Islam found me when I had no intention of being discovered.

I grew up in Southern California during the 1960s in a non-practicing Christian home. I don’t recall feeling particularly religiously inspired growing up, except maybe while singing “O’ Holy Night” with Johnny Mathis on my parents’ hi-fi. Some years we went to church on Easter Sunday, and some years we barbecued a steak instead.

Matters of faith were not discussed with any depth in my home; I remember my stepfather saying, “Kari, did you leave this milk out on the table? No? Well, Jesus knows if you’re lying … Jesus knows.” But, there was no further discussion about what Jesus would do about the spoiled milk. “Jesus knows” was just left hanging cryptically in the air.

My mother felt uncomfortable discussing anything, well, personal. Her way of instructing me on topics of any delicacy was to deliver the message via books and pamphlets. So, I learned about the facts of life through a pamphlet, and I learned about Christianity through the Golden Children’s Bible. I read that Bible in its entirety many times as a child, taking comfort from the stories of the Prophets. Abraham, Noah, Moses, Solomon and David, John and Jesus — I read all their stories, but what I lacked was the context and relevance of their lives to mine. Without a thread linking the words on the page to my life, they were only stories.

I memorized the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer because I heard kids at school reciting them. I longed for the religious surety of my classmates: “Have you been Baptized? No? Well, you’re going to Hell.” This frightened me; I worried my entire family was floundering around without being baptized, and we were sure to burn in Hell.

As a young adult I took the attitude of “as long as I’m a good person, and live an ethical life, God will love me.” That was fine, except as my world became more complicated I realized I was living a life full of loose ends and selfish decisions. I was floating through the years, reacting to whatever came in my direction, without a definitive plan. I thought I was aiming to fill the void I felt inside of myself, but I didn’t have a sense of what was actually missing. I got married, made a home, had a successful career, and started a family with the birth of my precious son, but none of it brought real contentment. By the age of 30, I found myself a divorced, single mother of a little boy.

Against all advice, and despite the worried looks and words of consternation from my WASP-ish family, I met and married my second husband, Ahmed, the foreign, dark-skinned Muslim guy I met at work.

Ahmed is a soft-spoken artist from Bombay. When we married, I made it very clear that I had no intention of embracing his faith, and he made it very clear that it was fine with him. His only caveat was that if we had children they would be raised as Muslims. This sweet man was the opposite of the media’s portrayal of the crazy or sinister Arab or Muslim, and so I had a different window on Islam through him, and I agreed to marry him. It didn’t feel like a threat to our future children, or me; he fasted quietly, he prayed quietly, he lived and let live.

Being married to a spiritually confident person like my husband began to have a negative effect on my “God will love me if I’m a good person” philosophy. I knew I was missing out on something much more profound than the “it’s all good” theory. I realized that I had no connection to God. I wanted what Ahmed had — a solid relationship with the Divine — but I was afraid of Islam. It seemed kind of tricky, and you had to actually work at being a Muslim; that didn’t sound easy, or let’s face it, fun. I just didn’t want to consider it.

A couple of years later we had a baby girl. Ahmed whispered the Adhan, (the Muslim call to prayer) in her ear only moments after she was born. She would be a Muslim.

Reminiscent of the promise made by the miller’s daughter to Rumpelstiltskin, the time had come for me to keep my promise to raise my daughter as a Muslim. As I looked into her sweet, tiny face, I told her I’d figure out this Islam thing for her and give her what I didn’t have as a child — open discussion about God and faith, and a framework with which to structure her life. I would make sure that she would have confidence in her relationship with God and an identity that would hold her true. I told her I would read the Quran, and learn about Islam to make sure it would be good for her.

I kept my promise. As I began to read the Quran, a miraculous book of verse and wisdom, I found my beloved and blessed Prophets Abraham, Moses, Joseph and Jesus. I found common-sense instructions about commerce and trade; I read beautiful verses that described the magnificence of the earth, its creatures, and my responsibility towards their care.

I studied the life of Prophet Muhammad, God’s blessings be with him; and because every aspect of his life on earth was chronicled by his followers and carefully preserved, I was able to consider his story as a historical document.

Muhammad laughed; he cried; he showed displeasure and frustration. He was gentle, but firm; and he was strong yet vulnerable. I was inspired and moved by the fact he took the counsel of his wife, Khadijah. I loved it that he needed her comfort and strength as he began to receive Divine revelations through the Angel Gabriel. The early female followers of Islam questioned the blessed Prophet in the mosque on matters of law and social justice, and he gave them equal time and an equal voice. In his last sermon, Muhammad admonished the future generations of Muslim men to respect and cherish their wives and daughters.

After about a year of reading and thinking, my brain made a connection to my heart, which sparked my soul into life. I felt God speaking to me through the Quran and the life of this pure-hearted Messenger. I had set out to vet a religion for my daughter, but while doing this promised research for her I found God, and Islam found me.

Kari Ansari is a writer, editor, marketing consultant, co-creator of the popular America’s Muslim Family Magazine and Muslim Family Bookshelf blog, and one of the founders of the Muslim Family Life Foundation.

Mrs. Ansari and her husband established America’s Muslim Family Magazine in 2003 to help fill the void of Muslim media in America. The magazine offered a positive and refreshing look at life for Muslims in America. Through its pages the magazine dealt with issues pertinent to Muslims living in the United States and encouraged active participation in government, the education system, and all aspects of American life.

In addition to her work in publishing, Mrs. Ansari uses her more than 20 years of experience in direct marketing and advertising as a marketing consultant specializing in the Muslim niche market. She has helped American companies approach the Muslim target market with cultural confidence, while at the same time she works with Muslim organizations to bridge the divide into the mainstream American marketplace.

Mrs. Ansari was born and educated in the United States and is a convert to Islam. She has been an active member of the Muslim community for more than a dozen years, working toward the positive inclusion of Muslims into the mainstream American society. She has four children ranging in age from 21 to 8. She and her husband, Ahmed, a native of India, currently live in Northern Virginia.

Source: Huffingtonpost.com. Read her other articles: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kari-ansari

Picture:https://www.americasmuslimfamily.com/americas-muslim-family/images/indexImages/summer2006/Cover600px.jpg

IslamiCity, 12 April 2009.

There are many stories that contemporary imams rarely tell their congregations. The story of Mukhayriq, a rabbi from Medina, is one such story. I have heard the stories about the battle of Uhud, one of prophet Muhammad’s (SAW) major battles with his Meccan enemies, from imams and Muslim preachers hundreds of times, but not once have I heard the story of Mukhayriq, who died fighting in that battle against the enemies of Islam.

So, I will tell the story of Rabbi Mukhayriq — the first Jewish martyr of Islam. It is quite apropos, as the season of spiritual holidays has begun.

Mukhayriq was a wealthy and learned leader of the tribe of Tha’labah. He fought with Prophet Muhammad (SAW) in the battle of Uhud on March 19, 625 AD, and was martyred in it. That day was a Saturday. Rabbi Mukhayriq addressed his people and asked them to go with him to help Muhammad (SAW). His tribe’s men declined, saying that it was the day of Sabbath. Mukhayriq chastised them for not understanding the deeper meaning of Sabbath and announced that if he died in the battle, his entire wealth should go to Muhammad (SAW).

Mukhayriq died in battle against the Meccans. And when Muhammad (SAW), who was seriously injured in that battle, was informed about that death of Mukhayriq, Muhammad (SAW) said, “He was the best of Jews.”

Muhammad (SAW) inherited seven gardens and other forms of wealth from Mukhayriq. Muhammad (SAW) used this wealth to establish the first waqf — a charitable endowment — of Islam. It was from this endowment that the Prophet of Islam helped many poor people in Medina.

When Muhammad (SAW) migrated form Mecca to Medina in 622, he signed a treaty with the various tribes that lived in and around Medina. Many of these tribes had embraced Islam, some were pagan and others were Jewish. All of them signed the treaty with Muhammad (SAW) that is referred to by historians as the Constitution of Medina. The first Islamic state, a multi-tribal and multi-religious state, established by Muhammad (SAW) in Medina, was based on this social contract.

According to article 2 of the constitution, all the tribes who were signatories to the treaty constituted one nation (Ummah). Mukhayriq’s people, too, were signatories to this treaty and were obliged to fight with Muhammad (SAW) in accordance with article 37 of the constitution, which says: “The Jews must bear their expenses and the Muslims their expenses. Each must help the other against anyone who attacks the people of this document. They must seek mutual advice and consultation, and loyalty is a protection against treachery. A man is not liable for his ally’s misdeeds. The wronged must be helped.”

In a way, Rabbi Mukhayriq, who was also a well-respected scholar of Jews in Medina, was merely being a good citizen and was fulfilling a social contract. But his story is fantastic, especially for our times, when we are struggling to build bridges between various religious communities. Mukhayriq’s loyalty, his bravery, his sacrifice and his generosity are inspirational.

Perhaps it is about people like Mukhayriq that the Quran says: “And there are, certainly, among Jews and Christians, those who believe in God, in the revelation to you, and in the revelation to them, bowing in humility to God. They will not sell the Signs of God for a miserable gain! For them is a reward with their Lord” (3:199).

Mukhayriq was a true citizen of the state of Medina, and he gave his life in its defense. He was a Jew, and he was a true Islamic hero, and his story must never be forgotten.

If Muslim imams told his story, I am confident that it would contribute to manifestations of increased tolerance by Muslims toward others. There are many such wonderful examples of brotherhood, tolerance, sacrifice and good citizenship in Islamic traditions that undergird the backbone of Islamic ethics. I wish we told them more often.

Dr. Muqtedar Khan is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. He is also the Director of the Islamic Studies Program. He earned his Ph.D. in International Relations, Political Philosophy, and Islamic Political Thought, from Georgetown University.

Source: Delaware Online

http://www.islamicity.com/articles/Articles.asp?ref=IC0912-4008

But at the same time Islam claims a societal role for humans, and not simply a peripheral role but one in which society is viewed holistically, as greater than the sum of its parts – almost as a complex organism in its own right. And this role of society as a dynamic complex system intersects and overlaps with the role of the individual. So the Qur’an speaks of “ummatin” (the larger community) as having a collective fate, a collective life, a collective responsibility that interacts in a dynamic manner with each individual that is part of the society. And it doesn’t speak of the life of a community in an entirely allegorical or philosophical way but rather as having its own reality and therefore a responsibility and a destiny. “Every society will be called to its book.” (Qur’an 45:28) Just as individuals have a book that is a record of the reality of what they are and which is used to judge them and determine their fate, so too does every society have a book and a judgment awaiting them.

The Qur’an also implies a collective mode of thinking for each society -“We have adorned for each society their acts.” (Qur’an 6:108) So identification with a group and an admiration of the acts of that group is an instinct built into human beings. Every group has a particular taste, a particular aesthetic and a way of looking at things that makes their own achievements seem more pleasing than those of other groups. We value what we are familiar and comfortable with and we value that which originates from our own society (we have a group identity, a national identity that interacts and intersects with our individual identity) and we often devalue or deem as irrelevant or as something to be subsumed, that which is outside of our own societies.

So built into human nature are two modes of thinking that co-exist and overlap one another – individual thinking, and a complex, evolving, shifting ecosystem of group-thinking. This instinct to be part of a group is extremely powerful, whether the group is a nation, a culture, a sub-culture, a group of philosophers one identifies with, a political grouping, liberal, conservative, progressive, socialist, neo-con, political hawks, groups united on specific prejudices, groupings based on arts, music, business, corporations, commercial brands, technology, military forces, anarchists, internet discussion groups, groups of like-minded bloggers, groups that adhere single-mindedly to past traditions…groups that overturn tradition…and so on….

The impulse and need to form and participate in groups is a pattern built into the nature of humans, and while on one level our thinking is individual, on another it is, almost subconsciously, collective. Our individual consciousness evolves in the milieu of a complex, interconnected mental ecosystem where group ethics and a collective spirit and intention in action arises. Collective modes of thought emerge due to shared opinion, ideological direction, and will. So a society or group can take on the characteristics of a single complex individual and be viewed in that manner. And just as there is a limited lifespan for individuals there is also a term, a limit, a timeframe governed by a variety of conditions for the survival of any given mental ecosystem. When the life and vitality in the ideas around which a society or group congregates fades, weakens, or degenerates, that society, that manifestation of ideology and social structure reaches the end of its term, the end of its functional societal lifespan.

“And for every society there is a term, so when (the conditions of) their term is fulfilled they shall not remain behind, nor shall they go before.” (Qur’an 7:34)

So there arises a responsibility laid out not only by the Prophet but by revelation (the Qur’an) and by the reality and nature of societies and the laws which govern them. They have a life and death and an existence for a given span and will be called to an accounting (to their book). And so the Qur’an calls for people who will “rise up for Allah’s sake in twos and singly” (Qur’an 34:46) as the conscience of a society, as those who impart life to societies which blindly lay the foundations of their own demise and the conditions of their own degeneration. These will not approve group-think when it merits disapproval, nor allow a societal nafs-amarra to overrun their individual nafs-lawwama, but will act instead on carefully considered knowledge and inner conscience. Approval and disapproval takes on a metaphysical quality as the individual binds or distances himself from the reality which a society or group generates for themselves – and so we each are called upon to write our part, to manifest our corrective role in society’s unfolding “book”.

“Truly what unites the people and imparts to them a common shared (negative or positive) destiny consists in individual approval and disapproval.” (Imam Ali – Nahjul Balagha)

- Irshaad Hussain

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This is a Downing Street “clarification”. When the deputy prime minister says illegal, he means legal. When he says disastrous, he means brilliant. When he says black, he is fumbling for the word white.

On Wednesday Nick Clegg stood at the dispatch box and described the Iraq war as “the most disastrous decision of all” and the invasion of Iraq as “illegal”. Downing Street hurriedly explained that what he actually meant was that the invasion was a triumph of British arms and as lawful as driven snow.

Earlier in the week, the head of MI5 at the time of the war, Lady Manningham-Buller, had vindicated Clegg’s statement. So, too, had earlier evidence from Lord Goldsmith, the then attorney general. To Downing Street, this was of no matter. Clegg was caught between the whirring flywheel of truth and the crashing gears of a mendacious diplomacy. He was torn to shreds.

The Liberal Democrat leader appears to have come unqualified to the task of high office. When pushed against the wall by the arch-warmonger, Jack Straw, he showed himself a serial truth-teller. While this handicap may not be insuperable at home, in foreign affairs it is a killer. Clegg was supposed to lie under political torture, and failed.

David Cameron, who is intelligent enough to agree with Clegg, was in a difficult position. He was visiting Barack Obama in Washington at the time. He knows, with the US president, that Afghanistan is the next most disastrous decision after Iraq. The two men can say that in private, but not in public. There they have to present Afghanistan as a great victory for Nato, a triumph of liberal interventionism. Britain and the US are marching to war shoulder to shoulder against Johnny Taliban and the mussulmen. Defeat is not an option.

Cameron and Obama have emerged from this first bilateral meeting as sensible men who must somehow navigate their respective ways from an inherited war to an honourable peace, amid a western foreign policy that has spent a decade drenched in sophistry.

Commentators are often asked to predict history’s verdict on a particular era, and are well advised to decline. But it is hard not to see western policy in the first decade of the 21st century as sunk in a morass of folly. It was subcontracted to a defence lobby desperate for a role, which it found in exploiting weak leaders by playing on the ideology of fear.

As a result, at the end of the decade western states found themselves spending more money to become less safe, with their global interests more at risk than at the start. The legacy of the victory over communism was squandered. In Britain, policy failed the Ernie Bevin test, that a citizen should be able to buy a ticket at Victoria station and go anywhere he damn well pleases.

This has applied not just to the blood-thirsty horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has applied to the stance taken against other peoples opposed to these wars, such as Iran and Pakistan. It has led the US and Britain into contentious relations with the entire Muslim world, fuelling anti-western sentiment not only across Asia but, as Manningham-Buller pointed out, among Muslim populations within the west. The last decade has seen an entire foreign policy elite lose the art of friendship. Bred under the communist threat, the west’s leaders craved a mighty enemy and found it by exaggerating the threat from militant Islam and elevating terrorist gangs to the status of state enemies.

As a result, British policy has relied on one outdated premise after another. It relies on the collective security of Nato, long detached from its supposed purpose and entombed in the citadels of Kabul. It relies on Trident submarine missiles, on an “out of area” fleet and on aerial combat jets, all archaic cold war deterrents. It has an obsession with nuclear weapons that has bred an equal obsession in countries that lack them. Yet it can barely afford a helicopter.

The enmity of states has given rise to the deployment of other counter-productive crudities, such as sanctions on Iran, trade barriers against the developing world and the exchange of rhetorical abuse, beloved of George Bush and his amanuensis, Tony Blair. These two seemed at times to mimic Plato’s tyrants, “always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader”.

The past decade has been an age of pretence, of the US pretending to police the world, of Britain pretending to be its deputy, of Europe pretending to be America, of Russia pretending to an empire, and of China pretending wealth can substitute for democracy. Europe’s Lisbon treaty pretended it could fashion a new state from the crooked timber of Europe’s national identities and economies, bringing the common currency close to collapse.

Bush and Blair treated the world as an enemy – “He who is not with us is against us”. From French surrender monkeys to Chinese traders, from Latin American drug growers to British computer hackers, from international lawyers to UN mediators, every alien was a suspect foe. Foreign policy lurched into paranoid mode. Guantánamo filled with victims and ludicrous sums were spent on security. The world responded in kind. Airports became nests of xenophobia.

This was nowhere better demonstrated than in Blair’s dreadful January appearance before the Chilcot inquiry, which now meekly claims to be unconcerned with the legality of the Iraq war (so what is it concerned with?). All evidence has testified that the war was a mistake and undermined Britain’s security. Blair’s contradictory display of pro-war self-delusion, arrogance and folly should be a textbook video for any school of 21st-century statesmanship.

Though Cameron’s public remarks on foreign policy so far have seemed reactionary, especially on the war, he learns fast, and is comfortable at summits and in bilateral encounters. His preamble to this week’s successful visit to Washington rejected the past emphasis on a special relationship and recognised that Britain was a “junior partner” but a partner “of choice”. It had its own view of the world. Subsequent confused signals over an Afghanistan withdrawal have hinted that Britain may at last realise some leverage over US war policy.

Everyone wants to leave Afghanistan, the only question being how and when. Britain has more than a stake in this. To leave only the US hopelessly fighting the Taliban would visit on Washington an even lonelier defeat than is implied by the current talk of a phased withdrawal. Obama is on a painful hook. It is for Britain to help him off it without the senseless slaughter of more soldiers.

The prize before these two leaders is now great, of bringing the mendacious bravado of the past decade into line with reality on the ground. It is to end two unnecessary wars and rebuild trust with a Muslim world that has no more interest in the pestilence of terror than does the west. It is to accept that the world is not a place of blocs but of individual states, each with divergent interests and fears. It is to realise colossal savings in defence spending and to shift the emphasis of foreign policy from state-sponsored paranoia to global trade and prosperity.

Clegg is right. So if Cameron cannot yet tell the truth, he can at least mean what Clegg says.

This article was written by Simon Jenkins and was first published in The Guardian, 22 July 2010. Read the original article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/22/clegg-truth-iraq

The initial and quite understandable response of many newcomers (to Islam) is to become an absolutist. Everything going on among pious Muslims is angelic; everything outside the circle of the faith is demonic. The appeal of this outlook lies in its simplicity. The newly rearranged landscape upon which the convert looks is seen in satisfying black and white terms of: them versus us; good against evil.

This mindset is sometimes called convertitis. It is a common illness, which can make those who have caught it rather difficult to deal with. Fortunately, it almost always wears off. The only exceptions are those weak souls who imagine that the buzz of excitement caused by their absolutist, Manichean division of the world was a necessary part of Islamic piety, or even that it has some spiritual significance. Such people are often condemned to wander from faction to faction, always joining something new, in an attempt to regain the initial excitement engendered by their conversion.

Most new Muslims, however, soon see through this. A majority of people come to Islam for real spiritual or intellectual reasons, and will continue with their quest once they are inside Islam. Becoming Muslim is, after all, only the first step to felicity. Those individuals who adopt Islam because they need an identity will be condemned to wander the sectarian and factional hall of mirrors, constantly looking for the perfect group that will give them their desperately needed sense of speciality and superiority.

But actions are by intentions. A hundred years ago the founder of the Anglo-Muslim movement, Imam Abdullah Quilliam, in Liverpool, was writing that those British people who convert for Allah and His Messenger would, by the grace of God, be rightly guided. Those who convert for any other reason are in serious spiritual trouble. Just as the salah (i.e. prayer) is invisibly invalidated if the niyyah (i.e. intention) at its outset is not correct, similarly, Islam will not work for us unless we have entered it in faith, out of a sincere quest for God’s good pleasure. If things are not going right for us, if we find no delight in our prayers, if Ramadan simply makes us hungry, if we cannot seem to find the right mosque or the right company to take us forward, then we would do well to start by examining our intentions. Did we become Muslims only, and purely, to bring our souls to God? Other reasons: solidarity with the oppressed, admiration for Muslims we know, desire to join a group, the love of a woman – none of these are adequate foundations for our lives as Muslims deserving of Allah’s grace and guidance. Imam al-Qushayri says that spiritual aspirants are only deprived of attainment when they neglect the foundations. So we need to look within, and if necessary, renew our faith, following the Prophetic Sunnah. Renew your iman, a celebrated Hadith enjoins.

So what are we? Statistically, perhaps, fifty thousand people. But once we have taken the plunge, and enjoyed the feel of Islam, and come to know through experience, rather than through reading books, that Islam is a way of sobriety, dignity, poise and rewarding spirituality, what exactly is our self-definition? When we meet family and friends who are not Muslim, how do we carry ourselves? Do we treat Islam as a great secret? A discreet eccentricity that we hope people will not be so crude as to mention? Or, on the contrary, something we wear on our sleeves, feeling that it is our duty constantly to steer the conversation back into sacred quarters, confronting people with Islam, that they might have no argument against us at the Resurrection?

More generally, what is our view of the wider world of unbelief, which, despite the breathless predictions of some of our co-religionists, continues to grow more powerful and more prosperous? How much of it can we affirm, and how much of it must we publicly or privately disown?

We can, of course, take the easy way out, and avoid engaging with these questions, by retreating from the mainstream of society, and consorting only with Muslims. But this is not so easy. We need to be employed, since this is pleasing to God; and we need to maintain good ties with our relations, since this is also enjoined in the Hadith. “Keep company with them both in the world in keeping with good custom”, (31:15) says the Qur’an to converts who have unbelieving parents. And the Hadith explains that non-Muslim parents have significant rights over their Muslim children.

But more significantly than this fact, to solve the problems thrown at us and at our identity by the real world outside the mosque gates, we need to engage regularly with non-Muslim society. But for this, there would be no effective d‘awah. People do not hear the word of Islam, generally, by being shouted at by some demagogue at Speakers Corner, or by reading some angry little pamphlet pushed into their hand by a wandering distributor of tracts. They convert through personal experience of Muslims. And this takes place, overwhelmingly, at the workplace. Other social contexts are closed to us: the pub, the beach, the office party. But work is a prime environment for being noticed, and judged, as Muslims.

There is nothing remotely new in this. Islam has always spread primarily through social interactions connected with work. The early Muslims who conquered half the world did not set up soapboxes in the town squares of Alexandria, Cordoba or Fez, in the hope that Christians would flock to them and hear their preaching. They did business with the Christians; and their nobility and integrity of conduct won the Christians over. That is the model followed by Muslims, particularly the Sufis, down the ages; and it is the one that we must retain today, by interacting honourably and respectfully with non-Muslims in our places of work, as much as we can.

If this is clear, then my initial question still begs a response. What is a British Muslim? What kind of creature is he/she? The public consensus has clear ideas about other British identities: British Anglican, British Jew, British Asian Muslim or Hindu: all these are recognised categories, and a certain community of expected response governs interactions between the majority and these groups. The Anglo-Muslim, however, is not a generally recognised type.

My own belief is that the future prosperity of the Anglo-Muslim movement will be determined largely by our ability to answer this question of identity. It is a question mainly for converts, but, which many of whose dimensions, will come to apply also to second-generation immigrant Muslims here, who have their own questions to ask themselves and this culture about what, exactly, they are.

To frame a response, I think it is useful to step back a little, and consider the larger picture of Islamic history of which we form a very small part. I mentioned earlier that Islam usually spread through the utilisation of commercial opportunities as opportunities for d‘awah. That picture is one of the most extraordinary success stories in religious history. Compare, for instance, the way in which the Muslim world was Islamised to the way in which the Americans were Christianised. Islamisation proceeded with remarkable gentleness at the hands of Sufis and merchants. Christianisation used mass extermination of the native Americans, the baptism of uncomprehending survivors, and the baleful scrutiny by the Inquisition of any signs of backsliding. A more extreme contrast would be impossible to find.

Perhaps no less extraordinary than this contrast is its interesting concomitant: Christianisation brought Europeanisation. Islamisation did not bring Arabisation. The churches built by the Puritans or the Conquistadors in the New World were deliberate replicas of churches in Europe. The mosques constructed in the areas gradually won for Islam are endlessly diverse, and reflect and indeed celebrate local particularities. Christianity is a universal religion that has historically sought to impose a universal metropolitan culture. Islam is a universal religion that has consistently nurtured a particularist provincial culture. A church in Mexico City resembles a church in Salamanca. A mosque in Nigeria, or Istanbul, or Djakarta, resembles only in key respects the patterns, now purified and uplifted by monotheism, of the indigenous regional patrimony.

No less remarkable is the ability of the Muslim liberators to accommodate those aspects of local, pre-Islamic tradition, which did not clash, absolutely with the truths of revelation. In entering new lands, Muslims were armed with the generous Qur’anic doctrine of Universal Apostleship; as the Qur’an says: “To every nation there has been sent a guide”, (35:24).

This conflicts sharply with the classical Christian view of salvation as hinging uniquely on one historical intervention of the divine in history: the salvific sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. Non-Christian religions were, in classical Christianity, seen as demonic and under the sign of original sin. But classical Islam has always been able and willing to see at least fragments of an authentic divine message in the faiths and cultures of non-Muslim peoples. If God has assured us that every nation has received divine guidance, then we can look with some favour on the Other.

Those who believe that Muslim communities can only flourish if they ghettoise themselves and refuse to interact with majority communities would do well to look at Chinese history. Many of the leading mandarins of Ming China were in fact Muslims. Wang Dai-Yu, for instance, who died in 1660, was a Muslim scholar who received the title of Master of the Four Religions because of his complete knowledge of China’s four religions: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Many of the leading admirals in the navy of the Ming Empire were practising Muslims.

In China, mosques look very like traditional Chinese garden-temples, except that there is a prayer hall without idols, and the calligraphy is Qur’anic. In some of the most beautiful, you will find, as you enter, the following words in Chinese inscribed on a tablet:  “Sages have one mind and the same truth. In all parts of the world, sages arise who possess this uniformity of mind and truth. Muhammad, the Great Sage of the West, lived in Arabia long after Confucius, the Sage of China. Though separated by ages and countries, they had the same mind and Truth.”

In these examples from India and China, we see a practical confirmation of Islam’s proclamation of itself as the final, and hence universal, message from God. In a hadith we learn: Other prophets were sent only to their own peoples, while I am sent to all mankind.

It is not that the Qur’anic worldview affirms other religions as fully adequate paths to salvation. In fact, it clearly does not. But it allows the Muslim, as he encounters new worlds, to sift the wheat from the chaff in non-Muslim cultures, rejecting some things, to be sure, but maintaining others. In Islamic law, too, we find that shara‘ liman qablana, the revealed laws of those who came before us, can under certain conditions be accepted as valid legal precedent, if they are not demonstrably abrogated by an Islamic revealed source. And Islamic law also recognises the authority of ‘urf, local customary law, so that a law or custom is acceptable, and may be carried over into an Islamic culture or jurisdiction, if no Islamic revealed principle is thereby violated. Hence, we find the administration of Islamic law varying from country to country. If a wife complains of receiving insufficient dower from her husband, the qadi (judge) will make reference to what is considered normal in their culture and social group, and adjudge accordingly.

All of these historical observations have, I hope, served to make quite a simple point: Islam, as a universal religion, in fact as the only legitimately universal religion, also makes room for the particularities of the peoples who come into it. The traditional Muslim world is a rainbow, an extraordinary patchwork of different cultures, all united by a common adherence to the doctrinal and moral patterns set down in Revelation. Put differently, Revelation supplies parameters, hudud, rather than a complete blueprint for the details of cultural life. Local mindsets are Islamised, but remain distinct.

This point is obvious to anyone who has studied Islamic thought or Islamic history. I reiterate it today only because some Muslims nowadays reject it fiercely. Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy.

These young people, who haunt our mosques and shout at any sign of disagreement, are either ignorant of Muslim history, or dismiss it as a gigantic mistake. For them, the grace and rahmah (mercy) of Allah has for some reason been withheld from all but a tiny fraction of the ummah (Muslim community). These people are the elect; and all disagreement with them is a blasphemy against God.

We cannot hope easily to cure such people. Simple proofs from our history or our scholarship will not suffice. What they need is a sense of security, and that, given the deteriorating conditions of both the Muslim world and of the ghettos in Western cities, may not come readily. For now, it is best to ignore their shouts and their melodramatic but always ill-fated activities. Our psychic problems are not theirs; and theirs can never be ours.

Islam is, and will continue to be, even amid the miserable globalisation of modern culture, a faith that celebrates diversity. Our thinking about our own position as British Muslims should focus on that fact, and quietly but firmly ignore the protests both of the totalitarian fringe, and of the importers of other regional cultures, such as that of Pakistan, which they regard as the only legitimate Islamic ideal.

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad graduated from Cambridge University with a double-first in Arabic in 1983. He then lived in Cairo for three years, studying Islam under traditional teachers at Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world. . Since 1992 he has been a doctoral student at Oxford University, specializing in the religious life of the early Ottoman Empire. Shaikh Abdal Hakim is the translator of a number of works, including two volumes from Imam al-Ghazali’s Ihya Ulum al-Din He appears frequently on BBC Radio and writes occasionally for a number of publications, including The Independent; Q-News International, Britain’s premier Muslim Magazine; and Seasons, the semiacademic journal of Zaytuna Institute

http://www.monthly-renaissance.com/issue/content.aspx?id=66

http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/default.htm

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By Gary Younge

The Guardian, Sunday 4^th July 2010

Last Wednesday newly released documents revealed evidence that, in a less degraded political culture, would have produced a scandal. The Chilcot inquiry heard that the then attorney general, the government’s chief legal adviser, explicitly warned Tony Blair that an invasion without further United Nations approval would be illegal.

“In view of your meeting with President Bush, I thought you might wish to know where I stand on the question of whether a further decision of the UN security council is legally required in order to authorise the use of force against Iraq. My view remains that a further [UN] decision is required,” wrote Lord Goldsmith. As if further clarification were necessary, a handwritten note, assumed to be written by Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning, warned: “Clear advice from attorney on need for further resolution.”

Unable to say he hadn’t been told, Blair instead behaved as though English had just become a foreign language. “I just don’t understand this,” he wrote in the margins. The very next day he flew to Washington and told George Bush he was “solidly with the president” regardless of what the UN did. Put bluntly, it is irrefutable proof that the British prime minister was willing to flout international law.

A few hours after the document’s release, across the Thames in a sweaty room in Lambeth, the Labour leadership contenders went through their paces. Each argued that under their guidance the next Labour government would listen so that it could learn, and inspire so that it could lead. Each paid homage to fairness, equality and empowerment while struggling to differentiate themselves. The lack of ventilation in the room and engagement from the stage induced a strange compulsive torpor. You couldn’t look away because there was nowhere else to look, but you couldn’t listen because they spoke in a parliamentary patois that mixed English with some obscure institutional inflection. It was as though Charlie Brown’s teacher were standing for leader of the opposition, her words turning to an unintelligible drone by the time they reached the back of the hall.

You would think there might have been a connection between these two events. The inquiry marked another crucial moment in an investigation that is revealing the true extent of duplicity and criminality within a Labour government that led up to an unpopular and calamitous war; the hustings are a bid by members of that self-same party to renew its credibility and purpose after a crushing defeat at the polls.

But in two fetid hours, Iraq never came up. Not a single candidate uttered its name from the podium and not a single question about it came from the floor. The whole evening was like a cross between Seinfeld andFawlty Towers – a show about nothing in which nobody mentioned the war.

That many of us who opposed the war and still oppose the occupation find this problematic is no surprise. It was the most defining personal political choice of the decade and, ethically speaking, not a remotely tough call. The fact that it was illegal adds judicial finality to a moment of moral clarity; but even within the law, it would have been wrong. The ramifications were not only predictable but predicted. Hundreds of thousands murdered, even more displaced, the unleashing of sectarian violence. Getting that wrong speaks to a major, murderous error of judgment.

True, it had come up in previous leadership debates, and will undoubtedly come up again. But the frontrunner, David Miliband, would like us all to move on and, if Wednesday is anything to go by, seems to be getting his way.

“You’ve punished us enough about Iraq,” he told Labour voters before the election. “The purpose of these elections is how we build a better tomorrow,” he told the Telegraph at the weekend. “Not how we debate a better yesterday.”

