silence of the media IV: dialouge of unprovable assertions

There has certainly been a full-scale resurgence in the Blame Islam movement (myself, I tend towards the Blame Muslims camp). Jonah Goldberg calls on "moderate" muslims to prove they are not terrorists. Dipnut (no offense intended, that's his pseudonym) has a lengthy and rational post which says that "moderate" muslims are really the fanatics at that Islam is rotten at its core. Steven Den Beste calls for Islam itself - the sum total of the faith, not just individual strains of interpretation - to be radically "defeated" (extending his earlier arguments). And ego-surfing on LGF reveals calls for internment camps and "nuking the cube". These examples represent a progression of sorts.



Let me respond^[1] to Dipnut and Steven, explicitly, since their arguments represent a logical plateau. The arguments by NRO and LGF commentators are a kind of fallacious gorge isolating them and I have no desire to venture into such depths. With respect to Dipnut - his arguments are reasoned and well-organized, and it was a pleasure reading his writing. While I cannot fault his reasoning, my disagreement with his conclusions is no great surprise, but the reason is because I simply do not accept his assumptions (upon which his arguments are solidly grounded).



Dipnut writes:

The murderous mobs and terrorist cells may be un-Islamic in some obscure canonical sense, but right now they are more representative of Islam as a whole than are such as Aziz Poonawalla. The actual killers are only a small minority in Islam, but their sympathizers (by which I mean anyone with a neutral-or-better opinion of their activities) probably number in the hundreds of millions.

May be un-Islamic. Are more representative. Probably number. These are Dipnut's impressions and opinions, shaped by the media silence of which I addressed earlier in this series.



Note that I do not think the media is racist or that fixing that silence is a priority or any other such victimized petulance. The WHY behind the reason for the media filters are essentially irrelevant. But reliance on such heavily filtered data guarantees flawed conclusions.



The majority of Muslims ARE "moderate". This is a simple fact. The "core" of Islam is quite sound and healthy - but existing as it does in Asia and the Middle East, and documented in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Gujarati, mostly existing offline, and being of absolutely zero entertainment or shock value to the American media, the assertion that the core is rotten is intellectually dishonest. If Dipnut recognizes that the Core of Islam is completely beyond his access for observation and analysis, then the entire thesis must be re-examined^[2].



Note that these assumptions are central to Steven's analysis as well. I sent Steven a link to the David Warren article "Wrestling with Islam" with the sole motive of finding it interesting, and certainty that it would trigger his blogging impulses (I dont have any ambition or desire to change Steven's view of Islam, as he speculated, though I certainly make use of him as foil for my own arguments). The Warren article is far-reaching in its scope - so I suppose what a reader chooses to extract is a reflection of their own bias. For example, I focused on a specific subset, a historical narrative. Steven focuses on Warren's pessimism as a function of his (Warren's) religious belief, regarding the outcome of the perceived clash of civilizations. Steven parlays this into an expression of his own atheist worldview, and finds cause for optimism:

If that's correct, it gives me even more hope for a positive outcome in this war, for it means that a sufficient number of terrible setbacks for their side will shatter that faith, as the infidel keep winning and Allah keeps not showing up for the fight.



I know that's not something a devout Muslim like Aziz would think is desirable, but for me as an atheist I see religion as being helpful for individuals but largely negative for society collectively. To the extent that individuals practice it without it becoming a societal force, it's net positive (in most cases) providing comfort and guidance. When it starts meddling in politics, the effects are uniformly negative in part because it is uniformly anti-pluralistic. Thus for me the ideal state is actually something like what we have in the US, where religion is quite common but there are so many different ones that no single one attains critical mass.

I agree that the United States is the closest to ideal, for complementary reasons, as a member of a minority of a minority religion. Steven is mistaken when he thinks I would disagree with him about the desirability of Wahabis finding that Allah does not materialize to lend their deranged interpretations spiritual legitimacy. I think my self-interest in such a scenario is obvious. But where I start to disagree is in how he extrapolates his atheist worldview to the most unlikely of targets - ie, the practice of religion:

I've been wondering for a while, and have sometimes voiced the possibility, that indeed one way for this war to end is for us to shatter Islam itself; not Islamism or pan-Arabism, but Islam outright. At the very least, the most fundamentalist forms of Islam may need to be shattered.



