Is Terror only in the Hearts or in Holy Texts too? A dialogue between S Gurumurthy and Javed Anand

Wait only for five minutes from now! Wait for the Mujahideen and Fidayeen of Islam who will make you feel the terror of Jihad. And stop them if you can. Feel the havoc cast into your hearts by Allah, the Almighty, face His Dreadful Punishment, and suffer the results of fighting the Muslims and the Mujahideen. Await the anguish, agony, sorrow and pain. Await, only for five minutes, to feel the fear of death. ”Within minutes of this e-mail finding its way into media computers, the jihadi bombs in Ahmedabad blew to smithereens over 50 persons. By the time terror hit Ahmedabad, such e-mails had become the pattern. The mails came ahead of the blasts in Jaipur and Bengaluru earlier. Also now in Delhi which was blasted on September 13. All in the name of Indian Mujahideen.

See how, in its Ahmedabad mail, the jihadi outfit unveils its Islamic agenda against the Hindus — read India.

“O Hindus!... Haven’t you still realised that the falsehood of your 33-crore mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute and naked idols of Ram, Krishna and Hanuman are not going to save your necks, Insha-Allah, from being slaughtered by our hands? Nor is your fictitious faith in monkeys, pigs and nude statutes going to save you from the Wrath of Allah and His humiliating punishment”.

“Know that it is only the true confession of the Oneness of Allah Alone,with no associates, that can save your blood from being spilled on the streets of your own cities. We call you, O Hindus, O enemies of Allah, to take an honest stance with yourselves lest another attack of Ibn-e-Qasim sends shivers down your spines, lest another Ghauri shakes your foundations, and lest another Ghaznawi massacres you, proving your blood to be the cheapest of all mankind! Have you forgotten your history full of subjugation, humiliation, and insult? Or do you want us to repeat it again? Take heed before it is too late!”

The IM goes further, quotes the most fundamental document, the Quran, to validate its theological stand. “Yes! We — the terrorists of India — The Indian Mujahideen, the militia of Islam whose each and every mujahid belongs to this very soil of India — have returned, to execute the compulsion of Allah: “Fight them (the disbelievers), Allah will punish them by your hands and bring them to disgrace, and give you victory over them and He will heal the hearts of those who believe.” (Quran 9:14). It goes on to quote: “Fight those disbelievers who are near you and let them find harshness in you.” (Quran 9: 123). “Go forth light armed or heavy armed and fight with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah.”[(Quran 9: 41). So the IM claim is simply this: we are doing what the Quran commands us to do against the non-believers, namely those who do not believe in Islam.

The jihadis have openly challenged the pure Islamic theologians to deny that the position it takes against the Hindus is not the position of pure Islam. No Islamic theological school, not a single mullah or maulvi has shown the guts to tell the jihadis that non-believers in Quran do not mean non- Muslims. The Islamist scholars have kept deafening silence. The jihadis have thus effectively shut the Islamists’ mouth by quotes from the holy Quran.

But what about the secularists? The terrorists are misguided youths, angered by the Hindu outfits in Gujarat and elsewhere, they would counsel. The grievances of the terrorists need to be addressed, they would pontificate, to dissuade them from the wrong path. But what the secularists miss is that the jihadis claim, on the basis of their faith, the right to kill ordinary Hindus.

Do the secularists have the guts to ask the Islamic scholars to come out and deny that the theological position of Islam is not what the terrorists claim it to be? But, not surprisingly, not a single secular media or editor, nor any political party or leader would dare ask why the Islamic theologians are silent on the terrorists’ view of the holy book. What has their grievance against Hindu outfits or the governments to do with their claim that Islam mandates them to attack non-Muslims? The real issue is whether the Islamic faith mandates so. If the jihadis are aggrieved then they can take to violence against the state. Terrorism normally isolates the terrorists from mainstream society.

But when the terrorists claim that they have been directed by their holy text to kill people of other faiths and that view is not challenged by the mainstream scholars or the secularists, then the terrorists cannot be isolated. This is what the secularists seem to have preferred to miss out.