This is a curious piece of logic. The best indication of what people will do with power is to look at what they did when they had it. For what we do tomorrow is inevitably bound up with what we did yesterday. People who made grievous errors yesterday shouldn’t be trusted to make intelligent decisions tomorrow unless they are able to account for their mistakes today. In truth they haven’t been punished even nearly enough. They should be in jail.

The attempt to paint those who still raise these arguments as obsessives mired in paradigms past misses both the point and an opportunity. The point is that the occupation is still going on, and the other war to which it is inextricably bound, in Afghanistan, is still going wrong. “The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common,” wrote the 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan. “And must have forgotten many things as well.” But in the past people had the decency to at least wait until things had finished happening before they started forgetting them.

The opportunity Iraq provides is to understand what went wrong in government as a means to restoring trust within the party and the country, which would be indispensable for any serious effort to commence an ideological, moral and political renewal. There are, without doubt, many other vital issues. But there are few that encapsulate the issues Labour needs to grapple with, whether you supported the war or not.

Among other things, Iraq raises the following questions: What does a Labour government do when it is presented with facts that contradict its convictions? How does it respond when most of the country demands that it change course? When have the candidates put their consciences before their careers? What internal democratic mechanisms exist within the Labour party to check the will of a determined leader? How does it deal with dissenters and dissent within its own ranks? How would a Labour government respond when it has clearly made a mistake?

It is not the only prism through which Labour’s period in office can or even should be examined; but it is the only one that brings together those fundamental questions in one issue.

In an ideologically crowded field, it also provides a rare distinction between the candidates. There’s only so long they can ignore this elephant in the room before it takes a dump on the carpet. Andy Burnham is proud to have supported it; Diane Abbott is proud she didn’t; David Miliband regrets supporting it and even having the issue raised; Ed Miliband and Ed Balls weren’t in parliament for the vote and, while neither spoke out against it, now say it was wrong. But the other reason why it is important is because it is unavoidable.

When giving examples of why Labour should listen more, a few candidates mentioned the 10p tax rate, an important subject to be sure but not the one that produced the largest demonstration in the history of the country or killed anybody. When asked about whether Labour had got the balance right between civil liberties and protecting the country from terrorism, David Miliband recalled sitting in Downing Street on 7 July 2005 and asking himself: “Could we have done anything to prevent this?” Well they could have not invaded Iraq, which every investigation has shown was the primary thing that made Britain a target.

It is precisely because the issue is so toxic that the poison must be drawn. For only then can Labour be dragged from its sick bed and stand for something more than just elections.

We often wish we could enter the hearts of our loved ones and see them from the inside, so we could truly know them. That wish hardly ever gets fulfilled and when it does, in rare moments, the glimpses are faint and fleeting. Moreover, what we see there does not always please us. But there is one exception, and in this case we are extremely fortunate. It is Muhammad (sallallhu alayhi wa sallam) who Muslims are supposed to love most of all human beings. We can enter the deepest recesses of his heart, and the view does not disappear. It stays still for us, and what we see there never fails to please us.

To enter Muhammad’s (saws) heart and see what is there we have to turn to his innumerable du’as, or supplications to Allah. There was hardly a moment in his life when Muhammad (saws) was not making some du’a: standing, sitting, lying down, in private and in public, for everything he did, big or small, in every situation he faced, in joy, in sorrow, in hardship and in ease. Du’as were the very breath of his life. It is with these du’as that every element of his life was consecrated; nothing profane remained. His life became a single unbroken act of worship. Let us look at some of his du’as in their English translation:

• O Allah, I am Your servant, the son of Your servant, the son of Your maid-servant, and entirely at your service. You hold me by my forelock. Your decree is what controls me, and Your commands to me are just. I beseech You by every one of Your names, those which You use to refer to Yourself, or have revealed in Your Book, or have taught to any one of Your creation, or have chosen to keep hidden with You in the Unseen, to make the Qur’an al-Karim the springtime of my heart, the light of my eyes, the departure of my grief, and the vanishing of my affliction and my sorrow.
• Allah! Unto You do I submit, in You do I believe, upon You do I depend, Unto You do I turn, For You do I contend; Unto You do I seek judgment. So forgive me for what I did and will do, for what I concealed and what I declared, and for that of which You are more knowledgeable than I.
• O Allah! You are my Lord, there is no deity but You. You created me and I am Your slave-servant. And I am trying my best to keep my oath of faith to You and to seek to live in the hope of Your promise. I seek refuge in You from my greatest evil deeds. I acknowledge your blessings upon me and I acknowledge my sins. So forgive me for none but You can forgive sins.
• All Praise is due to You, O Allah! You are the Sustainer of the heavens and of the earth and whatever is in them. Praise be to You; and Yours be the domain of the heavens and the earth and whatever is in them. Praise be to You; You are the Light of the heavens and the earth and whatever is in them. Praise be to You.
• Our Lord and Lord of everything! I give witness that You alone are the Lord, and that You have no partner. Our Lord and Lord of everything! I give witness that Muhammad is Your servant and Prophet. Our Lord and Lord of everything! I give witness that all men are brothers. Our Lord and Lord of everything! Make me and my family sincere to You in every hour of this life and the next. O Splendid and Majestic One, hear me and reply! Allah is the Greatest, the Greatest; Light of the Heavens and the Earth! Allah is the Greatest. Allah suffices me and there is no one better than Him to trust in.
• You are the Truth. Your promise is true, meeting with You is true, Your word is true, Paradise is true, Hell is true, Muhammad sallallhu alayhi wa sallam is true, the Hour of Judgment is true.
• Glory be to Allah and grace is His as great as the number of His creatures, the extent of His domain, and the ink needed to write down His countless signs of presence, omnipresence, and grace.
• O Allah! Grant me light in my heart, light in my sight, light in my hearing, light to my right, light to my left, light above me, light underneath me, light before me, light behind me, and grant me light.
• Our Lord, by Your knowledge of the Unseen, and by Your power over Your creation, grant me life so long as You know life to hold good for me, and grant me death when You know death to hold good for me! Our Lord, I ask You for the fear of You in public and in private, and I ask You for the ability to speak the word of truth in tranquility and in anger, and I ask You for frugality in wealth and in poverty, and I ask You for happiness which is never exhausted and I ask You for pleasure which is never ending, and I ask You for contentment with Your decisions, and I ask You for the finer life after death, and I ask You for the pleasure of looking upon Your face, and meeting You without ever having undergone great suffering, and without ever having been subjected to misleading temptation.
• O Allah! I ask You for vitality in this life and the one to come. Allah I ask for Your forgiveness and well-being in my practice of religion, my life, my family and my wealth. Allah! Cover over my faults and set my fears at ease. Allah! Protect me from before me, and from behind me, and on my right, and on my left, and from above, and I seek refuge in You from all attempts to undermine me.
• O Allah, have mercy on me! Do not leave me alone for even a moment, and put my affairs in order, there is no God but You.
• In the name of Allah I go out; I place my trust in Allah! O Allah, I seek refuge in You from bring made to stumble, from straying and from being made to stray, from doing wrong to others and from being wronged by others, and from misunderstanding and from being misunderstood.
• O Allah, nothing is easy except what You make easy; and You make the difficult easy if it be Your will.
• O Allah! I seek refuge in You from the evil of my hearing, the evil of my sight, the evil of my tongue, and the evil of my heart.
• O Allah! I seek refuge in You from knowledge which does not benefit, from a heart which is not humble, from an inner self which is never satisfied, and from a prayer which is not answered.
• Allah! Change our hearts. Change our hearts to be obedient to You.
• Allah! I seek refuge in You from need except of You, and from meekness except before You, and from fear except of You. I seek refuge in You from my ever telling an untruth, or perpetrating indecency, of becoming overweening because of my relationship withYou. I seek refuge in You from the malice of enemies, incurable disease, shattered hope, withdrawal of favour, and the sudden fall of vengeance.
• O Allah. Make me live and die for You, oft-remembering You, humble before You, sighing, repentant. My Lord, accept my repentance, cleanse me of my misdeeds, answer my prayer, substantiate my plea, guide my heart, straighten my tongue and banish all ill-will from my breast.

  To Allah we belong, and to Him is our return. O Allah! You suffice me in disaster. So reward me for it and replace it with something which is good.

  Allah, unto You I complain of my weakness, of my helplessness, and of my lowliness before men. O Most Merciful of the merciful, You are Lord of the weak. And You at my Lord. Into whose hands will You entrust me? Unto some far off stranger who will ill-treat me? Or unto a foe whom You have empowered against me? I care not, so You be not angry with me. But Your favouring help-that were for me the broader way and the wider scope! I take refuge in the Light of Your Countenance whereby all darkness are illuminated and things of this world and the next are rightly ordered, lest You make Your anger descend upon me, or lest Your wrath beset me. Yet it is Yours to reproach until You art well pleased. There is no power and no might except through You. (du’a in the most distressful moment in Ta’if )

In his du’a, we find an entirely humble and ever wakeful heart totally immersed in the remembrance of Allah in all His power and glory. The remembrance is in love and joy, without a moment of forgetfulness. We find a heart that knows that Allah is everything and he himself is nothing. His heart is emptied of everything so that Allah can occupy it. It is in complete faqr, or absolute poverty waiting to be enriched with Allah’s forgiveness, mercy, guidance and help. There is not the slightest trace of pride or self-sufficiency. In these du’a we see a heart in unconditional submission to Allah’s will. We find a heart entirely humble before Allah and ever thankful to Him under all circumstances. We find a heart pleased with Allah, eager to please Him, loathe to displease Him. We find a heart willing to be patient and persevering. This wise heart understands that all that truly matters is the Akhirah (the Hereafter), not the duniya (this world), and that the duniya must not be purchased by selling the Akhirah. In short, we see the perfect heart of a perfect slave of Allah, a human heart that has attained its highest and noblest state.

Du’a spontaneously welled up in Muhammad’s (saws) heart in an ever flowing stream. It is as if they were just there in his heart, waiting silently to make an appearance at the most fitting moment. The words are simple, yet wonderfully precise, unimaginably solemn in tone, and absolutely clear in meaning. And how moving they are! Words pour out in smooth succession, throbbing with an emotional fervour unmatched anywhere else in language. The whole being of the utterer is in the utterance. Language seems to have transcended its usual barriers to become a perfect vehicle for the heart yearning to reach its Master. This is no poet deliberately trying to create effect: nothing short of miracle can account for it, and the miracle is Allah’s overflowing grace on the heart of His beloved Messenger.
Oh, what a heart Muhammad (saws) had! His heart was no narrow region, its compass and depth are beyond our comprehension. Let us try to imagine what kind of person he was to have a heart like this! Is there any one else in human history who had a heart like this and whose heart is laid bare so fully for our view? But we can do more than just view it, we can also enter this blessed heart and rest in its cool shade and be blessed until we draw our final breath.

Having once seen Muhammad (saws) through his du’as, what more does one need to know him? It is this humble, obedient and devout heart that Muhammad (saws) carried everywhere, and everything he said or did bears its imprint. The heart was the seed, the heart was the blossoming and flourishing plant, the heart was the fragrant flower, the heart was the sweet and nourishing fruit . The heart was everything. To miss this is to miss our beloved Prophet (saws) altogether.

Yet today we find scholars and thinkers, even Muslims, around us who write and talk about Muhammad (saws) while totally oblivious of his unique heart. The result is a gross misrepresentation of him. In their presentation of Muhammad (saws) minus his heart, nothing remains of him. They, in fact, present someone else who is not Muhammad (saws) at all; they present a fictitious character, born out of their own folly and blindness. In failing to see the kind of heart he had, they mistake the true identity of the perfect Slave and Messenger of Allah. May Allah save them from themselves and us from their harm!
My brothers and sisters, consider how blessed we have been to have such a person as our Messenger of Allah. Let us prostrate ourselves in thankfulness to Allah. Also consider how fortunate we have been to still possess all these treasures from Muhammad (saws). Every weary and thirsty traveler journeying through life can drink from this inexhaustible, pure and nourishing fountain. What better gift can anyone leave for others? What better friend or benefactor can there be for us? We ought to pray for those noble ancestors whose patient and painstaking labour of love has preserved and handed down to us these priceless treasures. Let us know Muhammad (saws) as he should be known. Let us enter his blessed heart and make our dwelling there. Let us have the heart to love and follow him with all our being. For that we have to tune our heart to his.

We love and follow Muhammad’s (saws) way to our own benefit beyond measure in this world and the Next. In this world, it will free us from the clutches of the many demons within and outside us who are ever ready to tear us into pieces. It will bring our life a harmony and tranquility that we cannot otherwise find. And the benefit in the Next World is incalculable. Each of us, prosperous or poor, happy or unhappy, will one day wake up to find ourselves destitute and helpless on a Day very unlike any we have experienced here and in a World very unlike the one we know here. That will be the Day of Judgement in the World of Akhirah. At that moment of sore need we will have none except Muhammad (saws) to come to our rescue. He alone will have Allah’s permission to plead with Allah to be merciful to us. All of us will need him on that Day of days, and truly our need will be great. By loving and following him now while there is yet time, we can lay the foundation of our hope on that Heart-rending Day.

Let us all rejoice in the limitless blessing we have in Muhammad (saws). Let us all joyfully say Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wassallm.

*****

A. K. M. Mohiuddin is a retired university professor of English literature living in Bangladesh. He can be reached at this address: akmm45 [at] yahoo [dot] com

[ This article originally appeared on www.islamicity.com ]

On 5 January 2009 the Israeli army rounded up around 65 Palestinians (including 11 women and 11 children under the age of 14) in Gaza, several of whom were waving white flags. After handcuffing the men and stripping them to their underwear, the soldiers marched their captives 2km north to al-Atatra and ordered them to climb into three pits, each three metres high and surrounded by barbed wire. The prisoners were forced to sit in stress positions, leaning forward with their heads down, and prohibited from talking to one another. On their first day they were denied food and water. On the second and third, each was given a sip of water and a single olive. On the fourth day the women and children were released and the men were transferred to military barracks.

It was just one of the stories to emerge from the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict conducted by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes and “possibly” crimes against humanity. But in a conflict that saw 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians killed compared with about 1,400 Gazans, Goldstone was particularly scathing about Israel’s “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population” – which he said amounted to “collective punishment”.

The Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobbies concentrated their displeasure not on the substance of Goldstone’s report but the essence of his identity. Branded a “self-hating Jew”, he was effectively barred from his grandson’s bar mitzvah after the South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket it. The prominent US constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz has described Goldstone as a “despicable human being”, “an evil, evil man”, “a traitor to the Jewish people” and the UN’s “token court Jew”.

Then this month came “revelations” from an Israeli newspaper that, as a judge under the apartheid regime, Goldstone sentenced black people to death. This, according to Israel’s government, discredits not only Goldstone but everything he discovered about Gaza and, by association, international criticism of the occupation. “Such a person should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists, who are not subject to the criteria of international moral norms,” argued the Knesset Speaker, Reuven Rivlin.

“Although he was involved in clear racist activity, he had no problem writing such a report,” said the chairman of the Knesset’s state control committee, Yoel Hasson, who called Goldstone a hypocrite. Not to be outdone, Dershowitz (a strident advocate of torture) has now likened Goldstone to the Nazi geneticist Josef Mengele.

This crude one-downmanship in identity politics has no winners and many losers. Facts about racism in the past cannot excuse realities about racism in the present. Playing off the legacy of South Africa’s townships against the plight of the captives of al-Atatra seeks not to alleviate the suffering of either group but in effect to dismiss them. But for all the hyperbole and absurdity, there are important principles at stake about who can claim moral authority, on what basis, and to what end.

Let’s start with the most obvious. This is a cynical ploy by the Israeli government to divert attention from the findings of the UN report. Government officials have almost said as much. A foreign ministry official described the investigation by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth as “explosive PR material”. Hasson claims: “Had [the Israeli foreign ministry discovered this earlier], it would have greatly helped us in our activity against the report.” But the report is about Gaza, not Goldstone. Having lost control of the message, Israel is now trying to shoot the messenger.

That Israel would try to do so on the backs of black South Africans is a laughable indication of its desperation. For if Goldstone was complicit in apartheid’s crimes, then Israel was far more so. Israel was South Africa’s principal and most dependable arms dealer. As we learn elsewhere in the Guardian today, it even offered to sell the South African regime nuclear weapons.

“Throughout the 70s and 80s Israel had a deep, intimate and lucrative relationship with South Africa,” explains Sasha Polakow-Suransky, author of The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa. “Israel’s arms supplies helped to prolong the apartheid regime’s rule and to survive international sanctions.” No criticism of Goldstone’s complicity from representatives of the Israeli state can be taken seriously that does not acknowledge and condemn Israel’s even greater support of the self-same system.

But just because the Israeli government wants to change the subject doesn’t mean that we have to. Goldstone’s apartheid record matters. For the left to claim it doesn’t, simply because he came up with a conclusion about Gaza that they agree with, would also be cynical. Appointed senior counsel in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising, Goldstone rose through the South African judiciary during one of apartheid’s most vicious periods. While in power he ordered the execution of two black South Africans and turned down the appeals of many others.

“A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times or by omission or by silence,” wrote the late Trinidadian intellectual CLR James in The Black Jacobins, “shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.”

Goldstone’s claim that faced with a “moral dilemma” he thought “it was better to fight from inside than not at all”, is inadequate. Not only did he uphold apartheid laws, he enforced them. This is not a question of 20:20 hindsight: many in a similar position at that time chose a more principled stand. Both morally and professionally he had other options, and he is compromised by not having taken them.

But his record did not end with apartheid. While he may not have led the drive to a non-racial democracy, he followed it eagerly. When the system started to collapse, he fully embraced change. Nelson Mandela asked him to chair the commission into public violence primarily because he was trusted by both sides. As such, he was an archetypical transitional figure. After that he went on to produce respected reports into the ethnic conflicts in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. So while his credibility as a human rights advocate might be diminished, it is by no means destroyed.

Finally, there is the insidious role that Israel has attempted to play as ideological gatekeeper for acceptable political behaviour among Jews. The attempt to tarnish any criticism of Israel, regardless of its merits, as unjust is untenable; to castigate them as un-Jewish is deplorable. “What saddens me today is that any Jew who speaks out with an independent voice, especially with the conduct of the state of Israel, is regarded as a self-hating Jew,” says retired South African constitutional court justice Albie Sachs, who is also Jewish. “Why should someone be made to choose between being a Jew and having a conscience?”

Gary Younge’s book Who Are We – and Should It Matter in the 21st Century? is published on 3 June

Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, Thursday 8^th April 2010

The west’s proudest export to the Islamic world this past decade has been democracy. That is, not real democracy, which is too complicated, but elections. They have been exported at the point of a gun and a missile to Iraq and Afghanistan, to “nation-build” these states and hence “defeat terror”. When apologists are challenged to show some good resulting from the shambles, they invariably reply: “It has given Iraqis and Afghans freedom to vote.”

As British electors don democratic finery and troop to the polls next month, elections in both war-torn countries are looking sick. Last month’s poll in Iraq, blessed (or cursed) with a Westminster-style constitution, has failed to yield a coherent government. It appeared to show the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, just beaten by his predecessor, Ayad Allawi. If so, it would be a remarkable case of a developing world democracy actually ejecting a sitting leader. In that respect, Iraq would be ahead of Britain, where the opposition must lead by at least 10 percentage points to be certain of power.

For the time being, Baghdad’s government has been in abeyance. The Sunni militias, reportedly backed by al‑Qaida, have returned to the streets, and the death rate is again soaring. Kurdistan is all but a separate country, and the odds are on the Sunnis being forced back into a semi-autonomous region. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died and millions been driven from their homes – including almost all Iraq’s ancient population of Christians. The import of democracy has so far just inflamed local tension and fuelled fundamentalism. Like precious porcelain, elections were exported without instructions on their care. In the absence of adequate security, they are little more than tribal plebiscites.

At least in Iraq western troops are leaving the country to its fate. The west’s guilt at the mayhem left behind will start to diminish with time. People will blame George Bush and Tony Blair, leaving them, as they wish, to render their account not to the Iraqis but only to God.

In Afghanistan, a similar saga has been running for nine years, and is growing ever more tragic. Last year saw the deaths of more Afghans (2,412) and more western troops (520) than since the 2001 invasion. Nato is locked in a struggle to hold Helmand province for the government of the president, Hamid Karzai, against insurgents who can wait as long as they like to defeat the hated invaders.

Nato is only now seeking control, nine years on, of the country’s second city of Kandahar, in which the Taliban is dominant and the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is the power broker. Karzai is said to have told local elders that there will be no assault on Kandahar “without their permission”. If Nato cannot negotiate a deal over the city, rather than reduce it to rubble, its mission is surely doomed.

The fact that Hamid Karzai was elected, by whatever dubious means, seems to infuriate western leaders. Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and their respective foreign ministers rage and telephone and pay visits and expostulate. The repetitive criticism hurled at Karzai for being corrupt and in the pocket of drug lords has become near comical, not least because of his eccentric response. Last week he threatened privately to swear allegiance to the Taliban himself (which might solve many problems).

The west is constantly telling Karzai to “clean up his act” or, as the New York Times harrumphs, “stop doing whatever he and his aides choose”. This is not because there is any likelihood of his obeying, but to help make the domestic case for the war look less shaky. As the joke in Kabul goes, as long as the west pretends to uphold his regime, Karzai must “pretend to be Swedish”. He is America’s exhibit A for world democracy. The idea that he might regard himself as the elected representative of the Afghan people, warts and all, with a future to consider and his neck on the line, is beyond consideration.

Democracy in both America and Britain is coming under scrutiny these days. Quite apart from the antics of MPs and congressmen, it is said to be sliding towards oligarchy, with increasing overtones of autocracy. Money and its power over technology are making elections unfair. The military-industrial complex is as powerful as ever, having adopted “the menace of global terrorism” as its casus belli. Lobbying and corruption are polluting the government process. In a nutshell, democracy is not in good shape.

How strange to choose this moment to export it, least of all to countries that have never experienced it in their history. The west not only exports the stuff, it does so with massive, thuggish violence, the antithesis of how self-government should mature in any polity. The tortured justification in Iraq and Afghanistan is that elections will somehow sanctify a “war against terrorism” waged on someone else’s soil. The resulting death and destruction have been appalling. Never can an end, however noble, have so failed to justify the means of achieving it.

The high-minded attacks on corruption in Muslim states from London and Washington is futile. In most countries corruption is the lubricant of power. Nor is the west that clean. Britain showered corruption on the Saudis to obtain arms contracts. The activities of American firms in “rebuilding” Iraq were wholly corrupt. In 2001 the British in Kabul – in the person of Clare Short no less – were put in charge of suppressing Afghan opium, fuel of most of that country’s corruption. Britain allowed it to continue, when the Taliban had been in the process of stamping it out.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats are dishonest to say that the Afghan war is justified “provided” Karzai ends corruption, stops rigging elections, and trains his army and police. None of this will happen, and is merely cover to avoid saying what these politicians know to be true – that British soldiers are dying for a dud hypothetical.

As Britons go the polls, they should challenge their candidates to justify what is being done in their name. A system of government that they have spent two centuries evolving and still not perfected is being rammed down the throats of poor and insecure people, who are then hectored for not handling it properly. Why should they? The invasions of their countries was not their choice. They did not ask to be a model for Britain’s moral exhibitionism. They did not plead for their villages to be target practice for western special forces.

Karzai is told he will lose Nato protection if he continues to associate with drug dealers and warlords – many of whom appear to be his relatives. He knows – as we know – that this is bluff. There can be no counter-insurgency without a client regime. Obama and Brown need him as much as he needs them.

Amid this bluff the only certainty for Karzai is that, one day, Nato will get fed up and leave him to his fate, as it is now leaving Maliki in Baghdad. If he wants to live, he must make his peace with Afghans, not Americans, and that means on Afghan terms. Free and fair elections and a stop to corruption will have no part to play in that survival game. Democracy has been greatly oversold.

(Prof Humayun Ansari OBE, is currently Professor of the History of Islam and Cultural Diversity, and Director, Centre for Minority Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London)

When I came to Royal Holloway thirty years ago to begin my doctoral research, I could not possibly have predicted that the then well-established and widely-accepted concepts of the ‘Muslim world’ and the ‘West’ would become such highly contested notions. The ‘Muslim world’ was generally taken for granted, albeit as something that was geographically bounded, inferior and essentially different from the West. Arguably, British historical writing – or at least the majority of it, particularly during Britain’s imperial phase – reflected the power relations with Muslim societies. Now, three decades later, it is ‘Islamophobia’ (reflecting the existing climate of widespread fear and hostility towards Islam and Muslims) and ‘a clash of civilisations’ (in which the current war against terror – and by extension Islam – has come to occupy such prominence lately) that both interrogate the dynamics between knowledge and power in today’s rapidly globalising context.

Norman Daniel, the widely-respected historian of Islam and Muslims, who published his Western Images of Islam as long ago as 1960, highlighted the political and religious considerations behind distorted western views of Islam, examining Christian-Muslim interaction from medieval times to the modern world. According to him, hostile attitudes and hatreds had become deeply embedded, surfacing from time to time given the right context or conditions. We may or may not go along with all that Daniel proposed, but Edward Said – while agreeing with Daniel – gave his thesis a timely post-modern twist in what became his controversial study, Orientalism, published in 1978 not long before I reinvented myself as a PhD student. And since its publication, Said’s many protagonists have argued that a new more sophisticated kind of ‘Orientalism’ has emerged and continues to shape attitudes in the so-called West.

But, despite the impact of Said’s ideas, much of the debate generated by his work has been conducted by non-historians; few of the latter have engaged with Said’s argument. Indeed, many of them have dismissed him as being not only confused but also plainly ahistorical. It is this lack of engagement that has prompted me in my lecture this evening to explore how – over time – British historical imaginations have processed or handled Islam and the so-called Muslim world.

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As I have just mentioned, since Orientalism’s publication in 1978 there has been a great deal of debate about Said’s thesis and propositions. His study has provoked much controversy but it has also generated an immense amount of positive intellectual development across many humanities and social sciences disciplines. Said, as is well-known, sought to explore the relationship between power and knowledge; between imperialism and scholarship. He saw ‘Orientalism’ as a Western discourse that essentialises the Muslim world in pejorative ways, one that was intimately entwined with imposition of imperial power, offering ideological justifications for it While a wide range of academics have developed or refined Said’s framework, others have challenged and, indeed, denounced it, as Robert Irwin puts it, as a perverted muddle of ‘malignant charlatanry’. In terms of the production of historical knowledge about the peoples, politics and cultures of the so-called Orient, disagreements have been to do with approaches, sources, and interpretive paradigms. An increasing number of scholars have come to accept that knowledge is socially-constructed and that complex developments contribute towards shaping our understandings of the world. Hence, social and political interests play a significant role in the adoption of one way of construing reality rather than another. Others claim that they tell it like it is; they allow facts to speak for themselves, and have no interest in the social utility of the historical knowledge that they produce. Intellectual curiosity, ‘lust for knowing’, is apparently their only drive. Bernard Lewis, thus, defended Orientalism as ‘pure scholarship’, a discipline that strove towards objectivity. On the other hand, A.J. Arberry (who was a government censor during the Second World War) in his compilation, Oriental Essays (1960), while denying that he himself had any political agendas, accepted that politics nonetheless intruded academic scholarship. Indeed, it could be argued that politics is always present, but not necessarily where people claim to locate it since politics has less to do with interactions than actions and results, which are always unpredictable. It is, thus, difficult to put intentions on trial.

Absolute claims such as these demand closer inspection, and so what I want to explore this evening is how far there were scholars who were genuinely ‘purely’ interested in Islam and Muslim societies and so studied them for their own sake. I want to do this by looking at the places that Islam and Muslims have occupied in British historical imaginations from the outset of the early modern period to the present.

One of the key reasons for examining the past is to uncover the shape of human experience: can we discern any patterns in it, and how can we make sense of it through time? For many centuries, in the context of Britain, ‘the march of history’ was understood in sacred terms. For Christian writers historical knowledge bore witness to the grand theme of Creation and the Last Judgement. But as Islam spread through the Mediterranean, posing a theological and political threat as it conquered the bastions of Eastern Christendom, the mysterious rise of this ‘falsehood’ against the truth of Christianity compelled an explanation. How to stem its rising tide and protect Christians and Christendom (and convert Muslims) from this scourge?

The response of medieval and early modern Christian scholars was to create ‘a body of literature concerning the faith, its Prophet, and his book, polemic in purpose and scurrilous in tone, designed to protect and discourage rather than to inform’. Attacks on Islam were in part a way of propping up ideological conformity among various Christian denominations, in Britain as elsewhere. With military power unable to withstand Islamic expansion, refutation through argument and missionary work was considered the best option for overcoming the challenge, for which knowledge of the Muslim adversaries, their beliefs and practices, was considered crucial. In much of this scholarship, a repertoire of Christian legends rather than hard historical evidence about Islam and Muslims, nourished by imaginative fantasies, served the purpose. While the explanations provided were never fully satisfying, writers such as William Bedwell – the so-called father of Islamic studies in England – succeeded in creating a portrait of an exotic, and deluded, ‘other’ – and hence a negative perception became deeply embedded in the ‘British’ social imaginary, something that possesses considerable emotional resonance even to this day.

That said, when we look at the early modern period, we find that, in the British Isles at large, there was little awareness of, let alone curiosity about, Muslims – even less so in serious literature. Most of those who had sufficient resources and interest to sponsor Arabic studies were either churchmen (as was the case with most forms of learning, not just this field) or closely aligned with their causes who aimed primarily at producing materials to achieve their own salvation as well as that of wayward Middle Eastern Christians and Muslims. Thomas Adams, a wealthy draper and sometime Lord Mayor of London, created the Chair of Arabic at Cambridge in 1632 in the hope that he might, through his patronage, contribute to converting Muslims. Four years later, William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the University of Oxford, established its Professorship in Arabic, primarily as part of the struggle against Catholicism.

It is important to note, however, that in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, those in Europe who studied Islam tended to do so not out of interest in that faith per se, but primarily to pursue intra-confessional polemic. During the Reformation, Islam was frequently used by one group of Christians to criticise another. Protestants were likened to Muslims for deviating from and perverting the true faith. Such developments, of course, need to be located in the context of Ottoman expansion in competition with other European states. It is noticeable though that, while there was considerable conflict between the states, it did not take the form of ‘Islamdom’ versus ‘Christendom’.

The 1600s are credited with having marked the beginning of ‘modern’ British historical writing. The confident authority of the Christian world view began to crumble as secularised interpretations of history, centred on human rather than divine activity, gained ground. Reason combined with empirical evidence was coming to be accepted as the final authority for deciding what was historically credible. Scholars now increasingly possessed the resources and linguistic potential to investigate more rigorously than before the nature of Muslim beliefs, history, traditions and practices. Hence, writings on Islam became contradictory, reflecting the fragmented views held by Europeans on the subject, influenced by political thinkers such as Descartes and Spinoza. The old stereotypes were repeated by most writers, but now alongside newer observations that found favourable things in Islam. For example, there was The General Historie of the Turkes (1603) by Richard Knolles. A fear-inducing chronicle, it was filled with accounts of Ottoman atrocities, cruelties and torture. Knolles, like earlier English writers, called the Ottoman Empire the “great terror of the world”, Islam the work of Satan and Muhammad a false prophet. But – here is the difference – Knolle also acknowledged Turkish determination, courage, and frugality and the massive 1,200 page account contained much positive information about Muslims, until then considered mortal enemies. Likewise, Edward Pococke’s 1649 Specimen Historae Arabum while casting Islam as the religion of the false prophet, managed by deploying Arabic sources and historians to avoid many of the distortions of medieval polemic and presented what was, for its time, a more balanced view of Muslim society. A little later Paul Rycaut, in his The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, drew a picture of Ottoman despotism, unequivocally corrupt and backward, straight out of the old stock of ignorance and fear. But it also recounted accurate, knowledgeable and insightful details of Turkish life and history, of Ottoman political, military, and religious organisation, of the diversity of Islamic beliefs and traditions. In it there was also acknowledgement of mutuality of commercial interests and benefits and admiration of many aspects of Islamic culture. But importantly, having been written by British men, these histories lacked the breadth of understanding of Muslim societies that eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century women observers, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Sophie Lane-Poole, would contribute thanks to what they wrote about spheres of life to which they, as females, had exclusive access.

By the end of the seventeenth century, while the intellectual climate had changed significantly in favour of ‘freethinking’, both orthodox Christians and so-called ‘deviants’ continued to critique each other. Humphery Prideaux’s 1697 Life of Mahomet aimed to uncover ‘[t]he true nature of imposture fully displa’d in the life of Mahomet, with a discourse annex’d for the vindication of Christianity from this charge’, while Henry Stubbe’s anti-Trinitarian tract, Account of the rise and progress of Mahometenism (written in 1671 but not actually published until 1911), trenchantly challenged ‘the fabulous inventions of the Christians’ in the light of reason, contrasting this with his positive assessment of the life of Muhammad and Islam’s rationality. What is particularly interesting is that both these authors used Pococke’s work and sources extensively but interpreted them in radically different ways to arrive at opposite poles in their conclusions – one hostile (thanks, it should be added, largely in response to the challenge of Deism rather than Islam), the other sympathetic, to Islam and Muslims. What we see emerging out of these controversies by the eighteenth century are rather more balanced understandings of Islam, for instance Simon Ockley’s The History of the Saracens in 1718. Nevertheless, given the religious context in which they were operating, their authors could hardly be expected to write wholly positively of a religion that had proved ‘the first ruin of the eastern church’. Ultimately, even Ockley condemned Muhammad as the ‘great imposter’.

