (661-750) gave way to the ostensibly more pious Abbasid caliphs, whose readiness to accept non-Arabs solidified Islam's hold on its far-flung possessions. From their imperial capital of Baghdad, the Abbasids ruled, with waning authority, until the Mongol invasion of 1258. The most powerful of their successors would emerge in Anatolia, among the Ottoman Turks who invaded Europe in the mid-14th century and would conquer Constantinople in 1453, destroying the Byzantine empire and laying claim to virtually all of the Balkan peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean.

Like their Arab predecessors, the Ottomans were energetic empire-builders in the name of jihad. By the early 16th century, they had conquered Syria and Egypt from the Mamluks, the formidable slave soldiers who had contained the Mongols and destroyed the Crusader kingdoms. Under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, they soon turned northward. By the middle of the 17th century they seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe, only to be turned back in fierce fighting at the gates of Vienna in 1683--on September 11, of all dates. Though already on the defensive by the early 18th century, the Ottoman empire--the proverbial "sick man of Europe"--would endure another 200 years. Its demise at the hands of the victorious European powers of World War I, to say nothing of the work of Mustafa Kemal AtatÃ¼rk, the father of modern Turkish nationalism, finally brought an end both to the Ottoman caliphate itself and to Islam's centuries-long imperial reach.

To Islamic historians, the chronicles of Muslim empire represent a model of shining religious zeal and selfless exertion in the cause of Allah. Many Western historians, for their part, have been inclined to marvel at the perceived sophistication and tolerance of Islamic rule, praising the caliphs' cultivation of the arts and sciences and their apparent willingness to accommodate ethnic and religious minorities. There is some truth in both views, but neither captures the deeper and often more callous impulses at work in the expanding umma set in motion by Muhammad. For successive generations of Islamic rulers, imperial dominion was dictated not by universalistic religious principles but by their prophet's vision of conquest and his summons to fight and subjugate unbelievers.

That the worldly aims of Islam might conflict with its moral and spiritual demands was evident from the start of the caliphate. Though the Umayyad monarchs portrayed their constant wars of expansion as "jihad in the path of Allah," this was largely a faÃ§ade, concealing an increasingly secular and absolutist rule. Lax in their attitude toward Islamic practices and mores, they were said to have set aside special days for drinking alcohol--specifically forbidden by the prophet--and showed little inhibition about appearing nude before their boon companions and female singers.

The coup staged by the Abbasids in 747-49 was intended to restore Islam's true ways and undo the godless practices of their predecessors; but they too, like the Umayyads, were first and foremost imperial monarchs. For the Abbasids, Islam was a means to consolidating their jurisdiction and enjoying the fruits of conquest. They complied with the stipulations of the nascent religious law (shari'a) only to the extent that it served their needs, and indulged in the same vices--wine, singing girls, and sexual license--that had ruined the reputation of the Umayyads.

Of particular importance to the Abbasids was material splendor. On the occasion of his nephew's coronation as the first Abbasid caliph, Dawud ibn Ali had proclaimed, "We did not rebel in order to grow rich in silver and in gold." Yet it was precisely the ever-increasing pomp of the royal court that would underpin Abbasid prestige. The gem-studded dishes of the caliph's table, the gilded curtains of the palace, the golden tree and ruby-eyed golden elephant that adorned the royal courtyard were a few of the opulent possessions that bore witness to this extravagance.

The riches of the empire, moreover, were concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. While the caliph might bestow thousands of dirhams on a favorite poet for reciting a few lines, ordinary laborers in Baghdad carried home a dirham or two a month. As for the empire's more distant subjects, the caliphs showed little interest in their conversion to the faith, preferring instead to colonize their lands and expropriate their wealth and labor. Not until the third Islamic century did the bulk of these populations embrace the religion of their imperial masters, and this was a process emanating from below--an effort by non-Arabs to escape paying tribute and to remove social barriers to their advancement. To make matters worse, the metropolis plundered the resources of the provinces, a practice inaugurated at the time of Muhammad and reaching its apogee under the Abbasids. Combined with the government's weakening control of the periphery, this shameless exploitation triggered numerous rebellions throughout the empire.

