Albania to create world’s smallest sovereign state for Bektashi order

Prime Minister Edi Rama confirmed plans for Vatican-style state within Albania’s capital Tirana. / bne IntelliNews

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By bne IntelliNews September 23, 2024

Albania is planning to create a sovereign microstate for the Bektashi Order, a Sufi Muslim sect, within its capital Tirana, Prime Minister Edi Rama confirmed in a speech to the UN General Assembly on September 22. 

The new state will be modelled on the Vatican City in Rome. The plan for the Bektashi microstate reflects Albania’s broader aim of promoting peaceful religious coexistence both at home and abroad.

The new state, which would occupy a 10-hectare parcel of land — about one-quarter of the size of Vatican City — would have its own administration, passports and borders, according to media reports. It will follow the religious practices of the Bektashi Order, a Shiite Sufi group founded in 13th-century Turkey. 

While specifics on the granting of sovereignty remain unclear, Bektashi leaders have expressed enthusiasm for the project. 

In his speech to the UNGA, Rama spoke of Albania’s historical role in fostering religious tolerance, citing examples from World War II and the recent Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, according to a transcript published by the government.

“While Albania may be a small country, it has given the world good examples, which has been taken to protect our common humanity,” Rama said, referencing Albania’s protection of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. “The Jewish community grew 20-fold during the Holocaust thanks to Muslim and Christian families who protected them from the Nazis.”

Rama also pointed to Albania’s recent sheltering of Afghans following the Taliban's return to power, calling it an example of the country’s commitment to protecting the vulnerable: “After the devastation of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban three years ago, we sheltered several thousand Afghans who would otherwise have ended up in the ninth circle of Hell!”

The Bektashi Order has a long history within Albania, having gained prominence in the 15th century through its influence on the Janissary Corps, the elite soldiers of the Ottoman sultan. The order was later banned in Turkey during the secular reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and many of its members relocated to Albania, where it has since thrived.

Nearly half of Albania’s population identifies as Muslim, but the country has significant Catholic and Orthodox Christian minorities.

The Bektashi Order accounts for about 10% of Albania’s Muslim population. It is known for its progressive values, including allowing alcohol consumption, permitting women to dress freely, and eschewing strict lifestyle rules.

The creation of the new microstate is seen as a continuation of Albania’s tradition of religious tolerance, which is central to its national identity.

“Albania … gave the world the youngest saint, Mother Teresa, whose life embodied love for humanity,” Rama said. “It reminded us that not all of us can do big things, but we can do small things with great love. This is the principle on which Albania stands… this is the source of our inspiration, to support the transformation of the center of the Bektashi World Order into a sovereign state within our capital, Tirana.”

The Bektashi leadership, led by Baba Mondi, the order's head, would oversee both religious and administrative functions of the state, with citizenship limited to senior religious figures. The order envisions the microstate as a spiritual and administrative hub, operating independently of the Albanian government.

 

Poet and journalist in Egypt faces intense cyberbullying: “The collective male mindset targeted my body”

It has become so normalized that if you disagree with a man, you criticize his ideas; but if you disagree with a woman, you attack her body and her morality. In the darkness of this form of conservativism, no one refutes it. As an intelligent woman in Egypt with my own ideas, the bullying takes myriad forms.

Fatima Naoot

• 13 mins ago
 
• August 6, 2024

Cyberbullying and online blackmail against women in Egypt is on the rise, according to a study published by the Speak Up initiative in March. | Photo courtesy of Niklas Hamann on Unsplash

This Op-Ed is one in a series aimed at shedding light on critical global issues that demand urgent attention and address a spectrum of challenges affecting us all, emphasizing the need for collective action and support. By fostering awareness and encouraging collaboration, the writer hopes to inspire positive change and contribute to a more compassionate and equitable world as we cover the multitude of issues that impact our global community.

Orato journalist Mahasen Hawary met with Fatima Naoot, an Egyptian poet, engineer, and human rights activist. The two engaged in conversation about women in conservative Arab societies and the challenges they face as thinkers and opinion-makers. The journalist asked her about her response to campaigns that attempt to morally and ethically assassinate her character rather than engage in substantive debate. Ms. Naoot shared these thoughts.

Being born in a conservative society in Egypt, I saw women treated like disabled creatures who need a crutch in the form of a man. My own problems began many years ago, but they are not my problems alone. Women who think and ask questions in society, become like strange beings, as if we should not exist. We appear to move beyond the natural boundaries set for us. Expected to allow others to think and decide for us, we cannot truly lead.

I am a woman with independent ideas in Egypt, in a conservative society often viewing women as mindless. I experience a culture where women represent mere bodies designed to please men, carry children, give birth, and raise them – nothing more. Consequently, the collective male mindset targeted my body, harassing me relentlessly and going as far as fabricating indecent images of me.

Escalation of bullying degrades woman poet, activist in Egypt

In the reactionary mindset of Egypt’s conservative culture, the simplest way to attack a woman is to degrade her. Throughout my intellectual journey, I faced many forms of bullying, but the fabrication of vulgar photos felt deeply disturbing. When someone published these pictures and others began spreading them widely, I felt upset and distressed. Even in a more civilized society, an experience like this would bother a woman.

It has become so normalized that if you disagree with a man, you criticize his ideas; but if you disagree with a woman, you attack her body and her morality. In the darkness of this form of conservativism, no one refutes it. As an intelligent woman in Egypt with my own ideas, the bullying takes myriad forms.

In addition to fake nude photos, bullies mock my appearance. For example, they make fun of the shape of my nose. Sometimes I wonder, “If I like my nose, why does it bother you?” I cannot understand why attacking someone’s facial features feels appropriate.

My reaction to bullying changed over the years. In the beginning, I often cried. When I expressed an opinion or shared a poem, people launched full campaigns against me. Some professors at my college who since passed away made their mark on Egypt’s cultural life and in doing so, stirred up stagnant waters. I leaned on them for support.

At that time, as a young poet recently graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, I maintained an idealized image of the world. I drew from my Sufi father’s perspective and the education I received in a school run by nuns. I never imagined at that time how cruel people could be.

Despite attacks on her and her family, woman continues to call for justice

The world of poetry supposedly represents a realm of delicate feelings, emotions, and imagination. Yet, the gossip and hatred I encountered shocked me. The attacks on me publicly escalated to moral assassination. In response, I once wrote an article entitled “My Ordeal with Intellectuals,” as I grappled with feeling psychologically broken. I isolated myself for a while from the cultural community, having once idealized it.  