Certainly Wahhabism has to be the primary target of this, and what would remain in what I see as the ideal case would be Islam as personal religion but without Islam as mass movement. Islam existing, Islam still broadly believed, but Islam in a thousand small pieces (if not in hundreds of millions). Islam not as a small number of vast monoliths, but Islam as a personal faith, interpreted as the result of individual study and thought. Islam as belief and not dogma; as religion and not as identity. Islam as moral guidance and not as politics. Islam as the equivalent of the thousand Protestant sects of Christianity, not Islam as Catholic Church. Islam as a force in individual lives but with little direct effect on the operations of society (any society, theirs or ours). Islam as one religion among many.

This extends Steven's prior ideas about Defeating Islam, but here the scope is expanded dramatically. Having never met Steven, I can't be certain, but I think I detect his sense of humor at work. It cannot be a coincidence that his side of the debate with me always returns to defining my belief on his terms :) But treating this as a serious proposal, it's easy to identify gaping flaws in his understanding of how Islam is structured.



The fact is, the vision of an intensely personal Islam that Steven advocates is already central to the faith. In fact, as a Shi'a, I am further from this state than a Wahabi, since Shi'a do believe in hierarchical religious systems and Sunnis practice a more distributed form of worship. The analogy between Shi'a and Sunni is analogous to Catholic and Protestant. The danger of the Wahabis is not that it is a centralized theocracy, but rather that every wingnut with a Qur'an is free to indulge in projection of their prejudices and grievances onto the text, without any authority to assist with the context.



The great schools of Islamic thought - four Sunni "madhabs", and the Shi'a branches - all have extensive devotion to exegisis of the Qur'an, as a coherent book. Only the Wahabis take a word-by-word, reductionist approach to the text. Lacking a centralized authority, they are able to assign meanings based on expediency, not context or analysis. Steven's solution would undermine these traditional structured schools and actually encourage Wahabi-like theologies. To extend his analogy towards Christianity, he is labeling Protestants "Catholics" and then arguing that they need to be more Protestant!



Also, Steven has a dramatically false assertion:

Warren makes a point also made elsewhere that the western concepts of tolerance and sympathy (which manifest in the most extreme form now as "multiculturalism") are in fact relatively modern, and that the Muslims who embrace those ideals learned them from the West (mainly from Christian missionaries), and are in the minority.

Actually, Islam makes the same distinction in the Qur'an that Christianity has always made between "believers" and "non-believers". I find it ironic that an atheist like Steven has never come across this concept in Christianity before. The Qur'an has very strong messages of tolerance - explicitly calling for respect and freedom of other faiths to exist and practice in peace. The most famous surat in the Qur'an about tolerance has a powerful, yet simple message:

O disbelievers!

I worship not that which ye worship;

Nor worship ye that which I worship.

And I shall not worship that which ye worship.

Nor will ye worship that which I worship.

Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion. [109:1-6]

And the Abbasid Caliphate, based in Baghdad^[3], was reknowned for its tolerance and benevolent rule over its non-Muslim subjects. The Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt even had non-Muslims at the highest levels of government. And the Mughal Emperor Akbar married a Hindu princess. These are simply a few counterexamples to disprove Steven's general assertion that tolerance is alien to Islamic teachings or cultures.



And Steven makes the same media-filtered gaffe as Dipnut when he tries to assert that tolerant Muslims are in the minority. It certainly me be true that a minority of Muslims viewed in the media are tolerant. But to extrapolate from a filtered data set to the general populace? I invite Steven to consult his copy of Bevington and review the section on "Estimated Error in the Mean" (specifically Equation 4.14).



Dipnut also tries to underscore the general argument by making the case that the Wahabis' control of Mecca lends them a far-reaching legitimacy:

A "moderate" Muslim*, living in the West, may deplore the bloody-minded Wahhabi sect of Islam, but as a Muslim he cannot elude its influence. The Wahhabis own Mecca, and as we'll soon see, whoever owns Mecca gets to decide not only the landscaping and architecture but the meaning of the place. When our friendly Muslim goes on his hajj, he'll be in the Wahhabis' hands. He'll live, for a time, in their brutal austerity, in their idea of a good society. He'll adopt their customs. He'll do as they say, if only to get through the day in a strange land. The white-washed, windowless walls will enclose him, the endless drumbeat of purity purity purity will soak into him as he reaches for the wellspring of his own soul, to offer his devotion to God.

