(Here is another rather long article on the issue of Islam-West relations. Before reacting to the title or the terms used alone readers are requested to first kindly peruse the piece. I am sure your queries will be answered within the same text. Regards)

On March 16, 2001 several youths allegedly attacked two Muslims who were standing outside their mosque in Sparks. One Muslim had his arm broken. The other was more seriously injured and was in a critical condition in hospital after undergoing three operations. These are only a few documented incidents of barbarism in the West and are enough to prove that even years before the 9/11 attacks there existed a clear pattern of hate crimes and discrimination against Muslims the world over.

On November 26, 2006 at 6: 30 am the listeners of WMAL tuned to find radio host Jerry Klein discussing the episode of forced removal of six Imams from a US Airways flight. Then Klein did something shocking. He asked if Muslims in the US should be forced to wear markers for identification, like tattoos on the forehead and then opened the floor for live calls. Within no time telephone lines were choked with callers. While some thought Klein was ‘off his rocker’ others not only endorsed the notion but also went to the extent of suggesting that either they all be shipped back to their native countries or be put in Nazi styled concentration camps. It was after one hour that the saner ones were relieved to learn it was actually a hoax, an experiment to unearth the hidden bias against Islam.

Hate crimes and manifest biases have indeed accelerated since 9/11. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that they existed even before the said attack. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has recorded these hate crimes. It is only too exigent to list all such major attack here because they showcase the gravity of the situation and the extent of hatred for the Muslim in the United States well before 9/11. In 1994 a hate criminal gutted down a nearly completed mosque in Yuba City. In 1995 the Islamic centre in Springfield was destroyed by arsonists. On September 17, 1995 the windows, walls and trees of the Islamic Centre of Passaic County in Patterson were found painted with obscenities and graffiti. Flammable liquid was found on the floor of an outbuilding. The same year vandals attacked the mosque at Clarkston, by breaking windows, damaging lights, discharging fire extinguishers, and burning satanic symbols into the carpet. In October 1995 the Islamic Centre and Masjid of Greenville was destroyed in an arson attack. Some hooligans painted an obscene message on the wall of the Flint Islamic Centre/Genesee Academy in Flint. On March 19, 1996 the employees of a radio station in Denver entered the local mosque after morning prayers. They reportedly played the national anthem on a trumpet, harassed the worshipers, and broadcasted the incident live on radio. On February 22, 1998 a beer bottle was thrown through the second floor window of the mosque in Bloomingdale. On March 8, 1998 someone torched three school buses owned by the local Islamic school in Ottawa, Canada. In March 1999 a mosque was seriously damaged by an arsonist in Minneapolis. In May 1999 a man was arrested after fleeing in his car from the area of a mosque in Denver. Loaded weapons, machetes, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and bomb making materials were found in his car. He allegedly said “I am an enemy against the Islamic nation and I was going to take care of business.” In June1999 a Toronto radio station broadcasted a live call-in program. A caller denounced Islam and said “Nero burned the wrong people — he should have burned the Muslims.” On June 20 2000 a gunman seriously injured a worshiper at an Islamic Centre in Memphis. In November 2000 a suspicious fire gutted the lobby of a mosque in Surrey, British Columbia, and severely damaged the rest of the building. Witnesses reported seeing a van speeding away from the mosque just before an explosion was heard. In February 2001 a mosque in Winnipeg, Canada was attacked with animal feces, eggs and white paint smeared on the front of the building. Garbage was strewn around. On March 16, 2001 several youths allegedly attacked two Muslims who were standing outside their mosque in Sparks. One Muslim had his arm broken. The other was more seriously injured and was in a critical condition in hospital after undergoing three operations. These are only a few documented incidents of barbarism in the West and are enough to prove that even years before the 9/11 attacks there existed a clear pattern of hate crimes and discrimination against Muslims the world over. This also clarifies any misgivings in our minds about the September 11 attacks’ impact over the Western mind. The inexplicable environment of anger and pain, as illustrated above, had already been established years ago. In fact, whereas throughout the Cold War Muslims had served the Western interests well, after the demise of the Soviet Union, there could be no one other than the Muslims that would become the scapegoat for continuous military and imperial expansionism. While Western intellectuals aided by Jewish and Indian scholars and Muslim clerics still in contact with the Western intelligence agencies worked overtime to develop the new mental construct called the Islamic Peril; the people in the West were gripped by a new chilling frenzy identified by some as ‘Islamophobia’. The new trend could be witnessed everywhere in the developed and the developing world. From the US to France, from Germany’s Neo-Nazi’s to India’s saffron clad hooligans, all found an easy prey in the Muslim populace of the country. ‘Islamophobia’ or Anti-Islamism?