Tension between the center and the periphery was, indeed, to become the hallmark of Islam's imperial experience. Even in its early days, under the Umayyads, the empire was hopelessly overextended, largely because of inadequate means of communication and control. Under the Abbasids, a growing number of provinces fell under the sway of local dynasties. With no effective metropolis, the empire was reduced to an agglomeration of entities united only by the overarching factors of language and religion. Though the Ottomans temporarily reversed the trend, their own imperial ambitions were likewise eventually thwarted by internal fragmentation.

In the long history of Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the centrifugal forces of localism would be bridged time and again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political culture. No sooner had Muhammad died than his successor, Abu Bakr, had to suppress a widespread revolt among the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years later, the head of the umma, the caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was murdered by disgruntled rebels; his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for most of his reign with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor of Syria, Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went on to establish the Umayyad dynasty after Ali's assassination. Mu'awiya's successors managed to hang on to power mainly by relying on physical force, and were consumed for most of their reign with preventing or quelling revolts in the diverse corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids during the long centuries of their sovereignty.

Western academics often hold up the Ottoman empire as an exception to this earlier pattern. In fact the caliphate did deal relatively gently with its vast non-Muslim subject populations--provided that they acquiesced in their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate status, however, let alone attempt to break free from the Ottoman yoke, they were viciously put down. In the century or so between Napoleon's conquests in the Middle East and World War I, the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820's, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan explosion of the 1870's, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897--all were painful reminders of the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule.

Nor was such violence confined to Ottoman Europe. Turkey's Afro-Asiatic provinces, though far less infected with the nationalist virus, were also scenes of mayhem and destruction. The Ottoman army or its surrogates brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in Mesopotamia and the Levant in the early 19th century, against civil strife in Lebanon in the 1840's (culminating in the 1860 massacres in Mount Lebanon and Damascus), and against a string of Kurdish rebellions. In response to the national awakening of the Armenians in the 1890's, Constantinople killed tens of thousands--a taste of the horrors that lay ahead for the Armenians during World War I.

The legacy of this imperial experience is not difficult to discern in today's Islamic world. Physical force has remained the main if not the sole instrument of political discourse in the Middle East. Throughout the region, absolute leaders still supersede political institutions, and citizenship is largely synonymous with submission; power is often concentrated in the hands of small, oppressive minorities; religious, ethnic, and tribal conflicts abound; and the overriding preoccupation of sovereigns is with their own survival.

At the domestic level, these circumstances have resulted in the world's most illiberal polities. Political dissent is dealt with by repression, and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife and murder. One need only mention, among many instances, Syria's massacre of 20,000 of its Muslim activists in the early 1980's, or the brutal treatment of Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur by the government of Sudan and its allied militias. As for foreign policy in the Middle East, it too has been pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism and subversion to outright aggression, with examples too numerous and familiar to cite.

Reinforcing these habits is the fact that, to this day, Islam has retained its imperial ambitions. The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and world domination has remained very much alive. Even the ostensibly secular doctrine of pan-Arabism has been effectively Islamic in its ethos, worldview, and imperialist vision. In the words of Nuri Said, longtime prime minister of Iraq and a prominent early champion of this doctrine: "Although Arabs are naturally attached to their native land, their nationalism is not confined by boundaries. It is an aspiration to restore the great tolerant civilization of the early caliphate."

That this "great tolerant civilization" reached well beyond today's Middle East is not lost on those who hope for its restoration. Like the leaders of al Qaeda, many Muslims and Arabs unabashedly pine for the reconquest of Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the country a grave historical injustice waiting to be undone. Indeed, as immigration and higher rates of childbirth have greatly increased the number of Muslims within Europe itself over the past several decades, countries that were never ruled by the caliphate have become targets of Muslim imperial ambition. Since the late 1980's, Islamists have looked upon the growing population of French Muslims as proof that France, too, has become a part of the House of Islam. In Britain, even the more moderate elements of the Muslim community are candid in setting out their aims. As the late Zaki Badawi, a doyen of interfaith dialogue in the UK, put it, "Islam is a universal religion. It aims to bring its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim community."