And for the rest of his life, five times a day, he'll relive the experience, praying toward the Mecca of the Wahhabis' sterile hopes and dreams. Of course, this won't make him a Wahhabi. He can retain his own ideals, his own interpretation. But that interpretation will always be at odds with a central part of his religious experience. A small thing, perhaps, but a small leak in the boat means bailing water throughout the journey.

This is absolutely false (to say nothing of the profound misunderstanding of Hajj^[4]). Consider a history lesson: ALL of the great Islamic empires (Ummaiyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Babur, Ottoman) established their capitals in brand new cities - Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Delhi, Constantinpole - rather than try to control Mecca directly. The main role of Mecca was that whichever ruler's name was read aloud at the Great Mosque on holy friday was the generally acknowledged Symbolic Leader of Islam (in the Sunni tradition). But this did not translate to any kind of pan-Islamic control, and rival Islamic empires existed simultaneously at many points in history.



Granted, the Wahabis control Mecca, but that is SOLELY because the Sauds control Arabia. And the Sauds control Arabia SOLELY with British, then American, support.



But is their control of Mecca the reason that the Wahabis have established such a threatening posture regarding proslytezation? NO. It is because Wahabis are funded by Saudis^[5]. The success of the Wahabis is DIRECTLY a function of their enormous base of political and economic support from the Sauds. The Sauds are DIRECTLY supported by the West. The West is in a Clash of Civilizations with Wahabi Islam? Do you detect a certain irony?



The truth is that the rest of the 99% of the Muslims worldwide who belong to thousands upon thousands of different ethnic/political sects, and who adhere to any one of hundreds of theological schools, are not influenced by Wahabism because they control Mecca. It is because the poverty of the third world, the oppressive rule of tyrants, and the misguided implementation of ideological economic policies, have all resulted in a vast pool of disaffected people^[6]. These people exist in Palestine, in Turkey, in Israel, in Egypt - even in France. This is fertile ground for Wahabism, a parasitic interpretation whose Christian counterpart has not gained much traction in recent history (the occassional Fallwell and Robertson aside) because the disaffected class has largely been pacified^[7].



The real problem thus boils down into a top-down parasite (Wahabism) that is artificially supported (Sauds) feeding on a vast pool that is fed from bottoms-upwards by oppression and misery. How to correct the problem? Remove either the parasite or the pool. The pool is a larger problem and much more complicated^[8]. The parasite is a simple problem. Which do you think the war on Iraq will solve, if you by into the warblogger and neocon theories about why Iraq needs the smackdown?



So what then to make of all these non-Muslims exhorting Reformations and Defeats? Al these calls for Islam to be remade into something a little more Western or democratic or Christian or fuzzy or otherwise compatible with the NRO crew and the neocon agenda? The fact is, Islam as mass movement is a manifestation of the inherent strength underlying the basic undistorted message of the Qur'an. Which is embodied by the daily living practice of nearly a billion "moderate" muslims worldwide. This is an unstoppable force of good in the world, whose legacy is generation upon generation of decent and moral people, who strive for ascension to the next world by the virtue of their deeds in the present one.



This may not be very reassuring to Steven, but Islam has and will continue and grow. The calls for Reformations and the polemics about how rotten the Core of Islam is, are mere hysterics, fueled by false binary-ism of the Clash of Civilizations thesis. Those who buy into the existenc of a separable entity called "The West" and another called "Islam" are naturally going to try and neuter the other side. Steven's hope that Islam loses its appeal and becomes more of a personal philosophy (akin to his self-defined engineerism) is really an attempt to destroy what makes Islam unique, so that it becomes more familiar, and thus less threatening. Trying to convince him that Islam is not the problem, that it is a solution to the problem, is pointless, and it is not my goal, because what he thinks about Islam is essentially irrelevant.



The current phase of Wahabism is an artificial construct, which we as Muslims must deal with realistically - but it is not a manifestation of an inner rot - it was grafted onto Islam by Imperials and continues to be propped up by neo-Imperials. But ratherthan cast stones of blae, we have to grapple with it in a realistic way. I will discuss how Muslims need to do this in my long-promised final post in the Silence series.







^[1] The silence of the media series has been extended. This is not my oft-promised final silence post. It's the penultimate one, though. Probably.