Unfortunately term ‘Islamophobia’ fails to do justice with the pervasive and complicated process of discrimination, intrusion and elimination faced by the Muslims around the world and at best is a misnomer. Like most of the neologisms this coinage was developed keeping in mind the sensitivities of others. It literally means an unnecessary fear of Islam, yet the issues of bias against and discrimination and hate faced by Muslims are left unattended. The most appropriate term should have been ‘anti-Islamism’ on the pattern of anti-Semitism. Yet perhaps it was overlooked because thanks to the Western scholars the word Islamism had already acquired a highly political and controversial overtone. It is important to note here that while the word Semitism is used to refer to the Semitic culture and values term Islam is most obnoxiously restricted to the description of political and militant interpretations of Islam — a glaring case of scholarly double standards.

It was keeping this factor in mind that a Commission on British Muslims and ‘Islamophobia’ (CBMI) was established in 1996 and the term made its way to us. Since then several world leaders including former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and uncountable others have used it to express their concern over the victimization of Muslims around the globe. In the following discourse we will prefer the term anti-Islamism because of its all encompassing scope and desist from employing a term that overlooks the reality of Muslim material weakness, lack of any serious threat to the West hence the absence of genuine reasons to fear an Islamic onslaught. If someone thinks that Islamism projects only political aspect of the issue, that is a problem of his or her perception and not ours. The Islamic peril – a historical background Edward Said in his series of books focused at cultural and scholarly discrimination against the East, points out how the West invented an image of the Orient that really suited its ambitions. His book Orientalism interestingly does great justice to the intellectual and scholarly double standards witnessed in the quest of the ‘Orientalists’. It was natural that when such an attitude was rationalized it would lead to a counter attack in the shape of Occidentalism. Since the West in general is better informed and educated compared to the East the ‘Occidentalist’ response was not as well thought out and academic. Rather it relied more on hearsay and the pseudoscience giving further credence to the ‘Orientalist’ theory that the West is superior to the East. Ironically the same Western intellectual traditions have continued to date unabated despite the serious attempts by conscientious scholars like Noam Chomsky to stall them. Interestingly while the inbuilt dictionaries of well-known word processors like Microsoft Word accept Occidentalism as a valid word, ‘Orientalism’ is not recognized as a valid term. Similarly the term ‘Islamophobia’ is not found in a virtual encyclopedia as strong as Encarta. Anti-Islamism then, at least in the scholarly discourse, is a well meditated offshoot of the crude philosophies of the ‘Orientalists’ playing on the baser instincts visible during the medieval times of crusades. It must be clear that unfounded conspiracy theories existed about the Muslims in the Western world even during the times of the crusades. For instance people were told that the Muslims worship a horrible statue called Mohamet and that they marry their own sisters. The latter was an allusion to the permission in Islam to marry ones cousins which is not allowed in Christianity. The same attitude continued for considerable time. When Christian armies took over the Muslim Spain their first victims were libraries and public baths. The West has never quite allowed Islam to assimilate in the local culture. Take for instance the case of Turkey which despite being a secular country has thus far not been able to enter into the European Union. Nato’s delayed response in Bosnia can also be viewed through the same prism. It is altogether a different thing that in the West and even among other influential groups like Jews and Indians you can still find some voices of sanity. Yet the fact remains that since 9/11 they are rapidly losing relevance. How to engineer a clash The troika of defense establishment, industrial bounty hunters and belligerent intellectuals desperately seeking influence, continuously kept exploiting the concept of cultural otherness and the fear of the unknown. At the end of the World War II this league of the mischievous reinvented the threat in the shape of the Soviet ascendancy. At that time President Franklin Roosevelt was fully cognizant of the Soviet contributions in the war against Hitler. When the establishment’s moles George Kannan and Paul Nitze were busy churning literature painting the Bosheviks in hostile shades, FDR was being seen propounding the idea of the four policemen which essentially included Moscow. But then FDR disappeared from the scene all of a sudden and a hawk like Truman took over. That was the start of the Cold War and the defense industrial complex got a new lease on life. Something of the same proportion happened at the end of the Cold War. The US had cobbled together a rag tag army of thugs from across the Muslim world to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was called the Brzezinski doctrine. Later the same was to be applied backwards on Islam itself. As early as 1981, when it was evident that the Soviet