Saturday, May 28, 2016

Articles on Muslim Extremism in India











































































Thursday, May 26, 2016

Nationalism vs. Jingoistic Nationalism in the Indian Context

I’m not those who outright completely reject the ideas of nationalism and national security, for I believe that centrally governing the planet to everyone’s satisfaction is impossible (except if ever faced by a threat from aliens!), when there are disputes even between provinces within countries, and to imagine the world as a completely, perfectly peaceful place with no problems is utopian, for humans are imperfect creatures, and what we perceive as good and evil actually exist with respect to each other as to light and darkness. Nationalist cohesion is necessary for progress and security, but it shouldn’t override humanism as Nazism did. Especially in the Indian context, when it comes to Pakistan, there are those who have made what I call “peace-mongering” a mindless industry that is different from genuine peace activism based on attempting at real conflict resolution, and it is more of an intellectually elitist exercise at distortions to create false equivalences, as I have discussed in some detail here.

However, in general, as a principle, long-term peace and stability, which will only be in our interest, and jingoism perpetuating conflict is not, and blindly believing in the version of events presented by the government of the country you happen to be born in is silly (though blindly rejecting it to be biased to the other side is equally silly and that’s another story), and peaceful resolution may involve understanding the other side and making even territorial compromises if the other side has its own valid standpoint too, as India did in the context of border disputes with Bhutan in the 1970s and 1980s, the recent Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh and even the Rann of Kutch Arbitration with Pakistan in 1968. 

One occasion when India did blunder on this front was the Nehru government’s handling of the Sino-Indian border dispute.  Nehru was not overly trusting of or generous to the Chinese as many imagine, but in fact, a little too aggressive and tried to unilaterally impose the Indian position on the Sino-Indian borders, on the Chinese (his infamous “Forward Policy” among those who know of it), ignoring the advice of military officers like Thimayya asking him to not provoke the Chinese, and rejecting the very fair and pragmatic Chinese offer of a swap of Indian and Chinese claims over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh respectively (do kindly study the history of the Sino-Indian border dispute carefully and with an open mind before calling me anti-national).

Herman Goering is believed to have said during the Nuremberg trials – “Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” Likewise, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks has stated in an interview in 2011 – “I’ve discovered that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it.”


Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Challenges Posed by Muslim Orthodoxy in the West in the Domain of Women's Sports

The interference of regressive theology in sports has also seeped its way into many developed secular countries as well. Omar Hallak, principal of the Al-Taqwa college in Australia recently disallowed female students from taking part in running for fear that excessive running might lead them to “losing their virginity”. Though he denied the allegations made against him, he could not explain why exactly some girls were not allowed to participate in a running event. The principal’s views and his conviction in them is a sign of worry for the future of the game for it indicates that despite the continuing struggle to emancipate women from falsified gender barriers, there are certain schools of thought which can be detrimental if not checked. Another case on similar grounds can be cited from may 2015, when the students of an Islamic high school refused to play against a Catholic school team because it included two girls and ‘mixing’ with the other gender is supposedly against the norms of their faith, forcing the other team to bench the two girls despite getting the clearing from the governing body for fielding them. The decision to bench the girls received flak from many liberal thinkers in Canada, who criticized the Catholic school team for ‘tolerating intolerance’ and for not standing up for the two girls, who were completely eligible to take part in that game.

Challenges Posed by Muslim Orthodoxy in Muslim-Majority Countries in the Domain of Women's Sports

Indeed, it’s not as though women’s teams of Muslim-majority countries don’t compete in regular tournaments or that they always follow the dress codes prescribed by the orthodox maulvis. The Pakistani women’s teams in different sports are a good case in point in this regard, since their attires are no different from those of the female sports teams of countries where Muslims are not in majority (though a petition had been made to the High Court of the Pakistani province of Sindh to the effect that women’s cricket and hockey matches were repugnant to Islam, but it was dismissed). Also, the 2012 Women’s Squash World Cup was won by Egypt, another Muslim-majority country, and Malaysia, yet another Muslim-majority country, secured the third place. Also in this list of accomplished Muslim women is ten-year-old Alzain Tareq from Bahrain, who in 2015 became the youngest ever competitor at the world swimming championship in Kazan, Russia. Nor is sport for women something new to Islamic history per se, as is clear from the references to Razia Sultan and Nur Jahan in the Indian context in this book, for example.