^[2] Consider: what are the policy ramifications of a Core of Islam that is sound? What consequences exist if the assumption that the Core of Islam is rotten, is in fact false?

^[3] There is no small amount of irony in the notion that to "save" and "reform" Islam, the West must conquer Baghdad to do it.

^[4] Few non-Muslims are aware, but what you do during Hajj was prescribed by the Prophet SAW, and is not influenced in any way by the Saudis. The religious rituals, the ascetic quality to the experience, all are constant and have been since the Prophet SAW himself led it. What teh Saudis have done is actually make Hajj safer, cleaner, and more accessible, and they finance hundreds of thousands if not millions of pilgrims each year, providing opportunity for Hajj to millions who would otherwise never have the means to complete this requirement of faith. The treatment of the Hajj is the one single aspect of the Saud legacy in Islam with which I not only find zero fault, but actually praise to the highest degree.With all due respect to Dipnut, all his comments about Hajj and filtering worldview and whatnot are the purest nonsense.

^[5] Did I mention that the Sauds were installed by the British, and continue to be supported by America?

^[6] The source and nature of these failed policies and terrible condition is not relevant here.

^[7] Funded by the success of imperialism. Ironically, if the pundits are correct and Islam must follow exactly the path that Christianity took from Bad Boy to Paternal Figure, then Islamic nations shoudl also embark on imperialist courses. Now we are getting into Orwell's theories of perpetual war abroad to disguise the problems at home, and its a nother topic...

^[8] I don't buy into the self-victimizing conceit that the West deliberately oppresses muslims because they hate Us and What We Stand For. Though, doesn't that rhetoric sound familiar?

I voted for ExciteBike

Get in the holiday spirit!



The Tournament of Stuff Holiday Edition is up. Naturally, since ham is haram, I voted for stockings. And I'm voting for the North Pole because of my Magnetic Resonance background (which makes me more attuned, pardon the pun, to the Earth's Switch campaign)



(what the heck is the Tournament of Stuff? Glad you asked. Try not to get sucked into the Movie Puzzle.)

the coming thing

Steven Den Beste has analyzed an essay I forwarded him (originally brought to my attention by Bill Allison). Titled, "Wrestling with Islam", it is a deeply analytical and evocative look at how radical Islamism was shaped and brought to form, and the nature of the vacuums which it rushed to fill. There are many observations and ideas in this piece, but the heart of the essay is this compelling historical narrative, which I am reproducing in full despite its length:

As I have already hinted, in the Lahore of my childhood, where Protestant I attended a Catholic school, along with many Muslim Pakistanis -- it was very easy to be a Christian. Bear in mind that, until recently, almost all of Pakistan's Muslim prime ministers, and party and military and business leaders, came up from schools such as the one I attended, not only in Pakistan, but in India, too. In fact, the case was somewhat similar through most of the Islamic world, wherever European Imperialism left its mark, which was almost everywhere. And as the Europeans left, chiefly British, French, and Dutch, they left emerging ruling classes, who, largely because of this education, did their thinking more in English, or French, or even Dutch, than in Urdu, or Arabic, or Malay.



To be modern meant, in practice, to have been educated by Christians, chiefly by Roman Catholics, and many of those indeed missionary monks and nuns. And upper-class parents sent their children to these schools, not because they were Christian, but because they were the only schools where a decent, modern education was available -- one which would equip them to understand, and thus "to survive", that big new modern world.



Through schools like my own St. Anthony's the New Class was reproduced and sustained. This meant that at the top of society, we had an instinctive commitment to religious tolerance -- for if you get rid of the Christians, where will your kids go to school? How will they learn to network? And correspondingly, at the bottom of the society, among the common people, this tolerance tends to be confirmed whenever it is not disturbed, from the ages-old human willingness to somehow get along with your neighbours, if only to avoid the loss of everything you have in communal violence.



So from the bottom, to the top, there were strong reinforcements for what I think is the finest political slogan: "Live and let live."



At the top, leaders quite well acquainted with the broad cosmopolitan world of modernity -- people who were just as much Westernizers as the colonial administrators whom they replaced. The future movers and shakers, more likely than not, also went on to university in the West, to clinch the effect. And while they remained Muslim, at least nominally, they were also secularized, and imbued with our Western distinction between Church and State -- in their case, Mosque and State. They tended, unconsciously or even consciously, to look upon their own religious inheritance as backward, inferior, incapable of competing. It was only as Westernized, modern, secular, educated people that they could feel equal with their "mentors" in the West.