Union was suffering from imperialist overstretch following its great mistake in Afghanistan and would sooner or later be defeated, the US establishment started feeding the media with anti-Islamic propaganda. A classic case of this is the documentary film — The man who saw tomorrow — on the prophecies of Nostradamus, a mystic and seer from the middle ages. Among his predictions there was one regarding the rise of a terror king by the end of the millennium. Banking on the ancient Christian eschatological fears about the millennium, the mushy film painted a depressing picture. By this time it was evident that the conservative US establishment had planned its next target — the Muslim world — owing to its possession of natural resources and huge territory. Otherwise the middle ages were full of uncountable seers and fortune tellers. More than half of Nostradamus’ own predictions have never been proven right, while the others are too ambiguous to be interpreted correctly. Interestingly, following the collapse of the Berlin wall the ‘neo-Orientalists’ like Bernard Lewis started preparing the ground for the so-called War on Terror. In the September 1990 edition of The Atlantic Monthly his article titled The Roots of Muslim Rage appeared, which is a case study in anti-Islamism. It was in his article that the term the Clash of Civilizations was first used. It is worthwhile extensively quote here because that article really proved to be the seed for the war on terror. After confessing that Islam once had provided shelter and opportunities to the non-Muslims living under its suzerainty he observes: “But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.” It is imperative to note here that Lewis is Jewish and likes to fashion himself as an Islam and Middle Eastern expert. He goes on to write: “For the past three hundred years, since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, Islam has been on the defensive, and the Christian and post-Christian civilization of Europe and her daughters have brought the whole world, including Islam, within its orbit. For a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this Western ‘paramountcy’, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third — the last straw — was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties”. Again please note that now Lewis is trying to launch a sexist attack on the Muslim ethos. But again except for a few odd countries, no one from the Muslim world was confronting the West at the time of his piece. This mischaracterization does not cease throughout the article. Consider this: “The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and ‘concubinage’ that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet.” Further unfurling a laundry list of forgotten accusations he also tries to justify imperialism and loses the composure of a scholar. “Some Western powers, and in a sense Western civilization as a whole, have certainly been guilty of imperialism, but are we really to believe that in the expansion of Western Europe there was a quality of moral delinquency lacking in such earlier, relatively innocent expansions as those of the Arabs or the Mongols or the Ottomans, or in more recent expansions such as that which brought the rulers of Muscovy to the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Hindu Kush, and the Pacific Ocean?” And see further mischaracterization. Lewis first claims that it is part of the Islamic ethos to insist that while Muslims may rule non-Muslims but Muslims should never allow themselves to be ruled by non-Muslims and then writes: “It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. —- The true faith, based on God’s final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection.” Sorry, come again! “Never given to Judaism?” They say an angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes. Otherwise an Islamic scholar should have known that in the days of Muslim supremacy Jewish people enjoyed unprecedented rights across the cosmopolitan Islamic regions. After Lewis’ tirade came Huntington’s writing the Clash of Civilizations. Huntington’s piece owing to his personal influence reached a much wider audience and paved the way for the current war on terror. In Pakistan General Zia had already been assassinated and it was pretty easy to manipulate the Jihadi to create the incubus of Islamist terror. The idea of Pre-emptive wars was hence replaced by the so-called preventive wars. After 9/11 the situation has only worsened as countless anti-Islamic intellectuals have found space in prestigious institution, media outlets and on the web. Polemical works of Irshad Manji, Ibn Waraq, Faithfreedom.org, Daniel Pipes and numerous others are now in front of us. Daniel Pipes another prophet of doom recently plotted to rally the Europeans with the neo-cons against Islam. He is believed to be the orchestrator of the Danish cartoon controversy as he had spent sometime with the editor of Jyllands-Posten before the publication of the cartoons and confesses on his site his contacts with the man responsible for the trouble.. The Muslim reaction was indeed stupefying and as a result hate crimes against Muslims in the West have only increased. Pipes, whom I am obliged to call the plumbing of the anti-Islamism in the West, however expressed disquiet regarding the fact that a huge number of Americans were still tolerant of Islam. By the end of the day, however it all boils down to our own follies and attitudes.. Our own share of the pie