The late eighteenth century was also a period of transition in British imperial history, and, not surprisingly, this too had an impact on how Islam and Muslims were viewed by contemporaries. The East India Company from the mid-eighteenth century had been steadily establishing dominance in India, often taking power from Muslim rulers in the process, but it was still navigating its way towards finding the right strategies in order to establish firm control. Many who ran the early Company in India admired and appreciated indigenous cultures, saw merit in their history and assimilated. William Robertson was one Enlightenment historian who expressed an early willingness to value Indian culture and society as the development of an equivalent and equally valid civilisation to that of Europe. However, whereas Europe was seen to have ‘progressed’, India during the Mughal period was perceived to have ‘stagnated’ in relative terms. Hence, Robertson believed that India should be facilitated but not coerced in its socio-economic and cultural development by a form of imperial rule and commerce that demonstrated respect for India’s cultural heritage. This ‘development approach’ to history associated particularly with the Scottish Enlightenment from the 1750s to the 1790s, concluded that the human record was one of material and moral improvement, of cultural development from ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilisation’, and that their own society stood at the pinnacle of achievement. Since Muslim societies were judged as, at best, semi-barbaric, colonialism – Empire in other words – was justified.

As British imperial expansion progressed, there was a further shift in attitudes to Islam. There was perhaps less prejudice alongside a greater sense of curiosity; so while history continued to be written as a moral tale, critical enquiry gave birth to new historical values. Yet stereotyping persisted. Edward Gibbon while exploring how Christianity ended European classical civilisation in his 1788 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, imbued Islam with several positive attributes, but his final moral judgement on Muhammad was that the Prophet ended up an ambitious impostor. And whatever its virtues, Gibbon did not want Europe to be over-run by Islam nor the Quran ‘taught in the schools of Oxford, her pulpits [demonstrating] to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.’ While Gibbon along with another of Britain’s most eminent Enlightenment scholars, William Jones were both admirers of Muslim civilisations, they both firmly believed in the superiority of the European, because, for them, Europe had forged ahead in gathering useful knowledge, in its command of ‘Reason’ and its application of the scientific method – in all these fields, they believed, other peoples lagged far behind. Those who judge Jones’s scholarly work as entirely motivated by aesthetic and academic interest really need to look at his life and career more closely, as this reveals him to be not only complex, inconsistent and contradictory but also someone who possessed undoubted utilitarian propensities. Far from being a disinterested Orientalist, in Mukherjee’s assessment, Jones was a late eighteenth-century ‘liberal imperialist’, who had no doubt in his mind about ‘the excellence of our constitution, and the character of a perfect king of England’ – after all, he served for many years as a judge in British-controlled Calcutta.

Thus, the ways in which British historians of this period analysed, imagined and depicted the so-called ‘Orient’ were often intertwined in complex ways with growing British power, often over Muslim peoples. In time, these realities began to shape historical accounts. The Romanticist influence on historical writing was also felt. The ‘Orient’ attracted interest as it became less threatening while remaining exotic. One key (though not uncontested) element of nineteenth-century thought on the ‘Orient’ was a particular concentration on the difference between East and West. Islam constituted a distinct type in terms of civilisation, cultural essence and core values – these, many Orientalists of the time believed, shaped a different Muslim consciousness, mind-set and behaviour.

Scottish Enlightenment thinking continued to be the leading intellectual influence. John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone, both highly instrumental in the extension of British power in India and West Asia, would have seen themselves as no more than subscribing to the forces that drove societies from one stage to another. Both belonged to a broad band of historians comprising conservatives as well as many liberals and radicals, among whom imperial expansion, born out of human enlightenment and effort, and underpinned by utilitarian ideas, became a dominant vision. They were supported by a growing evangelical public sentiment, which viewed Empire as the work of Providence. Notwithstanding their kinship with different schools of thought, all British historians during this period assumed the intellectual and moral superiority of contemporary Great Britain over the Muslim world.

Let us take probably the single most influential work in the early nineteenth century – James Mill’s 1817 The History of British India. For Mill, knowledge was nothing if it was not a source of power – a tool of change. Understanding the past was good ‘only for the improvement of the future’. Since Indo-Muslim society, a product of despotism, superstition and poverty, given to insecurity and lacking in progress, measured ‘lower’ in his scale of civilisation, British rule was justified. Similarly, Macaulay, a great admirer of Mill’s History, also believed in the benevolent impact of British rule in India and elsewhere. Macaulay’s dismissal of, and contempt for, the natives epitomised Saidian ‘Orientalism’.

But, while it might be argued that this kind of ‘Orientalist’ history writing had become hegemonic by the nineteenth century, Said’s argument leaves little room for the kind of contestation and contrasting approaches to Islam that were evidently emerging in this period. Take, for instance, the works of Edward Lane, a scholar who was to have an enormous influence on Middle Eastern studies. From Lane’s life, it is immediately clear that, in the context of the early nineteenth-century excitement about Egypt, while he remained committed to his own cultural heritage, he became genuinely interested in Egyptian society – its traditions, customs and people – to the point where he adopted an Egyptian lifestyle, dress and language.

While many scholars have levelled charges of ‘Orientalism’ against Lane – his awareness of his difference from an essentially alien culture, the coded sense of superiority in his major works, his views regarding the unchanging character of Middle Eastern societies – his biographer, Leila Ahmad, has shown that Lane possessed a relatively accurate and sympathetic understanding of Islam. It is true that he comes across, occasionally, as condescending, patronising, even admonishing, in his best-known An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (first published in 1836), but, when read in the context of his personal interaction, it could be argued that for the most part he strove for and largely succeeded in presenting an account of Egyptian society and its people that was respectful, and one that someone belonging to that culture could broadly accept as authentic and accurate. More usefully, it created a space for British scholars within which emotively-charged and hostile traditions could be more effectively challenged.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, new perceptions of Muhammad, accompanied by new attitudes to his religion were also emerging. This period was particularly crucial in British historical understanding of Islam, for it was a time when the enduring images of Muhammad as a heretic were juxtaposed with new images of Muhammad a noble figure. In contrast to Said’s methodological emphasis on the unity of the Orientalist discourse, what we witness is a considerable plurality of approaches to Islam. Thus, discourse about Islam, at times contradictory, became richer, more diverse and more complex than Said’s arguments suggested.

The reasons for this shift were many. Burgeoning knowledge about Islam and increased information made earlier stereotypes less tenable. The demise of Christian apocalypticism and the rise of secular historical method created the Muhammad of history, relegating to the shadows the Muhammad of Christian legend. The Victorian proclivity for great men coupled with their fascination for an exotic East engendered a sympathetic environment for a partial rehabilitation of Muhammad and Islam. And the rise of British power over Muslim lands made for a context in which the Prophet and his religion could be treated more benevolently, even while it continued to encourage and support criticism of its modern expressions.

This juxtaposition is clearly visible in Carlyle’s famous lecture on Muhammad, ‘Hero as Prophet’. In 1840, after centuries during which Muhammad had been called an imposter, a seducer or worse, he made the ‘first strong affirmation in the whole of European literature, medieval or modern of a belief in the sincerity of Muhammad’. And yet, he too, it might be argued, was prone uncritically to deploy ‘Orientalist’ tropes and attitudes in his rhetoric. Islam for Carlyle remained ‘a confused form of Christianity’, fit for semi-barbaric Arabs.

So the main assumptions of historical writing at this time remained paternalism and utilitarianism. Both contributed to the British assumption of superiority over the East and to the justification of colonial rule. Hence, William Muir, scholar and colonial administrator around the time of the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857-58, in his historical works, consistently denigrated Muhammad and the Qur’an, misrepresented Muslims and undervalued Islam, often through a conscious manipulation of, at times, questionable sources, in order to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity and British culture in justification of colonial dominance. In his Life of Mahomet he concluded, ‘the sword of Mahomet, and the Coran are the most fatal enemies of Civilization, Liberty and the Truth which the world has yet known’. In line with Whig interpretations of history, Victorians believed that they were positioned at the pinnacle of human development. Historians did not dispense knowledge of the past for its own sake, or simply to inculcate practical lessons – that is, to sustain British rule. Above all they strove to preach a moral sermon, to hold up the virtues that they believed had won empire in the East and which alone could preserve it.

By the later decades of the nineteenth century, biology, anthropology and other sciences had combined with Maine’s demonstration of the historicity of ideas and Darwin’s law of natural selection to produce a relative ranking of world civilisations along racial lines. According to these criteria, Muslim societies did not fare well. Britain had developed the highest ideal of social happiness and devised the scientific instrument of law to enforce it. Writing at the zenith of the Imperialist phase in England, William Hunter stressed the importance of national character of the British race – ‘adventurous, masterful, patient in defeat and persistent in executing its designs’ – as the key to its imperial success. J.R. Seeley’s Expansion of England, published in 1883, stated that the study of history could offer lessons for those serving the Empire. Lord Acton, Seeley’s successor at Cambridge at the beginning of the twentieth century, likewise considered the making of moral judgements to be the mark of true historical writing. For him, the British Empire possessed an essentially noble purpose – it was a benevolent and progressive force in human history. While Seeley believed in the necessity and moral justification of the continuance of British rule, a question that troubled him was how the British could reconcile the despotism of the Indian Empire with the democracy enjoyed by the colonies of white settlers (and indeed, the British themselves): how Britain could ‘be in the East at once the greatest Mussulman Power in the world … and at the same time in the West be the foremost champion of free thought and spiritual religions?’. Well, for such historians, Indian society being un-progressive and perhaps decadent, the important thing was to do Indians good in spite of themselves; to lead India (and the rest of the Empire) with a paternal authoritarian hand. The histories of the period up to 1914 broadly reflected these assumptions.

It is true that this was not invariably the attitude in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – drawing inspiration from Cobbett, Bright and Cobden, scholars such as J.A. Hobson challenged the justifications for imperial rule. Nevertheless, it undoubtedly remained the hegemonic view. The majority of British historians agreed with Seeley’s analysis. Re-evaluative trends in British Islamic scholarship were still at an embryonic stage, and thinly veiled disparagement of Islam and Muhammad such as that of David Margoliouth, Professor of Arabic at Oxford, continued to inform influential historical analysis.

However, while Islamic history offered scope to Orientalist scholars to draw favourable comparisons regarding the virtues and truth of Christianity, there had also emerged considerable questioning of the Christian faith and this led to the re-evaluation of both academic and popular attitudes towards other belief-systems. T.W. Arnold, who spent much time in scholarly pursuits in northern India, was part of a small group of historians who presented interpretations of Christian and Muslim cultural history and interaction that challenged the arguments of the orthodox Orientalist paradigm. Both in conception and construction, his 1896 The Preaching of Islam represented a radical departure in British Islamic scholarship. In contrast to reductionist constructions of Islam as monolithic, having only one authentic expression, Arnold affirmed the validity of all the varying and sometimes contradictory currents within it, and concluded in his The Islamic Faith that, since religion was defined by individual understanding and practice of faith, ‘no single formula—beyond the brief simple words of the creed—can sum up [Islam’s] many diversities’. E.G. Browne too exuded enthusiasm for and empathy with Arab, Persian and Turkish cultures and peoples. A scholar of enormous erudition, he travelled in Persia and his A Year Among the Persians, published in 1893, represented a sympathetic portrayal of Persian society. His monumental Literary History of Persia, which came out in 1902, further valorised its refinements. An adherent of the liberal view of progress in historical development, he became passionately interested in the politics of contemporary Persia, supported the Constitutional Movement and resistance to European imperialist encroachments. Browne’s positive analysis in his The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, published in 1910, not only countered the imperialist notions of Persian capriciousness and corruption as essential contributors of lack of progress; of their incapacity for democratic self-government, but also, by means of a ‘nationalist [counter] Orientalism’, announced the revival of an eastern people whose national character had empowered past historical achievements and might well do so again.

The climate of opinion in early twentieth-century Britain was, thus, simultaneously sympathetic towards and highly suspicious of Muslims. Muslim political activism imposed new demands on British authority, and pan-Islamism became a cause of increasing political concern as conflict with the Ottoman Empire intensified. Muslim aspirations seemed in sharp conflict with British imperial ambitions and political strategic security. These priorities were reflected in literature of the period. Cromer’s Modern Egypt (1908), for instance, effectively ignored Egypt’s achievements, highlighted its deficiencies through selective use of empirical materials, and offered an unbalanced rationalisation of British imperial rule. What was needed, he suggested, was a system that would ‘enable the mass of the population to be governed according to the code of Christian morality’.

The aftermath of the First World War witnessed the revival of the idea of British colonial mission and imperial obligation. The Empire’s history as the unfolding of the story of liberty re-emerged as the dominant mode of interpretation. With the break up of the Ottoman Empire, Britain became much more strategically dominant in the Middle East, responsible for lands that were perceived to be inhabited by people not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world. Representing a main trend in British historical writing, historians such as Reginald Coupland still believed in the moral qualities of the British to shape a better world and saw the history and purpose of the Empire as the gradual unfolding of liberty. While not an officer of the Empire he spent much time in its service and he made influential historically rigorous contributions to the debates on the direction of the Empire and imperial policy making.

The post-Second World War years witnessed rapid change and much instability as the pace of decolonisation quickened and the Cold War began. In this context, Asia and Africa increasingly became the battlegrounds. Western governments felt the urgent need for reliable knowledge about critical areas to inform policy-making. But, in the late 1950s and 1960s, scholars such as Richard Southern and the afore-mentioned Norman Daniel showed that it was not so much new positive knowledge that was being produced by disinterested scholars, but rather the diffusion in more refined and complex forms of greatly distorted existing elaborations, creating inaccurate images of Islam and Muhammad, based on dubious sources and distorted readings of texts and scriptures, leading to crude and derogatory assertions.

Take Hamilton Gibb and Bernard Lewis, two towering figures in the field in this period. Their interest in Islam and Muslim peoples’ current affairs undoubtedly emanated from their desire to influence policy-makers. Gibb, for instance, was concerned that Western governments were acting largely out of ignorance and it was his belief that understanding of Muslim peoples’ beliefs and cultures by careful study of their specific past was essential for effective policy-making. However, the categories he used to organise the knowledge and to interpret Islam and the history of the Muslim peoples are illustrative of what many critics would eventually argue were the grave shortcomings of the Orientalist tradition. For instance, in Modern Trends in Islam (1945), Gibb started from the assumption that there was an unchanging and distinctive Arab or Muslim ‘mind’ whose nature he could infer from his knowledge of the traditional texts of Islam and which could be implicitly or explicitly contrasted with an equally singular and essentialised ‘Western mind’. On this basis Gibb was able to offer sweeping generalisations about the innate deficiencies of Muslims’ thought-processes, imagination and ethics that had caused them to stagnate and fail to modernise. According to Irwin, ‘As a Christian moralist, [Gibb] was inclined to blame Islam’s decline on carnality, greed and mysticism’. Gibb explained Ottoman decline by locating it in its specifically Islamic despotic character. Yet, as Roger Owen has pointed out, Gibb’s analysis was largely flawed as his data in fact suggested that in the groups and activities of the Ottoman Empire there was little that could be considered as specifically Islamic – indeed, developments under the Ottomans had close parallels in non-Muslim Europe and Asia. More recently Caroline Finkel has challenged even more convincingly such ‘myths’ of Ottoman decay.

Bernard Lewis was the other ‘big gun’ in the field of British scholarship on Islam, and like Gibb, he believed that the Orientalists’ deep understanding of Islamic civilisation rendered them uniquely capable of shedding light on policy matters. In 1953, Lewis, in a lecture on “Communism and Islam” at Chatham House, ignoring local contexts and histories, elaborated his conception of Islam, similar to that of Gibb, as a civilisation with a distinct, unique and basically unchanging essence. For Lewis, Islam’s core features included an essentially autocratic and totalitarian political tradition that made Communism appealing to Muslims. Lewis accepted that, while Muslims were obliged to resist impious government, their subservience to authority took precedence. This contrasted sharply with ‘the spirit of resistance to tyranny and misrule … inherent in the core values of Western civilisation’. This line of argument ignored what Muslims had actually done over the centuries when confronted with impious or tyrannical rule. But such overarching, monolithic, delineations of the ‘Islamic civilisation’, underpinned by apparently timeless and uniform ‘Islamic concepts’, became very attractive towards the end of the twentieth century, with Lewis, for instance, pointing to ‘a clash of civilisations’, in his words, ‘the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both’. In such writing, one can indeed see many of the key features of Said’s ‘Orientalism’.

Gibb and Lewis’s ideas, like ‘Orientalism’ in the Saidian sense more generally, dovetailed modernisation theory, the dominant paradigm from the 1950s to the 1970s. A common set of assumptions about the character and trajectory of historical change, it denoted the process of transition from traditional to modern society as universal, linear and initiated by the West. Why Muslim societies had not modernised according to the Western model, it was argued, had little to do with social, political and economic forces – their legacies of colonialism, continuing foreign domination or economic under development – rather, they had become disoriented because of their essentially static nature, psychological deficiencies and cultural pathologies. Unlike the early modern Europe’s insatiable thirst for discovering the ‘secrets’ of Muslim advances, Muslims seemed uninterested in learning about the sources of Europe’s growing strength. Their societies were, therefore, unable to develop the institutions and internal dynamics that might lead to fundamental social transformation from within. Lewis, in his From Babel to Dragomans and The Muslim Discovery of Europe, linked the failure of Muslim societies to modernise with their lack of the spirit of enquiry, their misplaced sense of superiority, and their insularity and hostility towards the West. According to Lewis ‘Few Muslims travelled voluntarily to the land of the infidels …The question of travel for study did not arise, since clearly there was nothing to be learned from the benighted infidels of the outer wilderness’. And so, Lewis argued, change had to come from outside. New historical findings, however, challenge such analyses, and show that Muslims were, actually, intensely curious about and fascinated by European societies and peoples in the early modern period. Nabil Matar’s work, among others, has demonstrated that Arabic-speaking Muslims were deeply inquisitive about scientific, literary and political developments in ‘bilad al-nasara’ (the lands of the Christians) and, like their European counterparts, wrote ‘detailed and empirically based’ accounts of Europe in the seventeenth century.

Already beginning to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, this challenging of the framework of interpretation, which had hitherto both shaped historical analyses and conclusions and their perceived complicity with Western power in the Muslim world, brings me to reflect on the current state of play! I would argue that there is still an influential strand in historical writing, buttressed by those who hold reins of power, which links in with ‘Orientalist’ paradigms and rationalises Western superiority, tutelage and domination. It insists that the modern West remains at the pinnacle of a new hierarchy of human evolution; and that Muslim lands need to follow suit through the enfeeblement of Islam.

Niall Ferguson, for one, offering refurbished Whiggish wisdom, has furnished an historical basis for the current Anglophone liberal imperial project. His writings argue that the British Empire was a powerful force of order, justice and development for much of its existence and built much of the modern world; its paternalistic authoritarian practice of government, through a properly trained and knowledgeable administrative corps competent to dispense fairness and justice, ushered in ‘civilisation’/modernisation setting the natives on the path to progress. Alternatives to empire would have involved despotism, endemic disorder and economic decay, and resulted in dangerous instability.

In Ferguson’s writing, it would seem, we have come full circle – he offers canards once championed by old imperialists such as Mill and Macaulay. While he agrees with Marx’s deterministic approach to the evolution of human history, he, unlike Marx, is much more positively disposed to British rule and argues that the Empire was forced to make painful decisions in pursuit of ‘liberal’ objectives. Systematically ignoring sources that analyse or present the perspectives of the colonised, there emerges, in Gopal’s words, a ‘poisonous fairytale’ of ‘a benign developmental mission’ – a pattern that tends to reinforce the prejudices of those whom he seeks to influence. Highly provocative, Ferguson’s histories of the British Empire construct the ‘lessons’ that we are to learn from the ‘rise and demise of the British world order’. What are they? As part of the building of a similar empire, the war on Iraq was the right thing to do. For him, ruthlessness in its prosecution was justified: he says, ‘what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was no worse than the initiatory “hazing” routine in many army camps and even student fraternities’.

* * * * *

So what conclusions can we draw from all of these developments? It is very clear that dichotomous notions of the ‘clash of civilisations’, ‘the end of history’ and ‘liberal international interventionism’, while still popular and influential in policy-making circles, are now being challenged from both the contemporary and historical perspectives. On the theoretical level, the category of ‘civilisation’, while tangible in geopolitical, cultural and material terms, seems diffuse. In terms of cultures, values or systems of belief, they can be shown to be ever changing and adaptable to new conditions. Hence, unlike conflicts between states, it is difficult to know in what ways civilisations could be construed to ‘clash’. Moreover, it is being increasingly argued that ‘Islamic civilisation’, with distinctly recognisable features, like its Roman and Greek counterparts, has disappeared. Equally, with the globalisation of modernity, ‘Western civilisation’ also appears to have lost its specifically European character. This line of argument makes the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis seem untenable.

Historically too, many scholars today reject the portrayal of the relations and interaction between the so-called Muslim world and the West (both contentious terms because of their homogenising, reductionist and essentialist undertones) as a simple story of perpetual opposition and conflict. They seek to demonstrate historically that civilisations have never been hermetically-sealed separate entities – the shared story of Asia, Africa and Europe, for one, is replete with uninterrupted mutual exchange.

More specifically, Christian and Islamic ‘civilisations’ are being shown to have interacted fruitfully and to have borrowed from one other with mutually formative effects. The idea of ‘multiple modernities’ challenges the classical theory of modernisation as a uniquely and specifically European project. ‘Oriental globalisation’ literature, with its longer time frame, contests this thesis, demonstrating historically that many of the characteristics that are associated with the eighteenth-century British industrial revolution had emerged earlier in China, and that Middle East was ahead of Europe in this period. Thanks to Jardine and Brotton, we are now much more aware of the highly symbiotic relationship between Muslim and other European cultures and the profound influence of developments in Muslim societies on the emergence of European Renaissance and Enlightenment thinking – especially the role of the Ottoman Empire in generating mechanisms that lay behind ‘modernisation’. There was, in reality, no monolithic and unitary Europe confronting the Ottoman enemy. Nor was ‘Islam’ unremittingly ranged against the ‘West’. Yes, there were conflicts but there was also trade and the exchange and mingling of ideas, technologies and institutions.

This brings us to the question of how this challenging of the ‘Western-centric’ paradigm has emerged? Surely much of the answer lies in the changed context and the changing relations and balance of power in today’s world and the impact of this on the character of the historical knowledge being produced. Shifts in history writing reflect shifts in world politics, as the West itself is gradually de-centred by multi-centric global processes. Analysis of history writing about the Muslim world in Britain, as I have suggested this evening, reveals that it has always been produced in complex, diverse and non-monolithic ways. Nor, as Said contended more generally in his Orientalism, has it been entirely systematically constructed; there has not been one totalising vision of the West’s Islamic ‘Other’. British historians could write about the Muslim world ‘as often consumed by admiration and reverence as by denigration and depreciation’. But as British power expanded, some came to think of Islam and the Muslim world as ontologically different from, and inferior to, the ‘West’; and many such scholars placed their knowledge at the disposal of the Empire. Others, albeit more commonly at the margins, opposed imperialism or wrote more sympathetically about Islamic cultures and societies, though not necessarily deploying a different interpretive frame from mainstream Orientalists. Yet, individual historians are always products of their pasts as well as their presents. They cannot escape, to quote Bernard Lewis (rather ironically since he seems to exclude himself from this comment), ‘the prejudices of their culture and age…Even when writing of the past historians are captive of their own times – in their materials and their methods, their concepts and their concerns.’

Having acknowledged the limitations of British historical writing about the Muslim world, what alternatives are there? Said’s critique has undoubtedly helped us to become more acutely and self-critically conscious of the existence of multiple perspectives and the need to consider them in any historical analysis. The empowered, and much more articulate and confidently vocal, Muslim subaltern has contributed to the shifts in historical thinking and approaches. Moving away from global generalities, due attention is now being given to local and regional social and political dynamics, hierarchies of power and historical contexts. Likewise, factoring in the history of women living in Muslim societies into the wider story is being pursued with much more vigour, undermining stereotypes about their past lives (and present realities too).

But, all the same, it appears impossible to escape completely the essentialism that continues to inhere even in current historical epistemologies – a cultural essentialism that, for Said, was the hallmark of ‘Orientalism’. For someone in my position, there remains the nagging question as to whether or not I might have become, or at least be regarded as, a native informant? Have I become one of ‘us’, a product of British academia, part of the crop of new ‘Orientalists’ who, many argue, has emerged since the publication of Said’s Orientalism – someone who (whether they mean to do so or not) ends up applying a Eurocentric gaze that results in the sustaining of old hegemonies and dominances; one who uncovers the supposed mysteries of the ‘Muslim world’ for the benefit and in the interest of the ‘West’ – what Spivak calls the ‘European discursive production’ that continues to influence and shape our knowledge, culture and histories. Or is it possible, I wonder, to be a free-floating, cross-pollinated, historian. In other words, do we remain complicit in the ‘Western’ project or is it possible to develop instead a transnationally oscillating subjectivity. Taking such questions into account, perhaps all one can do is recognise the existence of discoursive tension within oneself, realise that all one is doing is fashioning one of many stories from one’s own relatively narrow perspective and seek to minimise the limits of the essentialism that inheres therein. I leave you with this thought!

(First published on Irshad Hussain’s blog, www.islamfrominside.com, on December 29, 2008) Article republished on khutbahbank by kind permission of Irshad Hussain

“Then when they came in to Yusuf, he took his parents to lodge with him and said: Enter safe into Egypt, if Allah please.” (Qur’an 12:99)

“And he raised his parents upon the throne and they (the brothers) fell down in prostration before him, and he said: O my father! (yaa abati) this is the significance (tawil) of my vision of old; my Lord has indeed made it to be true; and He was indeed kind to me when He brought me forth from the prison and brought you from the desert after the Shaitan (Satan) had sown dissensions between me and my brothers, surely my Lord is benignant to whom He pleases; surely He is the Knowing, the Wise.” (Qur’an 12:100)

“My Lord! Thou hast given me of the kingdom and taught me of the interpretation of sayings: Originator/Splitter of the heavens and the earth! Thou art my guardian in this world and the hereafter; make me die (ta-waffa) a Muslim and join me with the good.” (Qur’an 12:101)

Although in a narrative sense the sura of Joseph (Yusuf) is one of the most accessible and straightforward chapters of the Qur’an, describing in chronological order the story of Joseph’s betrayal by his brothers, his rise to prominence in Egypt, and his reunion with his family, it is simultaneously a narrative whose surface conceals immense depths of meaning. The apparent meaning is a veil over multiple layers of hidden significance. This is indicated by the verses themselves as they connote a deep level of purport in the narrative:

“Certainly in Yusuf and his brothers there are deep signs for the inquirers.” (Qur’an 12:7)

And the repeated references in the sura to the science of tawil is a pointer to the fact that what occurs in this sura requires a multi-layered interpretation for its significance to be understood.

In verse 100 (as well as in verses 4 and 5 of the sura), Yusuf addresses his father as “yaa abati” which is a personal form of address, whereas the brothers address their father using a more formal means of address. This is an indicator of the special spiritual bond between Jacob and Joseph. A bond that remains intact even through their years of separation – a symbol of this bond is Joesph’s cloak or shirt. Joseph’s cloak (or his shirt) was given to Joseph by Jacob as a gift. According to the story in Genesis, the giving of this cloak marked the beginning of the envy felt by Joseph’s brothers. The passing of a cloak in Islam (especially in Sufism or Shi’ite Islam) indicates a transfer of spiritual authority from one person to another or connotes an acknowledgement of a person’s spiritual stature. Joseph receives the cloak and this is symbolic of the connection between the heart of Jacob and that of Joseph and it is also an indicator of Joseph’s connection to the Divine. Joseph’s spiritual stature grows and increases over time, and the cloak/shirt later becomes a means of healing to his aged father (restoring the vision he lost through weeping over his separation from Joseph). This is symbolic of the great increase in Joseph’s own spiritual authority and ability as well as the deep mystical bond between him and his father.

So Joseph’s cloak/shirt is a symbol of the bond of deep love and shared spiritual knowledge between Joseph and Jacob. This is a bond that passes through higher worlds even as it connects two hearts. From Joseph’s heart, to God, to Jacob’s heart – a spiritual connection between two people passes through God. When traditional love, that is normal earthly love, witnesses such a deep, powerful bond of knowledge and spiritual attraction it may cause the arising of jealousy within earthly hearts. It is similar to the jealousy Rumi’s adherents felt when Rumi was in the company of Shams-al-din with whom he had an intensely close spiritual linkage. Or like the jealousy that some people in the Prophet’s time felt when they witnessed the bond between the Prophet and Ali or between the Prophet and some of his dearest companions. For those who have a ritualistic or predominantly exoteric connection to their religion but without the dominance of spirit within themselves – seeing such a powerful attraction and extreme intensity of spirit can, perhaps, lead to a spiritual jealousy and envy – it can bring out negative qualities of the nafs. In Yusuf’s brothers this manifests in their lowering Yusuf into a pit – which itself is symbolic of their desire to lower him in status. They “agreed that they should lower him down into the bottom of the pit….” (Qur’an 12:15)

Note: The lowering into the well is countered by an actual raising of spiritual status. In the darkness of the well Joseph is illuminated by  the light of inspiration: “….We revealed to him: You will most certainly inform them of this their affair while they do not perceive.” (Qur’an 12:15). God illuminates his soul with knowledge of what is to come and so bestows calm upon him in a desperate situation. When the outcome is determined, all anxiety disappears – the only unknown is how the conclusion will be arrived at, not the ending itself.

When Yusuf is lowered into the well, for Jacob also it is a lowering of status as his spirit has a connection with Joseph – his continued attachment and weeping over Joseph irks the brothers causing a continual annoyance and disrespect to flow from them – and the father lives in state of loss. So in verse 99 and 100 Joseph restores Jacob to his proper spiritual hierarchy by raising him to the throne – a sign of the restoration of his status after so long a period of time: “….he took his parents to lodge with him and said: Enter safely into Egypt….And he raised his parents upon the throne….” (Qur’an 12:100)

Also in verse 12:100 we arrive at the fulfillment of Joseph’s dream which is initially described in 12:4. After he has the dream, we are told that a part of Joseph’s prohethood is the ability to reveal the tawil (the hidden interpretation) of dreams and of events. And Joseph demonstrates this ability by interpreting the dreams/visions of the prisoners (when he is in jail) and of the king (when he is released). He does this by showing what events the dreams signify. In other words he maps the dreams onto real events in the world. But his own dream remains unexplained till verse 100. And at that point we learn that while interpretation of the dreams of others demonstrates his mastery of tawil, Joseph’s dream encompasses a sort of double tawil.

Joseph dreams (in verse 4) that he saw the sun, and the moon, and eleven stars prostrating to him. “When Yusuf said to his father: O my father! surely I saw eleven stars and the sun and the moon – I saw them making obeisance to me.” (Qur’an 12:4) The meaning of this is that he will come to a position of authority and will be reunited with his family who will recognize his authority. The further meaning of this is that he will become the spiritual centre of the constellation of his family and they will orbit around him and be guided (suggested by their prostration) through his spiritual authority. A further aspect is that the dream displays the eventual elevated spiritual position of all his family since they are all symbolized by heavenly lights or heavenly bodies.

If we reverse the chronology of these events (the dream and the final reunion with his family) then we see that the dream (from Qur’an 12:4) was displaying the true spiritual reality underlying all the events in this world leading up to Joseph’s reunion with his family and their prostration before him. So Joseph’s family prostrating before him indicates that his spiritual stature was such that he became the central gravitational fulcrum about which their souls orbited – he becomes the means by which his brothers are uplifted from their errors so that they become lights in their own right under the pull and influence and guidance of Joseph. Joseph becomes the guide who, though his identity is not known to the brothers, corrects the faults in their souls.

Joseph’s dream of the sun, moon, and stars is more indicative of reality and the true state of affairs than the material reality around him. The dream is a revelatory witnessing of spiritual realities. The actual events in this world are a shadow of this reality. So Joseph witnesses the true inner reality of events in his dream. Eventually that inner reality unfolds in the form of actual events in this world and Joseph says, “This is the interpretation of my dream.” (Qur’an 12:100)

But the dream was the truer reality as it was not simply a dream that maps onto this world but a witnessing of the spiritual bedrock underlying events – it was revelation. The dream is an explanation of the true meaning of the actual events that transpire later in time. The dream provides a deep explanation of the events even as the events show the true prophetic nature of the dream. It is a paradoxical double tawil that rises above the other dream interpretations made by Joseph. The meaning of the events preceded the events. So when spiritual realities are perceived in Joseph’s revelatory dream, that dream is more real than the events it foreshadows in the sense that it gives a truer picture of the nature underlying the events in this world.