As I grew accustomed the cyberbullying, these people took it a step further. They targeted my autistic son. Their evil and harsh words felt like daggers stabbing me. “If you were a good woman, God would not have given you an autistic son,” they said. “This is God’s punishment in life, in addition to the punishing you will get in the afterlife.” The pain of those words felt unsurmountable. It marked a new episode in my saga in their desperate attempts to demonize me.

Today, I have adjusted to the reality in Egypt. The praise no longer dazzles me, and I shrug the bullying off. Most of the hate campaigns stem from my calls for justice and citizenship. The women of Egypt exist in a society that leans towards racism and racial and gender discrimination. They differentiate between men and women, Muslims and Christians, and the rich and poor.

When someone like me advocates publicly for citizenship and justice, people become very agitated, especially if the voice comes from a woman. Most of my journalistic and poetic writings remain preoccupied with justice. Therefore, I constantly fight injustice.

Arrested and convicted, women fights on and sees some improvement in opportunity for women in Egypt

The culture of Egypt remains so male-dominated, women often take on male names. If a woman’s name, for example, is Khadija, she might refer to herself as Om Saeed or Om Mohamed, using her son’s, husband’s, or brother’s name. She cancels her own name to conform to society and gain its approval. In a way, she colludes in erasing her independent identity to align with social norms. I stand against those norms.

Some years ago, I advocated for a civil state in Egypt, free of religious discrimination. My vocal opposition to religious rule through writing and speech culminated in a controversy over the Muslim holiday tradition of sacrifice.

When I criticized animal slaughter taking place in public in front of children, a lawyer filed charges against me. I fought a fierce legal battle, experiencing firsthand the meaning of a “legal war.” In 2016, I received a prison sentence for alleged contempt of religion. It felt like a malicious case from the start,

Initially sentenced to three years, they reduced my conviction to a suspended six-month term. Remarkably, Egyptian legislation later criminalized public slaughter, shielding children from the sight. Despite personal attacks and moral assassination attempts, I do see improvements in women’s status in Egypt.

The political leadership now honors women with important ministerial roles and governorships—a first in our history. While I acknowledge these significant steps, I hope religious institutions will further respect women’s rights by preventing child marriages and addressing polygamy. More must be done.

 WAR ON THE SUFI

ICC war crimes verdict for Timbuktu jihad police chief

By

 AFP

The International Criminal Court on Wednesday will issue a verdict in the case of a jihadist police chief accused of “unimaginable crimes” during an alleged reign of terror and sexual slavery in the fabled Malian city of Timbuktu.

Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, 46, is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, rape and sexual slavery, and destroying religious and historic buildings.

Prosecutors say Al Hassan personally oversaw amputations and floggings as police chief when Islamic militants seized control of Timbuktu for almost a year from early 2012.

During the trial, which opened in 2020, prosecutors said Timbuktu citizens had lived in fear of “despicable” violence, citing the case of a man whose hand was amputated after being accused of petty theft.

“He was tied to a chair… and his hand was chopped off with a machete. A member of the armed group then held up his hand as a signal to others,” said then-chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.

Bensouda said the women and girls of Timbuktu suffered most under the “gender-based persecution” in force under Al Hassan’s alleged reign of terror.

He is accused of forcing women and girls to “marry” fighters, with some victims raped multiple times, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors said he was “personally involved” in flogging women accused of adultery. Other women were allegedly beaten for what the Islamists saw as misdemeanours such as not wearing gloves.

Al Hassan himself told investigators that the people of Timbuktu were “scared out of their minds”, according to the prosecutor.

– ‘Pearl of the desert’ –

Founded between the fifth and 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, Timbuktu is known as the “Pearl of the Desert” and “The City of 333 Saints” for the number of Muslim sages buried there during a golden age of Islam.

But jihadists who swept into the city considered the shrines idolatrous and destroyed them with pickaxes and bulldozers.

The militants from the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar Dine groups exploited an ethnic Tuareg uprising in 2012 to take over cities in Mali’s volatile north.

Al Hassan is the second Malian jihadist tried at the ICC for destroying religious sanctuaries in Timbuktu, which is inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

The court sentenced Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi in 2016 to nine years in prison, reduced by two years on appeal in 2021.

On Friday, the ICC made public an arrest warrant for one of the Sahel’s top jihadist leaders over alleged atrocities in Timbuktu from 2012 to 2013.

Iyad Ag Ghaly, is considered to be the leader of the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), which operates in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Also known as “Abou Fadl”, Ag Ghaly is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Timbuktu, the ICC said.

These included murder, rape and sexual slavery, and attacks on buildings dedicated as religious and historic monuments.

Judges issued the warrant against Ag Ghaly in mid-2017, but the document has been kept under wraps for the past seven years because of “potential risks to witnesses and victims”.

by Richard CARTER

The Anti-Colonial Marxism of Mahdi Amel

The Lebanese Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel was assassinated on this day in 1987. Amel developed a version of Marxism that was grounded in the experience of colonized societies, showing how class struggle converges with the fight for national liberation.

Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel. (Archives of Assafir Newspaper)

BYHICHAM SAFIEDDINE
05.18.2024
JACOBIN

With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive short intellectual shrift. When they register on the radar of ideological debates at all, such debates summarily present their work as proof of Marxism’s universalism rather than a means of transforming Marxism itself.

This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Amel, who was assassinated on this day, May 18, in 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pen name Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party’s national leadership by the time he was killed.

Amel’s legacy did experience a revival during the Arab uprisings that broke out a decade ago. His work garnered further attention after a volume of his selected writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in his philosophy of Marxism and its implications for how we understand colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.

A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of his philosophy’s assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in comparison and contrast to European Marxism as well as heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.

We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to major themes of post-WWII national liberation, including the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine.

Marxism, Colonialism, and Methodology

Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of some supposedly authentic precapitalist thought. He equally rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw the historical materialist baby out with its Euro-centric bathwater. Instead, Amel labored in a dialectical fashion to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and employed for its socialist liberation, which he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.

Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first in brief and later in detail, across a series of essays and book-length treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings were engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that emerged during his age and remain relevant to ours.Mahdi Amel called for a ‘methodological revolution’ in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism.

While Amel’s texts may be dense and at times repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx’s discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx’s own historical context in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of colonized countries, he was incapable of taking full stock of colonialism and incorporating it into his theory of capitalism.

The historical reality of colonized peoples is the inverse of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was incidental to, or mediated via, colonialism. Colonization, in the words of Amel, “cut the thread of continuity” in their history and “sent through it violent tremors.”

He believed these tremors reached all the way to the strata of the relations of production, as the material basis for precapitalist production was destroyed while the material basis for industrialization was denied. To put it another way, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not merely concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.