This discussion will remain incomplete without mentioning here our own weaknesses. We have stayed for long, thanks to the general reaction towards the occupation of the Muslim regions by the West, anti-knowledge. We are less educated, less skilled, more politicised, weak in production, quarrelsome in nature and often downright stupid. Since we did not have a taste for democracy and no courage to stand up to our dictators without foreign support, we have made a mockery of our lives. The fact that people like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes get away with their stupid logic should be enough to give us sobering thought. There is great need for a ‘Universalist’ like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan in the Muslim world these days.

We need to be more educated and knowledge centered than our critics. But unfortunately today we find neither the desire to learn more nor any Sir Syed around us. Our lives have become too materialistic and education is often rejected on the pretext that in the developing world it is not enough to earn bread and butter. In the march of civilization, however, bread and butter come after acquisition of knowledge.

Our ignorance has led us to the wrong side of the fence. Here we believe in the hearsay and pseudoscience. This ignorance has also tainted our attitudes and patience as well. We overreact on things like Theo Van Gogh’s documentary on Islam. Thanks to the Western imperialism we are so insecure that we do not even want to let a healthy debate take place. Muslims over centuries have even tolerated even heretics. Why is it that we get so flustered by simple instances of dissent?

Today we worry so much about Western support for Israel and for the corrupt regimes in the Muslim world. Instead of bickering about political issues for a decade we should only worry about education and development. After all when Huntington was writing his monograph he perceived China as the second threat. But today people reject anyone who takes a belligerent stance towards China. The world has changed and we need to adapt to it. If we succeed there will be no room for anti-Islamism anywhere in the world. :: Whither Political Islam? :: Pluralism, mass media and technology have made it quite easy for anyone to get his message through. Except for some very rare cases, if you want to preach your own faith and reach out to the people, no one will impede you.

Today a lot of talk is going on about the political dimensions of Islamic dogma. Unfortunately those who seek to explore the political dimensions of Islam seriously lack insight. Islam never claimed to be a political force. The life of its founder was spent in serious abnegation. And when he ventured towards the horizon of politics which were deeply mired in pre-Islamic paganism, the new vista proved to be a bottleneck in the quest of a just order. And then the political institutions were too rudimentary and of a makeshift nature. The fact that they were of this nature clearly alludes to Islam’s reluctance to give a rigid political system foreclosing the door for evolution and modification. The Prophet of Islam gave a clear indication of this by not nominating his successor during his lifetime. If today our clerics insist upon emulating a political system they hark back not to the time of the Prophet but to the times of the first four Caliphs. It is however pointed out quite often that their chosen system was a temporal interpretation of Islamic injunctions quite contextual to the ground realities of their time.