His dream is when he is truly awake because he is witnessing higher spiritual realities in it, realities that are concealed in this waking world. And the Qur’an says that when we awake after death in a higher spiritual reality, our sight (our understanding) will be piercing, awake. Joseph is already truly awake in that higher reality through his dream. He is armed with that experience when he acts in this world. Everything he does arises from a continuous process of tawil. His dreams apprise him of the spiritual reality underlying events in this world. And so Joseph, armed with the gift of tawil, acts with perfect balance and equanimity, guiding individuals (his family) and entire societies (Egypt) to that which is most felicitous.

As well, the dream of Joseph is an indication of the divine lights illuminating Joseph’s soul. When such lights open within an individual this is a sign that events of this world will be in submission to higher decrees. Joseph glimpses the divine decree in his dream. When Joseph is placed in a pit and later in prison, this is only a path to the fulfillment displayed in the dream. Joseph will be elevated. Those who wish him harm will be subdued by him – and through their submission to the nobility of Joseph (and thus to God), they find their salvation and they find mercy. The outcome of Joseph’s road was guided by Allah as stated in Qur’an 12:21: “And Allah was pre-dominant in his career, but most of mankind know not. (Qur’an 12:21)

When verse 100 speaks of Joseph’s family prostrating before him it uses a term that occurs in several places in the Qur’an to describe the action and inner state of someone who witnessed a manifestation of God and fell down prostrate in reaction to this divine theophany (as when Moses’ swooned when experiencing the Divine presence) or in reaction to  experiencing the true power of the Qur’an’s verses. For example Qur’an  19:58 says, “….When the revelations of the Beneficent were recited to them they fell down prostrating, adoring, weeping.” (Qur’an 19:58) Joseph’s brothers experienced an inner transformation brought about by Joseph’s guidance, so their prostration also encompassed an inner recognition of Joseph’s spiritual authority and their newly awakened spirits prostrated out of gratitude and realization.

In Qur’an 12:88 the brothers asked Joseph for charity, for sadaqa. They used a verbal form of the root s-d-q. They used it in its ordinary meaning of being charitable. They were unaware of the immense extent of Joseph’s charity towards them – he gives them not simply material charity but also a spiritual charity which is to be their salvation. He gives to them exactly what they ask for but in a manner far more deep and profound than they could have imagined. He gives them the gift of their own souls set right, of inner truthfulness (sidq). Their request is worth reiterating so we can become aware, in hindsight, of its double meaning. They ask: “O Mighty one, we and our family have been beset by hardship, and we have brought unworthy goods! So fill up the measure for us, and be charitable with us: surely God rewards those who are charitable!” (Qur’an 12:88) They asked for material goods, and received both material and spiritual goods. The hardship is the hardship of the fractures within their own souls caused by their placing Joseph into the well. The unworthy goods they brought were their own selves. They wish Joseph to fill up their measure and the measure he fills up is to raise their souls/selves to the proper measure – to place in their souls what was lacking. They wish Joseph to be charitable and he bestows upon them the ultimate charity by guiding them to a state of spiritual restoration and by bestowing upon them forgiveness and mercy.

“He (Joseph) said: (There shall be) no reproof against you this day; Allah will forgive you, and He is the most Merciful of the merciful.” (Qur’an 12:92)

In Qur’an 12:91 the brothers say: “By Allah! Allah has certainly chosen you over us, and we were certainly sinners.” (Qur’an 12:91) Joseph has, through careful and studied guidance brought them to a realization about their own selves. They experience a recognition of their former corrupted inner state and the corrections Joseph has brought about within them. This is a sign that Joseph has worked within his brothers an alchemical change that transforms them from a fallen state to a state of spiritual restoration. He lifts them out of the blind alley of the nafs al-amarra (the soul that commands to evil) to the state of nafs al-lawamma (the blaming soul – the active conscience) and activates within them the workings of spirit. The activity of this process is evident when they are told in verse 87, “….despair not of the spirit of Allah….” (Qur’an 12:87)

Joseph and his father had to reverse within the brothers the effects of their past wrongdoing and their past recalcitrance towards correction – to reverse the process by which they came under the influence of evil, of Shaitan (Satan). As Jacob mentions concerning the jealousy of Joseph’s brothers (early in the sura), “Lo, Shaitan (Satan) is for man an open foe.” (Qur’an 12:5) The brothers undergo a fall, akin to the fall of Adam, in that they are tempted and they succumb and act against Joseph. Joseph’s task is to lead them back from this fall, to liberate them from the grip of Shaitan, and restore their own souls to them. They have to be lifted out of the spiritual darkness into which they cast themselves by their actions against Joseph and returned to light. The inevitability of a successful conclusion is prefigured in Joseph’s dream in which his brother’s appear as heavenly lights. But for them to reach a stage of spiritual restoration it is not sufficient for Joseph simply to speak to them or lecture them. They have to learn through lived experience and they have to be guided through the appropriate experiences – Joseph acts as their guide – a spiritual guide of whom they are completely unaware. He shapes the difficulties and hardships they must go through, he maneuvers the twists and turns and stratagems that eventually bring them to a position of reunion, recognition, repentance, and salvation. The apparent plot convolutions in the sura can initially appear to be a tangle of different threads, but these resolve eventually into a concentrated spiritual tapestry. The threads of Joseph’s brothers are those of souls being purified of sins and faults. The thread of Joseph is a binding thread that connects all the disparate portions of the tapestry into a unified whole. Joseph’s position is one of deep spiritual authority.

In one sense , Joseph’s position of authority and power, and the actions he takes to correct and straighten the crooked souls of his brothers, and the gracious mercy he shows to all those who wronged him can also be seen as an earthly example and symbol of a higher guidance and judgement. God’s intention is not simply to discharge His wrath and vengeance upon humans, nor to doom them for slips of the soul, but rather the Prophets and revelation and the endless signs that are manifest out in the world and within our own selves are all a form of guidance and correction to steer us to felicity. The aim is to guide us, sometimes with rewards and sometimes with a stick, just as Joseph armed with knowledge that his brothers’ lacked, forced them into situations which were uncomfortable and trying for them but which ultimately had the aim of straightening the crookedness in their souls. And when the brothers were helpless in front of Joseph and subject to his command – he showed them only mercy. Just as Joseph had a hidden knowledge of his brothers’ situation and guided them to a spiritual realization which would allow them to turn in a new direction, so God has hidden knowledge of all our situations.

Verse 101 (“My Lord! Thou hast given me of the kingdom and taught me of the interpretation of sayings….”) uses similar wording to verse 6, except now Joseph recognizes through personal experience and knowledge the promise that was made in verse 6. And this expands further, if any such expansion was possible, Joseph’s profound gratefulness to God for the protecting bond that has guided him and his family to felicity and union through mysterious and astounding routes. It is here that we realize that Joseph’s position is a truly elevated one as he has a position of proximity to Allah denoted by the term wali. “Thou art my wali (proximate loving guardian) in this world and the hereafter….” (Qur’an 12:101) God is his wali in the two domains of this world and the hereafter, the material universe and the spiritual worlds.

This verse also uses the term Fatir, translated as Creator or Originator but which literally means “splitter” and possibly also referring to fitra (the primordial nature with which things are created). In this case it likely refers to the dual nature of creation which consists of both matter and spirit, form and substance, earth and heaven. “Creator/Splitter of the heavens and earth” says the verse. And God’s guidance of Joseph unites both these dimensions as Joseph’s every action in this world is one that originates in and descends from a higher realm and takes root in this world. While the two worlds, dunya (this world) and akhira (the hereafter), are in one sense separate it is also the case that the higher worlds encompass and envelop the lower ones. So when a command issues from the higher worlds, it operates irresistibly in the lower world, the world of the dunya – “He regulates the affair from the heaven to the earth….” (Qur’an 32:5) In sura Yusuf, verse 6 says: “…thy Lord will prefer thee and will teach thee the interpretation of events, and will perfect His grace upon the family of Jacob….” (Qur’an 12:6) This is like a command which issues from heaven and then, from that point on, invisibly but irresistibly regulates all matters concerning Joseph and Jacob and their family until they are brought to a state of felicity in verse 100. Everything that happens in between in this sura is guided by the promise of verse 6. And the patience of Jacob and Joseph is a sign of their proximity and surrender to God and His infallible promise. The word ta-waffa (also used in verse 101) refers to the moment of death when each soul is received by the angel or by God, and Joseph, recognizing in full the intense transcendence of the station he has reached in verse 100, asks God to preserve this elevated state of awareness and surrender within him, till he arrives at the moment of his death: “….make me die (ta-waffa) a Muslim and join me with the good.” (Qur’an 12:101)

-Irshaad Hussain

Tuesday 23rd February 201o

Let us agree on this: we live in pluralistic societies and pluralism is an unavoidable fact. We are equal citizens, but with different cultural and religious backgrounds. So, how can we, instead of being obsessed with potential “conflicts of identity” within communities, change that viewpoint to define and promote a common ethical framework, nurtured by the richness of diverse religious and cultural backgrounds? After all, a pluralistic society needs a strong and effective ethics of citizenship in order to face up to both its internal challenges (diversity, equal rights, racism, corruption, etc) and international challenges (economic crisis, global warming, migrations, etc).

Here’s one principle for reaching that goal: an ethics of citizenship should itself reflect the diversity of the citizenship. For while we agree that no one has the right to impose their beliefs on another, we also understand that our common life should be defined in such a way that it includes the contributions of all the religious and philosophical traditions within it. Further, the way to bring about such inclusion is through critical debate.

When it comes to the new Muslim presence in western countries, that critical debate is hard to achieve. Islam is perceived as a “problem”, never as a gift in our quest for a rich and stimulating diversity. And that’s a mistake. Islam has much to offer – not least when considering how individuals in politics and business have recently been behaving, within the limits of the law, but with a clear lack of ethics.

Islamic literature is full of injunctions about the centrality of an education based on ethics and proper ends. Individual responsibility, when it comes to communicating, learning and teaching is central to the Islamic message. Muslims are expected to be “witnesses to their message before people”, which means speaking in a decent way, preventing cheating and corruption, and respecting the environment. Integrity in politics and the rejection of usurious speculation in economics are principles that are pushing Muslim citizens and scholars to explore new avenues that bring public life and interpersonal ethics together.

More broadly, the Muslim presence should be perceived as positive, too. It is not undermining the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ethical and cultural roots of Europe. Neither is it introducing dogmatism into the debate, as if spiritual and religious traditions automatically draw on authoritarian sources. They can operate within both the limits of the law and in the open public sphere. On the contrary, the Muslim presence can play a critical role in thinking about our future and shaping a new common narrative. It can help recall and revive some of the fundamental principles upon which the cultures of Europe are based.

To put it another way, Muslims remind their fellow citizens that one cannot simply get rid of older ethical traditions and replace them with a supposedly neutral rule of law or by impartial values formed in a free market. To agree on the rule of law, equality and democratic transparency is surely not enough. Contemporary crises within societies, and at the international level, remind us we need more ethics in our public life, not merely more efficiency.

Whether we can agree on the content of a common ethic is another question entirely. But this is where critical and indepth debates should take place, and it’s in this way that the issue of our plural future together should be determined. That future cannot be shaped by superficial discussions of national identity, values or Britishness. Similarly, we must stop treating diversity as a hindrance, for it should be exactly the opposite. Rather, an ethics based on our common citizenship must be forged from a serious and profound engagement with the meaning of our common humanity.

• Read the Citizens Ethics pamphlet in full here

(Wednesday February 28, 2007)

Journeys of Wisdom

In the story of Joseph, there is inspiration for us all, especially those of us who have had first-hand experience of migration from our homelands to these shores. This should help us to understand better the greater journey, which is the journey of life itself.

In our monotonous lifestyles, it is easy to forget that journeys offer great lessons to us; whether in the guise of the daily drive to work or an unnerving mass movement of people across continents. Hence, it is possible to see a Divine purpose in the act of movement, because it is evident that human beings are not the only ones on the move.

For example, behind the outward serenity, there is a motion of protons and neutrons in an atom and the spinning of the earth. All move in an anti-clockwise direction. The pilgrims at Mecca follow this precise movement around the Ka’bah. By following His command, all are worshipping their Lord, signifying their submission which is Islam. Similarly, our migration to distant lands cannot possibly be for the sake of bread alone, but to fulfil a higher purpose.

In Joseph’s journey, God sets a precedent. Hence the interactions of a migrant with the indigenous population are worthy examples to emulate. Therefore, from a mere slave to becoming a minister in the government of a prosperous Egypt, Joseph does not let the power corrupt him, nor does he lose sight of the fact that all his actions must be a form of worship of His Lord.

He is firstly enticed by his master’s wife through her sexual advances, but he rejects them, preferring imprisonment to lewdness. Yes, of course, he is upset by trials and tribulations, but his attitude is not a nihilistic, despairing one. Instead, he shows perseverance in patience and prayer during hardship and is thankful to his Lord at times of ease. Furthermore, he never boasts about his unique skills of dream interpretation and far sighted wisdom. Instead, he attributes these qualities to God, as being His gifts. Above all, rather than seeking revenge he chooses to forgive his brothers.

Notwithstanding the high stature of Joseph, how much of the above have we been able to achieve during our time, not just in the city of Stoke-On-Trent, but these isles as a whole? Have we resisted the temptations, dealt honestly with people, used our God-given talents to help, albeit in a small way? Do we even feel we even belong to this soil, or do we prefer to partake in the politics of our lands many miles away? Do we eat the same curries that we feed our customers in our famous Baltis?

In brief, are we dynamically worshipping our Lord through our actions or restricting our worship to prayers alone? Only if the answer to these questions is yes can we hope to be emulating Joseph and only then can we feel that we have made the best use of our journeys.

February 1, 2008

‘Don’t teach children patriotism’

Nicola Woolcock

Patriotism should be avoided in school lessons because British history is “morally ambiguous”, a leading educational body recommends.

History and citizenship lessons should stick to the bare facts rather than encouraging loyalty to Britain when covering subjects such as the Second World War or the British Empire, the Institute of Education researchers said. Teachers should not instill pride in what they consider great moments of British history, as more shameful episodes could be downplayed or excluded.

The slave trade, imperialism and 20th century wars should be taught as controversial issues while students are deciding how they feel about their country, the report says.

Three quarters of teachers felt obliged to tell students about the danger of patriotism. The survey suggested neither pupils nor teachers wanted patriotism endorsed by schools.

Historians said last night, however, that it was impossible to teach the subject without patriotism or a recognition that British values were rooted in the past.

The report criticises the current drive to use citizenship lessons as a way of promoting pride in being British and developing a sense of belonging. It said: “To love what is corrupt is itself corrupting, not least because it inclines us to ignore, forget, forgive or excuse the corruption. And there’s the rub for patriotism.

“Countries are morally ambiguous entities: they are what they are by virtue of their histories.”

The authors added: “It is hard to think of a national history free from the blights of warmongering, imperialism, tyranny, injustice, slavery and subjugation, or a national identity forged without recourse to exclusionary and xenophobic stereotypes.”

Alan Johnson, the former Education Secretary, announced last year that pupils aged 11 to 16 would have compulsory lessons in British history. Ethnicity, religion, race and national identity will be taught, through studying immigration, the Commonwealth, the Empire and devolution, extending the popular vote and women’s rights.

Gordon Brown said at the time: “There is a golden thread that intertwines the unshakeable British commitment to liberty with another very British idea: that of duty and social responsibility.”

But Dr Hand, the co-author of the report, said: “Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both called for a history curriculum that fosters attachment and loyalty to Britain, but the case for promoting patriotism in schools is weak.

“Are countries really appropriate objects of love? Loving things can be bad for us, for example when the things we love are morally corrupt. Since all national histories are at best morally ambiguous, it’s an open question whether citizens should love their countries.”

The institute – part of the University of London – asked nearly 300 pupils aged 13 to 14, and 47 teachers, in 20 London schools, how patriotism should be handled. About 94 per cent of teachers and 77 per cent of teenagers said that schools should give a balanced presentation of opposing views. Fewer than 10 per cent felt patriotism should be actively promoted.

However, 19 per cent of teachers and 16 per cent of teenagers thought schools should support patriotic views when expressed by pupils.The historian Tristram Hunt said of the institute’s report: “I think it’s a very immature approach to the topic. The point is not whether history was right or wrong from a 21st Century liberal-left perspective. It’s about teaching students to understand the mindset and context of our forebears.

“The real problem isn’t that our children are being indoctrinated with patriotism, but that they don’t know enough British history.”

Ambiguous times

1750-1830 The Industrial Revolution: exploitation of the poor versus great wealth creation and growth

1807 Abolition of the slave trade. Britons were both practitioners of the trade and responsible for abolition

1947 Indian independence and Partition. How well did Britain manage its withdrawal from the sub-continent?

2003 Iraq war: was it liberation or occupation?

It’s more than a year since Israel launched its immoral attack on Gaza and Palestinians are still living on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. So what has Tony Blair done to further peace in the region? Virtually nothing, argues the historian Avi Shlaim

The savage attack Israel unleashed against Gaza on 27 December 2008 was both immoral and unjustified. Immoral in the use of force against civilians for political purposes. Unjustified because Israel had a political alternative to the use of force. The home-made Qassam rockets fired by Hamas militants from Gaza on Israeli towns were only the excuse, not the reason for Operation Cast Lead. In June 2008, Egypt had brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. ­Contrary to Israeli propaganda, this was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three. Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters. When Hamas retaliated, Israel seized the renewed rocket attacks as the excuse for launching its insane offensive. If all Israel wanted was to protect its citizens from Qassam rockets, it only needed to observe the ceasefire.

While the war failed in its primary aim of regime change in Gaza, it left ­behind a trail of death, devastation, destruction and indescribable human suffering. Israel lost 13 people, three in so-called friendly fire. The Palestinian death toll was 1,387, including 773 civilians (115 women and 300 children), and more than 5,300 people were injured. The entire population of 1.5 million was left traumatised. Across the Gaza Strip, 3,530 homes were completely destroyed, 2,850 severely damaged and 11,000 suffered structural damage.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, tending to the needs of four million Palestinian refugees, stated that Gaza had been “bombed back, not to the Stone Age, but to the mud age”; its inhabitants reduced to building homes from mud after the fierce 22-day offensive.

War crimes were committed and possibly even crimes against humanity, documented in horrific detail in Judge Richard Goldstone’s report for the UN human rights council. The report condemned both Israel and Hamas, but reserved its strongest criticism for Israel, accusing it of deliberately targeting and terrorising civilians in Gaza. The British government did not take part in the vote on the report, sending a signal to the hawks in Israel that they can continue to disregard the laws of war. Gordon Brown’s 2007 appointment as a patron of the Jewish National Fund UK presumably played a part in the adoption of this pusillanimous position.

One year on, the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas on earth, continues to teeter on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza, in force since June 2007, restricts the flow not only of arms but also food, fuel and medical supplies to well below the minimum necessary for normal, everyday life. Reconstruction work has hardly begun because of the Israeli ban on bringing in cement and other building materials to Gaza. Thousands of families still live in the ruins of their former homes. Hospitals, health facilities, schools, government buildings and mosques cannot be rebuilt. Nor can the basic infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza City’s sewage disposal plant. Today, 80% of Gaza’s population remain dependent on food aid, 43% are unemployed, and 70% live on less than $1 a day.

Meanwhile, the so-called peace process cannot be revived because ­Israel refuses to freeze settlement expansion on the West Bank. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently agreed to a temporary freeze of 10 months, but this does not apply to the 3,000 pre-approved housing units to be built on the West Bank or to any part of Greater Jerusalem. It’s like two men negotiating the division of a pizza while one continues to gobble it up.

Politically, the disjunction between words and deeds persists. Appeals to the Israeli government to lift or relax the blockade of Gaza were not backed up by effective pressure or the threat of sanctions. In fact, the only effective pressure was applied by the US on the Egyptian government – to seal its border with Gaza. Egypt has its own reason for complying: Hamas is ideologically allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic opposition to the Egyptian regime. The tunnels under the border separating Egypt from the Gaza Strip bring food and material relief to the people under siege. Yet, under US supervision and with the help of US army engineers, Egypt is building an 18-metre-deep underground steel wall to disrupt the tunnels and tighten the blockade.

The wall of shame, as Egyptians call it, will complete the transformation of Gaza into an open-air prison. It is the cruellest example of the concerted Israeli-Egyptian-US policy to isolate and prevent Hamas from leading the Palestinian struggle for self-determi nation. Hamas is habitually dismissed by its enemies as a purely terrorist organisation. Yet no one can deny that it won a fair and free election in the West Bank as well as Gaza in January 2006. Moreover, once Hamas gained power through the ballot box, its leaders adopted a more pragmatic stand ­towards Israel than that enshrined in its charter, repeatedly expressing its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire. But there was no one to talk to on the Israeli side.

Israel adamantly refused to recognise the Hamas-led government. The US and the European Union followed, resorting to economic sanctions in a vain attempt to turn the people against their elected leaders. This cannot possibly bring security or stability because it is based on the denial of the most elementary human rights of the people of Gaza and the collective political rights of the Palestinian people. Through its special relationship with the US and its staunch support for Israel, the British government is implicated in this shameful policy.

At present the British public is preoccupied with Tony Blair and the war in Iraq. What is often overlooked is that this was only one aspect of a disastrous British policy towards the Middle East, inaugurated by Blair, and which shows no sign of changing under his successor.

One of Blair’s arguments used to justify the Iraq war was that it would help bring justice to the long-suffering Palestinians. In his House of Commons speech on 18 March 2003, he promised that action against Iraq would form part of a broader engagement with the problems of the Middle East. He even declared that resolving the Israeli- Palestinian dispute was as important to Middle East peace as removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Yet by focusing international attention on Iraq, the war further ­marginalised the Palestinian question. To be fair, Blair persuaded the Quartet (a group consisting of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia) to issue the Roadmap in 2003, which called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. But President George Bush was not genuinely committed and only adopted it under pressure from his allies. Ariel Sharon, Israel’s hard-line prime minister at the time, wrecked the plan by continuing to expand Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Could Blair really not have realised that for Bush the special relationship that counted was the one with Israel? Every time Bush had to choose between Blair and Sharon, he chose Sharon.

Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in August 2005 was not a contribution to the Roadmap but an attempt to unilaterally redraw the borders of Greater Israel and part of a plan to entrench the occupation there. Yet in return for the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon extracted from the US a written agreement to Israel’s retention of the major settlement blocs on the West Bank. Bush’s support amounted to an abrupt reversal of US policy since 1967, which regarded the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to peace. Blair publicly endorsed the pact, probably to preserve a united Anglo-American front at any price. It was the most egregious British betrayal of the Palestinians since the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

In July 2006, at the height of the savage Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, Blair opposed a security council resolution for an immediate and ­unconditional ceasefire: he wanted to give Israel an opportunity to destroy Hezbollah, the radical Shi’ite religious-political movement. One year later, in June 2007, he resigned from office. That day he was appointed the Quartet’s special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. His main sponsor was Bush and his blatant partisanship on behalf of Israel was probably considered a qualification. His appointment coincided with the collapse of the Palestinian national unity government, the reassertion of Fatah rule in the West Bank and the violent seizure of power by Hamas in Gaza.

Blair’s main tasks were to mobilise international assistance for the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, to promote good governance and the rule of law in the Palestinian territories, and to further Palestinian economic development. His broader mission, was “to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the Roadmap”.

On taking up his appointment, Blair said that: “The absolute priority is to try to give effect to what is now the consensus across the international community – that the only way of bringing stability and peace to the ­Middle East is a two-state solution.” His appointment was received with great satisfaction by the Israelis and with utter dismay by the Arabs.

In his two and a half years as special envoy, Blair has achieved remarkably little. True, Blair helped persuade the Israelis to reduce the number of West Bank checkpoints from 630 to 590; he helped to create employment oppor tunities; and he may have contributed to a slight improvement in living standards in Palestine. But the Americans remained fixated on security rather than on economic development, and their policy remains skewed in favour of Israel. Barack Obama made a promising start as president by insisting on a complete settlement freeze on the West Bank, but was compelled to back down, dashing many of our high hopes.

One reason for Blair’s disappointing results is that he wears too many hats and cannot, as he promised, be “someone who is on the ground spending 24/7 on the issue”. Another reason is his “West Bank first” attitude – continuing the western policy of bolstering Fatah and propping up the ailing Palestinian Authority against Hamas. His lack of commitment to Gaza is all too evident. During the Gaza war, he did not call for a ceasefire. He has one standard for Israel and one for its victims. His attitude to Gaza is to wait for change rather than risk incurring the displeasure of his American and Israeli friends. As envoy, Blair has been inside Gaza only twice; once to visit a UN school just beyond the border and once to Gaza City. His project for sanitation in northern Gaza was never completed because he could not persuade the Israelis to allow in the last small load of pipes needed. A growing group of western politicians has publicly acknowledged the necessity of talking to Hamas if meaningful progress is to be achieved; Blair is not one of their number.

Blair has totally failed to fulfil the official role of the envoy “to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the Roadmap”, largely for reasons beyond his control. The most important of these is Israel’s determination to perpetuate the isolation and the de-development of Gaza and deny the Palestinian people a small piece of land – 22% of Mandate-era ­Palestine, to be precise – on which to live in freedom and dignity. It is a policy that Baruch Kimmerling, the late Israeli sociologist, named ­”politicide” – the denial to the Palestinian people of any independent political existence in Palestine.

Partly, however, Blair’s failure is due to his own personal limitations; his ­inability to grasp that the fundamental issue in this tragic conflict is not Israeli security but Palestinian national rights, and that concerted and sustained international pressure is required to compel Israel to recognise these rights. The core issue cannot be avoided: there can be no settlement of the conflict without an end to the Israeli occupation. There is international consensus for a two-state solution, but Israel rejects it and Blair has been unable or unwilling to use the Quartet to enforce it.

Blair’s failure to stand up for Palestinian independence is precisely what endears him to the Israeli establishment. In February of last year, while the Palestinians in Gaza were still mourning their dead, Blair received the Dan David prize from Tel Aviv University as the “laureate for the present time dimension in the field of leadership”. The citation praised him for his “exceptional intelligence and foresight, and demonstrated moral courage and leadership”. The prize is worth $1m. I may be cynical, but I cannot help viewing this prize as absurd, given Blair’s silent complicity in Israel’s continuing crimes against the Palestinian people.

Avi Shlaim is professor of international relations at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and the author of Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Verso, 2009). His fee for this article has been donated to Medical Aid for Palestine.

This article appeared in the Guardian on 3rd February 2010

Ian Burama

The Guardian, Saturday 5 December 2009

Switzerland has four mosques with minarets and a population of 350,000 nominal Muslims, mostly Europeans from Bosnia and Kosovo, of whom about 13% regularly go to prayer. Not a huge problem, one might have thought. Yet 57.5% of Swiss voters opted in a referendum for aconstitutional ban on minarets, allegedly because of worries about “fundamentalism” and the “creeping Islamisation” of Switzerland.

Are the Swiss more bigoted than other Europeans? Probably not. Referendums are a measure of popular gut feelings, rather than considered opinion, and popular gut feelings are rarely liberal. Referendums on this issue in other European countries might well produce startlingly similar results.

To attribute the Swiss vote to ban minarets – an idea that was promoted by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, but by none of the other political parties – to “Islamophobia” is perhaps to miss the point. To be sure, a long history of mutual Christian-Muslim hostility, and recent cases of radical Islamist violence, have made many people fearful of Islam in a way that they are not of Hinduism, say, or Buddhism. And the minaret, piercing the sky like a missile, is easily caricatured as a fearsome image.

But if the Swiss and other Europeans were self-assured about their own identities, their Muslim fellow-citizens probably would not strike such fear in their hearts. And that might be the problem. It was not so long ago that the majority of citizens in the western world had their own unquestioned symbols of collective faith and identity. The church spires that grace many European cities still meant something to most people. Few people married outside their own faith.

Until recently, too, many Europeans believed in their kings and queens, flew their national flags, sang their national anthems, were taught heroic versions of their national histories. Home was home. Foreign travel was for soldiers, diplomats, and rich people. “Identity” was not yet seen as a problem.

Much has changed, thanks to global capitalism, European integration, the stigmatisation of national feeling by two catastrophic world wars, and, perhaps most importantly, the widespread loss of religious faith. Most of us live in a secular, liberal, disenchanted world. The lives of most Europeans are freer now than ever before. We are no longer told what to do or think by priests or our social superiors. When they try, we tend not to take any notice.

But there has been a price to pay for our newly liberated world. Freedom from faith and tradition has not always led to greater contentment, but, on the contrary, to widespread bewilderment, fear, and resentment. While demonstrations of collective identity have not entirely disappeared, they are largely confined to football stadiums, where celebration (and disappointment) can quickly boil over in violence and resentment.

Populist demagogues blame political, cultural, and commercial elites for the anxieties of the modern world. They are accused, not entirely without reason, of imposing mass immigration, economic crisis, and loss of national identity on ordinary citizens. But if the elites are hated for causing our modern malaise, the Muslims are envied for still having faith, for knowing who they are, for having something that is worth dying for.

It is unimportant that many European Muslims are just as disenchanted and secular as their non-Muslim fellow-citizens. It is the perception that counts. Those soaring minarets, those black headscarves, are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith.

It is not surprising that anti-Muslim populism has found some of its most ferocious supporters among former leftists, for they, too, have lost their faith – in world revolution, or whatnot. Many of these leftists, before their turn to revolution, came from religious backgrounds. So they suffered a double loss. In their hostility to Islam, they like to talk about defending “Enlightenment values,” whereas in fact they lament the collapse of faith, whether religious or secular.

There is, alas, no immediate cure for the kind of social ills exposed by the Swiss referendum. The Pope has an answer, of course. He would like people to return to the bosom of Rome. Evangelical preachers, too, have a recipe for salvation. Neo-conservatives, for their part, see the European malaise as a form of typical Old World decadence, a collective state of nihilism bred by welfare states and soft dependence on hard American power. Their answer is a revived western world, led by the United States, engaged in an armed crusade for democracy.

But, unless one is a Catholic, a born-again Christian, or a neo-con, none of these visions is promising. The best we can hope for is that liberal democracies will muddle through this period of unease – that demagogic temptations will be resisted, and violent impulses contained. After all, democracies have weathered worse crises in the past.

That said, it would surely help if we had fewer referendums. For, contrary to what some believe, they do not strengthen democracy. They weaken it by undermining our elected representatives, whose job is to exercise their good judgment rather than voice the gut feelings of an anxious, angry people.

• Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009

From: The Guardian, Monday 30th November 2009

It wasn’t meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people’s fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth?

There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched? My country, like many in Europe, is facing a national reaction to the new visibility of European Muslims. The minarets are but a pretext – the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol.

Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burka; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence; cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands – and so on. It is important to look beyond these symbols and understand what is really happening in Europe in general and in Switzerland in particular: while European countries and citizens are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic – and it is scary.

At the very moment Europeans find themselves asking, in a globalising, migratory world, “What are our roots?”, “Who are we?”, “What will our future look like?”, they see around them new citizens, new skin colours, new symbols to which they are unaccustomed.

Over the last two decades Islam has become connected to so many controversial debates – violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage, to name a few – it is difficult for ordinary citizens to embrace this new Muslim presence as a positive factor. There is a great deal of fear and a palpable mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? And the questions are charged with further suspicion as the idea of Islam being an expansionist religion is intoned. Do these people want to Islamise our country?

The campaign against the minarets was fuelled by just these anxieties and allegations. Voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions. Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonised Swiss flag. The claim was made that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Swiss values. (The UDC has in the past demanded my citizenship be revoked because I was defending Islamic values too openly.) Its media strategy was simple but effective. Provoke controversy wherever it can be inflamed. Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people: we are under siege, the Muslims are silently colonising us and we are losing our very roots and culture. This strategy worked. The Swiss majority are sending a clear message to their Muslim fellow citizens: we do not trust you and the best Muslim for us is the Muslim we cannot see.

Who is to be blamed? I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective western societies. In Switzerland, over the past few months, Muslims have striven to remain hidden in order to avoid a clash. It would have been more useful to create new alliances with all these Swiss organisations and political parties that were clearly against the initiative. Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely “integrated”. That we face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence – challenges we must face together. We cannot blame the populists alone – it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.

Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is What I Believe

By John Pilger

5^th November 2009

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the “unique features” of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power “which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country”.
Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American  who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda — “public relations”, or PR. “What matters,” he said, “is the illusion.” Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion.  The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family.  Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the “army’s dirty work” in “urban combat zones”. What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

“I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”  We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one?

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.”

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

Menzies spoke incessantly about “the downward thrust of Chinese communism”. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied.  “We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” he said. “You are with us, come what may.”

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

“It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom…”.

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: “Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it. Terror is not terror if “we” do it. A crime is not a crime if “we” commit it. It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy.  It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere — from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.

According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country — unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst… We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia … a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”.

Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like “border protection” become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people.  Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude.  SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as “the subject of negotiation”. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as “the subject of negotiation”.

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies – are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we? Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, “There’s going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now.”

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion - “an episode”, according to one study, “more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”. In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. “Building democracy”, said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and  affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.

There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza.  I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable “looking from the side”.

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it’s tricky, isn’t it? Because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence – to no longer “look from the side” in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don’t like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population.  Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by “a person or persons unknown”. That’s how the coroner described it.  Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He’s in his sixties. He’s a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this - as they do to black Australians, almost every day - Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests?  How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international “shame list” for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent – not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.