There are also Muslim women like Behnaz Shafiei, who has been defying all laws of state and religion by riding her motorcycle on the streets of Iran, a country that prohibits women riders altogether (though it allows women to drive cars, unlike Saudi Arabia). But she is not the only one fighting for the rights of women to ride two-wheelers, groups of females in Dubai and Egypt, called Women of Harley Dubai Chapter and Girls Go Wheels have also taken this fight to the streets by getting together and asserting their freedom for riding. Their attempts are aimed not only at their own liberation, but that of many future generations so that women are encouraged to follow their paths without any worries about societal constraints.

An interesting development that can be examined in the context of clothing is that of the Iranian women’s football team being disallowed by FIFA to play an Olympic qualifier against in 2011 because of the dress code not conforming to FIFA regulations. It is noteworthy that Jordan too is an Islamic state which happens to be located in the Middle East but their players’ dress code wasn’t found objectionable, reiterating that making sweeping generalizations about women’s sports in the very diverse Islamic world would also not be appropriate.

The Kazakh player Zarina Diyas is another example. In 2015, she held Sharapova for a long while before giving away eventually. But the most important aspect of this is the way in which her mother encouraged her to play tennis. She accompanies her to the grounds and cheers for her too. Kazakhstan is a Muslim-majority country and there has been no resistance to Zarina playing her game the way she wants to.

Having said that, we may turn our attention to Saudi Arabia, a country the regime of which is the most conservative and oppressive towards women, other than Taliban/ISIS-like militias. Here, the issue is not only one of clothing. It is a country where girls are banned from sports in state schools (though it’s not so in private schools) and powerful clerics castigate women for exercising and female gyms must adhere to strict regulations, parading as health centres than as venues of sports.

The stance of the official Supreme Council of Religious Scholars is represented by Sheikh Abdullah al-Maneea, who said in 2009 that the excessive “movement and jumping” needed in football and basketball might cause girls to tear their hymens and lose their virginity. Newspaper articles refer to such women as “shameless” when they play sports and are a cause of great embarrassment for the women and their families. Some women have even received text messages advising them to stay at home and tend to their household duties as mothers and wives. In 2010, Sheikh Abdulkareem al-Khudair, who also sits on the Supreme Council for Religious Scholars, renewed a religious edict banning sports for women, which he said “will lead to following in the footsteps of the devil”!

However, it would be unfair to not give the other side of the picture in the very same country. Billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a nephew of the late King Abdullah, who is known to be a supporter of women's rights, has included women in his Kingdom Equestrian Team, part of his company Kingdom Holding, which has allowed Saudi women to compete in international competitions since 2007. There are liberal Saudi men who consider the women participating in sports to be pioneers and encourage the women to play regardless of the obstacles.  Saudi women have formed teams, like the basketball team Jeddah United, and a group of Saudi women led by Princess Reema al-Saud also organized a hiking expedition to Everest base camp this summer as part of a charity fundraising exercise to promote a healthy lifestyle for breast cancer patients. While Human Rights Watch had slammed Saudi Arabia for not sending a single female athlete in the Olympics, the National Olympic Committee of Saudi Arabia has indicated to Human Rights Watch that it may send female sportspersons from hereafter, and in 2012, the International Olympic Committee made it compulsory for every participating country to send a women’s contingent, leading Saudi Arabia to send two girls in its contingent to compete in judo and the 800 m. run, fulfilling the indication it had made to Human Rights Watch.

If we look at other countries in the Arab region, there have been some very positive examples which give hope to future generations of women sportspersons. One of them is Kuwaiti Line umpire, Aseel Shaheen, who in July 2015 became the first From Palestine, a woman is making history in the sporting world. Noor Daoud, who was the first Palestinian woman in history to compete in an international motorsport event in 2013, taking part in drift racing, one of the most dangerous disciplines in motorsports. Daood is not alone in this gender defying movement in Palestine; she is in fact part of a group of Palestinian women racers, coming from different cities and socio-economic backgrounds, who have become role models for speed enthusiasts of West Bank under their collective identity of Speed Sisters, which is also the title of a feature length documentary made on them by Canadian filmmaker Amber Fares. With a lot of creativity and makeshift logistics, these women maintain their passion for racing amidst shortage of funds, societal and religious naysayers and border tensions in Ramallah.