For Amel, it follows from this point that the colonial relation, which is all-encompassing rather than purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction in colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis for the colonized country’s social structure.” Consequently, colonialism does not end with the end of military occupation or by gaining political independence, but with the total severance of this relation in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.

Amel’s inquiry along these lines yielded the concept of the colonial mode of production (CMOP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism furnished Amel with a sound theoretical basis to develop his model. In each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant commentary and identified first principles.

For instance, Amel relied on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and on Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thereby distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts like class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but tried to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.

Colonialism and Class Struggle

Amel’s theorization led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a CMOP is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.The instability of rule in colonized countries is a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

Small-scale manufacturers in this context are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity in economic activity is not due to some “excess energy” of this social class, but rather stems from the limitations upon concentrating production.

These constrained economic relations of production had political implications. Tied in its own class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoise is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing a liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of rule in colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of the two social factions, urban merchants tied to foreign trade and landowners who direct their agricultural production toward colonial trade. This fusion negates the existence of either a national bourgeoisie, usually associated with industrialists, or a feudal class, usually associated with a colonial alliance.

Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s toiling masses — prominently peasants — is never complete at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the CMOP.

When peasants migrate to urban centers seeking employment relief, they rarely, according to Amel, experience a radical transformation in terms of class existence and consciousness. Although embedded in a new class position that involves small-scale consumer industry, they preserve their previous class connections and retain much of their past class consciousness, transitioning between the two positions with ease.

Amel described the pattern in Lebanon:


The worker returns to his village at every opportunity, for holidays, vacations, and funerals. In this way, his village becomes his centre of gravity and exerts a pull over him stronger than that of the city. Ultimately, he longs for the land he left and demands to be buried there, home to his ancestors.

Amel warned that the lack of class differentiation does not mean that class struggle is absent in the colonial setting, as nationalist forces would have it. Nor does it mean the national question is insignificant, as some anti-imperialist or internationalist Marxists would have it. Given the indirect relation of exploitation under a CMOP that is governed by the colonial relation, class struggle is directed against a structure of dependency and domination, not another social class. This means that socialist revolution in colonized societies is synonymous with national liberation:


The struggle for national liberation is the sole historical form that distinguishes class struggle in the colonial formation. Whoever misses this essential point in the movement of our modern history and attempts to substitute class struggle with “nationalist struggle” or reduces the national struggle to a purely economic struggle loses the ability to understand our historical reality and thus also to control its transformation.

Amel prevented his philosophy from lapsing into determinism or economism by placing his structural analysis in a historical perspective as he theorized class struggle.

He emphasized the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class becoming and resistance. He argued that before World War II, sectoral and economic forms of struggle by different factions of the toiling masses independent of each other precluded their very formation as a class. The period after 1945 saw these struggles converging in a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.

At that moment, the colonial relation became mutually constitutive of colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to sever this relation in order to transcend, and thereby destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region.

The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel’s intellectual labor focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, namely Islam, in politics.

In contrast with other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel’s thought did not lapse into orientalist tropes. He countered the ideology of defeat that ascribed the Arab loss in the 1967 war with Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lambasted the Arab bourgeoisie for portraying their own political failings as universal failings of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.

For Amel, turath, or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of the interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem that persisted in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind to be found in secular or communist polemics that saw Islam as being inherently reactionary.
Islam and Revolutionary Thought

By the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thought. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.

Amel developed critiques of different manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilist, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who saw the primary contradiction in Islam — or any other religion — as being that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who defer to power and those who defy it.

The traditional classification of precapitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Conventional scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified in the figure of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), while ascribing conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief over reason, exemplified in the figure of al-Ghazali. Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and rested on the assumption that reason was a monolith.The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force.

He pointed out that one could find a single scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking scientific reasoning as well as Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never fully antithetical to each other. As a result, subversive thought, as expressed in illuminationist Sufi Islam, took the form of rejecting reason in toto.

For Amel, the primary contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (juridical). Spiritual Islam, however, was not atemporal in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical becoming, was temporal and by extension political. Sufism, or certain strands of it, negates the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.

The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was Islam’s material rather than otherworldly existence that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even if, in Amel’s estimation, it had mostly served the interests of the ruling classes.

He identified notable exceptions to this rule in precapitalist Islamic societies that included the revolt against the third “Rightly Guided” Caliph, ‘Uthman Ibn Affan, in the period following the death of Muhammed, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Modern examples that Amel cited of Islam forming part of a revolutionary struggle in the age of national liberation included the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.
Revolution, Liberation, and the Palestinian Cause

Amel’s treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel shed light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, which included the role of noneconomic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the overwhelming majority of European settlers, whether they were artisans, farmers, bourgeois, or workers, opposed the revolution for national liberation.

The politicized working class was no exception. The working-class Algiers district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red neighbourhood” for serving as a popular base of the Algerian Communist Party. Yet it became “a haven of European racism” and “centre of fascist European terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.

The same anti-colonial logic applies to theorizing class struggle in Palestine. So-called labor Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be characterized as socialist. By contrast, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

The failure of Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow’s directive led the leadership of these parties to support the 1948 partition of Palestine. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic depiction of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jew, and a mercantile and landed bourgeoise, both Arab and Jew. It caused the communist movement to suffer a loss of popular support in Arab societies.Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalizing force that had an impact on class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who minimized the significance of successful armed resistance against Israeli occupation in the name of focusing on strengthening the central Lebanese state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.

Israel’s own attitude toward Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains determined in the last instance by the decision of those movements to adopt or reject national liberation strategies, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the significance of armed resistance to Israel and its allies derives from the objective centrality of the colonial relation in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.

Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in swaying this struggle toward a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point toward the end of sectarianism or its reproduction:

Either they go against the reactionary sectarian form of their ideological consciousness, i.e. in the direction of radically changing the sectarian political system of rule by the dominant bourgeoisie, or they align with this same reactionary sectarian consciousness — (but against the class interests of their toiling factions) — and lean towards sectarian reform of this system. In the latter case, the system would catch its breath in a movement that would renew its crisis, and subsequently the conditions for civil war.

There is no sectarian crisis in Palestine similar to that of Lebanon. But the leading armed resistance forces today in Palestine and across the region are Islamist in their ideology. Analyzing this resistance without centering the colonial relation, as Amel showed elsewhere, is a methodological error that mischaracterizes its revolutionary role as the latest stage in the war of national liberation.

The twentieth-century global conjuncture of national liberation may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. The colonial social reality of Palestinians, however, remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by all means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of early Arab communists, and, in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.

CONTRIBUTOR
Hicham Safieddine is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (2019) and the editor of Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel (2021).