I said, “You’re exhausted.”

He replied, “Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m just tired to death, mate.” He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as “a piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away… in a way that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs”.

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are? Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don’t look from the side – those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia’s historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep has fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

“The struggle of people against power, “wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

In Australia, we have much to be proud of – if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement – until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.

I believe the key to our self respect - and our legacy to the next generation - is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

First Published: The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Va.), 19 July 2009

Recent public opinion surveys show a majority of Americans see “little” or “nothing” to admire in Islam or the Muslim world. Seventy percent say Islam has nothing in common with their own faith, an increase from 59 percent two years earlier.

Those with the strongest anti-Muslim views rely most on the media – not personal experience, travel or study – for their information about Islam. Nor is the nation’s educational elite any less immune to the power of the predominant media narrative of Islam as irrevocably violent, anti-modern, anti-women and anti-democratic.

This same narrative dominates every aspect of the way we think and speak about Islam. It shapes how we listen to what Muslims say and how we interpret what it is they do. As such, it exercises a corrosive effect on everything from politics and theology to international relations, human rights and national security policies, including today’s “war on terrorism.”

This has left the West intellectually and politically unable to respond successfully to some of the most significant challenges of the early-21^st century – the rise of Islamist political power, the more narrow emergence of terrorism in the name of Islam, tensions between Western social values and multicultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations.

Often overlooked in discussions of contemporary relations between Islam and the West are the broad historical, intellectual and philosophical ideas that literally dictate how we as Westerners apprehend the world of Islam and the Muslims. If we take just one obscure corner of this vast field – that of the history of medieval science – we may be able to learn much about our views of Islam, and about ourselves as well.

Our starting point is the 11th century, the era of the Crusades. Before that, Christian Europe looked upon the Muslims with indifference; they were a nuisance to shipping and coastal settlements, but they were certainly not seen as an existential threat. All that changed in the run-up to the First Crusade, proclaimed in 1095. Now, a distinct portrait of Islam began to take shape in the medieval Western mind, with the practices and beliefs of the Muslims conceived as mirror-opposites of self-evident Christian virtues.

Where Christianity stands for love, Islam is a religion of violence; where Christ stands for truth, Muhammad and the Quran stand for falsehood; where Christians are chaste, Muslims are sexual deviants. Over time, these notions acquired a number of corollaries: Muslims are backward, and fearful of modernity; the West is rational, Islam is irrational and fanatical. In an observation as apt now as when it was first advanced 900 years ago, one chronicler of the First Crusade acknowledged that it was not important to actually know anything about Islam in order to attack it: “It is safe to
speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken.”

One of the most salient aspects of the medieval history of science is the relationship between sacred and profane knowledge. Under the influence of Augustine and other Church Fathers, the early Christian world saw no reason to explore what the Ancient Greeks had called “the nature of things.”

Yet, things looked quite different to the Muslims. Arab scholars found divine support for science in the Quran, the revealed Word of God. A number of verses refer to the order inherent to God’s universe and to man’s capacity to exploit this order for his own needs, such as keeping time. Elsewhere, the Quran advocates the use of God’s creation for orientation amid the featureless deserts and navigation across the oceans. By one scholar’s count, the Arabic word for “knowledge” (ilm) and related terms comprise almost 1 percent of the Quran’s 78,000 words and are among its most frequently used terms, a feature that highlights just how important the concept was for the first Muslims. At the same time, many of Islam’s rituals demand a sophisticated understanding of the natural world. Believers could not simply follow the example of Augustine and close their eyes “to the course of the stars.” Rather, Muslims are required to know the proper times of the five daily prayers, the precise direction of Mecca – known as the qibla – and the start of the lunar fasting month of Ramadan.

Nowhere was the interaction of faith and science more important than in the question of the qibla. The earliest Muslims of Central Asia and Spain simply directed their prayers to the south, in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad when he was in Medina, which is to the north of the holy city. As Muslims’ scientific understanding of their universe became more sophisticated, they began to demand greater accuracy in conforming their practice to the sacred geography of Islam.

What is noteworthy here is the way medieval Muslim opinion deferred to the scientists on such an important question of religious ritual. One of the
greatest treatises on mathematical geography was a work by Abu Raihan
Mohammed Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, written in the 11th century, to find the
direction of Mecca from Afghanistan. His “Determination of the Coordinates of Cities” is the first work in history to determine accurate geographic locales with the techniques of spherical trigonometry.

As early as the 9th century, all six trigonometric functions – sine and cosine, tangent and cotangent, secant and cosecant – were known. Only the sine function was an import, from Hindu astronomy; the other five were Arab discoveries. This allowed the use of calculations in the place of geometric diagrams and paved the way for the development of modern mathematical astronomy.

Urban areas saw the rise of the mosque-based timekeeper. These were professional scientists, who determined local prayer times, built astronomical instruments, wrote treatises on astronomy, and taught students. Their work included the production of meticulous almanacs – from the Arabic ”al-manakh” – to list the prayer times for each day of the year in such distant locales as China and Morocco. In medieval Cairo, 200 pages of special tables were available for keeping time by the sun and other celestial markers.

Islamic teachings also went hand in hand with other disciplines. Injunctions in the Quran to heal the sick provided great impetus to the study of medicine. The religious ritual of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca created a need for cartography and navigation. Speculation among Sufi mystics on the transformation of the soul in union with God helped fuel the alchemists’ search for ways to transform base metals, laying the groundwork for modern chemistry.

Even many of the foods we eat – artichokes, oranges, apricots – and our technical vocabulary – words like algebra, azimuth, zenith, and zero – all come from the Arabs. Most important, there evolved the very idea that man was capable of understanding God’s universe and of interpreting it for his benefit.

I have gone into considerable detail to challenge the notion of Islam’s inherent enmity toward science and innovation because I believe this is a first, crucial step toward restoring the Muslims’ rightful place in the history of Western ideas – and toward transforming the ways in which we think about the Islamic world in general.

When Western ideas of science do allow a role for the Arabs, it is often as caretakers of Greek learning, preserved from loss by Arabic translators until its discovery by Latin scholars, beginning in the 12th century. This notion would have come as a complete shock to medieval Christian thinkers.

The philosopher Roger Bacon, one of the earliest Western proponents of the scientific method, praised the Muslims for their intellectual innovations: ”Philosophy is drawn from the Muslims.” A leading translator from the Arabic urged his fellow Latin scholars to follow the Muslim lead in astronomy; another hailed Arabs as the only people to truly understand geometry.

It was only with the later rise of the Renaissance that the West – having feasted on Arab learning for several centuries – set about to erase the Arab contribution from the historical record. Eager to claim direct descent from the likes of Aristotle and Archimedes, Western thinkers marginalized the role of Arab learning. Francesco Petrarch, often called the father of Renaissance humanism, went so far as to decree: “I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia.”

Here, then, is the origin of the notion of the Renaissance as the “recovery” of classical learning, which comprised the natural birthright of Christian Europe. Such accounts are coloured profoundly by a Western consensus, often invoked to explain the state of the Muslim world today, that Islam is inherently hostile to innovation.

But what if we were to reject this view? Suddenly, a number of possibilities suggest themselves, and miscellaneous facts that have been floating around start to fall into place. The origins of the Western scientific lexicon - from azimuth to zenith, from algebra to zero; the unmistakable strains of Arab philosophy throughout the works of Thomas Aquinas and other seminal Western thinkers; the mark of Arabic poetry on the works of the troubadors; the everyday presence on our dinner tables of such crops as hard wheat, watermelon and spinach – all this starts to take on new meaning.

Suddenly, it becomes possible to reimagine the relationship between Islam and the West as one of internal cultural rivalry, rather than that of unavoidable civilizational conflict. In effect, this would mark a return to the world view captured in one of the most remarkable landmarks in the history of ideas: the world atlas produced by the Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi in the 12th century by commission of the Christian king of Sicily, which was then multi-faith – Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox.

Jonathan Lyons is the author, most recently, of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization. He teaches at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Va.

(C)2009 Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star

http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/inbox/story/1165736.html

I’ve been considering some of the larger features of the architecture of the Sīrah recently and I find – and I’m sure most Muslims find this when they open its pages – an extraordinary immediacy to the story that it tells.

Some stories – classic stories – of course are timeless; people are still enthralled by Homer, by Shakespeare, but the Great North Legends. There’s something different when we look at the Sīrah of the Prophet (saw) as well as being a great yarn, it seems to leap out of the pages at us with an alarming immediacy.

Sometimes when I get a moment or two to think, I try to work out what it is that makes that story so immediate. In the context of this meeting one might invoke most obviously, something that’s very obviously there – hard wired into the logic boards of the Prophetic drama – but which we tend not to think about, which is that we take the story to a cosmic struggle between ‘The One’ – la ilaha ill Allah – and the superstitious many of the Arabs.

We take it to the heroic story whereby selfishness in terms of local, tribal vendettas which had been plaguing Arabia for a thousand years are replaced by the principle of a single law applicable to everybody. We tend to think of it in those terms – in terms of Tawhīd and in terms of sharī’a. But there’s another dimension that was clearly important to many of the protagonists themselves which is an economic dimension to the sīrah.

When you consider the divine wisdom in sending the seal of the Messenger (saw) to that, then and there you recognize first of all, the magnitude of the divine estimation of the man (saw) because he really was up against it. Sent to a people mā unthira abā’uhum – whose forefathers had not been warned, taking them from one end of the religious spectrum – polytheism – to the other end – monotheism; taking them from lawlessness to strict lawfulness; taking them from a belief in nothing in particular to a belief in life after death, so, many extraordinary challenges he met and successfully faced. But one of them that we tend not to focus on is the fact that the divine wisdom sent him to a community that was mercantile.

We think of the 7th Century Arabs as wondering Bedouin hanging about the desert, stories around the campfire not caring too much about higher things. But the reality of the sīrah is that it’s essentially an urban story, and it’s a tale of two cities, and the hijra is a city from a mercantile, plutocratic immoral elite, to a new space that is to become a zone for the muhājirīn and for the masākīn and for the poor and for the mustad’afīn. We tend to ignore this as Muslims frequently, that the reason for the struggle is for the mustad’afīn, not for waving a particular flag, but for the mustad’afin – for those who are made weak.

So he sent the Prophet (saw) to – we can’t really use the word ‘capitalist’ because it’s so long ago – but to a strongly mercantile, selfish, detribalising community – the Qureysh. That is where the divine wisdom has chosen to place this final, Jewel – like soul.

And we find this is a community where tribal ties are breaking down; religion is not taken seriously by too many people. It’s kind of like modern, Western religion – it’s a civic religion – you have your own faith, your own little community, and your own little festivals, and your funny little superstitions stories. In the public space, what counts is money and certain types of civic relationships. The religious thing is kind of like ‘your tribe does this, and your deity does etc. we don’t care if you’re worshipping Al-‘Auza Armanāt or Hubal, it’s really the public concern. What really is the centre of the city of Mecca and what people really worry about is the economic reality. If you threaten that then you’re really a trouble maker.

Mecca before Islām is the city in where Umāya ibn Khalaf can walk past the Ka’ba with his entourage of feudal servants and slaves, and there be no legal contract at all between them.

The Prophet (saw) is sent to that people, and it’s no coincidence that his message begins among the victims of that unjust economic order. Who are the victims? The woman and the slaves are the ones being trampled upon – they’re at the bottom of the heap and they’re the ones who first start to respond. That is axiomatic in Prophetic religion. That’s where the truth tends to spread – not with the rich and the powerful and the prestigious and the famous, but it’s the broken-hearted – the munkasirāt Al-Qulūb – whose hearts are broken by the weight that is pressed upon them by people whose main concerns are farming an extra dollar.

That’s why sometimes in the West – in America for instance – sometimes you hear Arabic expat communities saying ‘why don’t white people become more Muslim?’ because they see all these black people and Hispanics coming into the mosque and they get anxious – they’d really like to see more kind of people like me [Audience laugh]. When you ask them why, they don’t have a terribly good way of expressing what’s actually in their hearts. There are issues of race there, there are issues of self-esteem, and there are some not very nice attitudes that bring that about. But the reality is, if you look at the sīrah and you look at the Prophetic nature of divine providence in the ages, that’s where the spiritual wealth is distributed.

In an unrealistic, competitive, cruel, computer-obsessed society – it’s amongst those people that you will find the soft hearts that will respond to the truth. The African – Americans, the Hispanic Muslims, in Australia there are more Aboriginal converts to Islām than there are white converts to Islam despite the demographic disparities. Latin America – it’s in the flabella’s that the religion prospers, that’s the reality of Tawhīd. Those are the people to whom it appealed, primarily only of course become its destiny is universal. And sometimes those Arabic ex-patriot communities driving their Mercedes and living in the exurbs and really hoping that people assume they’re white – don’t really like to be told that. Often Muslims are just as uncomfortable to be told what the sīrah is really about, as non-Muslims. Because it isn’t about Middle class complacency it doesn’t say you can’t have a car and you can’t have a decent income, and you can’t succeed. It’s not a monastic aesthetical tradition that turns its back on the world. But it does say very sternly that it’s with the people, whose hearts are broken that Allah is with, anā ‘aind Al-munkasirāti qulūbahum – ‘I am with the broken hearted’, as He says (swt) in the hadīth qudsī. That’s where you expect truth to exist.

And in this country that’s what a lot of people can’t understand. They can’t get that some middle=class guy in a big cathedral who goes to Church once a year on Easter Day, might actually not be who God is interested in. And that God is actually interested in precisely the people whom the establishment, ethos and all of the media are least respectful of, which is the toothless old Bangladeshis in the mosque in Brick Lane, which is really where the deep process of spiritual self- noting and the remembrance of Allah (swt) is taking place.
That’s the radicalism of the Prophetic vision. It doesn’t say revolution; it does say, revolutionise the way in which you categorise people. A luminous heart is much more likely to be the old Bangladeshi housewife in the tenement building than the stock broker in his BMW, who sometimes goes to a revivalist Christian Meeting.

That’s the nature of Tawhīd and this is a stern, absolute, Prophetic teaching. Allah is with the oppressed Israelites, not with Far’ūn. Again and again these stories are to remind us of that uncomfortable fact. I find it uncomfortable.
I recently calculated that I’m endlessly grumbling about my academic salaries – we always do – because we work so hard and we do such important things and we get so much less than the doctors, so it’s obviously wrong, but actually I’m in the top 1% of global earners; I told my children and they kind of respected me a bit more when they heard that [Audience laugh] although it didn’t affect their pocket money.

That’s the reality, but where the divine regard truly is, is with those people whom the system really has no time for at all, or regards them as backward people, sexists, homophobes, fundamentalists, useless immigrants, asylum seekers – the most despised people are likely to be where the divine pleasure is most likely to be found.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us contemplating the fact of the hijra: the Prophet (saw) is sent to this mercantile community and his opponents are all millionaires of their time; hard hearted plutocrats. What they really want is not for him to say ‘you can worship your God, as long as you let us worship ours.’ But their deities are linked inextricably to this oppressive system. Their deities are unable to inspire them with the long term vision and the humanity and softness of heart that enables them actually to do something about the people in the street selling the Big Issue.
In our context we have the same sort of Umay ibn Khalaf-type of arrogance, except in our system which is so brilliantly designed; we tend to sweep away from our sight, the reminders that there are victims of the system we have created.

One of the consequences of globalization is that we don’t see the poor; the poor are the ‘third world’ doing the jobs which we have farmed out to them. Why have call centres in London when you can open one in Bangalore and pay them 5% of what you pay them in the UK? And it doesn’t matter if they burn out because they’re being worked too hard, they’re not unionized, they have mental problems, you never get to see that, you just get the nice Indian voice selling you a mortgage, saying ‘Hello, I am Sebastian’ [Abdul Hakim Murad imitates an Indian voice; Audience laugh].
You don’t know that he’s probably really suffering and he’s not allowed to talk to you because there’s an inspector wandering to see they’re on the case all the time and there’s a million other Indians outside waiting to take that job. It’s not very nice.

We all know about Nike shoes and the consequences of globalization. Occasionally these break surface in order to prick our complacency, but generally not enough to make a real difference. We talk about ‘trickle-down economics’ and eventually the ‘third world’ will become like us, but there is the other paradox: the other obsession of Umay on khalaf is that ‘I have a million dinars, next year in shā’ Allah, I’ll make another million,’ and it goes on forever.
And we Muslims tend to be the same. In Abu Dhabi we’ve got a seven star hotel so is it possible to have an eight star hotel? How many more stars can there be? It’s an infinite process because human ambition, human vanity is endless, and we’re never really satisfied.
The hadīth says, low kana lil insāni wādin min dthahab l’temenna an yukūna lahu wādiyan.

If a man had a valley of gold, he would wish that he had two valleys. That’s our nature.
The process of wealth-creation is halāl because it’s Allah’s rizq and we’re grateful for it – there are adāb – and we have a great mercantile civilization has Habib Ali indicated. These are people who couple the da’wa with making a living, but there are limits. There are limits.

The problem with the modern system is that there’s nothing about it that can ever suggest that there’s a limit. Somebody comes up with a book sometimes, like Fred Hirsch’s book Social Limits to Growth, which points out that after a certain point people don’t get happier, as they get richer. And some of you might have seen the headline just two weeks ago where everybody was trying to figure out why it is that although we’re twice as wealthy in this country as we were in 1968, by the conventional indices which of course is basically material indices even, we’re actually less happy.
So what exactly do we mean by progress? How much further can it go before we get even less happy and we’re working much harder are messing up the environment at an ever-increasing rate. Is there something in the system that can genuinely put the brakes on that, and push as into a new, less-greedy, less crazy circle of destruction and increasing  – it seems – unhappiness?

Secularity can’t because secularity only knows matter, and take matter away from it, it’s diminishing. Religion is the alternative to that. All the world’s great religions are alternatives to that.

The sīrah gives you a particular vision because of all of the foundation stories of the world religions, the one that is clearly couched in terms of doing something practical for the mustad’afīn and for the outcast, doing something practical about an oppressive economic order doing something practical about the fact that human beings eventually become diabetics and it’s not ideal. That there is an alternative and the alternative is the hijra to Medina, where an extraordinary different image of humanity is created.

Not a welfare state or the state taking over things that should be a free gift of soft human hearts, not that at all; but rather a society where you don’t see the mustad’afīn unsupported. Where the muhājirīn, when they came from Mecca, immediately the Ansār give them half of what they have; half of my house is yours, half of my wealth is yours, extraordinary things that you would never consider. That’s the vision he had (saw) the hijra is an economic and social fact, as well as a political and ‘tawhīdic’ fact. It’s about moving from unrestrained consumerism and greed, to a social vision in which people genuinely have a reason to make social sacrifices.

Now, it’s time to pray Maghrib and I’m not going to detain you much longer. But the moral of what I’m saying is clear. The internal logic of the system, however efficient, and however ethically sensitive it may claim to be, the internal logic of an ultimately material system is one of endless expansion, and more growth.

We know that there are physical and environmental limits to how much more growth there can be because the resources of the planet are finite.

There is something insane about a model of growth: the West is endlessly pressing on the ‘third world’ because if those third world countries and Thailand and Zimbabwe and Malawi and all of those places had Western lifestyles and levels of consumption, the global environment would collapse over night. We are urging on the third world something that if they actually did, it would kill us all. That’s the lunacy of the system. So we need a long term wisdom – a Prophetic wisdom – we need a prophetic wisdom that is based in these two great principles of the sīrah, one of which is zuhud – us being happy with little – a very, very un-modern ethic – but something that all of us detect at certain times. At Ramadan for example, and genuinely make a sacrifice, and somehow when we lose something and we’ve given it to a good cause – when we’ve not experienced a pleasure – we feel something deeper, more calm in ourselves.

The other principle is the principle of the mustad’afīn – the weak and the outcast who have always been at the centre of the monotheistic message, because Allah (swt) is God of Justice as well as a God of Mercy, and for both of those reasons, He commands us however successful we might be, in our legitimate halāl, mercantile pursuits, to put them at the centre rather than the margins of our concerns. And if the Muslim World, particularly, wealthy people in the Muslim World, actually put this into practice, rather than just endlessly getting angry about the American Empire building or Palestine – if they put that into practice, if even 1/10 of the wealthy in the Muslim World actually paid their zakat – most of the problems in the Muslim World would be overcome and you would see something of the beauty of the Medinan alternative that would overcome so many difficulties in our communities and the knots in our hearts.

So we ask Allah (swt) to soften our hearts, soften the hearts of the wealthy, and to give us true inspiration from this economic dimension of the sīrah of the chosen one (saw).

Al-salām ‘alaykum wa rahmat Allah

Globalised Before Globalisation: The Forgotten History of the Muslim Trader

Date: Wednesday, 7th May 2008
Time: 18:30 – 20:30
Venue: Buckingham Suite, The Britannia International Hotel, Marsh Wall, Canary Wharf, London E14 9SJ

Details: Public Lecture by Habib Ali and Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad. By caravan, sea and on foot, Muslim traders spread wealth and faith throughout the world – from the Silk Road to the Sahara and beyond. Their good conduct and savvy business acumen helped create great societies.  Their peaceful ways won people over. In an age of so-called “disaster capitalism” what is the role of Muslim business people in bringing good ethics and a spiritual consciousness back to what has become a dog-eat-dog world?

Partners: This event is co-organised with Islamic Circles and Wharf Muslim Association.

]]> http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2009/10/globalised-before-globalisation-inspirational-khutbah/feed/ 0 http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2009/09/the-quranic-concept-of-time-inspirational-khutbah/ http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2009/09/the-quranic-concept-of-time-inspirational-khutbah/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:09:45 +0000 Editors http://khutbahbank.org.uk/?p=2957 When the Quran talks of past events it often speaks of them as if these events exist within our own memories or in a collective human memory as an integral part of our own selves and of our human heritage and nature. It has a unique methodology in that it asks us to recall some past historical occurrences in the same manner with which we remember events from our own lives, as if they exist in our own individual, personal storehouse of experiences. “And remember We gave Moses the Scripture and the Criterion (between right and wrong) Quran 2:54 …. And remember Abraham and Isma’il raised the foundations of the House Quran 2:127 ….And remember We divided the sea for youQuran 2:51 ….And remember We took your covenant Quran2:63 …. Remember Your Lord inspired the angels Quran 8:12….This is a word of remembrance to those who remember Quran 11:114 ….And remember Jesus, the Son of Mary, said…. Quran 61:6 .” It uses a language and a direct mode of expression that encourages us to erase the distance between ourselves and these past events, these historical events, by pulling them to the forefront with a compelling immediacy of attention. It seems to be telling us, through its technique of expression, that this historical distance does not exist in any real, metaphysical, essential sense.

The Quran asks us to be present, in our own era, wherever truth requires us to be present and it requires that presence to be a deeply rooted presence, not a superficial, ineffective, fleeting presence. It asks us not to regard humanity’s past as merely “tales of the ancients”Quran 83:13, or as quaint historical footnotes that are irrelevant to our times and our own modern notions about the nature of things, about the nature of society, of humanity, of morality. It presents the world as more than just matter, as more than a chronological string of occurrences. Rather, it posits an essence and reality to certain events that lifts those events out of time, giving them a presence in a higher reality, in a deeper, more substantial layer of existence, and thereby makes their essential truths accessible to all times and places. So when the Quran speaks of Moses and Aaron, of Zachariaha and Maryam, of the various prophets and men of knowledge that have walked the earth it raises their stories out of historical time and into a universal time. It presents them almost as universal memories and then it asks us to remember, to recall.

Then it tells us that these memories are family memories – the family is that of Adam , and Abraham , Moses and Aaron , Jesus and Muhammad and all the other messengers and their supporters recalled in the pages of the Qur’an. Between us and them there is to be no distance in love, respect, or honour. All distances are erased – the chronological time that separates us and them vanishes, like an ephemeral veil that dissolves at our touch. With the Qur’an’s methodology we are with Moses when he confronts Pharoah, we are with Abraham when he destroys the idols, we are with the Prophet as he struggles to deliver the message. We are with him as he tells the story of mankind and awakens the memories and lessons and truths of our own past within us.

So the Quran teaches us a new way to look upon history. It is not “ancient stories” but living truths. It teaches us to erase the distance between ourselves and the past and to call forth the past like memories, till a total picture of the history of truth is formed – a history which spans all times and all places, a history whose essence is imprinted in the substance of reality and which is not restricted by any earthbound chronology.

Memories are not distinct from us, they are an integral part of us, of our knowledge, of who and what we are. They define and shape us, they are not intellectual abstractions but are a living part of us, shaping our consciousness and our personalities. The Quran asks us to extend our memory beyond our individual selves and so unites our separate histories with the total history of humanity with the aim of giving substance to our ephemeral, fleeting lives and uniting us with the common thread of truth that weaves its way across the centuries.

Meta-historical religion

In the Qur’an, the key “events” which determine man’s metaphysical makeup all take place outside the flow of time as we know it. They take place in a different plane of existence than this material plane – in a “trans-historical” or “meta-historical” plane, where time has a different flow and flux so that the relation of that world to this must be viewed as a hierarchical rather than a linear relationship.

One of these events is the creation of Adam and the teaching of the names to him. The Quran says, “…Thy Lord said unto the angels: lo! I am about to create a mortal out of mire, And when I have fashioned him and breathed into him of My Spirit, then fall down before him prostrate….And We taught Adam the names (realities) of all things….” Quran38:72… These events take place outside of the flow of history as we understand it. They are metaphysical, rather than exclusively physical in nature. They are metaphysical answers to the question “What is man? What is contained in his essential nature and what is his potential?”

Islam is not a religion rooted in a single historical event through which God enters history – instead all the key events take place outside history, in pre-eternity in a different hierarchy of existence. Then a “descent” to this world takes place through which these timeless events enter into the realm of cause, effect, and chronological, linear time.

Another event spoken of in the Quran is the pre-eternal covenant made between God and the human spirits (all of the descendants of Adam). This is expressed in the form of a question which God asks all of the human spirits before allowing them to enter into the physical plane of existence. He asks, “Am I not your Lord?” Quran 7:172. They all answer in the affirmative, the implication being that everyone who is born into this world has agreed in substance (in the essence of their soul) to this covenant, and that although we may have no conscious knowledge or memory of this pact, its reality is woven into our very nature. This world is a place of distraction and forgetfulness but at our core lies the metaphysical truth of this covenant and one of the purposes of religion is to awaken to consciousness an awareness of this bond between God and man as well as all the concealed potentials that flow from this bond. All of the Prophet’s have come throughout the entirety of history to remind men of their promise of fidelity to this pact. The Quran also often refers to itself as “a reminder”, as a call towards taqwa, towards an awakened, aware consciousness.

A third event spoken of in the Quran is mankind’s acceptance of the “trust” offered to them by God. “We did indeed offer the trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains; but they refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof. But man undertook it (the trust)….”Quran 33:72,73.

These key events all deal with the metaphysical nature and capacity with which man is created. A concurrent event, the teaching of the names (or realities) of all things to Adam, is an indicator that within man (within his metaphysical makeup) exist vast storehouses of knowledge, or a capacity for knowledge, through which he can comprehend mysteries that perhaps even the angels are unaware of (signified by their bowing down before Adam).

The Quran constantly urges mankind to “remember” – to become aware of their inner nature through this remembrance and to awaken that nature. These “pre-eternal” events are events that are perfectly real without taking place in historical time. If time is considered as a horizontal progression, these events take place along a vertical axis, one which stands hierarchically above all times and all places. Man’s essence, because of his origin and nature, participates in this hierarchy. His actions, his movements (mental and physical) in this world, and the state of his nafs (essential self) that results from those actions has an impact on the full substance of his being – throughout its vertical axis. The Quran attempts to awaken us to this hidden aspect of ourselves – it is a reminder to a humanity that is “sleeping” and a call for us to awaken from our amnesia, our “forgetfulness” regarding the essential nature of our being. It is a reminder that beyond the horizontal aspect of our existence is a truly vast vertical dimension, an unseen ocean of possibilities and nascent potentials.

Irshaad Hussain is a contemporary Islamic thinker and author of Islam from Inside.

Added January 10, 2009

“And whoever turns himself away from the remembrance (dhikr) of al-Rahman (The Compassionate), We appoint for him a shaitan (a satan), so he becomes his close companion (and associate). And most surely they (the satan’s) turn them away from the path, though they (the people) persistently imagine that they are rightly guided….” (Qur’an 43:36-37)

This verse, highlights a repeatedly arising theme in the Qur’an – the importance of dhikr (remembrance of God) – but highlights it in a unique and powerfully crucial manner. It links the turning away from a steady and steadfast contemplation and remembrance of God in the aspect of His Mercy and compassion with the entry of Shaitan (Satan) into one’s affairs. And as verse 43:37 indicates, this entry is an invisible, unperceived arrival so that the person remains unaware that he has been turned and deflected away from a felicitous path but instead imagines that he “is rightly guided”. This theme of people turning away from God’s name of Mercy (al-Rahman) and compassion recurs in several places in the Qur’an and is perhaps due to these people desiring a special recognition or concession for their group, their viewpoint, their tribe, or their social and poitical status. “No remembrance comes to them from the All-Merciful newly arrived but they turn away from it.” (Qur’an 26:5) Instead they are faced with a general beneficence that does away with special pleading and levels all hierarchies except that of consciousness and awareness of God and beauty of conduct.

Rahman and Rahim are two denotations of mercy used throughout the Qur’an. The Rahman is generally considered to be an all-embracing universal mercy and compassion (linked to God’s Majesty) which pervades existence and from which everything in existence derives benefit, while Rahim is sometimes defined as a more specialized and focused mercy.

Here (in verse 43:36) we are invoking, through dhikr of the name al-Rahman, the entry into our hearts of that generalized mercy through which all creation obtains benefit – a benefit which is not restricted only to particular groups, and which is not withheld from anything or any creature in existence. And the invocation is an invitation for that mercy to enter and settle into our hearts.

Note: If there is an impediment to this process – to engaging in a remembrance with the heart – if we find it difficult to open this door it is, perhaps, because we ourselves are the door – and if the door is locked, it is locked through our forgetfulness, negligence, and through the careless habits acquired over a lifetime which hinder a true inward consciousness and awareness from arising within us. When we are in this state, then the dhikr is first a recognition of the door, then an approach to the door, then a knocking on the door, and finally an opening of the door of our heart.

When remembrance (dhikr) of Allah is connected with the aspect of His mercy and compassion, that quality of mercy begins to manifest within one’s own character – it gains a real, living presence and the heart expands with it’s growth. One’s thinking, words, actions, and all one’s relationships within families, communities, and in the wider world begins to display this mercy. This dhikr then becomes a shield against the countless invisible ways in which Shaitan injects himself into people’s lives, even into their religious lives so that, as the verse indicates,“…they (the people) persistently (and mistakenly) imagine that they are rightly guided….” (Qur’an 43:37) though they are deflected from correct guidance.

This is why we find Imam Ali (a.s.) provided a guideline for determining the character of a people. He said:

“Be not mislead by their prayers and fasting…rather, try them when it comes to telling the truth and fulfilling trusts.” (Nahjul Balagha)

When weighing a person’s trustworthiness and their religious ethos, the Imam said not to look at their prayer, fasting, and hajj but to look into their character and how this character displays itself in the workings of life. Then we can see where their attachments lie, what their desires lead to, and what principles manifest in their behavior and aspect.

This is because the prayer, fasting, etc. are a means. Although initially they may be an end in themselves, they are an extraordinary means of remembrance through worship (and they always remain a necessary obligation since they never cease to be an ever expanding means). Remembrance is a means of awakening a slumbering consciousness, which is in turn a means of transformation, and this transformation leads to inner upliftment, and this upliftment makes it possible to draw near to the one to Whom we pray. Prayer is the means and each prayer is an opportunity to advance in this process. So the question becomes: what has our prayer made of us?

The Prophet said that

“whoever has no worldly life has no religious life”.

By this he did not mean that we should plunge ourselves into worldly pursuits but that the one who separates his inner religious self from his life within the trials and distractions of the world has not grasped the full purport and meaning of religion. If we pray and fast, attend the masjid, perform the rituals and consider this the entirety of religious life we are, in a sense, secularizing our religion. Our inner religious self has never had its mettle tested in the world if it remains safely and comfortably within these confines. When it is tested, will the world get the better of us, or will our faith (our iman) guide and direct the quality of our behavior in the world?