As for the Taliban (be it the Afghan one or the Pakistani one) and its attitude towards women, the less said the better. Though it no longer holds its sway over most of Afghanistan, a new Taliban (different from its Afghan counterpart but ideologically similar) has emerged in Pakistan. Maria Toor, an ace female squash player from Pakistan who has made a mark on the international stage doing her country proud, actually chopped her hair to disguise her female identity while playing with boys in a Taliban-infested region, and her father actually shifted the family from there to Peshawar for the sake of his daughter’s sports career, a testimony to his gender-sensitized outlook.


The Islami Jamaat-e-Talba (IJT) and the Punjab Students’ Association (PSA) clashed in Karachi in October, 2015 clashed over what seems to be the issue of boys and girls playing cricket together. The IJT and PSA students engaged in a fight that injured both male and female members of the PSA. The IJT claimed that the fight was part of propaganda of the PSA to malign the IJT. The claim of the PSA is, however that the IJT had warned the female players to not play cricket in the Karachi University campus.

In the capital city of Kabul, a group of Afghan women are pioneering a revival of sports for women in a country that is still reeling from the after effects of being ruled by Taliban for years. From being virtually banned from public life and denied many basic human rights under the Taliban regime, the members of Afghanistan’s National Cycling team is trying to peddle forward in the right direction while tackling many roadblocks like family pressure and patchy public support.

Thus, despite the challenges, sporty Muslim girls are racing along, fighting the obstacles. More power to them!



Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Why Ex-Muslims’ Endorsing Violent Interpretations of Islam as the Accurate Ones Should Not be Seen as Validating Bigotry towards Practising Muslims as People


It is possible to quote any scripture (allegedly out of context according to its liberal adherents) to justify malpractices, like some verses in the Bible namely Deuteronomy 13:12-15, Samuel 15:3, Leviticus 24:16 and Matthew 10:34 seemingly advocate violence against “non-believers” and the Purusha Sukta of the Rigved, an ancient Hindu scripture, is taken by some to justify caste discrimination, but these verses do not define the entire religion. This article mentioning an anecdote from the British parliament does make an interesting read in this regard, as does this video make an interesting watch in this connection. There are Quranic verses like 2:2565:25:85:326:1086:15110:9949:1360:8 and 109:6 preaching peace, religious tolerance and human brotherhood, as does the letter from Prophet Muhammad to the Christian monks of St Catherine’s monastery and there are episodes from Prophet Muhammad’s life, as per Islamic lore, indicative of such an approach too, such as his allowing a woman to throw garbage at him daily and his succeeding in ideologically, winning over her by way of humanitarian affection. Those suggesting that peaceful verses in the Quran are superseded by violent verses (which the vast majority of practising Muslims globally regard as contextual) would do well to note that verse 109:6 appears towards the end of the book, and preaches nothing but peace.

