Al-Jazeera’s telecast of Osama bin Laden’s statement taunting and daring the United States is chilling evidence, were any needed, that across Qatar, Kabul, Kashmir, Kaaba, Khartoum et al, the Islamic brotherhood thumbs its nose at the modern world and its values. Simultaneously, the Pakistani Urdu weekly Takbeer’s interview with the Saudi fugitive offers an insight into the kind of assistance Gen. Pervez Musharraf will provide America in its just-launched war against terrorism.
The timing and purpose of the interviews is to tell President Bush and his band of multiculturalists that bin Laden is in control of his life and mission; and keep the spirit of jihad alive among the faithful. The interviews show that the Taliban-Musharraf regimes are fully aware of his whereabouts, and have no intention of turning him over to his American hunters; a fact Taliban has formally admitted in the wake of the US counter-attack.
Smarting from the wounds of September 11, which saw thousands vapourised in one gruesome hour, the US can only blame itself for this humiliation. After initially calling for a crusade against terrorism, President Bush fell prey to the twin evils of multiculturalism and short cuts. Even as Americans sought to come to terms with the religious fury wrought on them and Sikhs (part of the Indic tradition) became victims of racial angst, the President appeared among the mullahs and appeased them by changing the name of his operation against terrorism from Infinite Justice to Enduring Freedom, because the mullahs said that only God can render infinite justice!
This metaphysical semantics has subtly put the culprits of September 11 beyond the scope of the white man’s law – a fact the US is yet to realize as it goes about its desert bombing blitz! President Bush has meanwhile not seen fit to visit a gurdwara, a remission that we in India must never forget, much less forgive (the gurdwara visit of the US envoy in India cannot make up for this insensitivity).
Several American analysts have lambasted the White House’s one-sided concern for Muslims, especially as Muslim academics and clerics appearing on radio and television only formally condemn the outrage and hold American policies abroad responsible for it. In other words, Americans had it coming, and rightly so. One writer observed: “I have noticed no comparable stress on the heightened responsibilities of Muslim Americans.” Another warned against the currently popular ad-blitz by apologists that the word “Islam” means “peace”. Actually, according to British historian Paul Johnson, “Islam” means “submission,” which is very different, and in fact one of its objectives is to obtain that submission from all, if necessary by force. The Bush administration would do well to ponder over this fact.
I am not among those Indians (in and outside Government) who felt that the Manhattan attack would compel America to take on our battle against terrorism. Indeed, I do not even regard this as desirable, given the explicit exhortation of the Bhagvad Gita to manfully fight the wars forced upon us, and that too, upon our own battleground. That is why I am not disappointed for India that America has cuddled up to the wily Pakistani dictator. But I am saddened for America herself.
As I see it, America must inevitably be the next theatre of the war of a thousand cuts because radical Islam, promoted, funded and abetted by its closest Muslim allies – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – is on the warpath against it and its way of life. Radical or Wahhabi Islam, an extreme puritanical and fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam patronized by the Saudi royal family, has given Islam its most fearsome face, especially in the Indian sub-continent. Most terrorist groups like Taliban are Wahhabi in orientation, as Saudi patronage funds the madrasas in this part of the world, right up to Nepal.
Wahhabi Islam has historical roots in India. It took over the major Sufi orders (Naqshbandi, Qadiri, Chishti) and Shah Waliullah (1703-1762), father of modern Islamic revivalism, was a product of this amalgam. He invited the Afghan King to attack India (second Battle of Panipat, 1761, which ended in Maratha defeat). His disciple, Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi also joined the Wahhabi movement, and it was he who made it a mass movement by recruiting the Sufi orders in the cause of Islamic militancy. They remain active to this day – in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, even Chechnya.
Unfortunately, America does not wish to face this fact as it could destabilize its geo-strategic policies and endanger its oil interests. Hence, it continues to treat the Saudis with kid gloves and even though fourteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals, Washington allowed Riyadh to spirit twenty-four members of bin Laden’s family out of the country in the wake of the Manhattan tragedy!
As for Islamabad, Gen. Musharraf admitted in a CNN interview that there are over seven thousand madrasas in his country (annually graduating seven lakh students), most of which are breeding grounds for anti-US sentiment. Prominent Pakistani terrorist groups such as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed have known links with bin Laden’s Al Qaida network. Yet even after JeM’s brutal attack on the J&K State Assembly in which thirty-eight persons died, America has not yet declared it a terrorist group.
America’s inaction is in sharp contrast to the wake-up call buzzing through European capitals in the wake of the Twin Tower tragedy. A survey in The Netherlands shows that over sixty percent of the people feel that Muslim immigrants supporting the attack should be expelled. The left-of-centre De Volkskrant tersely commented, “Netherlands doesn’t accept anti-Western fundamentalistic attitudes from Muslims. In the eyes of most Dutch people, integration means adapting to a humanistic tradition, to the separation between church and state, and taking distance from the norms and values of one’s motherland.”
Germany has already identified extremist Arab groups and their members, and Interior Minister Otto Schily has moved to outlaw Koran schools (madrasas) and preachers who advocate violence. The Protestant church’s Bishop Rolf Koppe has frankly stated that he expects Muslim groups to distance themselves from Taliban and the terrorists, and that imams in the mosques must announce that “violence-prone fundamentalists in Germany are violating their rights as guests.”
France is blaming Britain for negligence in combating Islamic terrorism in the hope it would be spared. Many of the September 11 hijackers of the US planes and their trainers lived freely for years in Britain, using over forty companies, some banks and charity and security organizations for their covert operations. They include Zacarias Moussaoui, Djamel Behgal, and Omar Sheikh (the last was released in exchange for hostages at Kandahar and is suspected to have played a key role in the hijackings).
India too, has often complained of fundamentalist groups in Britain collecting funds and recruiting Muslim youth for terrorist activities in Kashmir and elsewhere. It is only now, apprehending danger to it’s own territory, that Britain has proscribed organizations suspected of exporting terrorism. Yet India, like America, is also in the grip of the virus called multiculturalism, a phoney concept that inhibits recognition of the core of the national genius, and thus blurs national identity and in times of crisis, national purpose. America lost face when President Bush showed up in a mosque; India suffered a serious reverse when the ban on the virulently anti-national Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) was followed by namaaz at the Prime Minister’s house.
The Pioneer, 9 October 2001