Thus neither have the mainstream Islamic scholars challenged the jihadis’ view that their holy text authorises them to kill the non-believers nor have the secularists asked mainstream Islamic scholars to deny the terrorists’ version of the Islamic faith. Emboldened the terrorists have now moved a step further in the Delhi terror mail. While, in the Ahmedabad mail, the jihadis have embarrassed Islamic theologians by quoting the holy text, they have embarrassed the secularists in the Delhi terror mail by relying on the secularists’ view to justify their terror against the Hindus. The secular enthusiasts had carried on a relentless hate campaign against the BJP and Narendra Modi after the Gujarat riots. They had even trivialised the Godhra terror attack that had roasted over 60 Ramsevaks, saying that it was an accident or that the victims themselves had set fire to the bogey, which enraged Hindu outfits even more. Later when acts of terror increased, the secular media even rationalised them by citing the Gujarat riots as justification for terrorists’ anger.

This secular largesse did not assuage the extremists. Instead it has put the Islamist terror on an escalator. Not surprisingly the jihadis have, in the Delhi email, used the very logic of the secular media, and very photographs carried by it a thousand times, to claim that they were taking revenge for the Gujarat carnage! While the jihadis see terror as a mandate of the holy book, the secular media remains juvenile in its oration. It still cites Shabana Azmi’s inability to get a fourth flat, in the building of her choice in the place of her choice as illustrative of the failure of constitutional equity to minorities, and asks how there could be peace with such injustice! But, no section is more badly treated or discriminated than the untouchables in India. If the secularists’ logic for jihadi violence is applied to them, they can legitimately turn terrorists. But mere grievances cannot produce that deadly hate. It is the jihadi theological claim, uncontested by the Islamist clergy and the secularists, that makes terror a religious duty, and a deadly one at that. Injustice, minus theology, cannot breed that deadly terror. Unless the debate on terror transcends the trivia and gets to the root of the terror — the theological motive for terror —the secularists will end up promoting terror, not containing it. Will they introspect?

comment@gurumurthy.net

 Source: Indian Express

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Hate is found in the heart, not in texts

Javed Anand

25 Sep 2008 03:18:00 AM IST

ROLLOVER Archimedes and you, too, Isaac Newton! Here comes S Gurumurthy, with his Mother of All Discoveries! Mercifully, he wasn’t in his bathtub when in a blinding flash he got it, his simple-as-can-be universal laws on terrorism. First Law of Terror: ‘Injustice, minus theology, cannot breed deadly terror.’ Second Law of Terror: ‘Muslims are terrorists because theology (Quran) commands them to kill.’ The sheer simplicity of his propositions should bowl all of us over but for a few hitches in his high theory. What theology, one might wonder, prompted the French ‘reign of terror’ in the closing decade of the eighteenth century? What turned Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian aristocrat, into the ‘founding father’ of anarchism and a protagonist of revolutionary terror in the latter part of the nineteenth century? Closer to our time, could it be Catholicism that drove the Irish Republican Army into acts of ‘deadly terror?’ Not too far from where he lives, has Hindu theology inspired the LTTE to celebrate the cult of suicide bombers? What accounts for naxalite terror? If Gurumurthy’s First Law of Terror poses a few difficulties, so does his Second Law of Terror. The tripod that is the foundation for this law rests on the three ‘kill’ verses from the Quran as quoted from the murderous e-mails of the Indian Mujahideen.

Gurumurthy need not have waited for these monsters to surface. He could have as easily have plucked the same verses, and some more, from the innumerable ‘Hate Islam’ websites years ago. I could cite them here but why burden a man already consumed by hate? Instead, here are some Quranic verses that say the exact opposite of those that Gurumurthy loves. “If they hold aloof from you and wage not war against you and offer you peace, Allah alloweth you no way against them” (4.09). “Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors” (2.19).