Whether in its militant or its more benign version, this world-conquering agenda continues to meet with condescension and denial on the part of many educated Westerners. To intellectuals, foreign-policy experts, and politicians alike, "empire" and "imperialism" are categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and, more recently, to the United States. In this view of things, Muslims, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, are merely objects--the long-suffering victims of the aggressive encroachments of others. Lacking an internal, autonomous dynamic of its own, their history is rather a function of their unhappy interaction with the West, whose obligation it is to make amends. This perspective dominated the widespread explanation of the 9/11 attacks as only a response to America's (allegedly) arrogant and self-serving foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As we have seen, however, Islamic history has been anything but reactive. From Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of an often astonishing imperial aggressiveness and, no less important, of never quiescent imperial dreams. Even as these dreams have repeatedly frustrated any possibility for the peaceful social and political development of the Arab-Muslim world, they have given rise to no less repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration and to murderous efforts to transform fantasy into fact. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of regaining, in Zawahiri's words, the "lost glory" of the caliphate.

Nor is the vision confined to a tiny extremist fringe. This we saw in the overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, in the admiring evocations of bin Laden's murderous acts during the crisis over the Danish cartoons, and in such recent findings as the poll indicating significant reservoirs of sympathy among Muslims in Britain for the "feelings and motives" of the suicide bombers who attacked London last July. In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. In this sense, the House of Islam's war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.

To the contrary, now that this war has itself met with a so far determined counterattack by the United States and others, and with a Western intervention in the heart of the House of Islam, it has escalated to a new stage of virulence. In many Middle Eastern countries, Islamist movements, and movements appealing to traditionalist Muslims, are now jockeying fiercely for positions of power, both against the Americans and against secular parties. For the Islamists, the stakes are very high indeed, for if the political elites of the Middle East and elsewhere were ever to reconcile themselves to the reality that there is no Arab or Islamic "nation," but only modern Muslim states with destinies and domestic responsibilities of their own, the imperialist dream would die.

It is in recognition of this state of affairs that Zawahiri wrote his now famous letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, in July 2005. If, Zawahiri instructed his lieutenant, al Qaeda's strategy for Iraq and elsewhere were to succeed, it would have to take into account the growing thirst among many Arabs for democracy and a normal life, and strive not to alienate popular opinion through such polarizing deeds as suicide attacks on fellow Muslims. Only by harnessing popular support, Zawahiri concluded, would it be possible to come to power by means of democracy itself, thereby to establish jihadist rule in Iraq, and then to move onward to conquer still larger and more distant realms and impose the writ of Islam far and wide.

Something of the same logic clearly underlies the carefully plotted rise of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the (temporarily thwarted) attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to exploit the demand for free elections there, and the accession of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. Indeed, as reported by Mark MacKinnon in the Toronto Globe & Mail, some analysts now see a new "axis of Islam" arising in the Middle East, uniting Hizballah, Hamas, Iran, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of Iraq's Shiites, and others in an anti-American, anti-Israel alliance backed by Russia.

Whether or not any such structure exists or can be forged, the fact is that the fuel of Islamic imperialism remains as volatile as ever, and is very far from having burned itself out. To deny its force is the height of folly, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is to play into its hands. Only when it is defeated, and when the faith of Islam is no longer a tool of Islamic political ambition, will the inhabitants of Muslim lands, and the rest of the world, be able to look forward to a future less burdened by Saladins and their gory dreams.

Mr. Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University of London, and his new book, "Islamic Imperialism: A History," on which this article is based, is about to be published by Yale. This article originally appeared in the April issue of Commentary.

04-05-2006, 10:50 PM

QUOTEApostates from Islam -The case of the Afghan convert is not unique.
by Paul Marshall
(Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, is the editor, most recently, of Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law.) 

THE NEWS THAT, DESPITE the Afghan parliament's last-minute attempts to prevent him from leaving, Abdul Rahman has been given asylum in Italy has drawn a global sigh of relief. But now is not the time to forget the issue. The case of Rahman--an Afghan Christian tried for the capital crime of apostasy--is not the only one, even in Afghanistan, and is unusual only in that, for once, the world paid attention and demanded his release. But there are untold numbers in similar situations that the world is ignoring.

Two other Afghan converts to Christianity were arrested in March, though, for security reasons, locals have asked that their names and locations be withheld. In February, yet other converts had their homes raided by police.