2024 Elections: What’s at stake for India’s minorities?

Could a third term under Narendra Modi see the formalising of second-class status for minorities and the destruction of the country’s ancient composite culture?

Sajjad Hassan 

Published April 29, 2024 

PRISM/DAWN

If the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi succeeds in winning a third five-year term in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections, many fear that India’s religious minorities, especially Muslims, will see their second-class status formalised in law and practice.

But for Hindu supremacy to be fully realised, which is the stated aim of Hindu nationalists, they will have to expunge India of any Muslim influence, of which there is much, historically. When Indians cast their vote in the coming weeks, they would do well to be aware of the weight of their electoral choices. And the international community would do well not to drop the ball on India.
Second-class citizens

In a recent article, political scientists, Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs asked the rhetorical question: “Is India under Narendra Modi … beginning to resemble the American South under Jim Crow?” referring to state and local laws introduced in the southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th century that enforced racial segregation.

They explain that Jim Crow laws were aimed at blunting the Reconstruction Amendments that abolished slavery and gave equal rights to Blacks. They were designed to make Blacks second-class citizens. Similarly, in India, Hindu nationalists seek to diminish the constitutionally guaranteed equal citizenship of Muslims and turn them into marginalised, less than fully equal citizens.

Jim Crow laws lasted for almost a century, ending only in the 1960s. Varshney and Staggs claim that since Hindu nationalism is in its early phase, it could still be forestalled before it is institutionalised via political and legislative processes. They suggest that the ongoing national elections present an opportunity for Indians to do that.

However, the comparison between Jim Crow and Hindu nationalism diverges in their ultimate objectives. While Jim Crow merely targeted the equal citizenship of Blacks, Hindu nationalism has a more totalitarian goal.
What does Hindutva want?

To fully grasp the end-goals of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva, it is necessary to read its foundational texts. There are none more seminal than We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who led the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) from 1940 to 1973. The RSS is considered the heart and soul of the vast network of Hindu nationalist organisations, of which the BJP is the political wing. Narendra Modi, a life-time member and former official of the RSS, credited it for grooming him to political leadership.

In his text, Golwalkar writes of his wariness of “hostile elements” within the country that “act as menace to national security”, singling out Muslims as the number one threat, followed by Christians. His solution to “the danger of a cancer developing into its body politic” was offering the “foreign element” two options: “either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow it to do so, and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race”.

MS Golwalkar. Credit: Golwalkarguruji.org — image via Scroll.in



Another of the movement’s foundational texts is Essentials of Hindutva (1923) by Vinayak Damodar Savakar, who is considered by many to be the foremost Hindutva thinker. In Essentials, he provided Hindu nationalism with an ideology, which in a nutshell claims that India was special, as it offered something nobody else could — Hindu thought. This unique Hindu supremacy, Savarkar believed, was under threat because of the presence of non-Hindus. He called on Hindus, fragmented as they were, to unite and reclaim their supremacy. Violence against Muslims, Savarkar said, was the means to achieve that goal.

Golwalkar drew on Savarkar’s thoughts. He also admired the race theories of fascist Germany and Italy and recommended that Hindustan, the land of Hindus, should profit from their lessons. In We or Our Nationhood Defined, he wrote: “To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of its semitic races — the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.”

Golwalkar saw the world in apocalyptic terms. His objective was clear: “To rule over the world was the heavenly task ordained to Hindu race.” He called upon Hindus to “rally to the Hindu standard, the bhagwa dhwaj [and] set our teeth in grim determination to wipe out the opposing forces”.

Some Hindutva leaders today have explicitly articulated this vision. For instance, in March 2020, a Hindu priest named Yati Narsinghanand, who is the president of Akhil Bharatiya Sant Parishad (All India Priests Council) and someone close to the BJP, was reported to have told his followers, “Humanity can only be saved if Islam is finished off. Hindus: Read the Gita along with Mahabharat, and learn how to die fighting.”

This call was made around the time BJP leader Kapil Mishra was leading processions in Delhi calling for violence against the mainly Muslim participants in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, chanting the mantra: “Desh ke ghaddaron ko, goli maro saalon ko [Shoot the traitors of the country].”

In 2023, another BJP leader, an MLA from Telangana, T Raja Singh, at a rally in Mumbai, urged his audience to take to arms. “I would like to request all my Hindu brothers that the coming time is the time of struggle, it is the time of war,” he said. “Every Hindu is obliged to unite. Hindu should not become one who rings temple bells, but rather he should become a Hindu who kills landyas”, a derogatory reference to Muslims.

At a public meeting of Hindu priests in December 2021, in the holy town of Haridwar, a star speaker, Annapurna Maa, the general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, was heard exhorting her audience: “If you want to eliminate their population, then be ready to kill them and be ready to go to jail. If only a 100 of us become soldiers and each of us kills 20 lakhs of them, we will be victorious…”

Modi is circumspect in his speeches now, but was not always so. As chief minister of Gujarat, soon after the pogrom there in 2002 during his term that left at least 2,000 dead, mostly Muslim, he was often reported in his public speeches to evoke visions of a religious struggle of good over evil.

“This is the holy place of shakti [godly power], the power for extermination of asuras [demons],” he said in one speech. “We have resolved to destroy and stamp out all forces of evil…”
The montage that is India

Beyond the goal of cleansing the Hindu land of the “cancer” to save the nation, there is another equally compelling reason for the Hindutva project to be more than just about marginalising Muslims. That has to do with the fact that India today is, in the words of historians Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot, “an intricate montage assembled from assorted material”, of which the Islamic is a critical element. The desire on the part of Hindutva leaders to fully realise Hindu supremacy will also require extirpating Muslim life and Muslim imprint from today’s India.

Historians view the era between 1200 AD and 1750 AD (Medieval India in history textbooks) as the foundation for the highly diverse human landscape of modern South Asia, with its pluralistic culture that draws on both Indic and Islamic traditions. In their magisterial work, India Before Europe (2006), Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot show how the Central Asian ethnic heritage, Persian cultural orientation and Islamic religious affiliation of North India’s ruling elite class in the period after 1200 AD led to the dissemination of many innovative elements through the subcontinent.

While acknowledging that the encounter between Indic and Islamic peoples and cultures led to short-term conflicts, Asher and Talbot note the vast degree to which cultural practices inspired by Perso-Islamic traditions became integral to the subcontinent as a whole in the long run. South Asia’s art and architecture, its political rituals, its administrative and military technologies and even its popular religions were deeply inflected by the new forms.

This composite culture, the authors note, forms the basis of India that exists today, in its foods, dressing and music, languages that people speak, the built architecture, and its popular religions, among others.

The ruins of the Krishna temple in Hampi, Karnataka, in 1868. 