“Allah does not forbid you respecting those who have not made war against you on account of (your) religion, and have not driven you forth from your homes, that you show them kindness and deal with them justly; surely Allah loves the doers of justice” (6.08).

In short, Allah forbids Muslims from war except in self-defence.

Here again are a few sayings of Prophet Mohammed. “Those in whose heart is not mercy for others will not attain the mercy of Allah”; “Power consists in not being able to strike another, but in being able to control oneself when anger arises”; “A perfect Muslim is one from whose tongue and hands mankind is safe”. “He will not enter paradise whose neighbour is not safe from his wrongful conduct”; “The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr”.

On May 31 this year, five lakh Muslims from all over India assembled for a rally at the Ramlila Grounds in Delhi.

There they raised hands and took an ‘Oath of Allegiance’: “We fully support the declaration of this ‘Anti-Terrorism Global Peace Conference’ of the Jamiatul Ulama-i-Hind and other organisations.

We are bound by the fatwa of Darul Uloom, Deoband and undertake that we shall condemn terrorism and spread Islam’s message of global peace.” Be it 9/11, 7/7 (UK), the Beslan massacre, the Bali bombings, the Madrid blasts, after each such barbaric event, I could cite fatwas from the highest Islamic authorities from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Indonesia, US, UK, Spain.

So which is the ‘real’ Islam? That of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, SIMI and IM, all of whom together add up to but a minuscule, albeit lethal, number of the 1.4 billion Muslims? Or of Muslim religious leaders in India and elsewhere, each of whose following runs into millions? More to the point, we might ask: why does Allah (Quran) and Prophet Mohammed teach one thing and its very opposite at the same time? For an answer to this paradox let’s go to the Bhagavad Gita, “the greatest gospel of spiritual works ever yet given to the race” (Sri Aurobindo).

How can Lord Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna that to fight and kill was his dharma be called the “greatest spiritual gospel”? Sri Aurodbindo: “We will use only soul force and never destroy by war or any even defensive employment of physical violence? Good, though until soul force is effective, the Asuric force in men and nations tramples down, breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes, as we see it doing today, but then at its ease and unhindered, and you have perhaps caused as much destruction of life by your abstinence as others by resort to violence.” As for those who might see Vishnu’s incarnation as a “God of War,” here’s a commentary you could access from http://www.hinduwisdom.info/ Hindu_Scriptures.htm: “Lord Krishna, after failing to convince him that it is the duty of a warrior to fight in a righteous war, reveals himself to Arjuna and answers his questions on the nature of the universe, the way to God and the meaning of duty.

“This magnificent dialogue between man (Arjuna) and Creator (Krishna) forms the Bhagavad Gita, in which the Hindu doctrine is fully explained.” Allah’s message to Prophet Mohammed and his followers in the nascent city-state of Medina, greatly outnumbered and overwhelmed on the eve of a war not of their choosing, resonates with Lord Krishna’s message to Arjuna.

No holy text preaches hate. But as the history of all religions shows, if we harbour it in our hearts, we can read hate in any sacred text we like: Bible, Quran or the Gita.

Javed Anand is co-editor Communalism Combat and general secretary, Muslims for Secular Democracy.

javedanand@gmail.com

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Concern for India and Muslims, not hate

S Gurumurthy

26 Sep 2008 12:51:00 AM IST

“GURUMURTHY need not have waited for these monsters to surface. He could have as easily plucked the same verses and some more from the innumerable ‘Hate Islam’ websites years ago. But why burden a man already consumed by hate.” These unfortunate remarks of Javed Anand, in his response to my article on ‘The Holy Text and Terror’ shows how anger has got better of the reason in him.

What he sees hate in me is what, as I explain here, I see as the concern in me for both Muslims and India. I had critiqued the Islamic scholars’ inability to take the jihadis head on and the seculars engagement with trivia like Shabhana Azmi’s concern for a better flat in a better locality. Now read on.