Some other Muslim countries have laws similar to Afghanistan's. Apart from its other depredations, in the last ten years Saudi Arabia has executed people for the crimes of apostasy, heresy, and blasphemy. The death penalty for apostates is also in the legal code in Iran, Sudan, Mauritania, and the Comoros Islands.

In the 1990s, the Islamic Republic of Iran used death squads against converts, including major Protestant leaders, and the situation is worsening under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The regime is currently engaged in a systematic campaign to track down and reconvert or kill those who have changed their religion from Islam.

Iran also regards Baha'is as heretics from Islam and denies them any legal rights, including the right to life: There is no penalty for killing a Baha'i. On March 20, Asma Jahangir, the United Nations special rapporteur on religious freedom, made public a confidential letter sent on October 29, 2005, by the chairman of the Command Headquarters of the Iranian Armed Forces. The letter stated that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had instructed the Command Headquarters to identify Baha'is and monitor their activities, and asked the Ministry of Information, the Revolutionary Guard, and the Police Force to collect any and all information about them.

Other countries, like Egypt, that have no laws against apostasy, instead use laws against "insulting Islam" or "creating sectarian strife." In 2003, Egyptian security forces arrested 22 converts and people who had helped them. Some were tortured, and one, Isam Abdul Fathr, died in custody. Last year, Gaseer Mohamed Mahmoud was whipped and had his toenails pulled out by police, and was told he would be imprisoned until he gave up Christianity.

While there has been no systematic study of the matter, and many punishments are not publicized, it appears that actual state-ordered executions are rarer than killings by vigilantes, mobs, and family members, sometimes with state acquiescence. In the last two years in Afghanistan, Islamist militants have murdered at least five Christians who had converted from Islam.

Vigilantes have killed, beaten, and threatened converts in Pakistan, the Palestinian areas, Turkey, Nigeria, Indonesia, Somalia, and Kenya. In November, Iranian convert Ghorban Dordi Tourani was stabbed to death by a group of fanatical Muslims. In December, Nigerian pastor Zacheous Habu Bu Ngwenche was attacked for allegedly hiding a convert. In January, in Turkey, Kamil Kiroglu was beaten unconscious and threatened with death if he refused to deny his Christian faith and return to Islam.

Meanwhile, on March 21, the Algerian parliament approved a new law requiring imprisonment for two to five years and a fine between five and ten thousand euros for anyone "trying to call on a Muslim to embrace another religion." The same penalty applies to anyone who "stores or circulates publications or audio-visual or other means aiming at destabilizing attachment to Islam."

Converts and Baha'is are not the only ones subject to such violence. Ahmadis, whom many Muslims regard as heretics, suffer a similar fate throughout the Muslim world. The victims also include many Muslims who question restrictive interpretations of Islam. In traditionally moderate Indonesia, Yusman Roy is now serving two years in prison for leading prayers in Indonesian and Arabic instead of only in Arabic.

Abdul Rahman's plight is merely the tip of the iceberg. Like the violence over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, or the Ayatollah Khomeini's demand that Salman Rushdie be killed for blasphemy, it reveals a systematic, worldwide attempt by Islamists to imprison, kill, or otherwise silence anyone who challenges their ideology.

We need to go beyond the individual case of Abdul Rahman and push for genuine religious freedom throughout the Muslim world. Especially we need to push for the elimination of laws against apostasy, blasphemy, heresy, and "insulting Islam." They seek to place dominant, reactionary interpretations of Islam beyond all criticism. Thus--since politics and religion are intertwined--they seek to make political freedom impossible.

**acharya** · (This post was last modified: 04-06-2006, 05:20 AM by acharya.)

Fukuyama's take on Islam and Islamists

Hasan Suroor

His prescription: the solution lies not in "fixing" the Muslim world by imposing democracy but in reaching out to alienated Muslims in the West.

CITING A diehard neo-con American academic approvingly in the current debate on Islam might seem like quoting the devil on the scriptures, but that is precisely why what Francis Fukuyama says about the threat from radical Islamists in his new book, After the NeoCons: America at the Crossroads, is significant.

Professor Fukuyama may have fallen out with the Bush administration's version of neo-conservatism but he remains a self-confessed neo-con at heart and therefore his liberal-ish analysis of what is loosely referred to as the threat from "Islam" or Muslim "fundamentalists" is interesting. He questions some key assumptions, which, because they are so widely held and are routinely repeated, are in danger of becoming conventional wisdom.