Credit: Lyon, Edmund David (1825-1891)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — taken from Scroll.in

In the south of the peninsula, the ‘Hindu’ Vijaynagara empire (1350-1550) drew significantly from Islamicate influence in military technology, secular architecture, courtly dress, as well as local languages. The successor ‘Muslim’ sultanates of the Bahmani state in the Deccan too, followed in this tradition, most importantly in their patronage to local languages, so much so that Golconda rulers, around today’s Hyderabad, occupied an important place in the historical memory of Telengana language — with one of the sultans, Ibrahim Quli Qutub Shah (1550-1580) often called Ibharama Chakravati by Telgu poets.

Bijapur’s Ibrahim Adil Shah II (1580-1627), called Jagat Guru, authored a collection of songs in dakani, Kitab-e-Nauras (book of nine rasas), that opens with an invocation to Saraswati, Hindu goddess of learning, followed by praise of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and then the Chisti saint Gisu Daraz. These were no exceptions.

In Bengal, the Hussain Shahi (1493-1538) rulers adopted local customs, such as purification by the water of Ganga at coronation ceremonies, and the Sufi poet, Saiyid Sultan (d 1648) published a genealogy of prophets of Islam, called Nabi Vamsha that included the Hindu god, Krishna.

In Gujarat, amid the flourishing literary tradition that the Ahmad Shah rulers patronised was the Sanskrit work Raja-Vinoda (pleasure of the kings), written in honour of the ruler, Mahmud Begada (1460s), presenting the sultan as an ideal Indic king, whose court was graced by the presence of the Hindu deity Saraswati, the goddess of learning. In Malwa, in central India, capital Mandu had fine libraries that included among their collection the track Nimat-nama (c. 1500), an illustrated recipe book for making dishes suitable for all seasons, including vegetarian as well as meat-based, with illustrations drawing on both Persian and Indic tradition, including the Bhagwata Purana.

However, it was the Mughals, especially Akbar (1556-1605), who helped create a state that was more Indian in character. The aesthetic that developed under Akbar’s guidance was composed of a fusion of Timurid and Indic models, and which went on to set a standard for subsequent Mughal arts and culture, including food, architecture and courtly dress and culture, Asher and Talbot argue.

Besides, in the realm of built architecture, of which there is ample evidence, literary production was an important site of Indic and Islamic collaboration. Examples are the translation of Ramayana and Mahabharata in Persian (Razm-nama) and Abul Fazl’s including in his Ain-i-Akbari, extensive sections on “the learning of India” — including philosophical schools, music, life cycle rituals, and modes of image worship. The scale of the borrowing led Audrey Truschke, a prominent historian of Sanskrit at the Mughal court, to conclude that these were efforts on the part of Abul Fazl to convince Akbar’s supporters of the virtues of infusing Sanskrit knowledge into Indo-Persian thought.

The tendencies towards synthesis had significant consequences. Man Singh, the highest ranking noble in Akbar’s court, only after his sons, built temples throughout the domain, including the Govinda Deva temples in Vrindavan, the largest in North India, in a recognisably Mughal style, and helped to spread Akbar’s belief in multiculturalism, just as Abdul Rahim Khaan-e-Khanan did by commissioning an illustrated Ramayana.

Among the most consequential contributions of the Mughal court to Indian letters, Allison Busch shows, was its engagement with Brajbhasha. A local (Hindavi) dialect of the region around Agra and Delhi, Mughal heartlands, Brajbhasha had existed until then, mostly as bhakti devotional poetry. Under Mughal patronage, it developed a sophisticated courtly style, inspired by Sanskrit poetics, and became the principal poetic language of north India. In creating the outcome, that could be described as classical Hindi, were Akbar’s nobles composing works in the language, including Todar Mal, Birbal and the Rajput nobles, as also Faizi and Abdul Rahim Khana Khanan — showing how courtly literature in Brajbhasha was nurtured within the multicultural context of elite Mughal society.

There were other enduring contributions too, of this age and milieu, outside the courtly realm. A major influence in the early part of this period was Sufis, and their dispersal, throughout much of the subcontinent. By the 14th century, the practice of Sama, devotional musical congregations, and Urs, annual pilgrimage to the shrines of Sufi saints, had become established Sufi traditions. Sufi shrines drew both Muslims and Hindus, and were themselves influenced by local traditions, including the Shattari Sufis of Bengal drawing on Nath yogis, and Rishi Sufis of Kashmir who led celibate lives and practised vegetarianism.

Sufism also contributed to reform in Hindu tradition, starting in the 14th century with the rise of sants, who like Sufis, were mystics, believed in a formless God, and extolled devotion to God as a primary religious practice. Kabir, the most influential, attacked rituals and customs of traditional religions, and excoriated the caste system. Guru Nanak (born in 1469), the founder of the Sikh tradition, also came from the same context.

Notably, Sufism also influenced Hindu bhakti tradition, as the historian of Indian religion John S Hawley points out. This is evident in the commonalities that the latter began to show in its focus on love for God, as did Sufis, the use of poetry and music in worship, and an ethics of compassion for others. Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas (1575), crafted in about the same age and the middle Gangetic Awadhi milieu of Sufi poets, Malik Mohammad Jayasi (Padmavat, 1540) and Mir Siyyid Manjhan (Madhumalati, 1545), exemplified this shift. Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu, became the preeminent object of devotion, in place of Siva.

It is these constructions of a cosmopolitan Indian paradigm, resulting in innovations that spoke to both traditions that Hindu nationalists must disentangle and destroy to be able to achieve their vision of a Hindu supremacist India. This will undoubtedly leave much violence in its trail.
‘Authentic fantasies’ of suffering

These historical accounts of co-living and co-production contradict Hindutva claims that have much purchase today, in popular as well as scholarly circles about the thousand years of conflict between Muslim “outsiders” and “local” Hindus; of forced conversions and the wanton destruction of temples. Hindu nationalists have developed a wide repertoire of suffering and victimhood of Hindus at the hands of Muslims. Evidence to support their thesis is slim.

Richard Eaton, one of the foremost historians of medieval India, shows how the claim that Islam spread in South Asia by the sword is incongruent with the geography of Muslim conversions in South Asia. There is an inverse relationship between the degree of Muslim political penetration and the degree of conversion to Islam, he notes. Most conversions happened in the north west and north east — Punjab and Bengal, farthest away from centres of Muslim power.

As to temple destruction, Eaton found, over a span of more than five centuries from 1192 to 1729, there were “some 80 instances of temple desecration”, well short of the 60,000 claimed by Hindu nationalists. Typically, the desecrated temples would have been associated with the authority of an enemy kingdom. The instances of desecrations followed a long-established pattern in India, of temples having been natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority, well before the coming of Muslim Turks, including their destruction. Among the most recent examples was the destruction in the 10th c of the Pratihara temple of Kalapriya near Jamuna, by the Rashtrakuta king Indra III.