This did not make them closet Christians, however, far from it. To become Christian would be to lose their claim to govern in a predominantly Muslim society. Those who were Christian to start with, stayed that way, and could mix freely in the ruling class. Those who were Muslim to start with also stayed that way, outwardly, though they began to lose their bearings inwardly.



Most often, they became socialists of one kind or another, for in the world of only a few decades ago, that very Western ideology of "socialism" could still be presented as the coming thing, as a "scientific" thing, the cutting edge of progress. Most came to believe that the best way to modernize their societies was through central planning, and that their own class was in effect the socialist vanguard, the people who had the education and ability to deliver their peoples into the modern world. They looked forward to a world that would be, if anything, post-Muslim and post-Christian -- to the triumph of a kind of universal civil order, that would be socialist in its economy, both East and West.



And naturally, they also bought into another Western idea, another idea which had no place in any traditional Muslim order. They became nationalists as well as socialists, for how can you advance socialism except within a coherent national order? Hence the ideological currents running through the Muslim world in the generation before Iran's Ayatollahs -- Nasserism, pan-Arabism, the Baathist parties of Syria and Iraq, the Bhutto faction in Pakistan, Sukarno in Indonesia, Algerian radicalism in the Maghreb. It was all so clear to all of them, that this was the way forward.



It was instead a catastrophe. Human nature is just what it is, and the laws of supply and demand operate to punish grand ideological schemes, just as the law of gravity operates against other forms of human flight. None of those five-year plans ever worked. And the only thing that did work was the elites clinging to power, trying to Westernize or modernize their societies with increasing frustration.



Moreover, consider the disconnect, between such rulers and their own people. In some ways Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and Bashir Assad of Syria, are the last survivors of that family of dinosaurs -- of that world that existed before the deluge of "Islamism" -- the word we now use for fanatically politicized Islam. (Please note carefully how I use it to distinguish from "Islam" at large.) Though even these radically secular rulers have made their own accommodations with the Islamist tide, and indeed their own connexions with Al Qaeda.



Elsewhere, we encounter the old elites, but find them like beached whales, still nominally presiding over the societies which they have helped destroy, economically, socially, religiously, and in every other practical way, so that there was nothing left for them but to find a new excuse for holding on to power, and someone else to blame for what happened.



In Pakistan, for instance, the elites are certainly still there, only beginning to be diluted by the arrivistes from the Islamist madrasas. From the other side, they are bled by emigration, for the engineers and the technocrats, and the other functionaries of the New Class, are leaving as fast as they can to the West. It is an economic imperative, there are diminishing opportunities at home; for where there is no oil to pump and refine, there tends to be precious little else in the way of an economy. They wash their hands of all those five-year plans, and get quite peacefully on planes for Europe and America, where they can hope at least to stay solvent. And all they are really leaving behind is the poor of their societies, to fend for themselves.



The New Class that remains, which by now is becoming rather an old class, finds itself enmired in a more and more urgent search for some new silver bullet, some fine new theoretical scheme to replace the tried-and-failed socialism, if for no other reason than to justify their own purchase on elitehood. The alternative is to slide down from eminence, into those mushrooming brick, stick, tin & mud suburbs that they must fear in a way that we, who have not seen them up so close, can never fully understand or empathize with. It is no small thing to lose your place in the social order; and especially in an order with such deep shafts.



It is in the last generation or two, that many of these people have begun, either subtly or overtly, to buy into "Islamism". For Islamism has been, since that heady moment when the clerics of Shia Iran led the overthrow of the late Shah, the "coming thing" in the Muslim world, the new, essentially political ideology, the new patent medicine, that offers a cure for whatever ails you.

But the conclusions that the author (David Warren) makes are by no means limited in scope to this narrative. In fact, there is something for everyone to disagree with, including (most emphatically myself, for example I do not agree as Warren does) the Clash of Civilizations thesis which ends the essay on a slightly pessimistic note.



I will address Steven's comentary and arguments about the essay in the next post in my Silence of the Media series. The full article has also been posted to the UNMEDIA mailing list (public archives are browsable/searchable by non-subscribers, take a look)

Clash of idiotarians

The following quote is not from Chomsky, or Fisk, or Said. Read:

"the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

These are the words of Samuel Huntington, oft-invoked author of the Clash of Civilizations thesis, with which I vehemently disagree.