Javed Anand reduces my article to two propositions. First, “Injustice minus theology cannot breed deadly terror” and second, “Muslims are terrorists because theology (Quran) commands them to kill.” He is right on the first and wrong, even malicious, on the second. He has not rebutted what I had said, which is okay; but he has accused me by saying,‘ Muslims are terrorists’, which I cannot ignore. I quote here the central concern of my article. “So the IM (terrorists) claim is simply this: we are doing what the Quran commands us to do against the non-believers, namely those who do not believe in Islam. The jihadis have openly challenged the pure Islamic theologians to deny that the position it takes against the Hindus is not the position of pure Islam. No Islamic theological school, not a single mullah or maulvi has shown the guts to tell the jihadis that non-believers in Quran do not mean non-Muslims. The Islamist scholars have kept deafening silence. The jihadis have thus effectively shut the Islamists’ mouth by quotes from the holy Quran.” The core of my concern — yes, it is concern, not hate as Javed Anand says in anger — is what is stated in bold letters.

And this is precisely what Javed Anand side steps. Every time, anywhere, they strike, the terrorists — whichever Islamic group they belong to — invariably claim that they are targeting the ‘non-believers’. And every time they claim so, the Islamic theologians issue a standard statement that ‘Islam does not countenance terror against innocent people’ and it is a ‘religion of peace’. It is true that the Jamiat-ul Ulama-i-Hind and other organisations held the ‘Anti-terrorism Global Peace Conference’ at Deoband.

It is commendable that a large gathering of Muslims at the Ramlila Maidan in Delhi took an oath against terror. The move is late just by a couple of decades, as it took place as late as February 25, 2008. Terrorism has been striking at India, in Jammu and Kashmir in the 1980s and elsewhere later from 1990s.

Nevertheless it is a great move in the national, and Muslim, interest. But the move is in no small measure due to the increasing crescendo of the globally led debate about whether Islam supports acts of the terrorists as they claim. This debate has been started in India and sustained by many who had to face hostile criticism and calumny for expressing their concern at the claim of the terrorists that Islam commanded them to act. If it were not external pressure why did the prestigious Deoband seminary wait for decades to make its first move to say that terrorism is not authorised by Islam? Any way better late than never.

Now let us examine the fatwa against terror issued from Dar-ul-uloom Deoband which Javed Anand sees as the Islamic theological counter to the terrorists’ claim of theological support. The conference defined terrorism as: “Any action that targets innocents, whether by an individual or by any government and its agencies or by a private organisation constitutes an act of terrorism.” It also said, “Terrorism negates completely the teachings of Islam as it is the faith of love and peace and any terrorist activity which targets innocent people directly contradicts Islam’s concept of peace.” And finally, it said, “We reject all forms of terrorism and do not allow any discrimination. Terrorism is a completely wrong and unthoughtful act whoever commits, irrespective of his association to whatever religion, community and class he belongs to.” Can one fail to notice the qualification of “innocent people” attached to the fatwa in the already abstract move. So “Targeting to kill the innocent people” is alone terror according to the fatwa. If the terrorists target those who are not innocent — normally the police, army personnel or others, while they are sleeping or eating, fall in this category — is that not terror? Let not this side issue, though significant, detain us. Now, on to the core issue.

The core element of the terrorists’ claim is, as I have said in my article and emphasised it here earlier, this: they are commanded by the holy text to kill the ‘non-believers’. The question is who are non-believers? It needs no seer to say that, for the terrorists, non-believers are those who do not believe in Islam. This is what attracts even highly educated techies and motivates them to turn terrorists in the cause of Islam against non-believers — read non-Muslims. This is the theological magnet for mobilisation.

This is what Deoband has not rebutted.

It has not said, nor has any other Islamic School, that ‘don’t read non-believers in the Quran as non-Muslims’. If the Islamic clergy declares that “non-believers does not mean non-Muslims” and issues a fatwa against those who consider non-Muslims as non-believers, then, and only then, the terrorists cannot use theology as a magnet to attract the Muslim youth kill the non-believers! That the terrorists make use of Islamic theology for their actions cannot be denied, and has not been. Why then do the Islamic scholars not openly declare that ‘non-believers do not mean non-Muslims’? But they seem to find it difficult.