We are to take the elevated character, the manners, the freedom from lower attachments that sincere adherence to the pillars of the religion can unfold within us, out into the world. We are to apply this in our day to day affairs – both the easy and the difficult. Truthfulness, patience, fulfillment of trusts, good speech and manners, generosity, kindness, humility, charity, mercy, guarding the weak, involving ourselves in the best affairs of society, in the guardianship of rights – and we are to do this in an ihsan (beautiful) manner – without crudeness, without being rough in action or speech. Like Prophet Yusuf (Joseph) who, in a foreign country, living among a foreign people with a foreign religion, rose to the highest prominence through his reliance on God’s mercy and acted with the patience, truthfulness, and beauty of character which emerged from this unwavering reliance. As Sura Yusuf says:

“…most surely (man’s) self (nafs) is wont to command (him to do) evil, except those who (are connected with) their Lord’s mercy….We reach with Our mercy whom We please, and We do not waste the reward of those who do good (who act in the most beautiful manner).” (Qur’an 12:53,56)

That society in which Yusuf rose to prominence did not look at his prayer and ritual practices (after all, these would have been foreign rituals to them) but they looked at his character, his truthfulness, his patience, his elevated knowledge, his sincerity, his fulfillment of trusts. Without these, which are among the fruits of efficacious prayer and fasting, can it be said that we have truly prayed and fasted. The people of Egypt reacted to how Yusuf comported himself within that society. He did not seek to blend in, that was not his goal – but he became known through the excellence of his conduct. “For the righteous are only known by that which God causes to pass concerning them on the tongues of His servants. So let the dearest of your treasuries be the treasury of righteous action….Infuse your heart with mercy, love and kindness….” (Imam Ali’s letter to Malik al-Ashtar)

Unfurling this level of awareness and comportment within ourselves is a difficult matter. For, as the Qur’an states, humans have a tendency to be forgetful and heedless when they interact in the world. In our thoughts it is easy to imagine ourselves behaving magnanimously and with dignity when faced with difficulty and hardship, when heavy pressures and dangers alight upon us. But when the reality surrounds us, our minds desperately seek escape or seek to strike out against the perceived causes of our difficulty and our hearts twist and turn confused and without direction. In such situations we may grasp, in our distress, at any direction that provides a path of action.

When our hearts are perturbed and made uneasy by events, the best direction to turn is towards the remembrance of God, for

“…surely by Allah’s remembrance are the hearts set at rest.” (Qur’an 13:28)

And the dhikr, the remembrance, that encompasses God’s aspect of Mercy through His name Al-Rahman, will stand as a protecting guard over error, arrogance, and an invisible, and deceptive enemy. Otherwise“…whoever turns himself away from the remembrance (dhikr) of al-Rahman, We appoint for him a Shaitan (a Satan)….” (Qur’an 43:36) This safeguarding dhikr begins on the tongue, enters the mind with concentrated consciousness, settles into a heart softened and cleansed through remembrance of Al-Rahman, and manifests in the myriad small actions a person engages in each day. It becomes a shield and a truly beautiful means of drawing near to the mercy of the Most-Merciful (al-Rahman) who has promised to be the companion of the one who engages in His dhikr.

“I am the close companion of the one who remembers Me.” (hadith Qudsi)

And for a people, a community, who live in a state of sincere remembrance, all things become possible.

- Irshaad Hussain-

This article was published with kind permission from Irshaad Hussain, whose website is at http://islamfrominside.com/

Related articles:

The fulfillment of Yusuf’s dream
The hermeneutics of takfir

Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad is perhaps the most significant British Muslim leader around. It is too bad that so few people know about him. Now that he has launched the Cambridge Muslim College, which is designed to train “local” specialists in Islamic knowledge who are able to “celebrate their identity” as British and Muslim, he should be given his due and treated like a national asset.

The Cambridge Muslim College is an important initiative for three reasons. First, as a Quilliam report recently showed, most of the imams in British mosques are foreign-born, and disconnected from the people they represent.

Second, the situation with the imams is dire, such that until last year the UK was considering importing imams from Pakistan. Not a good idea.

The third reason has to do with Islam’s crisis of authority. Islam, like Judaism, is a juridical religion. It has a longstanding legal component to it. When average Muslims start taking the religious law into their own hands it usually results in the politicisation, or bastardisation, of the religion – everything from ideological movements to regressive puritanical cults spring up. That is when untutored demagogues like Bin Laden and Bakri Muhammad strike.

Murad has long argued that in order to represent Islam, one must be steeped in the long history of Islamic law, which always pays attention to social nuance. Bringing that ethos to his college will go a long way in creating a better, more British, culture among Muslims. It will produce leaders that Muslims won’t be embarrassed about and who probably won’t give much fodder to the tabloids. They will probably shout less.

I have never spoken or communicated with Murad. I read his writings in the mid-90s when he began posting his articles on the internet –compiled here by Masud Ahmed Khan, a Guardian contributor. In those early essays Murad critiqued wahhabism and the poison of extremism. Murad’s basic argument, embedded inside a lot of hyperbolic prose, was that fanaticism had a deleterious effect on one’s spirit and that it distanced a Muslim from God.

This message, stripped down, was an extremely effective way of talking to young Muslims because they were in a very confused place. On one hand they wanted to be seen as good, pious, God-fearing types; but on the other, the only people who were around to talk in the language of piety were those who sought to manipulate the kids for political or ideological benefit. By telling young Muslims that extremism was tantamount to impiety, all while showing them Islam’s long history of spiritual learning, Murad gave youth, especially boys, an extremely effective mechanism for resisting those who tried to turn them into fanatics. I would be curious to hear what Muslims who became all-out Islamists, like Shiraz Maher, thought of Murad. My guess is that they either ignored him or were taught to demonise him. What is clear, however, is that without Murad there would have been more Mahers.

Murad remained true to his message after 9/11. “Terrorists are not Muslims,” he wrote shortly after the attacks. His condemnation of the hijackers was immediate and loud – and he was perhaps alone among the Islamic intellegentsia in arguing that the hijackers be excommunicated. It was a tricky position for him to hold because moderate leaders usually avoided throwing Muslims out of Islam (arguing instead that every Muslim can be saved). Murad definitely took a hit among some Muslim circles for taking such a hard line. They disparagingly began calling him a neocon.

More recently, it is Murad’s name that occurs at the very top of an open letter by British Muslims which strongly condemns anti-semitism.

Despite having taken such open and courageous positions, Murad’s work has remained ignored by most media, an oversight which has prevented his work from gaining a foothold in mainland Europe and the US. Instead, quite absurdly, young Muslims are encouraged to emulate non-Muslims and rightwing hacks.

I am not arguing that Murad is infallible or that he should be venerated like a living saint. He has held some curious positions. His view of Islamic history is romantic. He puts too much emphasis on evangelism. His social conservatism would not fit very well with the left. His reading of modernist Muslim thinking is unfairly dismissive. Some of his followers have needless tension with some Salafis.

However, on the important religious questions – Muslim extremism and politicisation of Islam – Murad has been right more consistently than any other Muslim leader in the western hemisphere. He identified the increasing extremism among western Muslim youth and diagnosed its causes before most. He has condemned conspiracy mongering, arguing that “wild denunciations of Great Satans or global Crusader Conspiracies are … not only dangerous, but are also discourteous”. Most important, he has argued for “de-ideologising” Islam, a position that puts him directly at odds with those who want to make Islam a political project bankrolled by extra-national syndicates.

When, long ago, I graduated from college, I stopped keeping up with Murad regularly, but I think now I will check in from time to time to see how his college is doing. The school seems to be off to a good start. It takes no government money. It is non-denominational. In addition to Islam, it offers coursework in the history of science and western intellectual thought. To lay a foundation for the future it is offering 10 full scholarships. It is, in every way, a welcome part of the future of religion in Britain.

The author of this piece is not affiliated with or in contact with Murad or the Cambridge Muslim College and wrote this piece on his own initiative

Karen Armstrong

The Guardian, Friday 14th November 2008

The practice of compassion is central to every one of the major world religions – but sometimes you would never know it. Instead, religion is associated with violence, intolerance and seems more preoccupied by dogmatic or sexual orthodoxy.

People don’t even seem to know what compassion is; they imagine that it means to feel pity for somebody, whereas the root meaning of this Greco-Latin world is “to feel with” the other, realising at a profound level that we share the same human predicament. This is crucial at a time when we are bound together – politically, economically, and electronically – as never before but have rarely been more perilously divided.

This is why we have launched a Charter for Compassion. During the next few days, millions of Jews, Christians and Muslims worldwide will be invited to comment, stage by stage, on a draft Charter on a multilingual website. Later, a council of inspirational thinkers representing the different faiths will examine their findings and write the final version. Finally, there will be a large signing ceremony.

The charter will not just be a statement of intent, but will call for practical action: asking preachers, for example, to emphasise the importance of good interfaith relations; calling upon scholars to examine the difficult passages of their scriptures, and asking educators to find ways of presenting compassion to the young as a dynamic, attractive ideal.

Why is this important? Because the religions should be making a major contribution to what must be the chief task of our day: to build a global community where all peoples can live together in mutual respect and where the powerful do not treat other nations as they would not wish to be treated themselves. If we do not achieve this, it is unlikely that we will have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. Any ideology – religious or secular – that breeds hatred and disdain for others is failing the test of our time.

The first person to formulate what has become known as the Golden Rule was Confucius: “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” It was, he said, the central thread that ran through all his teaching and should be practised “all day and every day”.

It requires us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain and refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Every single one of the major faiths has developed its own version of the Golden Rule and has insisted that it is the prime religious duty.

“My religion is kindness,” says the Dalai Lama; faith that moves mountains is worthless without charity, said St Paul; the Golden Rule was the essence of Torah, said Rabbi Hillel: everything else was “only commentary”. The bedrock message of the Qur’an is not a doctrine but a summons to build a just and decent society where there is a fair distribution of wealth and vulnerable people are treated with absolute respect.

The religions also insist that it is not sufficient to confine your compassion to your own group. You must have what one of the Chinese sages called jian ai, “concern for everybody” – honouring the stranger and loving your enemies.

Why, then, do we hear so little about compassion from the religious? Because whether they are religious or secular, people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Certainly the religious traditions have a deeply intransigent strain. But we have a choice. We can either emphasise this intolerance, as extremists and fundamentalists do, or we can make a concerted effort to make the compassionate voice of religion audible in our troubled world.

Do we need God and/or religion to be compassionate? Of course not. That is why we hope that atheists and agnostics, instead of berating religion (a policy that, as history shows, tends to make religious movements more extreme), will also sign up to the charter, working alongside the religious for a more compassionate world.

Seth Freedman

guardian.co.uk,        Friday 31 July 2009

For the most part, London’s Jewish community is a shining example of social cohesion and pastoral care. Large charitable donations are raised on a constant basis and distributed to those in need of assistance; sick or lonely individuals are clutched to the communal bosom and provided for by welfare associations and concerned neighbours; and the ethics inculcated into each new generation are built on a bedrock of values dating back to biblical times.

Yet the blind spot that persistently handicaps those from the upper echelons of power down to street level is British Jewry‘s relationship with Israel. The community is bewitched by a 60-year old spell which dictates that to be a “loyal” Jew, one must profess unconditional love for Israel, regardless of the many faults and failings of the Jewish state.

People who apply logic, reason, and above all compassion in every facet of their daily lives suspend their principles when it comes to Israel, preferring to don a mantle of defiance and defensiveness when dealing with one of the most thorny issues to face Judaism in modern times.

I’ve just spent a month in the heart of the north-west London bubble, running the gauntlet of pro-Israel zealotry almost every time the Israel/Palestine issue reared its head. Accusing dissenters of being self-haters, traitors and of washing Israel’s dirty linen in public is the bread and butter of the diehard Zionist brigade – and that’s just to those Jews daring to speak out against Israeli policies and crimes.

Non-Jewish critics of Israel are immediately branded antisemites, with entire media organisations and political parties derided as pathologically obsessed with Israel and the Jews, despite the hypocrisy of those pointing the finger and organising the witchhunts. When journalists or politicians are deemed “friends” of Israel, then those championing their cause can’t get enough of the sympathetic press coverage or the cosying-up in diplomatic circles.

Likewise, those demanding an end to dissident voices emanating from Israel are the very same who decry the tyranny in Arab countries. The old guard rule the roost in the British Jewish community, and they’ve got both the money and the machers to make sure their hegemony remains unchallenged by anyone disagreeing with their stance.

The sheriff’s posse can be rounded up at the drop of a hat, and once they’ve mounted their steeds, the dissenters are swiftly run out of town, or at least driven underground and denied a public airing for their differing opinions. Those at the helm of communal affairs pull rank whenever Israel is deemed to be vulnerable, even if to do so means defending the indefensible in times when Israel’s leaders wildly overstep the mark.

The latest figures on antisemitic hate crimes are indisputably unpalatable, yet those releasing the statistics play their own part in ensuring that the Venn diagrams of anti-Israeli and antisemitic sentiment overlap again and again, thanks to their own interlinking of Jewish and Israeli interests.

The CST thought nothing about protecting one of the most insensitively timed and insensitively inspired communal gatherings of recent years, in which the Board of Deputies of British Jews held a mass solidarity rally for Israel right in the midst of the Gaza onslaught. CST acknowledges that the upswing in antisemitic incidents this year is linked to Operation Cast Lead, yet point-blank refuses to see that British Jewry’s harnessing itself to the Israel-right-or-wrong bandwagon in the heat of battle gives a green light to any racist looking to label all Jews as supporters of Israeli brutality.

Jewish schools offer classes in “Israel advocacy” to their students, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for British Jewish pupils to be armed with facts and figures to defend the reputation of a state hundreds of miles away and with a vastly different constitution and a set of policies to the country in which they were born, raised and now live. That the Israeli government intends to pay young Israelis to become internet hasbara warriors is bad enough, but for impressionable British teens to be roped into the cause without any recourse to alternative political thinking in the classroom is beyond the pale – and demonstrates the smothering attitude of educators when it comes to dealing honestly with Israeli affairs.

Much of the problem is a generational one: those currently calling the shots in the British Jewish community grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, and at a time when Israel appeared to be the besieged underdog, valiantly fighting for survival against all the odds. The narrative of those who lived through those times cannot be easily dismissed, yet the experience of my generation – in which Israel has behaved as both aggressor and occupier on an unending basis – is at least equally valid, if not more so than that of those harking back to a bygone age.

However, just because a new breed of young Jews is emerging, doesn’t mean that the influence of our elders is in any way on the wane. For every one open-minded activist or youth worker trying to unyoke themselves from the harness of blind support of Israel, another hundred are happy to swallow the lies fed to them from on high.

For as long as Israel remains beyond the realms of serious criticism or censure by those forming mainstream opinion among British Jews, the community leaves itself open to charges of dishonesty and untrustworthiness by those on the outside – which is the last thing we need – and is a stain on an otherwise laudable reputation. While there is never an excuse for antisemitic violence or rhetoric, we must do everything in our power to put ourselves above reproach so that the racists cannot find any hook for their bilious attacks.

Professing blind support for Israel as though she can do no wrong is the achilles heel of our community. The same honest debate and rational approach that we demand from other sectors of society must be applied by us in the Israeli-Palestinian arena; to do otherwise undermines everything we purport to represent, and will come back to haunt us time and again for as long as the denial continues.

Arshad Gamiet

One of the most pervasive forms of misguidance is our human tendency to assume that a dominant culture is somehow superior to all other cultures. Just because the Western nations have economic and military muscle, we should not assume that they are also superior, morally, ethically and spiritually. This is a serious mistake. Many influential people in Muslim countries think that they should aspire to the dominant culture, and accept all its terms of reference. They believe that to be ‘modern’ you have to turn your back on your own heritage, to reject or at least hide your own religion in the garden shed. This inferiority complex, they think, is a sign of ‘education’ and ‘progress.’ Part of this problem is that people wrongly confuse their own tribal and national culture with Islam. In reality, Islam and Culture, and I mean tribal, ethnic and national culture, are quite separate and distinct ideas. I covered this topic in my previous khutbah. Islam is a way of living, away of being, ordained by Allah. It is a set of universal principles. Islam never changes. Culture is what people accept as normal behaviour from time to time and place to place. It’s always susceptible to change, depending on widely accepted norms in society. Sometimes, culture can be destructive when it becomes a vehicle of oppression for other people.

Oppression and enslavement take many forms. There is open political oppression, when governments restrict the human rights of citizens, free speech and free movement. Sometimes oppression can be economic, where the rich exploit the poor. Quite often oppressive governments use military force not to defend their country from enemies outside, but to defend their interests against their own people. These are obvious and open forms of oppression. But there are also hidden forms of oppression, more dangerous because we hardly notice them.

Cultural imperialism is a good example. It is unintentional when people naively think their own culture is inferior, and they must copy the dominant culture. But it can also be deliberate, when it involves the psychological manipulation of people’s wants and desires, enslaving their hopes and ideals. Cultural imperialism undermines a people’s self-confidence and self-image. The subtle, insidious nature of cultural imperialism easily traps the unwary. Language is one of the powerful ways in which one culture can assert its dominance over others

For example, in South Africa the Afrikaans dictionary used to tell us that a ‘gentleman’ in English is a ‘witman’ or ‘white man’ in Afrikaans, the language of Dutch settlers. The English/Afrikaans dictionaries also addressed other races in a demeaning manner that would not apply to white people.

In this country we are referred to as ‘ethnic minorities’ but no-one talks of the ‘ethnic majority.’ I prefer to use neutral terms like ‘the Asian community, the host community, the Afro-Carribean community and so on. Similarly, I don’t even like the term, ‘non-Muslim.’ It has a negative connotation. I prefer to say, ‘our friends and neighbours in the wider society.’ It’s much more friendly and inclusive. Islam is friendly and inclusive.

When we read the papers or watch the news, we should be aware of the use and misuse of language. Be critical. Separate hard facts from opinions. Carefully examine the hidden assumptions. Don’t just blindly accept someone else’s framework of debate. Question the terms of reference. Does it make sense? Is it fair and reasonable? If you feel even the slightest twinge of discomfort, you can be sure that something is amiss. Don’t ignore your instinct, your intuition. Don’t let someone make up your mind for you. Don’t let others set your emotional agenda. If you’re not careful, someone else will decide when you should laugh, when you should cry and become angry. Before you know it, you may stop thinking like a Muslim, and you’ll simply have become another little brown Englishman or Englishwoman.

Deliberately or naively, cultural imperialism turns people from the colonies into mirror-images of their masters: They become little brown Englishmen, and little brown Europeans. They pose no threat to the status quo, in fact they help to keep things as they are. They reinforce the false notion of superiority of one human being over another, one cultural system over others.

Sadly, many Muslim countries are politically independent but culturally enslaved. Their elites uncritically accept western norms of behaviour. They espouse western notions of “freedom,” “democracy,” ”progress” and being “civilized” without questioning the underlying assumptions these ideas are based on.

Forty years ago in South Africa, Steve Biko started the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, His views overturned the white/non-white, positive/negative, normal/abnormal paradigm and mindset. Biko’s life and tragic death was eloquently told in Richard Attenborough’s film, Cry Freedom. “Black” he said, is a more positive description than “non-white.” Muslims need to understand these hidden cultural assumptions and we must interrogate their validity. Don’t let others frame the debate on their terms. We must re-examine these assumptions where they are based on false notions of superiority. We must re-define the norms, where they are misguided, unfair or unjust. For example, the hijab/headscarf is not a sign of domination or oppression of women. It’s simply a dress code. It promotes modesty. Women should not be seen as sexual objects. The headscarf confers dignity on our women. Some Muslim regimes enforce it, some want to ban it, but among Muslims in the west, it’s clearly a matter of personal choice. Many sisters will tell you that it helps them define who they are. We don’t have to apologise for it. It’s not a sign of backwardness or enslavement. The real backwardness is in the assumption that western culture is somehow superior. The economic, political and military power of the West has also brought a certain cultural arrogance. This arrogance presents a world viewed through distorted lenses.

Empires and their cultures rise and fall, just as day alternates with night and the seasons follow each other in succession. This is Allah’s Decree. In His Noble Book, He reminds us:

“Qulil-laah humma maalikal mulki tu’til mulka man-tashaa’u watanzi-ul mulka mim-man-tashaa’, Wa tu’izzu man-tashaa’ watuzillu man-tashaa’ Biyadikal khair. Innaka ‘alaa kulli shay-in qadeer! [Sura Al-‘Imraan 3:27]

“Say: ‘O Allah, Sovereign of all dominion, You grant dominion to whom You will and take dominion away from whom You will. You exalt whom You will and abase whom You will. In Your hand is all that is good. You are able to do all things”. (Al-Imran, Verse 26)…”

But to solve the real problem of cultural imperialism, and of Muslims’ misplaced inferiority complex, we have to turn again to the Holy Quran. Where else?!

“O Mankind, I have created you from a single pair of a male and a female, then I made you into nations and tribes, so that you may know [and respect] one another, not that you should despise one another. Truly the best of you are those most inclined to good conduct, and Allah has full knowledge and is aware of all things.” [Sura Al-Hujuraa 49:13]

We need to articulate the Islamic world view and celebrate the Islamic ethos. We have to reassure our neighbours in the wider community that they have nothing to fear from a resurgent Islamic awareness. This is a natural and healthy process, when people regain self-respect and self confidence. In modern street parlance, we should be saying, ‘Islam is cool, man! Islamophobia is so, yesterday! Come on, for once, just step outside yourself; step outside your Eurocentric mindset, for once, step outside your misplaced sense of cultural superiority. You have nothing to lose but your prejudices.’

Let’s change the wrong perceptions, the fear and hatred of Islam. Through our personal example, we must show our friends and neighbours in the wider community that living Islam is a mercy and a blessing to all. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Those who promote violent political agendas, both inside and outside our faith communities, are the dangerous ones. Militant jihadis and far-right white supremacists are desperate people, who misuse Islam to try to clothe their political ambitions with a measure of respectability.

We Muslims who live in the ‘West’ have a huge responsibility to our neighbours in the wider society, to our children and to future generations. We must show by a clear, practical example, that Islam offers an alternative, sustainable way of living. We must try to be role models for others: We should educate ourselves with the essence of our faith, so that we can deal with the challenges of modern living, and be totally at peace spiritually, morally, and intellectually.

We can reduce the impact of cultural imperialism by taking a few simple steps. Change the channel or better still, switch off the TV. Don’t constantly expose yourself or your children to programmes that condone immoral attitudes. In school, college or the work environment attitudes towards drugs, alcohol, male-female relationships and same-sex relationships are very different to ours. Smile, be courteous and say why we differ. Treat others with respect and they will respect you. Don’t be rude or confrontational. On the other hand, don’t court popularity or seek approval for yourself by adopting values that will displease Allah. Islam shows us where to draw a line in the sand, but always with dignity and grace. Explain that Islamic values protect society as a whole, and some aspects of western culture lead to abuses of all kinds, from drugs and alcohol to the innocence of children and dignity of womanhood. Western liberties and excess has left a trail of broken families and a crumbling society. Islam offers a healthier alternative, placing the society’s wellbeing above the whims and caprices of individuals. Say this in a courteous and pleasant manner.

The way to resist the domination of one culture over another is to return to the true Islamic idea of unity in diversity. Human beings are one species, a unity, within the diversity of many cultures, languages and ethnicities. Allah’s divine Unity [Tawheed] is the unifying principle that connects all the diversity of His creation. We were created from the union of Adam and Eve, then multiplied through countless tribes and nations, diverse, colourful, yet equal in our status as human beings, custodians and trustees of Allah’s creation. This is an awesome responsibility. We Muslims are people of the middle way, the Ummatan wasatan. We ought to shun all kinds of extremes. We can be British, Pakistani, white, black, Asian, but essentially we are all equal human beings. We must never become obsessive with national or cultural pride. That’s losing the plot. Islam is not exclusive. It’s inclusive. We must be warm, welcoming and we must enable others to feel comfortable and secure in our presence. Prophet Muhammad said in a well known hadith,

“A Muslim is one from whose hands and tongue other Muslims are safe. A Mu’min [true Believer] is one in whom all humanity will find safety of their lives and property.”

When we consider the rising levels of fear, suspicion and Islamophobia today, we have to ask, how much are we ourselves a part of the problem? How far have we fallen short of our noble Prophet’s standards? Some of us still judge one another by wealth, by nationality, by race and social status. This is pre-Islamic behaviour, Jahiliyyah. Yet Allah and His Prophet constantly remind us that our only acceptable ranking is in our piety, in our loving awareness of Allah, expressed through our thoughts, words and actions. This is the only way we can measure superiority or inferiority among people: good actions driven by gratitude and love for Allah. We have to live in a constant state of love, fear and hope, loving Allah because He clearly loves us, fearing His displeasure and being ever hopeful of His Mercy. This is the real meaning of taqwa. I sincerely pray that Allah will help you and me, and all our loved ones, to become real people of taqwa, al-muttaqeen. Ameen. Then and only then, can we begin to free ourselves from psychological domination and cultural imperialism.

Fact is at last fighting fantasy in Afghanistan. Fact is that Tony Blair’s vainglorious jihad against the Pashtun insurgency is not succeeding, and British commanders, diplomats and politicians know it. After three years of “inkspots”, hearts-and-minds and take-hold-and-build, that battle-weary siren of defeat, talking to the enemy, is back onstage.

While on Monday the prime minister was greeting Operation Panther’s Claw with a parody of Lady Thatcher’s triumphalism, “Rejoice, just rejoice”, the deputy chief of the defence staff, Lieutenant-General Simon Mayall, was bizarrely declaring that the current Afghan war was “not against the Taliban”.

Other British ministers suddenly went anthropological. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, professes to detect not just good Taliban and bad Taliban but “three tiers” of Taliban. His colleague, the development secretary, Douglas Alexander, has newfound friends in the “moderate Pashtun”, allegedly eager to do something called “renunciate violence”. The defence minister, Bill Rammell, wants to “peel away the footsoldiers” and rebuild trust in government institutions.

This awayday at the school of oriental studies cannot conceal the fact that we have been here for years. The one thing you know (and the enemy knows) about a named military operation is that it ends, which is one thing counter-insurgency can never do. All talk of talking to the Taliban forgets that Americans were talking to the Taliban before 9/11. Indeed, they spent a fortune training and arming them against Russia. Britain’s first Helmand offensive in 2006 concluded that the Taliban would not be beaten and was followed by talking and a “cessation of hostilities”, involving a series of local deals with (good) Taliban and a joint withdrawal agreement. It was later regarded as a disaster.

Advocates of such a strategy are scrupulous to plead cases where it seems to have worked. The first British commander in Helmand, General Sir David Richards, insisted that he was merely repeating the Malayan inkspot strategy, apparently unaware that Pashtun were no more akin to Malays than they were to Geordies.

Now we are told by Miliband “the lessons of Northern Ireland” should be applied to Helmand. For years, Ulster secretaries refused to talk to Sinn Féin “until the men of violence lay down their guns”. Yet eventually there were talks and they duly laid down their guns. Now that Johnny Taliban has had a right drubbing, the Foreign Office implies, if he promises to stop shooting at us he should be offered a loya jirga a dozen cows and honorary membership of the Travellers Club. Then we can go home.

The comparison is false. Sinn Féin never laid down its guns before talking. Had it done so, it would have split and continued to be worsted at the ballot box by the government’s preferred Catholic party, the non-violent SDLP. Sinn Féin fought on and, though it did not win a united Ireland, its use of violence was effective. The SDLP was all but wiped out and Sinn Féin emerged as the voice of nationalist Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin leaders were in government and enjoying a de facto veto over its decisions. Whitehall can rewrite history, but Northern Ireland showed violence works.

Anyway, Afghanistan is not Ireland. Britain is not the sovereign power in Kabul, nor is the Taliban a single political entity. Its disparate warlords and commanders owe allegiance to different factions under thePashtunwali umbrella. The one thing that unites them is anger at the British ending their tolerated domination of southern Afghanistan in 2006 and a desire to rid the country of westerners. That is not negotiable.

Any reader of Ahmed Rashid‘s study of the Taliban will attest that the movement is little more than a religious banditry, motivated by tribe, war, pride, money and Allah, roughly in that order. After Mullah Omar took power in Kabul in the mid-1990s, the one moderating force was the exigences of that power. Taliban leaders were forced to co-operate with the Northern Alliance, treat with the CIA on drugs, and appease its Pakistani and Saudi sponsors. Younger bloods were also unhappy at hosting Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida Arabs.

All scope to manipulate that leverage after 9/11 was swept away by the foolish 2001 invasion. Lines that might have been put out to “moderates”, even after the invasion, were abandoned in favour of what amounted to an Anglo-American war of eternal occupation. The drone bombing of Pashtun villages is said by intelligence reports to have wiped out roughly half the established Taliban leadership, mostly those with whom the west might now be “talking”.

Each assassination brings a hothead to command, eager to prove his anti-Nato spurs and less inclined to negotiate. Each recruits dozens of fighters and provokes a furious revenge. The drone killings are directly counter-productive to Miliband’s stated policy, yet he supports them. It makes no more sense than Gordon Brown’s belief they have something to do with “terror on Britain’s streets”.

Any dispassionate observer returning from Afghanistan reports the same message. This is not working. People do not want their hearts and minds bribed or their infrastructure rebuilt. The money just gets stolen. They want their poppy crop left in peace and they want to know which sheikh or Taliban warlord will rule their lives a year from now. After years of being bombed, bankrupted and betrayed, they wonder who can offer them security. The answer is neither the British nor the regime in Kabul.

When Britain ruled the adjacent Punjab, its power was based on a large land army and the belief that it would never leave. It sent out its brightest and best. They stayed, and those who collaborated with them prospered. Today those who collaborate are murdered and night letters are pinned to their doors.

Everyone knows that the British will go but the Taliban will stay. That is why the strategy of take, hold and build is mere pastiche imperialism. It relies on the palpable nonsense that the Afghan army, a drugged militia of little competence and less loyalty, will fight and defeat its Pashtun cousins. It will not.

All wars end in talking, even if the conversation is usually brief and one-sided. Such will be any deal with the Taliban, good or bad. As the Canadians and most Europeans have realised, Afghanistan is essentially a war of American vendetta, and the more stupid for it. Yes, it will end in talk, but how many more must die first?

The standard assumption is that women’s lives have dramatically improved over the last 50 years. They have considerably more personal freedom; and opportunities for education and employment have been transformed. As a result they have much greater financial independence, which has given them more power to shape their lives. So far, so easy.

But something odd is going on that no one can explain. These huge social changes are not making women happier, and, according to several significant studies, women’s happiness relative to men’s has declined in the last 25 years. This includes women of all age groups, and it is evident in many countries, particularly in the US and the UK.

Let’s start with the most alarming evidence. It comes from the West and Sweeting study of 15-year-olds conducted in exactly the same place in Scotland in 1987, 1999 and 2006. When the 1999 results were published, there was concern that the incidence of common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and anhedonia(loss of capacity to experience pleasure) had significantly increased for girls from 19% to 32%. The increase for boys was much smaller, at only 2%. But the latest set of results are even more dramatic. There has been an increase for both sexes: boys are now on 21%, and girls are at a staggering rate of 44%.

The rate of increase is appalling. Over a third of girls agreed “they felt constantly under strain”; those who “felt they could not overcome their difficulties” had more than doubled to 26%. The number who agreed with “thinking of yourself as a worthless person” had trebled between 1987 and 2006. These findings could partly explain the recent reports of sharp rises in girls’ binge drinking and aggressive behaviour.

The first thought is that perhaps this gender gap is a teenage thing. Other studies showing a marked increase in mental ill-health of teenagers have prompted speculation that the transition to adulthood now is much more difficult and demanding. But the gap in mental ill-health between men and women is just as striking in other age groups; an NHS study published this year showed that between 1993 and 2007 common mental disorders had risen by a fifth for women aged between 45 and 64 (there had been no change in men), and among the over-75s, they were twice as likely in women as men.

Various explanations are put forward. Women’s levels of serotonin are more vulnerable, it has been suggested, but that doesn’t explain the change over time. Women are struggling with work and family, looking after their elderly parents, or coping with empty nest after children have left. Two American academics checked all the data from the US and the European Union to try to hunt down the explanation.

Stevenson and Wolfers found that American women – of all social classes, ages and whether they worked, stayed home, had kids or did not – had seen a decline in happiness since the early 70s. Thirty years ago, women reported higher rates of subjective wellbeing than men in the US. This advantage has been entirely eroded, and in many instances it is now men who are happier than women. So how did women manage to end up, after a generation of advances in gender equality, less happy typically than their mothers at their age?

There are no easy answers, conclude Stevenson and Wolfers. They pose the extraordinary question: “Did men garner a disproportionate share of the benefits of the women’s movement?” They suggest “perhaps the wellbeing data point to differential impacts of social changes on men and women, with women being particularly hurt by declines in family life, rises in inequality or reductions in social cohesion”. One finding they highlight is that women’s satisfaction with their financial situation has declined while men’s has remained stable – one possibility is that there has been a change “in the reference group” or expectations for women so that their lives are more likely to come up short.

This latter is key to the work of another American psychologist, Jean Twenge, whose most recent work has been to analyse what she describes as a “narcissism epidemic” in the US that is disproportionately affecting women. Her meta-analysis covered 37,000 college students. It found that in 1982, 15% got high scores on a narcissism personality index; by 2006 it was 25% – and the largest share of this increase was women.

The narcissist has huge expectations of themselves and their lives. Typically, they make predictions about what they can achieve that are unrealistic, for example in terms of academic grades and employment. They seek fame and status, and the achievement of the latter leads to materialism – money enables the brand labels and lavish lifestyle that are status symbols. It is the Paris Hilton syndrome across millions of lives.

Twenge points to the fact that in the 1950s only 12% of college students agreed that “I am an important person”, but by the late 80s it was 80%. In 1967, only 45% agreed that “being well-off is an important life goal”, but by 2004 the figure was 74%.