Quarrelling over labels may sound like quibbling but, as Prof. Fukuyama points out, "terminology is important." The day after the demolition of Babri Masjid I remember arguing with a Delhi-based journalist of a Western news organisation that he was wrong in calling it an act of Hindu "nationalists." For him, it was convenient shorthand to explain a complicated situation to his western readers. Indeed as journalists most of us are guilty of using labels that are, sometimes, misleading even though they serve the immediate purpose of communicating a difficult idea.

The problem arises when it seeps into serious academic and political discourse and is, then, accepted as a fact. If textbooks in India were to start describing the lumpen display of majoritarianism in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, as an act of Hindu nationalists it would be as misleading as portraying 9/11 as an act of Muslim fundamentalists. The communal frenzy that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid was certainly whipped up in the name of Hindu nationalism for party-political reasons but I doubt if any self-respecting and true Hindu nationalist would justify it. Similarly, 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Madrid, Bali, and London may have been carried out in the name of Islam but to suggest that all fundamentalist or "radical" Muslims are a potential source of terror is not only misleading but has the effect of conflating the security threat which, in turn, prompts a disproportionate response as the U.S.-British military adventure in Iraq has shown.

To a degree, even if unwittingly, Muslims themselves have contributed to this perception. The initial Muslim reaction to "Islamist" terrorist acts was too slow and late in coming and by the time they got their act together the damage had already been done. Far more damaging, however, is the idea of a pan-Islamic brotherhood to which many Muslims continue to cling on. During a debate on an Indian television channel, recently, a prominent Muslim "leader" insisted that such "brotherhood" existed and that the world's one billion followers of Islam shared a common bond.

Prof. Fukuyama, on the other hand, rightly argues that there is no such thing as a monolithic global Muslim entity though, like other faith groups, Muslims too are moved by what happens to their co-religionists in other parts of the world. The Muslim community is diverse comprising people of different nationalities and distinct social, cultural, and political background; and their worldview is shaped by the milieu in which they live.

Prof. Fukuyama says that to lump them together and label them as a common source of "Islamist" threat is to miss this diversity. But, more critically, it distorts the "threat assessment" and has serious implications for the strategy to deal with it. Much of the Bush administration's post-9/11 strategy, he believes, has been based on a wrong reading of the threat because it presumed that there was a common "Islamic" or "Muslim" enemy out there.

There are "significant" distinctions between different Muslim groups â and between them and ordinary Muslims. And, the professor says, it is important to remember them in order to get a more realistic sense of the "political dimension of the threat posed by radical Islamists."

"Terminology is important," he writes pointing out that there are broadly three categories of Muslim tendencies: "Islamic fundamentalists, Islamists and radical Islamists." And then there are ordinary Muslims.

"Islamic fundamentalists act out of religious motives and seek to revive an imagined earlier and purer form of religious practice. Islamists, by contrast, tend to emphasize political goals and want to bring religion into politics in some fashion, though not necessarily in ways that are hostile to democracy. The Islamist Justice and Development Party in Turkey, for example, was democratically elected and has supported Turkish entry into the European Union. Radical Islamists, or jihadists, like Osama bin Laden emphasize the need for violence in pursuit of their political goals."

Of these three categories, it is only the jihadists who pose a threat and they represent a "distinct minority of Muslims." The view that the threat is "deeply and broadly rooted among the world's more than one billion Muslims" and that in effect America is facing a "World War IV" (after the two World Wars and the Cold War) is grossly exaggerated, Prof. Fukuyama says.

"We are not fighting the religion Islam or its adherents but a radical ideology that appeals to a distinct minority of Muslims," he says. Questioning the view that this ideology derives entirely from Islam, he points out that in fact it "owes a great deal to Western ideas" appealing to the same sort of people who, in an earlier generation, may have gravitated towards fascism.

Muslim religiosity, he says quoting French Islamic experts Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, has little to do with the present-day jihadism. "Islamism and its radical jihadist offshoots are the product of what Roy calls `deterritorialised' Islam in which individual Muslims find themselves cut off from authentic local traditions, often as uprooted minorities in non-Muslim lands. This explains why so many jihadists have not come from the Middle East but have rather been bred [like the September 11 conspirator Mohamed Atta] in Western Europe," he adds.