But as the Bosnian historian, Edin Hajdarpasic, shows from his study of Balkan nationalism in the 19th century, enthusiastic depictions of suffering convey the essence of a political threat more vividly than simple facts or documentary narratives — a phenomenon he calls “authentic fantasy”. Hindu nationalists, themselves inspired by European nationalist movements at the turn of the 19th century, relied much on the construction of suffering and victimhood of Hindus, however divorced from facts.

Decolonial historiography shows how they drew on the Orientalist bias of British colonial historians, who saw the period of the previous 600 years, as a history of Muslim arrival and their dominance over Hindus, marked by Muslim fanaticism, and temple destruction, forced conversion, and Hindu oppression. In contrast to the dark Muslim medieval age, colonial historians like James Mill posited the ancient Hindu age as golden, and modern British, as liberal.
Call to violence

Hindu nationalists in power today are seeking to inflict retribution for their perceived sufferings by rewriting history. In some cases, this has taken physical forms — such as in the destruction in 1992 of the 15th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, a criminal act that was legitimised by the Supreme Court of India in 2019. Claims for several other historical mosques to be converted into temples have been set in motions across the country.

Elsewhere, place names have been changed to erase any hint of their Muslim heritage. Allahabad is now Prayagraj, Mughalsarai station is Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction, Aurangabad is Sambhajinagar and Gulbarga is Kalaburagi. Not satisfied with occasional erasures, the BJP government has thought fit to change high school history and politics textbooks by significantly altering and in some cases, fully scrapping the sections on Mughal history.


C

redit: Yasminsheikh, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons — taken from Scroll.in



The act of political forgetting targets minorities to deprive them of history, of the right to narrate, of the capacity for recognition. History tells us it is also a precursor to violence. As eminent historians Aditya and Mridula Mukherjee noted recently, “…genocide of a community is often preceded by the community being demonised, their names changed, their history being erased”, claiming “these processes have begun in India and open calls for genocide of Muslims are being given in various parts of the country with amazing impunity”.

More than Jim Crow South, the history of the Balkans in the late 19th century and post-Yugoslavia 20th century provides a better guide to understanding the future of minorities in India today. Hajdarpasic’s account of Balkan history alerts us to the real consequences of the claims of victimhood. Nationalists there used stories of suffering not only to inspire collective sacrifice but also to encourage mass violence against entire communities perceived as threats. He demonstrates how certain stories of victimisation in the region long outlived their original inspirations. Decades after overthrowing Turkish rule, Serbian nationalists could revive narratives about Turk-like enemies even in the late 20th century with catastrophic consequences.

Tanika Sarkar, eminent historian of modern India, demonstrates similar impulse in early modern Hindu nationalist thought. Emblematic of this repertoire was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 1818 novel, Anandmath, whose main character, the Hindu sanyasi (ascetic) rebel, Satyanand, is engaged in a messianic battle “for exterminate(ing) all Muslims on this land, as they are enemies of God”, a recompense for “inflicting misfortune on Hindus”. The novel is set in the context of the 1770 famines in Bengal, as the East India Company was inserting itself at the expense of the Nawabs of Bengal, and that resulted in a third of the population starving to death, both Hindus and Muslims. Historians inform Muslim fakirs (ascetics) rose up, along with sanyasis, against the depredations.

Sarkar calls for Anandmath, “the first explicit message in our literary history for ethnic cleansing”, one foretelling Hindu nationalist thoughts to emerge later in 20th century. Its protagonists deemed “elimination of Muslim rule and Muslim presence from the land” an act of worship of Bharat Maata (motherland), a deity that first emerged in the novel. In 1920, Savarkar and Golwalkar adopted Vande Mataram — hymn to Bharat Maata, contained in Anandmath — as aHindu nationalist anthem. Vande Mataram was also the rallying cry of Hindu communalists in anti-Muslim violence to follow during Partition.

Vande Mataram continues to inspire Hindu nationalist thoughts and action to this day. So when the terror-accused BJP MP Pragya Thakur recently instructed her audience to “keep your weapons sharpened”, to “in this world created by god … finish all oppressors, wrong-doers, sinners…”, she was deploying Anandmath’s template of the holy war — calling for violence against the entire Muslim population.

It is in such violent contestations borne out of ‘authentic fantasies’ of past sufferings that Hindu nationalists of today — following that of Savarkar and other Hindutva ideologues — seek to create Hindu supremacy, by waging permanent war against India’s 200 or so million Muslims and other ‘foreign elements’. Already, United Nations experts are alerting us to the fact that “India risks becoming one of the world’s main generators of instability, atrocities and violence, because of the massive scale and gravity of the violations and abuses targeting mainly religious and other minorities, such as Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others.”

Mass atrocity experts are warning: “If nothing is done to address these risks, India may continue to experience a rise in the number of violent (and fatal) attacks against religious minorities, an escalation in the scale of the violence, and an increased level of state involvement in atrocities.”

The burden on Indian voters to use the ballot to forestall the institutionalisation of Hindu nationalism, before it reaches a point of no return, is therefore, even heavier.

This piece is a longer version of the article, titled “Is the 2024 Lok Sabha election India’s last chance before the point of no return?” by Sajjad Hassan published on Scroll.in. It has been reproduced here with permission.

Header image: A protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act — photo taken from Prashant Waydande/Reuters

Between colonialism and extremism, Pakistan continues to exist in the shadows

Pakistan seems to be split into a minority of two extremes — the liberals and the conservative — whose voices are the loudest. In the meantime, no one knows what the vast majority of Pakistan wants, because no one is listening.

Sabahat Quadri 

Published April 17, 2024 

I have a long-time acquaintance who moved to Pakistan from Malaysia when he was almost an adult. For the sake of his privacy, let’s call him Junaid. He is a globe-trotting critic — the kind of acquaintance you can’t shake off, no matter how hard you try. He swapped the palm-fringed shores of Malaysia for the bustling streets of Pakistan, bringing along more than just his luggage; he brought his opinions too, and boy, does he love to share them.

Having also lived a few years in Saudi Arabia, he’s now busy comparing us to a country that could buy and sell us as a side project, and still telling us how terrible this country is. From bashing Pakistan to praising the latest country he’s set foot in, Junaid’s commentary is as consistent as the sunrise.

Fast forward to our latest encounter right after the elections — Junaid, unable to cast his own vote because he couldn’t get himself a CNIC from Nadra for unknown reasons — found joy in ridiculing those who did. He laughed about how ‘stupid’ PTI supporters were for thinking that voting was going to change the country.