The problem, Twenge believes, derives in part from a generation of indulgent parents who have told their children how special they are. An individualistic culture has, in turn, reinforced a preoccupation with the self and its promotion. The narcissist is often rewarded – they tend to be outgoing, good at selling themselves, and very competitive: they are the types who will end up as Sir Alan’s apprentice. But their success is shortlived; the downside is that they have a tendency to risky behaviour, addictive disorders, have difficulties sustaining intimate relationships, and are more prone to aggressive behaviour when rejected.

The narcissism of young women could just be a phase they will grow out of, admits Twenge, but she is concerned that the evidence of narcissism is present throughout highly consumerist, individualistic societies – and women suffer disproportionately from the depression and anxiety linked to it.

This is what alarms psychologist Oliver James. He is working on an updated version of his pioneering Britain on the Couch, which first argued that mental ill-health had increased despite more wealth. He worries that the Scottish teenage girls are the “canaries” down the mines, giving powerful indications of a set of social influences that are deeply damaging their wellbeing. He points to the pressures of a “consumerised, commercially driven version of femininity” that puts huge emphasis on girls’ appearance.

Girls are more compliant and eager to please – that is how they have always been socialised – but now the dominant social expectations of them are deeply destructive of their happiness. Breast augmentation quintupled in 2006 in the US, Twenge points out. The expectations of girls and women have multiplied and intensified – on every front, from passing exams to looking good and having more friends and better photos on Facebook. Technology proliferates the places in which one is required to self-promote.

One possibility is that women’s identity has always been framed around relationships – as mothers, daughters, wives, friends and sisters. “Relationality” is still central to how women see their lives, and yet it is entirely at odds with an individualistic, intensely competitive, narcissistic culture. Women, brought up to seek social approval, battle between competing frames of reference, and many end up feeling failure and inadequacy on multiple fronts.

guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 July 2009 23.55 BST

Article history

Denny Pattyn is an American priest of a special kind. In 1996 in Arizona, he set up a programme by the name of the Silver Ring Thing with the aim of urging young Americans to refrain from sex before marriage, convincing them that it is fornication, and sinful. Pattyn regularly holds events attended by hundreds of young Americans who read the Bible with him and then pledge before the Lord to preserve their virginity for their future spouses. At the end of the celebration, each puts on their left hand a silver ring inscribed with Biblical verses, which they wear until they marry.

The surprising thing is that Pattyn’s campaign has won a large following in the US, and received funding from the government. On French television I saw a long programme about Pattyn in which his followers defended virginity as a measure of virtue. A French psychologist appeared to discuss their ideas respectfully.

I began to wonder: Pattyn’s ideas about chastity as a measure of virtue are completely in line with Arab Muslim culture, but yet on French TV they deal with him politely because he is American, Christian and white. If an Arab or Muslim had said the same thing, he would have faced a barrage of accusations that he was backward, barbaric and contemptuous of women.

This western double standard is widespread, and there are countless examples. Elections recently took place in Iran and the winner was President Ahmadinejad. But there were allegations of vote-rigging. Western governments were up in arms, issuing strongly worded statements in support of democracy in Iran.

Yet Egyptian elections have been rigged regularly for many years and President Mubarak has taken office through rigged referendums, so why hasn’t that provoked such anger? The outcry is not to promote democracy but rather to embarrass the Iranian regime, which is hostile towards Israel and trying to develop its nuclear capabilities, which are a threat to western imperialism. The Egyptian government, on the other hand, in spite of being despotic and corrupt, is obedient and tame, so the western media overlook its faults, however horrendous they might be.

When the young Iranian woman called Neda Soltan was shot by an unknown assailant, her death quickly became global headline news. Western politicians were so moved that even President Obama, close to tears, said that it was heartbreaking. A few weeks later in the German city of Dresden, an Egyptian woman called Marwa el-Sherbini was attending the trial of a man who racially abused her because she was wearing a hijab. Fined €2,800 for insulting her, the extremist then went on a rampage, attacking Marwa and her husband with a knife. Marwa died on the spot.

The murder of Marwa and the murder of Neda should be seen as crimes of equal barbarity and of equal impact. But the murder of the Egyptian woman in the hijab did not break Obama’s heart and did not receive front-page coverage in the west. The murder of Neda incriminates the Iranian regime, whereas the murder of Marwa shows that terrorism is not confined to Arabs and Muslims – a white German terrorist kills an innocent women and tries to kill her husband simply because she is Muslim and wears a hijab. The western media do not care to convey this message.

In short the west, politically and in the media, generally adopts points of view and policies that are hostile towards Arabs and Muslims. But are Arabs and Muslims merely the innocent victims of this prejudice? Definitely not. We cannot use “the west” as an exclusive term meaning only one thing. There are millions of ordinary westerners who neither love nor hate Islam, simply because they know nothing about it.

Now, what of the image that Muslims themselves convey of Islam? If an ordinary westerner decided to find out the truth about Islam through what Muslims do and say, what would he find? Osama bin Laden would look out at him, as though emerging from a medieval cave to announce that Islam ordered him to kill as many western crusaders as possible, even if they are innocent civilians who have done nothing to merit punishment. Then the westerner would read how the Taliban has decided to close girls’ schools, arguing that Islam bans the education of women on the grounds that they are as intellectually and religiously deficient.

After that, the westerner would read statements from those who call themselves Islamic jurists, saying that a Muslim who converts to another faith must repent or have his throat cut. Some jurists will assert that Islam does not recognise democracy and that it is a duty to obey a Muslim ruler even if he oppresses and robs his subjects. They will welcome women covering their faces with the niqab so that those who see them are not driven by sexual desire.

The westerner will not find out that Islam gave men and women completely equal rights and obligations. He will not find out that in the eyes of Islam if someone kills an innocent it is as if he has killed everyone. He will never find out that the niqab has nothing to do with Islam but is a custom that came to us with the money of the Gulf from a backward desert society. The westerner will never find out that the real message of Islam is freedom, justice and equality, and that it guarantees freedom of belief, in that those who wish may believe and those who do not, need not, and that democracy is essential to Islam, in that a Muslim ruler cannot take office without the consent and choice of Muslims. After all that, can we blame the westerner if he considers Islam the religion of backwardness and terrorism?

Last year, I had to make a speech in Austria about the reality of Islam. I told how the Prophet Muhammad was so mild-mannered that when he knelt down to pray his grandsons Hassan and Hussein would often jump on his back in play. He would stay kneeling so as not to disturb the boys and then he would resume his prayers. I asked the audience: “Can you imagine that a man who stopped praying for the sake of children would advocate killing and terrorising innocent people?”

Many listened to this story with interestand later asked me how they could obtain real information about Islam. It is true that the west’s policy treats us as colonial peoples who do not deserve to enjoy the rights of their citizens, and it is true that its media is mostly biased against Arabs and Muslims – but it is also true that the retrograde Wahhabi reading of Islam that is now widespread helps to entrench an unfair and mistaken image.

It is our duty to start with ourselves. We must save Islam from all the nonsense, falsehoods and retrograde ideas that have attached themselves to it. Democracy is the solution.

By Uthman Lateef

Seldom do people in our contemporary world rise to heights or slump to lows and annex the public imagination, arousing sentiments of grief, loss and world-weariness, quite like Michael Jackson. His death, amid extensive preparation for his comeback tour, ‘This is It’, came as a cataclysmic shock to his fans, an abrupt jolt to cynics who had so many unanswered questions, and a pensive reminder to us all about the fragility of human affairs. ‘This is it’ and it really was ‘it’.

Michael Jackson’s life was one clouded by so many abnormalities; his early rise to fame and warped transition to adulthood, radical colour alteration, obsessive reliance on cosmetic surgery and Peter Pan-like persona allowed the unapologetic media machine to exploit his bizarre antics for worldwide public consumption. Michael Jackson became the world’s best loved phantom, a character that thrived on media publicity and shaped his existence around the ‘off the wall’, ironically the title of his fifth studio album released in 1979.

Michael was a tragic victim of his own success. This, because the success he found was in the realm of an ever-changing entertainment industry; Michael was neither always relevant nor always admired. His success was set on a shaky pedestal from where it and he was then knocked down. Where the literary critic William D. Howells (1837-1920) once remarked that ‘What the American public wants in the theatre is a tragedy with a happy ending’, this time the happy beginning ended with a tragedy as it did for Elvis Presley and countless others who became entangled into a world of false promises; once the initial glitter had worn off, the ever tedious task of maintaining appearances was no ‘Thriller’. Despite the money and fame, Michael Jackson was said to have died an extremely lonely man.

“But as for him who shall turn away from remembering Me – his shall be a life of narrow scope and on the Day of Resurrection We shall raise him up blind.” Al-Qur’an 39:23

Descriptions of Michael Jackson in life and now in death overflow with superlatives from ‘the King of Pop’ to the ‘Greatest’. The public grief following his sudden demise was evidenced, in part, by the so-far 12 suicides in his memory, the first of whom was a Tunisian teenage girl. That someone could take their life because Michael Jackson had died is a patent example of the extent to which the lives of some people are entirely shaped around and dependent on the artificially media produced image of a celebrity. Clearly then, the vacuum of our experiences are made emptier by our anxious straining with the artificial to fill them synthetically. Where Michael was plagued by his desire to be someone so unnaturally different, then we too, in our adulation of him may be filling our vacuums with the artificial. Celebrities like Michael are of course creations of the media and there is a danger that our fascination with such celebrities makes them receptacles into which we pour own purposelessness. Where the celebrity is the creature of the tabloid press, music videos and worldwide gossip, this very agency which gives the celebrity his name and fame is the very same agency that in turn destroys him. As Michael, and others who took his path, was ‘made’ by publicity, so too will he be ‘unmade’ by publicity. And then where does that leave his die-hard fans?

In our obsession with celebrities and entertainment we fail to give recognition to the oftentimes unsung heroes – doctors, teachers, aid workers. Their biographies become dry and unglamorous and are unable to satiate our thirst for gossip and scandal. Their accounts nevertheless are usually purposeful and genuine. Where one eulogy of Michael was that ‘he made the whole world dance’, then in the realm of serious pursuits where one labours to fulfil the purpose of his existence, Michael has no relevance. This is not to deny the good that Michael was known to have done; his care for children and world poverty drove him to donate large sums of money to alleviate world afflictions. But it is not the purpose of this article to exonerate or condemn Michael; it is instead an attempt to place things into perspective.

“Know that the life of this world is but play and amusement, pomp and mutual boasting and multiplying, (in rivalry) among yourselves, riches and children. Here is a similitude: How rain and the growth which it brings forth, delight (the hearts of) the tillers; soon it withers; thou wilt see it grow yellow; then it becomes dry and crumbles away.” Al-Qur’an 57:20

The verse is a powerful reminder of the illusory and ephemeral nature of our world. If we allow our enjoyments to define us, so that play, amusement, pomp, boasting and taking indulgent delight in wealth, become the raison d’être of our existence, then soon enough whatever we have amassed for our or others’ gluttonous consumption will wither away; it will cease to be the means for our contentment and will inversely become our grief and remorse because it does not remain nor is it ever enough. Likewise, a celebrity’s fame soon withers as time expires; Michael’s plan to reverse the negativity he had received during his high-profile trials in the US by performing a staggering 50 shows scheduled only weeks after his death should bring to mind the permanently relevant advice of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), who once drew some lines in the sand, and said:

“This [line] is Man, and this is his hope, and [the third line, between them] is his appointed time for death. So while he is in this state [in hope] the closer line [death] takes him.”

Perhaps it was too late for Michael to look attentively at the ‘Man in the Mirror’ and ask him ‘to change his ways’. Where Michael was killed by time – suffocated and then starved by his own fame, the man we see in the mirror is still a reminder to us that a lot needs to change. Islam promotes an awareness far removed from vain pursuits that provide only an intermittent thrill at the expense of what is more profound, life-changing, and what leads to the permanent –

“All that is on earth will perish: But the Face of your Lord will abide (for ever),- full of Majesty, Bounty and Honour.” 55: 26-27.

The Islamic Shari’ah aims at the protection of an individual from all forms of exploitation and society from the harms of an individual. Its focus on the needs of the society before the desires of the individual ensures that one person’s pursuits, of whatever type, are not at the detriment of the healthy functioning of society.

In essence, there is no real tragedy in Michael Jackson’s fall, for he has returned to his proper anonymous and original station. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) reminded his last audience in his last sermon,

‘Oh people, all of you are from Adam, and Adam was from dust.’

Michael will, as we all will, become passé, pass out of the picture; the bright lights, music, entertainment, will soon be replaced by a real world not glossed over by synthetic, a real ‘Neverland’ where people really never die.

And it is the seeking of the good of that abode that we must make our priority in life.

Released: 07.14.05

Navigate this report
Summary of Findings
About the Pew Global Attitudes Project
I. How Muslims and Westerners See Each Other
II. How Non-Muslim Publics View Muslims
III. How Muslims See Themselves and Islam’s Role
IV. How Muslims View Relations with the World
Methodological Appendix
Questionnaire

Navigate this report
Summary of Findings
About the Pew Global Attitudes Project
I. How Muslims and Westerners See Each Other
II. How Non-Muslim Publics View Muslims
III. How Muslims See Themselves and Islam’s Role
IV. How Muslims View Relations with the World
Methodological Appendix
Questionnaire

The takeaway line from the Gallup poll (pdf) on Muslims and integration in western Europe is very simple: there is no correlation between religious observance and feeling alienated from the society around you; but this is what the society around Muslims believes.

Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies, said at the report’s launch that:

If the integration debate defines people as people looking the same or thinking the same in terms of morality, then it’s natural for general public to assume Muslims are not loyal, but if the focus is widened and takes into account how people actually identify with their country and how much they identify with institutions, then it would draw a different picture. The data would suggest that the public is getting a narrow picture of integration and thereby drawing a false conclusion.

The figures that Gallup has produced are quite startling, and apply both to beliefs and symbols. In England, Germany and France, the three countries surveyed, Muslims are twice as likely as the general public to suppose that Muslims are loyal citizens. In Germany and the UK, they have higher confidence in the police and the judiciary than the general public (in France, where they are also over-represented in the prison system, they also mistrust the authorities more).

They are also, in all the countries surveyed, much less likely to want to live in communities made up predominantly of their own ethnic and religious population than the general public, though British Muslims are those most favourable towards the idea in Europe.

The second, startling fact, is that while almost everyone agrees that having a job is very important if you are to integrate into wider society, British Muslims place less value on both jobs and education as necessary for integration than any other group. Even so, 70% of them agree that finding a job is necessary to integrate, and 76% that education is (compared to the 95% of German Muslims, for instance, who hold these views.) In this light, it is frightening that the actual employment for British Muslims is only 38% – again, a huge outlier from all the other populations surveyed.

These polls are not ideal. The sample size, though large in absolute terms (with 500 Muslims and 1000 non-Muslims surveyed in each country) is not large enough to eliminate a large margin of error (5% for the Muslim figures, 3% for the general public) so only the broadest pictures are trustworthy and some results, such as the 0% of British Muslims apparently tolerant of homosexual acts are not to be taken literally. The full report is available here as a pdf for anyone who wants to poke at the figures.

Within this broad and blurry picture, it is possible to see the outlines of a clear argument between the British, or multicultural, model of integration and the French, secularising one. On some measures, the British come out worse, or at least more boorish: only half of British Muslims strongly agree that they always treat of other faiths with respect, compared to two-thirds of French Muslims; in both cases, the figure for the general population is about 10% higher. Similarly, and this is surely part of the legacy of the Rushdie affair, five times as many non-Muslim as Muslim Britons feel that integration demands that people accept public comments they perceive as offensive about their faith or ethnicity. In both France and Germany, Muslims are less sensitive and non-Muslims less keen on their right to offend.

In practice, however, 90% of all the groups surveyed agree that they had been treated with respect all day the day before.

The French, however, are much more divided about issues of religious symbolism, and much less likely to tolerate headscarves as legitimate symbols of loyal diversity. More than half the British public thinks that removing the veil is necessary to integrate minorities, compared to only an eights of Muslims. But that was the only item of religiously identifying clothing which a majority of the British rejected, whereas clear majorities of the French rejected headscarves, yarmulkes, turbans and “visible large crosses” as well. About a quarter of French Muslims also thought these were obstacles to immigration.

Andrew Brown is the editor of Cif belief. His most recent book is Fishing in Utopia, which won the 2009 Orwell prize

The word Rabee in Arabic refers to the season of spring. This season is indicative of a change in the landscape, when flowers bloom, when trees turn green and when there is a general renewal of life. The coming of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) represents change and a new beginning for the whole universe. His coming was like a light that lit up this universe.

This light was not only manifested in the person of the Nabi (SAW), but was also evident in his parents. It is recorded that when the father of the Prophet (SAW) was on his way to marry Sayyida Amina, he was stopped by a lady from Quraish who asked him to marry her. He refused, explaining that he was on his way to get married. After having consummated his marriage, he met the same lady who showed no interest in him. He then inquired from the lady as to why she showed such indifference towards him after wanting to marry him, she replied and said that he no longer carried that light on his forehead. The light had been transferred to the mother of the Nabi (SAW), Sayyida Amina.

When Sayyida Amina became pregnant with the Nabi Muhammad (SAW), she was told in a dream that she was pregnant with the Master of this nation and the sign of that would be that when she gave birth to him, she would witness a light coming out with him that would light up the palaces of Bosra in Syria. When she saw this light, she should then call him Muhammad. When she gave birth to the Prophet (SAW), she saw a light that lit up the skies from the east to the west. This was later confirmed by the Prophet (SAW) himself when he spoke about the light which his mother saw at his birth.

This Prophet of light then became the central figure in the life of every Muslim. He taught them how to eat, drink, speak, walk and sleep. He taught them how to pray to their Lord and how to establish a spiritual link with Him. He taught them to respect each other, how to interact with people and how to honour mankind. He taught them how to revere their womenfolk, mothers and fathers. He taught them the meaning of love, compassion, mercy and respect. With his coming, he set an ethical standard never before witnessed by this world and never to be equalled by any person after his demise.

This wonderful person became the guide, leader, inspiration and goal of every Muslim during his time, after he passed away, and in time to come. His status is so celebrated in Islam, that the faith of a Muslim is not complete until he loves the Prophet (SAW) more than he loves his self, his children, his parents and all of mankind. In his presence, no one was allowed to raise his voice above his voice, or else his good deeds would be obliterated without his knowledge. No one is allowed to call him by his name or to address him in the way they would address each other. This example was set by the Almighty in the Holy Quran where He refrained from calling the Nabi (SAW) by his name and instead addressed him as ‘O Prophet’ and ‘O Messenger’, as opposed to the other Prophets whom He addressed by their names.

His status is further enhanced by the confirmation of the Holy Quran of his sublime morals and beautiful manners. His excellent behaviour and beautiful personal features left no Believer in doubt about his status and position as the Prophet of Allah and the best of creation. His personal interaction with people was instrumental in drawing them closer to Islam and increasing their love for him (SAW). His outstanding disposition was acknowledged even by his enemies and people of other faiths. His compassion and care for his companions instilled in them a love so intense, so true, and so sincere, that he became their objective in this world and the hereafter. They feared that they would be separated from him after death and longed to be with him even in paradise. He became the all and everything for them when he informed them that he would intercede for the Believers on the day of judgement.

In the month of Rabee ul Awwal, Muslims all over the world acknowledge the importance of the coming of this beautiful Prophet (SAW) by celebrating his birth, his life, his character and his personality. These celebrations take the form of athkaar, praise, lessons from his seerah, and feeding of the poor and those who attend these gatherings. It is a gathering place for those whose cup runneth over with the love of the Prophet (SAW). It is a time of giving thanks to the Almighty for blessing this world with the presence of His beloved. It is an opportunity to recite the praiseworthy qualities of the Holy Prophet (SAW) in the form of famous Qasidas like the Qasidah Burdah and the Mawlid of Barzanji.

These acts of celebration are however not sanctioned by all Muslims. Some are of the opinion that it is an innovation and should not be allowed in Islam. This contrasts sharply with the general understanding of the word ‘bid’ah’ among the scholars of Islam. It is well documented that the Ameerul Mu’mineen, Sayyidina Umer (RA), gathered the people behind one Imam for the prayer of taraweeg and then commented about the beautiful bid’ah. The words of Imam Shafii (RA) concerning which bid’ah is either a good or a bad innovation are not disputed by the people of knowledge. The Prophet (SAW) himself referred to innovations being divided into the categories of good and bad  when he said that the one who introduces a good ‘sunnah’ in Islam will receive the reward thereof and the reward of those who follow him. Probably the most definitive proof for the permissibility of celebrating Mawlid, came from the Prophet (SAW) himself when he replied in answer to a question about fasting on a Monday, “I was born on that day and became a Prophet on that day”.

However, the debate is ongoing, with one group fearing the possibility of falling into sin, and the other group overcome by their love and reverence of the Prophet (SAW). But what cannot be disputed by anyone is that the Nabi (SAW) was sent as a mercy and blessing to this world, and his name, life and personality was honoured by none other than Allah (SWT). So whomsoever honours the Prophet (SAW) and praises him, only but follows the way shown to us by Allah.

Sheikh Bashier Benjamin
Online Journalist/Broadcaster
Voice of the Cape Radio, Cape Town, South Africa

Only days after they were groaning with fury at the Israeli lobby’s success in hounding the outspoken Charles Freeman away from his proposed intelligence job for President Obama, the Arabs now have to contend with an Israeli Foreign Minister whose – let us speak frankly – racist comments about Palestinian loyalty tests have brought into the new Netanyahu cabinet one of the most unpleasant politicians in the Middle East.

The Iraqis produced the hateful Saddam, the Iranians created the crackpot Ahmadinejad – for reasons of sanity, I leave out the weird ruler of Libya – and now the Israelis have exalted a man, Avigdor Lieberman, who out-Sharons even Ariel Sharon.

A few Palestinians expressed their cruel delight that at last the West will see the “true face” of Israel. I’ve heard that one before – when Sharon became prime minister – and the usual nonsense will be trotted out that only a “hard-line extremist” can make the compromises necessary for a deal with the Palestinians.

This kind of self-delusion is a Middle East disease. The fact is that the Israeli Prime Minister-to-be has made it perfectly clear there will be no two-state solution; and he has planted a tree on Golan to show the Syrians they will not get it back. And now he’s brought into the cabinet a man who sees even the Arabs of Israel as second-class citizens.

Lieberman’s first visit to Washington will be a gem. AIPAC – posing as an Israeli lobby when in fact it works for the Likudists – will fight for him and Lady Hillary will have to greet him warmly at the State Department. Who knows, he might even suggest to her that she imposes a loyalty test for American minorities as well – which would mean demanding an oath of faithfulness from Barack himself. The horizon goes on forever.

In Egypt, Avigdor Lieberman will have a tough time. Hosni Mubarak can be a soft touch for the Americans but it was Lieberman who, complaining that the Egyptian President should visit Israel or “go to hell”, deeply offended a man who has taken great risks in maintaining his country’s peace with the Israeli state.

Egyptians have been outraged to read in their newspapers that Lieberman has talked of drowning Palestinians in the Dead Sea or executing Israeli Palestinians who talked to Hamas. Last night, a supporter of Lieberman appeared on Al Jazeera television to describe Hamas as “an anti-Semitic, barbarous organisation” – even though Israeli army officers spoke openly with this supposedly “barbarous” group both before and after the Oslo agreement.

But the growth of such an extremist administration in Israel and the hopeless response of the Obama administration to the so-called supporters of Israel who destroyed Freeman’s career, can only be dangerous news for the Middle East. The Jeddah-based Arab News called the Freeman disaster “a grave defeat for US foreign policy”. But while uttering all the usual platitudes, the Arab press has been playing up the pusillanimous remarks of US press secretary Robert Gibbs when asked why Obama was “standing mute” in the Freeman affair. “I’ve watched with great interest how people perceive different things about our policy and during the campaign about whether we were too close to one group or too close to the other. So I don’t give a lot of thought to those.” Asked for “straight answers”, Gibbs said: “I gave you as straight a one as I can get.”

This was almost as funny as The New York Times when it attempted last week to explain why Lady Hillary was frightened of offending the Israelis during the formation of the Netanyahu government when she described the destruction of 1,000 Palestinian homes as “unhelpful”.

Her caution in the Middle East, it explained, was “a reflection of the treacherous landscape in the Middle East, where a misplaced phrase can ruffle feathers among constituencies back home”. You bet it can – and when Mr Lieberman comes to town, we’ll see who those feathers belong to.

Their owners would do well, however, to dwell on the incendiary language of Avigdor Lieberman. He speaks like a Russian nationalist rather than the secular Israeli he claims to be.

I covered the bloodbath of Bosnia in the early Nineties and I can identify Lieberman’s language – of executions, of drownings, of hell and loyalty oaths – with the language of Messrs Mladic and Karadzic and Milosevic.

Lady Hillary and her boss should pull out a few books on the war in ex-Yugoslavia if they want to understand who they are now dealing with. “Unhelpful” will not be the appropriate response.

Is the Ministry of Fear about to be reopened? I thought – when Lord Blair finally departed from us and George Bush left the White House – that the institution had been closed down, that we might have been allowed a few hours in the broad sunlit uplands. Change? Hope? Renewal? Inspiration? But no, the semantics of our masters are reverting to type. There are no uplands, just another new dark age of fear and terror.

A few months ago, the following Bush-speak would be wearily familiar. “Let me be clear: al-Qa’ida and its allies – the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks – are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al-Qa’ida is actively planning attacks on the US homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan … if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qa’ida to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.” Only, of course, this wasn’t Bush-speak. It was a Bush-clone, called Obama-speak.

And now a reversion to Blair-speak: “Contemporary terrorist organisations aspire to use chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. Changing technology and the theft and smuggling of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials make this aspiration more realistic than it may have been in the recent past…” Yup, that’s the Home Office for you. Dirty bombs. Biological weapons, according to the Home Office intelligence girls and boys – the same crew, presumably, who helped to give us weapons of mass destruction and five-minute warnings six years ago but who now work for Lady Jacqui. I thought it was Churchill who warned us in 1940 of a new dark age “made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science”.

That these two crimson-lit warnings should have come within three days of each other last month was surely not by chance. Note how the Taliban has now become conflated with al-Qa’ida, how the land mass of the Middle East has been pushed further east. Once it was Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Now it’s Afghanistan and Pakistan. And note how Tube train bombings in London have suddenly turned into dirty bombs, poison and radioactivity. The border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is now “the most dangerous place in the world”, according to Obama.

Well, tell that to the Raj. Didn’t Sir Mortimer Durand define the frontier – henceforth the Durand line – to separate India from Afghanistan? And hasn’t it always been “the most dangerous place in the world” (save, I suppose, for “Palestine” which – for all the usual reasons – got left out of the Obama speech of 27 March). Wasn’t it just a few miles up the road, in the Kabul Gorge, that an entire British army was wiped out in 1842? And was it not in 1893 that Lord Roberts spoke of “the policy of endeavouring to extend our influence over, and establish law and order on, that part of the border where anarchy, murder and robbery up to the present time have reigned supreme … Some 40 years ago the policy of non-interference with the tribes, so long as they did not trouble us, may have been wise and prudent, though selfish and not altogether worthy of a great civilising power”.

Yup, it was that same “porous” border – and count how many times you read the word “porous” in the weeks to come – that Obama is now talking about. The problem is that the dratted Pathans think this place is called Pushtunistan and no more recognise the Durand line today than they did in the 19th century. And when millions of people just don’t recognise a border, then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (or President Obama’s) aren’t going to be able to do anything about it. “We will insist that action be taken – one way or another – when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets,” Obama promises. If the Pakistani government doesn’t take action, the US will.

Ho hum. In the days of empire, we crossed the Durand line from the Raj into Afghanistan. Now Obama’s going to change the plot by invading in the opposite direction, from Afghanistan into the former Raj. And with just 20,000 extra troops. My colleague John Griffiths has been researching Soviet files on Moscow’s attempts to stamp out “terrorism” in Afghanistan with surges and cross-border raids. Here’s an analysis from the Soviet Frunze Military Academy on the “terrorists” the Russians fought in Afghanistan for eight bloody years:

“Several combat principles lay at the heart of mujahedin tactics. First, they avoided direct contact with the superior might of regular forces which could have wiped them out. Second, the mujahedin practically never conducted positional warfare and, when threatened with encirclement, would abandon their positions. Third, in all forms of combat the mujahedin always strove to achieve surprise. Fourth, the mujahedin employed terror and ideological conditioning on a peaceful populace as well as on local government representatives.”

The Frunze lads concluded that their “terrorist” enemies enjoyed night action, could move rapidly through the border mountains (in Obama’s “most dangerous place in the world”), had a broad intelligence network and could pick up details of secret Soviet unit movements. Now who does that remind you of? In his soon-to-be-published book, Griffiths recommends that the Frunze report should lie on every US president’s desk, permanently open at this page.

Do we never learn? Muslim Pakistan is detonating in front of our eyes while Israel, when it’s not grabbing more land from Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank, is claiming that Iran – not Pakistan – is the greatest threat to world peace. Its foreign minister doesn’t even want a Palestinian state any more. And what should we be doing? Trying to resolve the wound of Kashmir, of “Palestine”, of Kurdistan, of Lebanon. But no, we’re off on another adventure. Poison, dirty bombs, the lot. The most dangerous place in the world. Carry on up the Khyber.

This is Holy Week. It started yesterday with Palm Sunday and continues through Holy Thursday, Good Friday and culminates this Sunday with Easter Day. One can no longer assume most people will be aware of this, let alone the events these days mark; in a recent UK poll, only 22% could identify what Easter was celebrating. What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity? One can only presume that the New Atheists are organising a fabulous party to celebrate. Richard Dawkins could stump up for the crates of champagne out of his sumptuous royalties from The God Delusion.

But I’m curious as to how many of the country’s finest minds would join the celebrations. Increasingly, one hears a distaste for the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume, and how it has drowned out any other kind of conversation about religion: what it is, the loss of it, whether it matters, and what happens in a post-religious society? From sometimes surprising quarters there is an anxiety about the evangelical fervour and certainty of the New Atheists: they are so sure they are right, but there are plenty of people – and many of them would not count themselves as believers – who can’t share their contempt for religion.

Just this week, AN Wilson announces in a thoughtful cover article for the New Statesman that he has apostated, abandoning his fellow atheists. Or take another example: in the Third Way, a Christian magazine, the poet Andrew Motion reflects wistfully, “I don’t believe in God – though I wish I did, and I can’t stop thinking about it so who knows what might happen one day?” Wilson and Motion talk of uncertainty, doubt and faith in terms that are probably far more familiar to the vast majority of the British – many of whom still describe themselves as believing in God, whatever they mean by that – than the certitudes used by Dawkins. New Atheism may come to be regarded as winning a battle but losing the war.

What many argue is that the New Atheist debate has ended up down an intellectual dead end; there are only so many times you can argue that religion is a load of baloney. Ask a philosopher like John Gray or a historian of religion like Karen Armstrong and they are simply not interested in the debate; they bin the invitations to speak on platforms alongside New Atheists. Gray dismisses them as offering “intoxicating simplicity”; Armstrong is appalled by their “display of egotism and arrogance”. Both are deeply frustrated by a debate inflated by the media that generates heat but no light. They see the New Atheists mirroring a particular strain of fundamentalist Christianity with no knowledge of the vast variety of other forms of religious faith. In common with their Christian opponents, they share “the inner glow of complete certainty” – as Wilson describes his atheist conversion.

Armstrong and Gray converge again on where they pinpoint the key mistake. Belief came to be understood in western Christianity as a proposition at which you arrive intellectually, but Armstrong argues that this has been a profound misunderstanding that, in recent decades, has also infected other faiths. What “belief” used to mean, and still does in some traditions, is the idea of “love”, “commitment”, “loyalty”: saying you believe in Jesus or God or Allah is a statement of commitment. Faith is not supposed to be about signing up to a set of propositions but practising a set of principles. Faith is something you do, and you learn by practice not by studying a manual, argues Armstrong.

“We need to get away from the endless discussion about wretched beliefs; religion is about doing – and what every faith makes clear is that the doing is about compassion,” she argues. To try and shift the debate about faith into more fruitful territory, Armstrong came up with the idea of a global Charter on Compassion for all faiths (and none), which she is drafting and planning to launch later in the year.

From a different perspective, Alain de Botton, the philosopher and writer, has also been trying to broaden the conversation. He has founded a School of Life in London, which runs courses and events reflecting on how to live. He describes himself as “definitely an atheist”, but readily admits he borrows plenty from religions. His team have instituted the idea of Sunday sermons, and organise contemporary “pilgrimages”. “Even if you’re an atheist, there are a huge number of insights in religion,” he says. “We’re in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

De Botton argues that the decline of religious faith has left behind a real and widespread need for wisdom and insight; the media offers only a “cruel sentimentality” and gives little space to the most difficult of our life experiences, such as failure, death or envy, nor does it offer ways to deal with them. The author Mark Vernon teaches on some School of Life courses. A former priest and atheist, he now advocates a principled agnosticism rooted in an understanding of the limits of human knowledge. He argues that the most interesting conversations about faith are among those just outside religious traditions and those just inside – along the borders of belief, if you like.