Prof. Fukuyama cites European scholars to de-emphasise the Islamic roots of the jihadi movement and, instead, underline their Western "origins" pointing out that concepts like revolution, civil society, state, and the "aestheticisation of violence" do not flow from Islam but can be traced to the 20th century radical Western ideological movements.

"It is thus a mistake to identify Islamism as an authentic and somehow inevitable expression of Muslim religiosity, though it certainly has the power to reinforce religious identity and spark religious hatred," he says. Proof: "The most dangerous people are not pious Muslims in the Middle East but alienated and uprooted young people in Hamburg, London, or Amsterdam who ... see ideology [in this case jihadism] as the answer to their personal search for identity."

The issues dealing with "Islamist" extremism form only a small part of Prof. Fukuyama's book, which is essentially a critique of Bush-style neo-conservatism. But what he says should prompt reflection not only among the critics of Islam but also among those Muslim "leaders" who insist on espousing the idea of a grand pan-Islamic narrative ignoring the social and cultural differences (the way they dress, the food they eat, the language they speak) that distinguish Muslims from Muslims.

Just because all Muslims worship the same god and kneel towards the same direction when offering namaaz does not mean that these differences disappear. If there was an all-in-one Muslim brotherhood how does one explain the global shia-sunni divide, which has a history of bloodshed and is currently playing itself out so viciously in Iraq; the genocide of Muslims in a Muslim Sudan; the division of Pakistan between Bengali-speaking and non-Bengali Muslims; and other intra-Muslim conflicts arising out of tribal, linguistic, and political differences?

Pointing out that the Muslim world is "a big, diverse place," Prof. Fukuyama warns: "Simplistic theories that attribute the terrorist problem to religion or culture are not just wrong; they are likely to make the situation worse because they obscure the important fissures that exist within the world of global Islam."

He debunks another piece of prevailing wisdom â namely that Western-style democracy is an answer to the problem of jihadi terrorism. For, as he reminds us, the men behind the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid were born and brought up in modern democratic societies and were not alienated by a lack of democracy. Rather, they were alienated by the very nature of modern and democratic cultures in which they lived. His prescription: the solution lies not in "fixing" the Muslim world by imposing democracy but in reaching out to alienated Muslims in the West â not an easy task for those who prefer quick fixes.

**acharya** · (This post was last modified: 04-06-2006, 04:42 AM by acharya.)

Muslim India struggles to escape the past

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/st...1746860,00.html

Prominent individuals belie the poverty of a minority left behind by the 1947 partition

Randeep Ramesh in Mumbai
Wednesday April 5, 2006
The Guardian

On the sprung floor of a Mumbai dance studio standing amid a huddle of male and female dancers is a young woman, dressed in tight sequinned clothes, sucking on a cigarette. She is shouting at her troupe.

It is difficult not to notice 19-year-old Mumait Khan. Tattoos ride on her shoulders and her lower back and her sinuous dance routines have made her one of the most sought-after "item girls" to roll out of Bollywood. "Item" is Mumbai film-speak for a raunchy musical number slipped into mainstream Hindi films.

Article continues
In the lottery of life Mumait Khan has hit a jackpot. An Indian Muslim, she embodies an apparent contradiction that is rapidly becoming part of a national debate.

While government statistics reveal India's Muslims achieving lower educational levels and higher unemployment rates than the Hindu majority, paradoxically there are an increasing number of high-profile sports and film stars, politicians and industrialists among India's 150 million adherents to Islam.

India's tennis star, Sania Mirza, the country's president, Abdul Kalam, and Azim Premji, its richest man, are all Muslims. Like many success stories of this modern Indian Muslim resurgence, Mumait attributes her rise to self-reliance and self-help.

Although she says she still prays and comes from a pious family, it was poverty that persuaded her parents to overcome their conservative instincts and let her pursue a film career. Only after her father lost his job and could not get steady work again was Mumait allowed to begin dancing. Her appearance fee today runs into hundreds of thousands of rupees and she has just bought a duplex for 5.5m rupees (Â£70,000).