Speaking of apostates of Islam (“ex-Muslims”) criticising their former religion, there is a fairly well-known website run by an apostate and basher of Islam who has even offered a cash prize to anyone who can disprove his allegations against Prophet Muhammad (but there are books by apostates of other religions criticizing their former religions too, the most famous one being ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’ by Bertrand Russell, and there’s also ‘Why I am Not a Hindu’ by Kancha Ilaiah, levelling very strong allegations), but practically, he is the judge of the debate, or to go by what he is saying, the “readership” of the website, a rather non-defined entity. In fact, he has acknowledged that he came across a Muslim who “intelligently argued his case and never descended to logical fallacies or insults” and while that Islam-basher “did not manage to convince him to leave Islam”, that Muslim earned his “utmost respect”, which implies that practically, the Islam-basher is the judge of the debate. Likewise, that Islam-basher has mentioned with reference to a scholar of Islam he debated with, that the latter was “a learned man, a moderate Muslim and a good human being” and someone he (the Islam-basher) has “utmost respect for”. So, that Islam-basher’s critique of Islam, whether valid or invalid, has no relevance in terms of making blanket stereotypes about the people we know as Muslims or even practising Muslims. By the way, that Islam-basher bashes Judaism too. And it is worth mentioning that I have encountered several practising Muslims on discussion groups on the social media, who have, in a very calm and composed fashion, logically refuted the allegations against Islam on such websites. Indeed, as you can see here and here, there are several other apostates of Islam who have stated that while they personally left Islam thinking that the extremist interpretations are correct and moderate ones wrong (as is the case with apostates of many other religions), they have equally explicitly emphasized that that does not in the least mean that they believe that most people identifying themselves as practising Muslims support violence against innocent people, and this applies very well to apostates like Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasrin, who despite being largely disowned by the Muslim community and being on the hit-list of extremists, spoke our fiercely against the Gujarat riots and the Dadri incident. Rushdie opposed the idea of voting to power Modi as India’s PM and later supported the award wapsi, while Nasrin expressed horror at the prospect of the cancellation of the Ghulam Ali concert in Mumbai, and she, as an atheist, has openly declared in her book 'Exile: A Memoir' that she wants not only Islam but Hinduism and all other existing religions to die out the way the Pharonoic and Olympian faiths have.
And in fact, even speaking of the West, a report submitted by Europol, the criminal intelligence agency of the European Union, showed that only 3 out of the 249 terrorist attacks (amounting to about 1.2%) carried out in Europe in 2010 were carried out by Muslims. Even in the United States, most terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2005 were not carried out by Muslims
Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis giving a Biblical basis for their racism and anti-Semitism; Catholic fanatics in the United States bombing abortion clinics and night clubs and having killed innocent civilians during the Olympic Games in 1996; the Catholic fanatics constituting the Irish Republican Army; some terrorists from the Baptist sect of Protestant Christianity in Tripura and Nagaland in India killing innocent civilians giving a theological justification for their actions; Khalistani terrorists killing innocent civilians acting in the name of Sikhism (they blew up an airplane flying innocent civilians); the Jewish Defense League in the United States targeting Soviet singers and diplomats and the Haganah in the Middle East killing anti-Zionist Jews having acted in the name of Judaism; Hindu organisations like the Ranvir Sena having carried out caste-based massacres (including women and children) to avenge left-wing terror attacks, justifying the same theologically, and perhaps most oxymoronically, Buddhist monks inciting violence against those of other religions in Myanmar and Sri Lanka (not only Muslims but even Chin Christians in Myanmar and Tamil Hindus in Sri Lanka) are all examples of non-Muslim terrorists.


Not to forget that secessionists in different parts of the world – like the now erstwhile Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka (who killed civilians, bombing banks and marketplaces, and forcibly recruited children), and ultra-leftist radicals in places like Greece, India and Peru – are also a cause of much terrorism globally, and they aren’t even always motivated by religion. 

And no, I’m not in the least seeking to undermine the heinousness of the crimes committed by some in the name of Islam by pointing to others having committed similar crimes under other ideological banners, for a more highlighted wrongdoing is no less of a wrongdoing than a less highlighted wrongdoing, but only to point out that viewing only Muslims as villains, and that too, all or even most of them, would indeed be grossly incorrect. However, despite jihadist terrorists being a microscopic minority of Muslims, Islamist terrorism has become a bigger global threat for its well-coordinated international network since the 1990s, with the US-backed Islamist resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan having signaled its rise. And, let us not forget that when we had the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, the victims included Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim police officer who died fighting the terrorists (and by the way, there are more French Muslims in the local police, including those who have died fighting jihadist terrorists, than in the Al Qaeda unit in their country), Mustapha Ourad, a Muslim who was one of the magazine staff members killed in that attack and there was Lassana Bathily, a Muslim shopkeeper who gave sanctuary to many innocent civilians during the hostage crisis in Paris that followed. Even in the context of the more recent attacks in Paris, a Muslim security guard Zouheir, risking his own life, prevented one suicide bomber from entering a packed football stadium. More recently, Kenyan Muslims very laudably protected fellow bus commuters, who were Christians, from jihadist terrorists, and Kurdish, Emirati, Iraqi and Syrian Muslims have also been fighting the ISIS. In India too, most of the terrorism is not by Muslims, as you can see here and here.