Here is my personal experience of their difficulty. In the late 1990s, a well-meaning social worker from Calcutta and lawyer friend of mine (a Muslim) had organised a Hindu-Muslim dialogue in Madras, as Chennai was then, to discuss and sort out differences. In my brief intervention I asked the Islamic scholars present whether according to Islamic texts ‘Hindus’ were non-believers (Kafirs) and said that if the Hindus were not, then the problem between Hindus and Muslims would be just political, not theological.

After some silence a very prominent Muslim leader declared that Hindus were, as per Islam, non-believers. While a majority howled him down, a theologian came to his rescue, though in a convoluted manner. This is the theological gap in the Islamic discourse. The terrorists are exploiting it. A clear statement from Islamic schools that the ‘nonbelievers’ does not mean ‘non-Muslims’ in Islam will fill the gap. The Islamic theologians seem to avoid a confrontation with the terrorists on this point. This is what my article points out, and this is what Javed Anand misses or side steps. It is clear that Javed, the Muslim, not Javed Anand, the secularist has dominated the response. Anyway he should have read my article once more, before responding.

QED: When angry, don’t write.

comment@gurumurthy.net

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/is-terror-only-in-the-hearts-or-in-holy-texts-too?-a-dialogue-between-s-gurumurthy-and-javed-anand/d/875

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War on terror sorely needs a war of ideas

New Indian Express/Centrestage Sunday Column

October 5, 2008

By Javed Anand

No honest thinking person can deny that a sickness called terrorism has seized the minds of a small minority of Muslim across the world. And we only have to think of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq to realise that among the worst victims of terror are fellow Muslims. Yet, in India as also elsewhere far too many Muslims continue to live in a state of denial. This head-in-the-sands attitude helps no one, least of all Muslims.

Terrorism is a serious Indian and global concern today that calls for intense public discussion and debate. Only thus can the nature of the beast be recognised for what it is and ways of taming it fathomed. A one-word contribution to this debate – denial – is no contribution at all. Worse, the refusal to address this ugly reality tends to blur the boundary between the mass murderers and the community in whose name they claim to act.

At the same time, to trace the roots of terrorism in the holy text, to a few verses of the Quran, is to bark up the wrong tree. You can order dozens of books online today or access hundreds of scholarly articles, mostly by non-Muslims, that will tell you that terrorism in the name of Islam is no 1,400-years-old malaise. As both a product and a reaction to modernity, terrorism as we know it is a current, not ancient, phenomenon.

In his book, Terror and Liberalism, written post 9/11, the noted American political and cultural critic, Paul Berman, observes: “The terror war is nothing new or unprecedented. It is the same battle that tore apart Europe during most of the twentieth century – the battle between liberalism and its totalitarian enemies (read Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin). Islam is not the cause of this war. Islam is the arena in which this battle is presently being fought”. 

It is being claimed that there is an easy solution to the problem of Muslim terrorists. Since “the terrorists… use theology as a magnet to attract the Muslim youth to kill non-believers”, all the ulema need to do but for some curious reason are not doing is to issue fatwas that the expression “non-believers” in the Quran does not mean “non-Muslims”.  The remedy suggested is tantalising in its simplicity. But, alas, it can produce no magic potion as the Justice Munir Commission discovered during its probe into the causes behind the extremely violent anti-Ahmeddiya movement in Pakistan in 1953.

As part of his investigation, Justice Munir summoned the top clerics heading over half-a-dozen Muslim religious bodies to depose before the commission. From the answers that he received on their definition of a Muslim, Justice Munir was forced to the conclusion: “If we adopt the definition given by any of the ulema, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim (singular of ulema) but kafirs (non-believers) according to the definition of every one else”!

If one set of Muslims treats another set as “non-Muslims”, what chance of any fatwa resolving the problem?  The Quran certainly does not treat Christians and Jews, both of whom are considered descendents of Prophet Abraham just as Muslims are. If Christians and Jews and even fellow Muslims are in the crosshairs of terrorists, of what use any clarification on what the Quran really means by “non-believers”?