Walking past the rubbish-strewn streets and open sewers of the chawl or housing colony she grew up in, the teenager says: "Look, this is where I came from. I had to get out."

There is however growing concern that such high-profile success stories mask the relative decline of the Indian Muslim community.

The issue has political repercussions - Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the ruling Congress party, has made it clear that the nation's Muslims are key to winning elections, calling them the party's natural allies. Mrs Gandhi's party has embarked on a campaign to "empower" Muslims with quotas in jobs and universities. Hindu nationalist politicians claim an obscurantist minority is being appeased and pampered.

India has more Muslims than any country except Indonesia, a large religious minority in a professedly secular nation of a billion people. Indian Muslims often feel under pressure not to antagonise the Hindu majority and this sets them apart from many of their brethren in the rest of the Islamic world.

The result is that protests on global issues concerning Muslims, whether the Danish cartoons controversy or George Bush's "war on terror", are relatively muted in India. But there are some notable exceptions - a Muslim politician in Uttar Pradesh recently called for the beheading of the cartoonist and offered a 510m-rupee reward.

What is also striking about India's version of Islam is that it remains largely unreformed and looks outdated by comparison with other Islamic countries. Fatwas are frequently issued - priests pronounce on the correct length of tennis players' skirts. In India Muslim men can divorce their wives by saying talaq ("I divorce thee") three times - a practice largely abandoned in Islam. Last week village elders in eastern India even ordered a man to leave his wife after he said talaq three times in his sleep.

The most striking example of this attempt to be "authentic" are the beards and filigreed topi caps of students among the verandas and courtyards of Darul Uloom (House of Knowledge), a madrasa located in Deoband, 90 miles north-east of Delhi. The seminary is a global centre of Muslim learning with 15,000 schools worldwide adopting its sparse and dogmatic version of Islam. Although Darul Uloom spreads a message of peace, the Taliban sprung from its teaching.

Rising unemployment among Muslims in India has seen a steady increase in students. "My father is a farmer, but there is no work. He thought the best job was to become an imam (priest). People always need spiritual learning," said Mohammed Arif, 20, who has studied in Deoband for seven years.

A committee set up by the country's prime minister tasked with looking at minority employment found that despite making up 14.7% of the population, Muslims only comprise a fraction of the workforce in many areas.

In February there was an angry debate in parliament over the Indian army's refusal to tell the committee how many Muslim soldiers the country had. In the end the army relented: out of 1.1m Indian soldiers only 29,000 are Muslims.

There are many who wonder why Muslims, who before the subcontinent was divided made up a third of the armed forces, have stayed away from India's regiments. There is a widely held suspicion that Muslims prefer Pakistan. But in the three wars India has fought with Pakistan there were no signs of Muslim disloyalty and the dispute over Kashmir has not stirred wider passions.

More worrying, Muslims are falling behind Hindu Dalits, or untouchables, seen as the lowest social class. "In terms of educational achievement, Indian Muslim men in cities are less literate than their Dalit peers," says Abusaleh Shariff, a member of the prime ministerial committee conducting a socio- economic survey of Indian Muslims.

Why Muslims fare so badly is a mix of history and politics. When the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947, most of the Muslim upper and middle class emigrated to Pakistan. Those left behind were leaderless and mostly poor and many felt guilty they had been responsible for the carving-up of the country.

Experts also point out a linguistic divide. For many north Indian Muslims their language, Urdu, written in a modified Arabic script, is conspicuous by its absence in India.

Like their Hindu counterparts, descent often determines employment for Indian Muslims. The result is that poor artisans expect their sons to take over often low-paying jobs. "It is why 50% of car mechanics are Muslims. The fathers just hand over the business to the son," says Mr Shariff.

Academics say that rather like African Americans, Indian Muslims have become victims of history and discrimination. Some suggest that mimicking US policy on African Americans might help.

But, says Zoya Hassan, professor of political science at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University: "Unlike African Americans Indian Muslims are not organised. They have not campaigned for their rights effectively. Of course racism is easier to identify than an anti-Muslim bias, but African Americans were lifted by a policy of positive discrimination which could help here."

In numbers

Muslims form 14.7% of India's 1.1 billion population but only

3% or less of the Indian army

7% of public administrators

5% of the railways staff

3.5% of the country's banking employees

Sunder · (This post was last modified: 04-06-2006, 04:48 AM by Sunder.)