Now, this is an obnoxious man, so I take his comments with a pinch of salt. But he’s not alone in his disdain. A journalist in Islamabad, alongside a Twitter columnist, joined the chorus, labelling PTI supporters as everything from ‘uninformed’ and ‘ignorant’ to ‘over-zealous ideologues’ and ‘fanatics’.

But Pakistan isn’t just a battleground for political debates. It’s a free-for-all where everyone is itching to tell you how to live, how to pray, and even how to think. There’s a Junaid in every corner, ready to school you on the “correct” way to practice Islam or why your political views are outdated, leaving no room for alternative voices — not in politics, not in religion, and not even in culture.

Pakistan seems to be split into a minority of two extremes — the liberals and the religious — whose voices are the loudest. In the meantime, no one knows what the vast majority of Pakistan wants, because no one is listening. Most of us are stuck in the middle, drowned out by the roar of extremism on both ends, silently wondering: “What about us?”
Unaffected by global events

In the global spotlight, there’s a dialogue we’re missing out on. While Israel ramps up its genocidal assault on Palestine (because let’s not forget the escalating violence by the Israelis in the West Bank, despite our focus on Gaza), a new cognisance about colonialism has taken hold.

In their efforts to bring their cause to light, Palestinian voices in the diaspora are leading the charge, exposing colonialism for the ugly truth that it is. Through decades of patient campaigning and organising, Palestinian civil society has raised an awareness across the Global South of the devastation colonialism wrought, its lasting scars and its modern-day manifestations.

In Pakistan, we have also recognised this, but we seem unable to emerge from that looming shadow. Our leaders are both deeply embedded in the neo-colonial capitalist structures and snake pits of the Global North — more concerned with their own pockets than their country. Their collective visions of Pakistan’s future are borrowed from the Middle East or the West, while our intellectual class remains fixated on India. Our leaders completely abrogate any responsibility while the majority of Pakistanis are left to fend for themselves, trapped in poverty, illiteracy, and injustice.

Small sections of civil society are helping to alleviate some of these issues, but unless they can scale up at a phenomenal rate, there is little chance that they’ll do more than apply band-aids to the seething wounds inflicted upon us. Meanwhile, if there is some semblance of organisation within society, some spark of engagement and participatory citizenship — however you may dislike how they participate — we are quick to shut it down with contempt, derision, and indifference.

This is the same contempt a feudal feels for his serfs. The same contempt I’ve seen middle-class women hold for their domestic staff. The same contempt a school owner in a Katchi Abadi in Karachi has for his students (“Why give them parathas when all they’re used to are rotis?”). This isn’t just a lack of empathy; it’s a legacy of colonialism ingrained in our society. It’s the language of the British Raj internalised, absorbed, and well-padded with expensive foreign educations in neo-colonial USA or through Saudi Arabia’s deliberate attempt to spread Salafism.
Divide et Impera

Just as we continue to battle the quest for ‘fair skin’ — our deep-seated gora complex — and the drive to bury our native languages in favour of English, we should recognise that we’ve inherited this attitude of contempt from our oppressors.

After the 1857 War of Independence (which is still referred to in the UK as the Mutiny), Lord Elphinstone wrote:

“I have long considered the subject, and I am convinced that the exact converse of this policy of assimilation is our only safe military policy in India. Divide et impera (divide and rule) was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours. The safety of the great iron steamers, which are adding so much to our military power, and which are probably destined to add still more to our commercial superiority, is greatly increased by building them in compartments. I would ensure the safety of our Indian Empire by constructing our native army on the same principle; for this purpose I would avail myself of those divisions of language and race we find ready to hand.”

Similarly, Brigadier John Coke, an officer in the North West Frontier (before it became a province of Pakistan), said:

“Our endeavour should be to uphold in full force the (fortunate for us) separation which exists between the different religions and races, and not to endeavour to amalgamate them. Divide et impera should be the principle of Indian Government.” [sic]

Years earlier, Lord Macaulay had already started the process of breaking down the subcontinent’s existing education system. Having received an extensive grant for investing in education for the ‘natives’, he was hesitant to invest in existing materials which were all in either Persian, Urdu (which he called Arabic), or Sanskrit.

He lobbied strongly to replace all oriental literature with English books, because he “never found one among them (orientalists) who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.”

Lord Macaulay relished the idea of educating the Indian into “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

The British wanted us divided. They also considered us unable to progress on our own without their superior intellect and help. The US feels no differently. Nor does Saudi Arabia. Both countries have continued to colonise us and divide us.

Where once we longed to be British, we now long to be American or Arab (the rich Arabs, that is. No one here yearns to be a Yemeni). We educate our children in US universities. We internalise their language and their ideologies. These children return to their home countries to bring enlightenment to us. They bring back with them not solutions to the daily struggles of a family of 10 who can’t save for their futures, but principles of capitalism, secularism, liberalism, and rationalism that only serve to crush any last vestiges of identity the population is still clinging on to.

Meanwhile, those coming from the Middle East bring with them the outward trappings of Salafism and a complete disdain for Sufism, our music, our poetry, our rituals and customs, disregarding them all as either ‘innovations’ in Islam or superstitions learned from Hindus.

And this is possibly the logic (and I can find no other logic for it) behind the division of Pakistan into two non-contiguous land masses.

A small example of this attitude is the hugely popular Coke Studio. Leaving aside the irony of a programme sponsored by a global corporation that abets apartheid in Palestine and represents the worst aspects of capitalism, the programme itself is instrumental in reminding our middle classes of the great Sufi legacy we can and should remember, revere, and tap into.

However, as one former colleague of mine put it, it’s too ‘populist’ for him. Suggesting music from Coke Studio at my previous place of work (with a select few, all of whom were educated abroad and belong to the upper crust of society) will return a turned up nose and much mocking. Salafists, on the other hand, simply dismiss music as ‘unIslamic’, and have the same reaction to the popularity of the programme.

In all cases, these segments of society view each other and the vast majority of their fellow citizens (who don’t agree with them) with complete and utter contempt.
Break open the compartments

Britain’s iron steamers left a long time ago. Whatever veneer of civilisation the Global North had has been well and truly stripped since this latest war on Gaza, along with it any notion that Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, could be the spiritual leader of the Ummah.

The United States’ own domestic affairs are in a deep divide. Evidence of the corruption of their leadership, judiciary, media, and political system is visible for the whole world to see. Its social poles keep moving further and further apart. If we must learn from empire, perhaps this is what we should be looking at: what not to do with our own societies.

It’s time we stopped scoffing at each other’s views.