Why not try, as so many non-Muslim and Muslim scholars and theologians have been doing, and locate the spring-source of a modern day problem within our own space-time matrix? Why not zero-in, as others have done, on the three Muslims whose warped doctrines cumulatively sowed the theosophical terrain for terror in the latter half of the twentieth century: Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, an eighteenth century evangelist from the Arabian peninsula, Maulana Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami on the Indian sub-continent and Sayyid Qutb of Egypt’s Ikhwan-ul Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood)?

Before Maududi and Qutb, jihad (literally “struggle”) in the Islamic tradition was a word with multi-meanings; the struggle against one’s baser self was considered Jihad Akbar, the highest form of jihad. “The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr,” said Prophet Mohammed. But in the middle of the twentieth century, Maududi and Qutb after him fore-grounded jihad, gave it a radical new meaning, converting jihad and shahadat (martyrdom) into a revolutionary doctrine. Read V.I. Lenin’s What is to be done? (1902), the foundational document of the Bolshevik Party, Maududi’s Jihad fi Sabilillah (Struggle in the cause of Allah, 1939) and Qutb’s Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq (Milestones, 1964) together and you’ll find the latter two importing ideas from the very West that both abhor and producing a new Islamic theology. 

For Maududi and for Qutb, Islam is not a religion like others limited merely to religious rites and rituals. For Maududi, Islam is “a revolutionary ideology”, Muslim means the “International Revolutionary Party” mandated to carry out the “revolutionary programme” and jihad means “that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion which the Islamic Nation/Party brings into play in order to achieve this objective...  to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its place an Islamic system of state rule… The aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution”.

To reach his revolutionary goal Maududi seemed content with aggressive propaganda: “This party does not attack the home of the opposing party, but launches an assault on the principles of the opponent”.  But Qutb, the “philosopher of Islamic terror” for Berman, pushed the envelope further.

Maududi who died in 1979 never made much headway in Pakistan. He was repeatedly castigated by a host of Pakistani maulanas as being “outside the pale of Islam” and “an American agent”. He was sentenced to death in the early ‘50s on charges of sedition but later pardoned. He spent long years in jail for his bid to transform Pakistan into a “truly Islamic state”. Qutb was executed by hanging in August 1966 for allegedly masterminding the assassination of top Egyptian leaders. Maybe not even Qutb espoused terrorism. But there can be little doubt that both advocated a totalitarian ideology dressed up as Islam.

After his execution some of Qutb’s followers moved to Saudi Arabia where they successfully grafted his jihad and shahadat fantasies on to the dry-as-desert, highly puritanical and an extremely intolerant version of Islam propounded by the eighteenth century evangelist Wahhab. (Since the early ‘70s, flush with petro-dollars, the Saudi monarchy has been promoting this hate doctrine as the only acceptable version of Islam). In the battle to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in the late 70s, Wahhabism, Maududdiyat and Qutbism fused together – with lots of help from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US – to produce what noted Islamic theologian, Shaikh Khaled Abu El Fadl calls a “virulent puritan theology”.  Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and a plethora of other Muslim terrorist outfits are the outcome of this “theology of power”, enunciated by “orphans of modernity” enraged by a deep sense of “Muslim humiliation” and practised now by their equally powerless disciples. 

“The terrorists speak insanely of deep (philosophical) things. The anti-terrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things”, wrote Berman in an article in The New York Times in 2003. He argued that not for the first time the values of liberal democracies are under fierce attack and the “war on terror” couldn’t be won without a “war of ideas”. This war of ideas involves us all today, believers and non-believers alike. And what we are confronted with are not a few verses from the Quran or their interpretation but the killer cocktail produced by the coalescence of Wahhabi, Maududi and Qutbi doctrines.

Javed Anand is co-editor Communalism Combat and general secretary Muslims for Secular Democracy).

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