The quote comes from Salam Pax of the Where is Raed blog (linked at left on my blogroll), an iraqi living and blogging from Iraq. Salam Pax has a long rant in answer to the Clash-ians who have infested his comments section. Salam Pax had the following words of thanks and appreciation to the West that put Huntington's quote in perspective.

owned, body and soul

Jeanne D'Arc has a fantastic, ironic post about women:

do I hear a message to Western women: You'd better be grateful for the oppression we have here, because obviously our form of patriarchy is better than their form of patriarchy?

This post is actually wonderfully relevant to the points I was making in my burka and the bikini post. I won't go into detail, I'd rather see what you think in th comments. Go read Body and Soul blog!

Gujarat II: Muslims in India

Suman has posted a lengthy response to my Gujarat riots post. In my post, I presented a list of fairly comprehensive links from the BBC and the Times of India, and argued that the pogrom was an example of state-sponsored terrorism. By this, I meant the following:



"The officials of the State of Gujrat, who are linked to an extrmist political party called the BJP, were complicit in the riots in Gujrat. Complicity means that they knew the attacks were being planned well before the train fire, that the response of the state to the riots was to hold back so that the civilians who were attacked did not have sufficient protection, and that there has been essentially no punishment to those officials for their role in looking the other way. The sole purpose of this complicity was to achieve political gain."



Note, that the question of which religion the rioters were, which religion the BJP party happens to be, which religion the victims were, etc is all irrelevant. It's unsurprising that Suman took my post as some kind of polemic against those awful hindus, because very little happens in India which is not immediately forced through a religio-sectarian filter.



However, as I have been arguing consistently on this blog, religion is solely a wrapper, which lends legitimacy (and allows recruitment) to a political cause. I have been focusing on Islam, but none of my arguments are limited to that faith. In fact, it would be rank hypocrisy for me to suggest that when muslims enact atrocities in Islam's name, they are outside the faith, but when hindus do so in Vishnu's name, they are acting according to the basic teachings of theirs.



So, I am not searching for a root cause to the Gujarat riots, I already know what the cause is, it is simple Bonehead Tribalism:

These kind of barbaric decisions are always made in remote villages by a band of grizzled elder men, who invariably call themselves an "Islamic court". The truth is that these are immoral primitive tribal customs, which are used by the tribal elders as a power play of enforcing their authority. They are wrapped in poorly-argued Islamic reasoning, often bundled with some selective out-of-context Qur'anic verse, so that no one dares argue. But this is not Islamic, it's purely a primitive cultural practice, with its sole aim as a power play of I-have-control-over-you.

That is an example from Islamic bonehead tribalism, the Gujarat riots are an example of Hindu bonehead tribalism, but it is bonehead tribalism all the same. The political motivations behind the Gujarat riots, and the benefits and advantages it lent the BJP, are well documented. And the benefits that their political allies continue to reap. Here is an article in The Hindu, another in the Times of India (Google cache), and here is an org chart illustration of the relationships between extrmist Hindu groups like the VHP to political groups like the BJP, from Suman himself.



Suman also questions the BBC as a source for "unbiased news" about India. Since most of the pieces I linked to were simply factual accounts of people being burned, ministers being investigated, etc, ithey were highly factual with very little editorializing. Presumably the article which causes Suman the most concern regarding bias is the one which suggests that the Muslim mob did not initiate the train fire which was said to have sparked the Hindu rioters in revenge. Read the BBC article and judge for yourself:

Forensic investigators in India have raised questions over an attack which killed almost 60 Hindus and led to widespread anti-Muslim riots in the western state of Gujarat. Hindu pilgrims travelling by train were said to have been attacked by a Muslim mob in the town of Godhra which forced the train to stop and set fire to one of the carriages. But a report by forensic scientists in Gujarat says it does not appear that the fire on the train was started from outside ... The new theory does not answer the key question of who started the fire and why and seems at odds with eyewitness accounts given at the time.

But if one reflexively dismisses the BBC, then what about the Times of India report on the same? (slow website, here's the Google cache):

Investigations made by the Ahmedabad-based Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) have now shown that almost 60 litres of inflammable material was poured from inside the compartment before it was set on fire.