It’s a perspective that Gray shares. Describing himself as a sceptic, he looks to another border of belief for deeper insight into the nature of faith: the dialogue between the theistic and non-theistic. Intriguingly, where Gray, Armstrong and Vernon all end up is with the apophatic tradition of theology. Apophatic is a word no longer even in my dictionary, but it’s a major tradition of Christian thought, and central to the thinking of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas: it is the idea that God is ineffable and beyond powers of description. S/he can be experienced by religious practice, but as Armstrong puts it: “In the past, people knew we could say nothing about God. Certain forms of knowledge only come with practice.” It makes the boundary between belief in God and agnosticism much more porous than commonly assumed.

But the modern distortion was to make God into a proposition in which you either did or did not believe. He was turned into an old man in the sky with a long white beard or promoted as a cuddly friend named Jesus. Arguing about the existence of such human creations is akin to the medieval pastime of calculating how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

So the media has been promoting the wrong argument, while the bigger question of how, in a post-religious society, people find the myths they need to sustain meaning, purpose and goodness in their lives go unexplored. What worries Gray is that we forget at our peril that all systems of thought rely on myth. By junking the Christian myths, the danger is that the replacements are “cruder, less tested, less instructive”. At times of crisis – such as the economic recession – the brittleness of a value system built on wealth and a particular conception of autonomy becomes all too apparent, leaving people without the sustaining reserves of a faith to fall back on. The consequences of that will certainly not be cause for celebration, he warns.

He raises his daughters to be assertive: they can wear whatever they want so long as it’s not a headscarf. He believes in free speech and the right to cause offence but understands that he has neither the right to be offended nor to speak out. Whatever an extremist is, on any given day, he is not it.

He regards himself as British – first, foremost and for ever. But whenever a bomb goes off he will happily answer for Islam. Even as he defends Britain’s right to bomb and invade he will explain that Islam is a peaceful religion. Always prepared to condemn other Muslims and supportive of the government, he has credibility in his community not because he represents its interests to the government, but because he represents the government’s interests to Muslims. He uses that credibility to preach restraint and good behaviour. Whatever a moderate is, on any given day, he is it.

On his slender shoulders lies Britain’s domestic anti-terror campaign. And as soon as the government finds him things are going to start turning around. Until then we are resigned to the fact that we will be about as successful at fighting terrorism at home as we are abroad and for the same reason. Unburdened by any desire to forge consensus or engage in negotiation, the government seeks to craft new realities out of whole cloth and then wonders why no one wants to wear them. And so it is that the mythical Muslim will prove as elusive as weapons of mass destruction or the beacons of democracy that Iraq and Afghanistan were supposed to become.

Last week’s launch of the government’s new counter-terror strategy, Contest 2, was preceded by Hazel Blears’ threat to deny funding to the Muslim Council of Britain because of comments its deputy secretary, Daud Abdullah, made about supporting Palestinians. It shows how these domestic tensions are intertwined with foreign policy.

If this changes anytime soon it won’t be because of anyone we’ve elected at home. Britain has no independent foreign policy. Apparently when America wants to start wars, so do we; and when America wants to end them, we do too. We vacillate, at the pleasure of the White House, with great moral conviction. So long as its foreign policy is uncritically tied to Israel’s then we should expect discontent from the Muslim community. That is not a reason to change our foreign policy – we should do that because it’s wrong – but it is a reason to stop pathologising Islam as though the source of Muslim discontent is completely unfathomable.

“There is a grievance,” explains Salma Yaqoob, a Respect councillor in Birmingham. “There’s no reason to deny that. All you need to know that there is a grievance is a TV. These young men who want a short cut to heaven see innocent people being killed and then retaliate by going out and killing innocent people. There’s a chilling logic to it. It’s wrong. But it is logical.”

But while the problem may start with foreign policy it does not end there. Lest we forget, there were riots involving Muslims in Britain’s northern towns during the summer of 2001. Back then the issues were poverty (of Muslims and non-Muslims), organised racism and segregated housing.

Those problems have not gone away. Two-thirds of Bangladeshis in Britain and over half of Pakistanis live in poverty. The unemployment rate for Pakistanis is four times higher than for whites; for Bangladeshis it is more than five times. Among the youth it is worse – and in the areas where Muslims are concentrated, white people aren’t doing that well either.

People generally don’t make a living out of being Muslim and those who do should not be on the government payroll. The most obvious response to news that Blears was threatening to cut funding to the MCB was to say: “We shouldn’t be funding the MCB anyway.” Governments should not be in the God business. The fact that it funds the Church of England creates inequality. But the proper response is to stop giving the C of E money, not fund other religions.

Instead the government continues to approach Muslims as though their religion defines them. It rarely speaks to them as tenants, parents, students or workers; it does not dwell on problems that they share with everyone else; it does not convene high profile task forces to look at how to improve their daily lives. It summons them as Muslims, talks to them as Muslims and refers to them as Muslims – as though they could not possibly be understood as anything else.

“The confusion between the plural identities of Muslims and their Islamic identity is not only a descriptive mistake, it has serious implications for policies for peace in the precarious world in which we live,” writes Amartya Sen in Identity and Violence. “The effect of this religion-centred political approach, and of the institutional policies it has generated … has been to bolster and strengthen the voice of religious authorities while downgrading the importance of non-religious institutions and movements.”

And when it does talk to them as Muslims, it demands they join a society that doesn’t exist, on terms that would not be set for any other religious group. The Home Office pledge to challenge those who “reject parliamentary democracy, dismiss the rule of law and promote intolerance and discrimination on the basis of race, faith, ethnicity, gender or sexuality,” is laudable. But, in a period that has seen the Catholic church stained with endemic child sex abuse and the Church of England rent asunder over homosexuality, the idea that Muslims should be singled out is laughable. Given the rise of the British National party in areas where Labour once dominated, you would think the ministers might launch such a challenge closer to home. And if these are “shared British values” then opposition to war and torture are no less so.

The trouble with those who rail against multiculturalism is that they invariably struggle to articulate the kind of monoculture they would like to replace it with, let alone how they would enforce it. And when they do, things rapidly start to fall apart.

I have yet to see a culture where truly shared values were proclaimed by fiat from above rather than forged by struggle and through consensus from below, let alone one where the primary responsibilty for tolerance rests with the most impoverished minority group that faces the most intolerance. But I dare say that it is in that place that we will find the mythological Muslim – patriotic, pious, peaceful and patient – waiting for reality to come to him and tell him it is ready.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Monday 30 March 2009. Gary Younge may be contacted at g.younge@guardian.co.uk

Blears had been gunning for the MCB, the country’s main Muslim umbrella body, which has shown increasing independence in recent years, particularly in relation to British foreign policy. The pretext was a statement about Israel’s onslaught on Gaza signed by the MCB’s number two, Daud Abdullah, which Blears interpreted as a call for attacks on British ships if they were sent to intercept arms supplies to Hamas. Ten days ago, in a tone more associated with Raj-era colonial governors than democratic politicians addressing independent community bodies, Blears delivered an ultimatum to the MCB: either it sacked its elected deputy general secretary or all contacts would be severed.

Never mind that Gordon Brown’s idea about policing Palestinian waters has been kicked into the long grass of international talks; or that Abdullah, a Caribbean-born veteran of Grenada’s leftwing New Jewel Movement (later overthrown by Ronald Reagan) made clear he was not calling for such attacks – let alone attacks on Jewish communities, as Blears claims in a letter in today’s Guardian. All links have now been suspended. And if there were any doubt that the attempt to isolate Britain’s most significant Muslim body was linked to the new anti-terror policy, the timing of the ultimatum for the eve of the launch made clear that for Blears they were all of a piece.

Not surprisingly, the MCB has rejected the government’s diktat. As it acknowledges, to do anything else would destroy its credibility in the community, which can in fact only be boosted by the confrontation. The point seems to have belatedly dawned on Blears, whose department yesterday appeared to be looking for a way out as it pressed for “further clarity” from the MCB about its attitude to violence in the Middle East.

But the dispute goes to the heart of the fatal flaw in government policy towards the terror threat. Instead of simply aiming to stop indiscriminate attacks, something that unites almost all Muslims as well as non-Muslims, the idea underlying the new strategy is to confront “nonviolent extremism” as well. The definitions of such a catch-all target specified in earlier drafts, including support for armed resistance anywhere in the world, sharia law and a belief that gay sex is sinful, have mercifully been dropped. It became clear to other ministers – reported to include Jack Straw, John Denham and Harriet Harman – that not only would such zealotry brand most of Britain’s 2.4 million Muslims extremist, it could also apply to many Christians, orthodox Jews and atheists as well.

But strong echoes of this folly remain: for example, in the categorisation of those who reject Israel’s legitimacy as extremist. It is a policy that has been driven by neoconservative-leaning thinktanks – such as Policy Exchange, the Centre for Social Cohesion and the government-funded Quilliam Foundation – who believe Islamism, a political trend as broad as socialism or liberalism, is the enemy, rather than the tiny takfiri groups who think it’s a good idea to blow people up on buses and tubes.

That’s a dangerous blind alley, which makes such attacks more, rather than less, likely. Instead of listening to representative groups which can honestly reflect what drives Muslim anger – notably western support for wars of occupation in the Muslim world – the government ends up talking to its own creations and attempting to use cash to buy political docility. It is the same approach which preferred listening to republican defectors than Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, as the former chief of the defence staff Lord Guthrie enthusiastically emphasised this week.

The Contest 2 strategy has one merit, at least. It does for the first time officially acknowledge what the rest of the world has known for most of the past decade: that Muslim “perception” of the west’s support for Israel, the Iraq and Afghan wars and the wider war on terror plays a “key role” in fuelling “radicalisation”. But instead of then getting to grips with the cause of the problem, the response is still to treat the symptoms. Since Israel’s western-backed devastation of Gaza unleashed a new wave of Muslim political activism, for example, the reaction has been heavyhanded policing, attempts to link protest with terrorism and renewed Islamophobic campaigns in the media.

Perhaps Blears thought attacking the MCB would play to the gallery in such a climate. But as the Jewish Chronicle columnist Geoffrey Alderman warned yesterday, not only was her interference a democratic outrage, but a dangerous precedent for other community organisations. Would Blears refuse to engage with a Jewish Board of Deputies leader, he asked, who backed West Bank settlements the government regards as illegal? Muslims are already angered by the double standards that allow Britons to serve with Israeli forces in Gaza and the Zionist Federation to raise charitable funds for occupation troops accused of war crimes, while any parallel moves to support Hamas are treated as involvement in terrorism.

The government preaches globalisation but has failed to face up to the implications of the multiple identities and loyalties that flow from it. The presence of a large population with recent roots in a part of the world where British forces are fighting unpopular wars is one reason why domestic and foreign policy can never again be separated in the way that was possible in colonial times. The government’s counter-terrorism plan talks about Muslims needing to accept Britain’s shared values. Fortunately, they do already. Both Muslims and non-Muslims oppose wars of aggression and want British troops brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan; they both accept people’s right to defend themselves against invasion and occupation; and both mostly sympathise with the Palestinian cause. Now responding to that consensus would be a real counter-terror strategy.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Thursday 26 March 2009.

The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as “exercising caution”: the frightening balance of blood – about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn’t raising any questions, as if we’ve decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism.

Rightists, nationalists, chauvinists and militarists are the only legitimate bon ton in town. Don’t bother us about humaneness and compassion. Only at the edges of the camp can a voice of protest be heard – illegitimate, ostracized and ignored by media coverage – from a small but brave group of Jews and Arabs.

Alongside all this, rings another voice, perhaps the worst of all. This is the voice of the righteous and the hypocritical. My colleague, Ari Shavit, seems to be their eloquent spokesman. This week, Shavit wrote here (“Israel must double, triple, quadruple its medical aid to Gaza,” Haaretz, January 7): “The Israeli offensive in Gaza is justified … Only an immediate and generous humanitarian initiative will prove that even during the brutal warfare that has been forced on us, we remember that there are human beings on the other side.”

To Shavit, who defended the justness of this war and insisted that it mustn’t be lost, the price is immaterial, as is the fact that there are no victories in such unjust wars. And he dares, in the same breath, to preach “humaneness.”

Does Shavit wish for us to kill and kill, and afterward to set up field hospitals and send medicine to care for the wounded? He knows that a war against a helpless population, perhaps the most helpless one in the world, that has nowhere to escape to, can only be cruel and despicable. But these people always want to come out of it looking good. We’ll drop bombs on residential buildings, and then we’ll treat the wounded at Ichilov; we’ll shell meager places of refuge in United Nations schools, and then we’ll rehabilitate the disabled at Beit Lewinstein. We’ll shoot and then we’ll cry, we’ll kill and then we’ll lament, we’ll cut down women and children like automatic killing machines, and we’ll also preserve our dignity.

The problem is – it just doesn’t work that way. This is outrageous hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Those who make inflammatory calls for more and more violence without regard for the consequences are at least being more honest about it.

You can’t have it both ways. The only “purity” in this war is the “purification from terrorists,” which really means the sowing of horrendous tragedies. What’s happening in Gaza is not a natural disaster, an earthquake or flood, for which it would be our duty and right to extend a helping hand to those affected, to send rescue squads, as we so love to do. Of all the rotten luck, all the disasters now occurring in Gaza are manmade – by us. Aid cannot be offered with bloodstained hands. Compassion cannot sprout from brutality.

Yet there are some who still want it both ways. To kill and destroy indiscriminately and also to come out looking good, with a clean conscience. To go ahead with war crimes without any sense of the heavy guilt that should accompany them. It takes some nerve. Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who preaches for this war and believes in the justness of the mass killing it is inflicting has no right whatsoever to speak about morality and humaneness. There is no such thing as simultaneously killing and nurturing. This attitude is a faithful representation of the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: To commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate – and be right, not to mention righteous. The righteous warmongers will not be able to allow themselves these luxuries.

Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who sees it as a defensive war must bear the moral responsibility for its consequences. Anyone who now encourages the politicians and the army to continue will also have to bear the mark of Cain that will be branded on his forehead after the war. All those who support the war also support the horror.

* This article was first published in Haaretz.com, on 9 January 2009. Read more articles from Gideon Levy.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.” It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist”. They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” resulted in the murderous de-population of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing”. Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them’. The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war… we are appalled.”

Every subsequent “war” Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism. “It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on 2 January, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system… Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government , this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].”

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. “Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

In describing a “holocaust-in-the making”, Falk was alluding to the Nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewiz fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making “aid”, give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken on Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama’s silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings “Think”, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on 21 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now “Operation Cast Lead”, which is the unfinished “Operation Justified Vengeance”. The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of New Labour Party’s enduring, cringing complicity in Palestine’s agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries [because] the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial”. This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians”. What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their “trigger”; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on 5 November last, when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger”. A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government – which had imprisoned its violators – was shattered by the Israeli attack and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed”. The On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.

Behind this sordid game is the “Dagan Plan”, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long before its creation. “We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.” In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power”. Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity”.

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed… Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.”

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic,” she wrote on 31 December. “But I’m not talking about World War Two, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years… Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-Semitic than this.” She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. “I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.”

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility”. Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”?

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the auditorium and a thousand were turned away. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised society. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity”, as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, believing the world will not forget them.

But despite this gruesome demonstration of its overwhelming power, Israel once again faces the threat of political and military failure, just as it did in Lebanon in 2006. After its most pulverising assault ever on the blockaded territory, Hamas remains standing, its administration intact, its rockets reaching ever further into Israel proper. Far from turning the Gazan population against the Islamist movement, the signs are that Israel’s onslaught is cementing its support.

From what has emerged so far, the deal touted by President Sarkozy and Egypt would trade a full ceasefire for the opening of Gaza’s border crossings – which reflects Hamas’s own terms – combined with an international force on the Egyptian border to police arms-smuggling tunnels. So long as that didn’t challenge Hamas’s authority or involve stationing foreign troops inside Gaza, the Palestinian movement could clearly live with such an arrangement.

The Israeli government yesterday declared it accepted the principles of the plan, while the details had yet to be agreed. But it’s hard to see how a deal that could have been struck without war would be seen as anything other than a Hamas victory. And the domestic electoral boost won by Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak as a result of the firestorm they have unleashed would then be lost. That’s why the logic of what they have started is likely to push the Israeli government to set impossible conditions, blame Hamas for a breakdown and intensify its onslaught still further.

If Israel’s leaders are going to be able to declare the victory they failed to achieve in Lebanon, they can hardly be seen to leave the power and appeal of Hamas intact, let alone strengthened. At the very least, they would want to arrest or kill key Hamas leaders and stage a humiliating parade of captured fighters – combined perhaps with a buffer zone in the north of the strip.

But that would require Israeli troops to take their land invasion into the heart of the strip’s cities and refugee camps, at a certain cost of heavy casualties and public support. They would then face the choice of whether to drive Hamas underground and reimpose a full-blown occupation – or face intensified guerrilla war against sitting targets in a security zone, as happened in Lebanon in the 1990s. No wonder Livni and Barak are divided about what to do.

Whichever choice they make, the war is already cutting the ground from beneath Israeli and western policy across the region. Among Palestinians, it is undermining Mahmoud Abbas – whose presidential term runs out tomorrow – and his Fatah movement, while increasing support for Hamas in the West Bank, where US-trained and EU-financed security forces have now arrested hundreds of activists and banned Hamas demonstrations.

It is also strengthening those inside Fatah who want to break with the western-enforced schism between the two wings of Palestinian politics. Hussam Khader, a West Bank “Young Guard” Fatah leader, is one of those now demanding direct unity negotiations with Hamas, and for the Fatah-linked Al-Aqsa Brigades to fight alongside Hamas against Israel’s onslaught.

“Israel has made a big mistake,” he told me this week, “because Hamas will become stronger and Fatah weaker as a result of the war, even if Israel re-occupies the Gaza Strip.” Comparing Hamas’s resistance in Gaza to the battle of Karameh that secured Yasser Arafat’s leadership of the Palestinians in 1968, Khader predicted: “After this war, Hamas will lead the PLO.”

The same trend can be seen in the wider Middle East, where Hamas has won powerful new supporters, including democratic Turkey, while western allies, such as the Egyptian and Saudi dictatorships, have lost more credibility by being seen to have tacitly supported Israel’s attempt to crush Hamas at the expense of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Most of those Palestinians are in fact refugees or the families of refugees from the towns of southern Israel, including Ashkelon and Ashdod, which have been targeted by Hamas – and from which they were ethnically cleansed when Israel was established in 1948.

But the bulk of the western media would have us believe that the cause of this war is Hamas’s firing of mostly home-made rockets into Israel – which no state could tolerate without retaliation. In this myopic fantasy land, there is no 61-year national dispossession, no refugee camps, no occupations, no siege, no multiple Israeli violations of UN security council resolutions and the Geneva conventions, no illegal wall, no routine assassinations, no prisoners and no West Bank.

Nor would you have much sense that – as Akiva Eldar, the Israeli Ha’aretz columnist, wrote this week – “Gaza is still, practically and according to international law, occupied territory”, and part of one political entity with the occupied West Bank. Or that the US, Britain and the EU, while paying lip service to ceasefire calls, prepared the ground for this barbarity with money, arms and diplomatic support as hope of a viable two-state solution has disintegrated before our eyes.

Pressure now has to be brought to bear not only on Israel, but on those governments that support it – including Britain’s. That’s why the call by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, for an arms embargo on Israel and the suspension of the EU’s new cooperation agreement with Israel – the first mainstream party leader to do so – is so significant. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, calls it naive. In reality, the naivety lies in imagining that the west can continue to underwrite the injustice and bloodshed inflicted with no respite on the Palestinian people, without paying a price for it.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Thursday 8 January 2009. Read all articles by Suemas Milne.

Less than a week later all of these men were dead, killed by an Israeli rocket at a graduation ceremony. Were they “dangerous Hamas militant gunmen”? No, they were unarmed police officers, public servants killed not in a “militant training camp” but in the same police station in the middle of Gaza City that had been used by the British, the Israelis and Fatah during their periods of rule there.

This distinction is crucial because while the horrific scenes in Gaza and Israel play themselves out on our television screens, a war of words is being fought that is clouding our understanding of the realities on the ground.

Who or what is Hamas, the movement that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, would like to wipe out as though it were a virus? Why did it win the Palestinian elections and why does it allow rockets to be fired into Israel? The story of Hamas over the past three years reveals how the Israeli, US and UK governments’ misunderstanding of this Islamist movement has led us to the brutal and desperate situation that we are in now.

The story begins nearly three years ago when Change and Reform – Hamas’s political party – unexpectedly won the first free and fair elections in the Arab world, on a platform of ending endemic corruption and improving the almost non-existent public services in Gaza and the West Bank. Against a divided opposition this ostensibly religious party impressed the predominantly secular community to win with 42 per cent of the vote.

Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them. Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state. It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won’t recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world’s commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.

In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that. People still listen to pop music, watch television and women still choose whether to wear the veil or not.

The political leadership of Hamas is probably the most highly qualified in the world. Boasting more than 500 PhDs in its ranks, the majority are middle-class professionals – doctors, dentists, scientists and engineers. Most of its leadership have been educated in our universities and harbour no ideological hatred towards the West. It is a grievance-based movement, dedicated to addressing the injustice done to its people. It has consistently offered a ten-year ceasefire to give breathing space to resolve a conflict that has continued for more than 60 years.

The Bush-Blair response to the Hamas victory in 2006 is the key to today’s horror. Instead of accepting the democratically elected Government, they funded an attempt to remove it by force; training and arming groups of Fatah fighters to unseat Hamas militarily and impose a new, unelected government on the Palestinians. Further, 45 Hamas MPs are still being held in Israeli jails.

Six months ago the Israeli Government agreed to an Egyptian- brokered ceasefire with Hamas. In return for a ceasefire, Israel agreed to open the crossing points and allow a free flow of essential supplies in and out of Gaza. The rocket barrages ended but the crossings never fully opened, and the people of Gaza began to starve. This crippling embargo was no reward for peace.

When Westerners ask what is in the mind of Hamas leaders when they order or allow rockets to be fired at Israel they fail to understand the Palestinian position. Two months ago the Israeli Defence Forces broke the ceasefire by entering Gaza and beginning the cycle of killing again. In the Palestinian narrative each round of rocket attacks is a response to Israeli attacks. In the Israeli narrative it is the other way round.

But what does it mean when Mr Barak talks of destroying Hamas? Does it mean killing the 42 per cent of Palestinians who voted for it? Does it mean reoccupying the Gaza strip that Israel withdrew from so painfully three years ago? Or does it mean permanently separating the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, politically and geographically? And for those whose mantra is Israeli security, what sort of threat do the three quarters of a million young people growing up in Gaza with an implacable hatred of those who starve and bomb them pose?

It is said that this conflict is impossible to solve. In fact, it is very simple. The top 1,000 people who run Israel – the politicians, generals and security staff – and the top Palestinian Islamists have never met. Genuine peace will require that these two groups sit down together without preconditions. But the events of the past few days seem to have made this more unlikely than ever. That is the challenge for the new administration in Washington and for its European allies.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, December 31, 2008. William Sieghart is chairman of Forward Thinking, an independent conflict resolution agency.

Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with Obama and Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet. The EU politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians etc (for all the gory detail, see Harvard scholar Sara Roy’s chilling essay in the London Review of Books) were convinced that it was the rocket attacks that had “provoked” Israel but called on both sides to end the violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt and Nato’s favourite Islamists in Ankara failed to register even a symbolic protest by recalling their ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UN security council to discuss the crisis.

As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will be to inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the ranks of those very organisations that the west claims it is combating in the “war against terror”.

The bloodshed in Gaza raises broader strategic questions for both sides, issues related to recent history. One fact that needs to be recognised is that there is no Palestinian Authority. There never was one. The Oslo Accords were an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians, creating a set of disconnected and shrivelled Palestinian ghettoes under the permanent watch of a brutal enforcer. The PLO, once the repository of Palestinian hope, became little more than a supplicant for EU money.

Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. The west and Israel tried everything to secure a Fatah victory: Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the “international community” in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the IDF, their posters confiscated or destroyed, US and EU funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and US congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run.

Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza – in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer, “the public will then support the Authority against Hamas.”

Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this. Hamas’s electoral triumph was treated as an ominous sign of rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures were applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those of the party it had defeated at the polls. Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority’s combination of greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their acquiescence in a “peace process” that has brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people.

It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad base of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran. How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of IDF killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire, begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer, despite the Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests that followed, in which some 300 Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank.

On August 19 2003, a self-proclaimed “Hamas” cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in west Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire’s negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas, in turn, responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the EU declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization – a longstanding demand of Tel Aviv.

What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline – demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest-armed oppression of modern history.

“Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for 45 years against occupation force,” said General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993. The real grievance of the EU and US against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The west’s priority ever since was to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas – as publicly picked for his post by Washington, as was Karzai in Kabul – at the expense of the legislative council is another.

No serious efforts were made to negotiate with the elected Palestinian leadership. I doubt if Hamas could have been rapidly suborned to western and Israeli interests, but it would not have been unprecedented. Hamas’ programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the pathetic minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the history of Fatah has shown.

The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling tradition. Soon after the Hamas election victory in Gaza, I was asked in public by a Palestinian what I would do in their place. “Dissolve the Palestinian Authority” was my response and end the make-believe. To do so would situate the Palestinian national cause on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equitably, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size – not 80% to one and 20% to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the long run. The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired. There is no other way.

And Israeli citizens might ponder the following words from Shakespeare (in The Merchant of Venice), which I have slightly altered:

“I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that … the villainy you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Tuesday 30 December 2008. Read all articles by Tariq Ali.

When guide dogs are retired from service, it is common for them to enter a state best described as old-aged adolescence. As they begin to understand that they’re no longer responsible for the safety of their owner, the dogs can become almost puppyish, amazed by the unfamiliar freedom of irresponsibility.

It’s now 12 years since the first ever female, publicly named director general of MI5 retired from duty, and when we meet this week she is unrecognisable from then. The severe-looking woman with the brutally sensible crop and the dry, institutionalised reserve has softened into velvety folds of laughter, and a warmly engaging ease. Stella Rimington has just published her fourth novel, Dead Line, an elegantly pacy thriller starring a female MI5 agent, and at 73 she gives the impression of someone enjoying the novelty of speaking her mind. The effect is not strident so much as touching. Usually when people are being interviewed, you can see them telling themselves not to say too much, but before Rimington answers a question she often seems to be reminding herself that she really can let go.

“Yes, it is a gradual process,” she agrees, smiling. “The shades of one’s former existence do hang around for quite a long time. It takes a long time to get rid of that. And I still haven’t entirely got rid of it.”

She isn’t doing badly though. She spoke out against 42-day detention last month, and this week welcomes the government’s climb-down unequivocally. “We shouldn’t introduce new intrusions into our civil liberties unless they are absolutely necessary – and nobody had demonstrated that they were necessary. If there isn’t any need, then don’t move the boundaries.” She argues that we should “treat terrorism as a crime, and deal with it under the law – not as something extra, that you have to invent new rules to deal with.” She is opposed to ID cards, because she can’t see how they could be “a significant counter-terrorist measure”, and although she admits she’s “had more time to think about it since I left the service”, she says her attitude to civil liberties has always been liberal. The big change, she argues, has been not her position, but the politicisation of the issue.

“One of the things I have observed in the last few years, since I left, is that national security has become much more of a political issue. And that parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know,” she adopts a mocking playground tone, “‘We’re more tough on terrorism than you are.’ I think that’s a bad move, quite frankly.

“After the vote in the House of Lords, one heard the home secretary saying something like, ‘Well nobody can say I’m not tough on terrorism’. As though the implication was there are people who aren’t. Which strikes me as very odd. Because most of the people in the House of Lords whose contributions to that debate I’d read were serious people, who’d possibly spent a life, as I have, trying to protect the country from serious threats. So the implication that, you know, a politician was going to say ‘I’m tougher on terrorism than you are’ struck me as … ” and she flicks a wrist, batting away the boast with the back of her hand like a fly. “And it’s happened broadly since 9/11.”

The response to 9/11 was “a huge overreaction”, she says. “You know, it was another terrorist incident. It was huge, and horrible, and seemed worse because we all watched it unfold on television. So yes, 9/11 was bigger, but not … not …” Not qualitatively different? “No. That’s not how it struck me. I suppose I’d lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life, and this was, as far as I was concerned, another one.”

Rimington hopes President Bush’s successor will stop using the phrase “war on terror”. “It got us off on the wrong foot, because it made people think terrorism was something you could deal with by force of arms primarily. And from that flowed Guantánamo, and extraordinary rendition, and …” And Iraq, I suggest. “Well yes,” she says drily. “Iraq.”

Jacqui Smith gave a speech this week on international terrorism which rather remarkably failed to mention the war in Iraq at all. I ask Rimington what importance she would place on the war, in terms of its impact on the terrorist threat. She pauses for a second, then replies quietly but firmly: “Look at what those people who’ve been arrested or have left suicide videos say about their motivation. And most of them, as far as I’m aware, say that the war in Iraq played a significant part in persuading them that this is the right course of action to take. So I think you can’t write the war in Iraq out of history. If what we’re looking at is groups of disaffected young men born in this country who turn to terrorism, then I think to ignore the effect of the war in Iraq is misleading.”

These might not be unremarkable views for most Guardian readers – of whom Rimington is one. But according to Rimington, they are widely held within the intelligence service – much more so than most members of the public, and perhaps particularly Guardian readers, ever suspect.

“I don’t think I’m unusual, frankly. It’s the general public’s, or whoever’s it is, view that’s out of date.” She points out that Baroness Manningham-Buller, another former head of MI5, has been “saying broadly the same things. I think what that reflects is that the caricature of the service is out of date now.

“People [in the intelligence service] are very conscious of the possibility of intrusions into civil liberties – and therefore the importance of restricting that to the extent of what’s strictly necessary. I think people are fully aware that the more you intrude into people’s civil liberties, the more you set up grievances for people to, you know, encourage people to do all the unpleasant things that are going on.”

At times the picture Rimington paints of MI5 seems almost too good to be true. She has always said she never carried a gun; none of her agents were ever killed; MI5 does not kill people; it does not spy on the prime minister – not even Harold Wilson – or even vet BBC journalists (even though the BBC has admitted submitting names for vetting). As I run through the list, she anticipates the next question, and grins: “So what do we do?” No, I say. My point was going to be that, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?

What I mean is that we all know she’s not at liberty to tell the whole, unedited truth about her old job – so how can we know how much of her account to trust? She looks hurt, and then insulted.

“Why would I wish to engage in this and tell you a load of garbage? It would be a waste of everyone’s time, including my own. Maybe what you ought to be looking at is, are you pursuing a myth about what British intelligence does? Are you still back in the days when people thought that we were like the Stasi? If that’s where you’re coming from then you shouldn’t be surprised when my answer to your questions is no that doesn’t happen. Because it doesn’t.

“The point I’m making is that if journalists ask me certain questions and get the answer no, could it be that they’re asking the wrong questions? You’re assuming if you get the answer no, I’m saying we don’t do anything – so I must be lying. But the thing is subtle. If the answer’s no, it’s because the question isn’t the right question.” Has she ever given an untrue answer to a question? “I’m not in the business of giving untrue answers,” she says coolly. “I don’t think it’s helpful.”

Rimington has herself, though, been on the receiving end of some deliberate unpleasantness from her old service, and admits it shook her. In 2001 she wrote her autobiography, infuriating her former employer – and when she submitted the manuscript for clearance, someone put it in a taxi and sent it to the Sun. Suddenly, she discovered what it felt like to be on the wrong side. I ask if the experience had ever made her reconsider or doubt anything she’d done in office.

“I don’t think I doubted anything we’d done,” she says quickly. “But – well, I think I maybe did think more about people’s reaction to the secret state. When you’re in the secret state you are, hopefully, pretty confident of the probity of everything you’re doing, and the reason for it. And perhaps you don’t think that much about how it looks to people outside. Not that I think you necessarily should be thinking that – because it’s not your role.

“But I think I had this sense suddenly that, having been in the heart of it, here I was on the outside submitting this manuscript to the system and I had no control or knowledge of what was going on in that system. And I thought, hmm, I think this must be how people feel when they’re dealing with the state machine in many of its manifestations – this Kafka-esque thing.”

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Saturday October 18 2008. Read all articles by Decca Aitkenhead.

Now, imagine a film entitled Monopolize Me! in which a whole society is feed a steady toxic monodiet of highly processed, Christian-fried, pro-business, Israeli propaganda. The citizens of such a society will become intellectually malnourished, exhibit aberrant behaviour, and run the risk of premature political death. Any similarity to Canada and the U.S. is entirely intentional, but unlike Spurlock’s experiment with toxicity, The Lobby has ensured that ours has passed the failsafe point. First, here are the four “food groups” that constitute the bulk of the North American daily news diet:

• Fear–Manufactured paranoia toward Muslims (Islamophobia) keeps us in a state of perpetual insecurity so that we will willingly accept violations to our personal freedoms, internalize zionist propaganda, and not question authority.
• Infotainment–Overreporting on movies, TV, video games, sports, fashion, and the mating/marital/beauty habits of “celebrities” is a palliative narcotic that distracts us from issues that affect our lives, like the impending collapse of the North American banking system and the hijacking of our governments.
• Advertorial–Advertising bumpf and “infomericials” masquerade as news to stimulate our consumer reflex to keep us spending beyond our means, thereby enriching those who control the economy and pump out fear and infotainment.
• Censorship–News that might