Saturday, May 28, 2016
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 2:256, 5:2, 5:8, 5:32, 6:108, 6:151, 10:99, 49:13, 60:8 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.
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