A report by the FSL's Assistant Director Dr M S Dahiya, which is part of the charge-sheet filed in the Godhra case about a month back, is based on a study of the pattern of the burns in the compartment and a simulated exercise conducted on May 3 to recreate the incident. The report contradicts the view held so far that the mob which attacked the train threw inflammable liquid at the train using buckets and cans from a distance, even while the passengers had shut all the windows and doors of the compartment.

There was in fact extensive and parallel coverage by the BBC, the Times of India, Karachi Dawn, and The Hindu during the riots. None of the links I provided in the previous post were unique to the BBC. Allegations of bias imply that the events did not happen - but they did, and I can't fathom why anyone would try to deny it. It happenned, it was a tragedy, it was well documented everywhere in India and the international community.



Except in the United States. which was really my main point.



Suman seems to be implying that memory of Muslim atrocities if the fuel by which the riots burned. He then goes on to make a case that the entire history of Islam in India has been profoundly violent. While it's true that there has been great violence in India's history, to ay the onus upon Islam is hardly accurate. Take his specific examples, one-by-one:



1. Islam invaded India and conquered in it 1000 A.D. (historical link)



Well, true. And before that, the Aryans arrived, around 1500 BC. Let's not forget Alexander the Great, whose invasion of India severely weakened the Mauryan Empire of Ashoka. This in turn paved the way for further invasions, from Central Asia such as the White Huns. India, as a geographical entity, is as close to paradise on earth for agriculture as can be imagined, and it's hardly surprising that it was the target of settlement by numerous outsiders who arrived and settled in, and in so doing, contributed vastly to the rich tapestry that makes India more diverse than any other place on earth^[1]. One could just as easily pine for the good old days of the Harrapans, but what's the point? I confess that I don't see what relevance the arrival of Islam specifically has to this conversation.



2. Muslim rulers of India were tyrants.



To support this overly broad claim, Suman disingeniously links to Aurangzeb who was probably the most evil man in India's history. My own Dawoodi Bohra community has sufferred at the hands of Aurangzeb, actually, in that he found our Shi'a version of Islam to be heretical (sound familiar?). The leader of the community, Syedna Qutubkhan Qutbuddin AS, was beheaded by Aurangzeb in 1646 AD under the charge of being a 'raafzi' (one who has deviated from the path of Islam), a charge which Syedna refuted by saying that; far from being a 'raafzi' - he was upon the essence of the 'Sunnah'. Syedna chose martyrdom over admittance to such a charge (which would have destroyed the community), and the Bohras survived with beliefs and teachings intact.



But Aurangzeb was the last of the Mughal emperors. His predecessors were every different. To quote Suman's own reference on the subject:

The most important Islamic empire was that of the Mughals, a Central Asian dynasty founded by Babur early in the sixteenth century. Babur was succeeded by his son Humayun and under the reign of Humayun's son , Akbar the Great (1562-1605), Indo-Islamic culture attained a peak of tolerance, harmony and a spirit of enquiry.The nobles of his court belonged to both the Hindu and the Muslim faiths, and Akbar himself married a Hindu princess. Leaders of all the faiths were invited to his court at Fatehpur Sikri to debate religious issues at the specially built 'Ibadat Khana'. Akbar tried to consolidate religious tolerance by founding the Din-e-Ilahi religion, an amalgam of the Hindu and the Muslim faiths.



Mughal culture reached its zenith during the reign of Akbar's grandson Shahjehan, a great builder and patron of the arts. Shahjehan moved his capital to Delhi and built the incomparable Taj Mahal at Agra.

Having been to the Taj Mahal myself, I can only say that it is a place of divine tranquility. The beauty of the structure is simple, yet profoundly moving. I stood mesmerized in front of it. I took rolls of photos but could not bear to put them on the web, so inadequate were they to convey even a small portion of the Taj Mahal's grace. It was built as a monument to love.^[2]



And to lay the burden of violence on the Mughals is also applying some rather well-crafted blinders. The Marathas were a ferocious group that came close to rivaling the Mughals, led by their legendary leader Shivaji. They were feared and were paid protection money by many smaller kingdoms to ward off their ruthless plundering raids.