Today the ground realities are very different. Pluralism, mass media and technology have made it quite easy for anyone to get his message through. Except for some very rare cases, if you want to preach your own faith and reach out to the people, no one will impede you. The problem comes when people get too easily frustrated at a very early stage of their struggle. Islam essentially came like other monotheistic faiths to reform humanity. And this reform cannot take place through the use of force. Hence the compulsive institutions of state become irrelevant to the message of Islam in the postmodern age. Before we move even further on the political discourse. We need to comprehend the true message of Islam and the reform it seeks. Islam raised its voice against every sort of exploitation. It was the first monotheistic system of belief which ameliorated the lot of women, by making their rights part and parcel of faith. It also stamped out usury and other such trappings of cruelty from the society. Where the situation was too complicated and it would have taken a very long time in bringing about change, for instance slavery, it created ways to reduce the damage by encouraging the freedom of slaves. Another explanation of Islam’s decision not to curtail slavery in absolute terms might be found in futurism. If the world is gearing up towards the marriage of artificial intelligence and robotics, as envisioned by Isaac Asimov, the presence of such intelligent beings may fall under the purview of slavery. By this chain of argument we may conclude that society will one day evolve to such an extent that human slavery and polygamy will automatically be eliminated. Yet we also have to hand it to the West for the contributions which have brought humanity to this level of maturity. And to cut a long story short the Islamic message was meant in essence to free humanity from exploitation. The ways suggested and as illustrated by the Prophet are non-violent. However, violence for self-defense is permitted or at least tolerated. I say tolerated because peace has to be given the first chance. And when we talk of banning usury or interest it should be noted that it has political orientations of its own. By stamping out interest, Islam alienates itself from capitalism and modern banking. Since Muslims have not been able to make headway in an alternative to capitalist economics, religious politicians have focused more on issues of politics and punishment. Democratic values in Islam like Shura (consultation) are hence given an authoritarian color rather then their true spirit. Otherwise, the political realities of Islam should have embraced an economy closer to, yet not as rigid, as socialism and a polity democratic in nature. But if such is the Islamic stance on politics, why do religious politicians make such confident statements about political Islam. The problem lies in the struggle against imperialism. Two individuals have really shaped the contours of modern day political woes in the Islamic world, namely Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb. Both of these laureates were born during the final days of European imperialism when it was easy to challenge it and yet survive. The reactionary air of their time seriously influenced their mental sociology and they interpreted Islam in an utterly political way. Maududi insisted that Salat-ul-Wusta was an Islamic reference to the establishment of state. Syed Qutb proved to be even more radical. It was in those days that Muslim scholars debated whether they should become part of the system to bring a change in society or confront it from the outside. Maududi’s followers opted for the first way. As a result, initially politics was considered a vehicle to reach an end and hence reluctant politicians were born out of religious scholars. Later, the Afghan war and the direct and indirect influence of the US brought politicians posing as religious scholars to the fore. The experiment failed miserably leading to more problems than solutions. The state of things has remained the same ever since.

Another negative factor was the abject penury of the clerics. The Mullahs and Maulvis usually belonged to the lower strata of the society and hence quickly learned to exploit political debates. The problem is that most of the religious leaders do not want their followers to learn anything except their own philosophy. In such a condition it is evident that the true quest for understanding by founders of these orders has given way to mere rhetoric. The result is an abysmal meltdown. Only if Muslims devote themselves to the study of the sacred, instead of stumbling through unnecessary political issues, and work to ameliorate their lot through research and development, will they solve their predicaments. It is important to understand that the method of Islam is basically of preaching and educating not of imposing or enforcing. Otherwise the Prophet’s assertion that there is no compulsion in Islam will lose its meaning.

The author is a Pakistani television journalist, columnist and commentator on security, political and media affairs. He can be reached through his website www.pitafi.com.