QUOTE(acharya @ Apr 6 2006, 04:39 AM)In numbers

Muslims form 14.7% of India's 1.1 billion population but only

3% or less of the Indian army

7% of public administrators

5% of the railways staff

3.5% of the country's banking employees[/size]


[right][snapback]49451[/snapback][/right]

Of the bombings, kidnappings and other major crimes, what percentage have been contributed by muslims? Tiger Memmon, Dawood, Telgi, Abu Salem, and many more have been left off the list from the article above. Do we need to remind them of that ?

04-06-2006, 04:54 AM

Somebody asked them what happened to 15% hindus in Pakistan. Now only 1.5% Hindus are left in Pakistan and same is with Bangladesh.
How many Hindus are in Army or public services in Pakistan or Bangladesh?

Pakistan and Bangladesh was created for Muslims.

04-06-2006, 05:52 AM

This really is an idiotic argument. There were 20 kids in my class and yet only one of them always scored the 1st rank in the class. By this logic everybody should have shared the first rank on a rotating basis ? Or should every kid in the class be forced to hold ranks 1-20 throughout their school ?

04-06-2006, 10:26 AM

QUOTEhttp://www.danielpipes.org/article/3478

 CAIR Loses to Anti-CAIR
March 26, 2006
http://www.anti-cair-net.org/Dismissed
In a stunning setback, the Council on American-Islamic Relations' defamation suit against Andrew Whitehead of Anti-CAIR has been dismissed.

In a statement posted on the Anti-CAIR website, www.anti-cair-net.org, Whitehead announced that the parties reached a "mutually agreeable settlement" and that the case has been dismissed with prejudice. Although the terms of settlement are confidential, it bears noting that Whitehead issued no apology to CAIR, made no retractions or corrections, and did not alter the Anti-CAIR website, where the statements that triggered CAIR's suit remain posted, such as his calling CAIR a "terrorist front organization â¦ founded by Hamas supporters" that works to "make radical Islam the dominant religion in the United States." That clears the decks; no additional actions are pending between these two parties.


Why Is CAIR Suing Anti-CAIR?

04-07-2006, 01:56 AM

QUOTEBreaking records
FT
As reported in an Urdu daily newspaper, Maulvi Mohammad Afzal, 40, has succeeded in fathering 48 children off his four wives. The maulvi is a primary school teacher in Lahore and has been blessed with 24 pairs of twins, each wife having always given birth to two babies at a time.

The maulvi has now moved the Lahore High Court, through his learned council M D Tahir, advocate, to be allowed to take a further five wives so that he can father more pairs of twins with a view to entering the Guinness Book of Records. The maulvi has further petitioned the Government of Pakistan for a special and handsome stipend to support his burgeoning family. 

The petition is now before the honourable judges of the Lahore High Court and they are considering the plea of the portly maulvi who in the picture accompanying the news report appears to be the very essence of piety with his flowing facial hair, skull cap and pudgy, frowning countenance.


Now you know how they reproduce. He is just 40 and have 48 kids.

04-07-2006, 01:58 AM

QUOTEDonât apply Islamic law to non-Muslims!
FT
Quoted in the daily Pakistan Shehbaz Bhatti of All Pakistan Minorities Alliance said that Islamic law should not be applied to non-Muslims, especially non-Muslim women. He explained that these women were abducted, forcibly converted, forcibly married, raped and then divorced. The catch in this was that on conversion to Islam the non-Muslim womanâs earlier marriage is dissolved automatically under Islamic law

QUOTEBring two witnesses!
According to daily Pakistan a Quran teacher Qari Afzaal used to teach a 10-year old girl in a home in Baghbanpura, Lahore. He started having forcible sexual intercourse with the little girl. The girlâs widowed mother went to the police station but the thanedar insisted that she bring two witnesses because he was scared of the cleric. When the widow told Qari Afzaal not to rape her daughter he took out his dagger and raped her too. After this, local people stormed the police station and forced the thanedar to register an FIR

This is from Islamic nation and they say Islam protect woman and its a religion of peace. <img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' />

04-09-2006, 01:06 PM

Interesting website..

http://www.anti-cair-net.org/

and a related article..

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2811

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