It’s time we stopped dismissing the other for their desi accents or local brand of shoes.

It’s time we turned inwards in contemplation; remember that we are all, from all parts of the country, human beings whose diversity gives us strength rather than dividing us.

It’s time we moved beyond the circles of school and family that keep widening the rift between the silent majority and the vocal few.

Start by actually speaking to the people (which is something that none of the reigning political parties do either) and finding out what they really want, rather than assuming you know what is best for them. Start by listening with the respect we learned from our elders, not the crude superiority of the white man towards the brown native.



The author is a graphic designer, web designer, and writer, currently managing the secondary educational product at Knowledge Platform, where she writes engaging educational content for K-12 English language and development courses on pedagogy.

Are Roots of Terrorism in Religion or Politics?

Ram Puniyani | 29 Nov 2023

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The origins of terror groups and acts lie in deeper political issues that the media ignores.

Police personnel pay tribute to the martyrs who laid down their lives while fighting terrorists during 26/11 attack, on its 15th anniversary in Mumbai, Sunday, Nov. 26, 2023. Image Courtesy: PTI Photo/Kunal Patil

Fifteen years ago, on 26 November 2008, Mumbai witnessed a horrific terror attack. Ten terrorists, armed to the teeth, landed in the city via sea route and indiscriminately killed 166 innocent citizens. The chief of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), Hemant Karkare, and two other police officers were also killed in these coordinated attacks. Today, as we remember the horrors of 26/11, the impact of another act of terror by Hamas in Israel is very much in the air. The Mumbai attacks fifteen years ago were engineered by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiaba (LeT). In all the years gone by, many parts of West Asia have witnessed terror acts, such as by the Taliban and the Islamic State or ISIS. In India, Kashmir has also suffered acts of terror, the roots of which lie in its complex political scenario.

A section of the dominant media and many political commentators present all these acts as resulting from a common thread—boundary-less religious extremism related to Islam. However, this position ignores the deeper dynamics of these painful acts. However, nothing can be further from the truth. While many terror acts and groups have in common an Islamic identity, the underlying reasons for terrorism are highly varied. The birth of Hamas lies in the injustices heaped upon Palestinians and the total violation of United Nations resolutions by Israel time and again. The issue of Kashmir has another political dynamic altogether. Al Qaeda and ISIS are products of United States-sponsored training camps in Pakistan. Therefore, rather than roots in Islam, the origins of terror acts lie in deeper political issues. 

One major cause of acts of terrorism is the policies pursued by global superpowers trying to control oil wealth. The imperialists and their allies have their eyes fixed on appropriating global oil resources. In recent years, a central phenomenon that spurred the rise of terrorist groups has been the United States cultivating fundamentalist Islamist groups through the CIA in client states such as Pakistan. 

The United States’ goal to dominate West Asia due to its “oil hunger" has been brought out very well by many commentators. Their research based on the CIA’s own documents has shown how the CIA funded the training of the Mujahideen, ultimately leading to the formation of Al Qaeda and later ISIS.

In his book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (Harmony, 2003), Mahmood Mamdani writes that funding these outfits cost around $8,000 million and 7,000 tons of armaments. On 19 May 2009, then-United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that her country “came in in the ’80s and helped build up the Mujahideen to take on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan….The Soviet Union fell in 1989, and we basically said, thank you very much…” 

Many commentators and the mainstream media deliberately underplay how the United States funded madrasas in Pakistan to train Al Qaeda and its clones, who later became Frankenstein monsters for the country. What is also underplayed is how these terrorist outfits have hurt Muslims around the world.

The Kashmir imbroglio has different dynamics. When the autonomy promised to Kashmir in Article 370 was undermined in the 1950s and 1960s, the disgruntled youth resorted to violent means instigated by Pakistan’s ISI, which had the backing of the United States. This situation was worsened by the entry of Al Qaeda clones in the 1990s, and the resistance in Kashmir, based on Kashmiriyat, or the synthesis of the region’s Buddhist, Vedantic and Sufi traditions, became a communal issue, and Kashmiri Pandits were targeted as a result. To restate: this terrorism had regional and local political undercurrents and expressed itself in the language of religion.

Hamas has a different mechanism as far as its roots and origins are concerned. The Zionists initially declared an intention to settle in Palestine but began to appropriate the land. Further, they blocked any democratic expressions of resistance of Palestinians. It kept expanding the areas under occupation to the extent that, through two major expansions, its existing hyper-representation in the land (55% of land for 30% Jews) expanded the occupation to nearly 90% of Palestine.

Zionists are occupiers who constantly try to extend their hold over the Palestinian lands. They resort to ancient holy books to claim that Palestine is their land and they are its chosen people. Their expansionism has reduced the Gaza Strip to an “open prison” and forced the West Bank Arabs to live with tremendous hardships.

These three phenomena—Palestine, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban—are propagated as being due to Islamic terrorism. Nothing could be more myopic than this deliberate propaganda about ‘Islamic terrorism’ that the United States media has expounded in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. This propaganda allowed the United States to invade Afghanistan, where it killed 60,000 people. Its oil hunger led it to attack Iraq on the pretext that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction”, which it did not have. They repeatedly claimed that Iraqis would welcome the invasion of their country and greet the invading army “with flowers and chocolates”. Instead, Iraqis resisted, and the Islamic State was eventually born.

The Mumbai terror attacks were also an outcome of sour Indo-Pak relations. As the army dominated Pakistan and was influenced by the United States, it harboured terrorist groups like the Lashkar e Taiba, which the Pakistan Army used to drive a wedge between Pakistan and India. As Pakistan’s civil leadership initiated some peace manoeuvres, the generals, uncomfortable with peace efforts, would unleash trouble—as when Pervez Musharraf occupied Kargil and later came the 26/11 attack.

The 26/11 attack also led to the murder of Karkare, who was investigating terrorism cases from Malegaon to the Samjhauta Express, in which the likes of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Swami Aseemanand, and Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit were arrested. Sadhvi is still on bail in the Malegaon blast case and once said she had given a "shraap" or curse to Karkare.

While remembering the 26/11 tragedy of Mumbai and the killing of ordinary innocents and police personnel is very important, to think that it was due to religion is off the mark. To club all these geopolitical developments as ‘boundary-less religious extremism’ that is Islamic in nature serves the goals of imperialist nations and their allies who have wrought havoc in West Asia, particularly by training Al Qaeda. 

The media must go deeper into these developments instead of taking recourse to propaganda or easy ‘answers’ in blaming Muslims and Islam. Terrorism is not a religious but a political phenomenon with a range of instances from the Irish Republican Army to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and innumerable others.

The author is a human rights activist. The views are personal.