3. The Partition was the bloodiest event in Indian history.



well, I agree. But again we seem to be laying the blame upon only one of the two combatants in the sordid chapter. If there is blame to be laid anywhere, it is upon the British, who deliberately fanned the lames of Hindu-Muslim tension during their rule in order to maintain control of the large population with their small, small numbers. The Partition was enacted by playing to the conceit of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, against Ghandi's objections, and soon gathered steam among both Hindus and Muslims. It was the darkest chapter in India's history, and it is the shame of Hindus and Muslims both.



4. and 5. Violence over Kashmir and Bangladesh.



Again, we have conflicts that have everything to do with politics and almost nothing to do with religion. The truth is that Kashmir has never been allowed to choose its own fate, and if India were willing to allow free and fair democratic elections, and allow Kashmiris to determine for themselves their future, the issue would disappear.



The Bengali Holocaust was entirely the fault of Pakistan. Again, it was a ploy for regional power - losing East Pakistan meant that the economic and agrarian strength of the Pakistani state would be (and has been, as it turned out) even more compromised. But apart from playing a propaganda role, religion itself was not at fault, it was the fault of the Pakistani leaders and the public who turned a blind eye to the atrocities being committed ostensibly in their name.



The truth is that there are many Hindus who feel that Islam has been a blight upon their society. Muslims are also the subject of conspiracy theories such as controlling the media, the government, the banks. Many Indians - especially in the poorer and lower castes - have fixated upon muslims as the Evil Within, and skewed versions of history (such as the one Suman linked to to illustrate the revisionism taking place) exist to serve the ideological needs of these people.



All of this actually is very reminiscent of the status of Jews in Europe during the early 20th Century, and the climate under which an entire ethnic group in German society could be targeted as a source of all ills, and subsequently eliminated. Muslims are the Jews of India.





^[1] Indian territories and kingdoms have been ruled by polytheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. The subcontinent is so diverse that each state has a separate language - not a dialect, but a full language!

^[2] Few people know that Shah Jahan planned to build an identical monument, out of black marble, across the river from the white Taj Mahal. Thus he intended to symbolize the love between himself and his wife. But he was deposed by his son and confined to a small cell which had an overlook to the white Taj, where he spent the rest of his life gazing at the beauty of his half-finished monument. Somehow, to me, the fact that the Taj Mahal is only half completed, makes it all the more beautiful.

silence of the media III: Nigerian fatwa rejected

The silence of the media has been a recent recurring theme (I've edited post titles to reflect this). The Nigerian riot and "fatwa" against the woman journalist regarding the Miss World pageant sparked a length essay by Steven demanding that normal Muslims cease their "apathetic silence" lest they be considered complicit in brutal repression tactics such as these.

I responded with part I in this series, making two points. The first is that the Nigerian fracas was another example of bonehead tribalism, a purely political power grab wrapped in religion solely to lend it legitimacy. This is a point I have argued previously, repeatedly.

The second point was that the perception of Muslims' silence is a classic Bateson's double-bind (see my Columbus Day post). Waging a PR battle to assault this stereotype is IMHO a wasted effort, that energy is far better spent directed inwards to the community and focusing on weeding out bad ideas and extremism from within.

The second post in this series pointed out that Muslims have not been silent since 9-11, counter to the prevailing sterotype. There have been massive condemnations from religious and secular leaders and organizations.

This post is simply a followup, in reporting via the BBC that the two top Muslim religious authority councils have rejected the fatwa issued by the governor of Zamfara state:

Nigeria's second highest Islamic body, the Jama'atul Nasril Islam (JNI), announced that a ruling issued on behalf of Zamfara's state government was not binding and should be ignored.

This followed a similar ruling on Thursday from the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (SCIA) which said the deputy provincial governor who issued the edict had "no authority" to do so.

The article also notes that the government of Nigeria had said it would not allow the fatwa to be carried out, even it was valid. Far from making Nigeria seem to be a seething bed of militant Islam, it is apparent that Nigeria is a country where state authorities tried to leverage religion in order to gain political points with the Muslim majorities in those states. The federal givernment of Nigeria quickly exerted its power to declare the fatwa illegal, and the national Nigerian Muslim authorities quickly exerted their authority to declare the fatwa immoral.

This information drastically affects the perception of Nigeria, and of Islam, but it is completely absent from US media reports thus far. I would appreciate any reader who notices mention of the muslims councils' rulings in the US media to alert me via the coments section.