Thursday, December 10, 2009

Mountains and minarets - By Ian Buruma - GUARDIAN.Co. UK



Of Mountains And Minarets


Ian Buruma writes: 

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



"Those soaring minarets, those black headscarves, are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith."

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


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Mountains and minarets

Minarets are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith
Switzerland has four mosques with minarets and a population of 350,000 nominal Muslims, mostly Europeans from Bosnia and Kosovo, of whom about 13% regularly go to prayer. Not a huge problem, one might have thought. Yet 57.5% of Swiss voters opted in a referendum for a constitutional ban on minarets, allegedly because of worries about "fundamentalism" and the "creeping Islamisation" of Switzerland.
Are the Swiss more bigoted than other Europeans? Probably not. Referendums are a measure of popular gut feelings, rather than considered opinion, and popular gut feelings are rarely liberal. Referendums on this issue in other European countries might well produce startlingly similar results.
To attribute the Swiss vote to ban minarets – an idea that was promoted by the right-wing Swiss People's Party, but by none of the other political parties – to "Islamophobia" is perhaps to miss the point. To be sure, a long history of mutual Christian-Muslim hostility, and recent cases of radical Islamist violence, have made many people fearful of Islam in a way that they are not of Hinduism, say, or Buddhism. And the minaret, piercing the sky like a missile, is easily caricatured as a fearsome image.
But if the Swiss and other Europeans were self-assured about their own identities, their Muslim fellow-citizens probably would not strike such fear in their hearts. And that might be the problem. It was not so long ago that the majority of citizens in the western world had their own unquestioned symbols of collective faith and identity. The church spires that grace many European cities still meant something to most people. Few people married outside their own faith.
Until recently, too, many Europeans believed in their kings and queens, flew their national flags, sang their national anthems, were taught heroic versions of their national histories. Home was home. Foreign travel was for soldiers, diplomats, and rich people. "Identity" was not yet seen as a problem.
Much has changed, thanks to global capitalism, European integration, the stigmatisation of national feeling by two catastrophic world wars, and, perhaps most importantly, the widespread loss of religious faith. Most of us live in a secular, liberal, disenchanted world. The lives of most Europeans are freer now than ever before. We are no longer told what to do or think by priests or our social superiors. When they try, we tend not to take any notice.
But there has been a price to pay for our newly liberated world. Freedom from faith and tradition has not always led to greater contentment, but, on the contrary, to widespread bewilderment, fear, and resentment. While demonstrations of collective identity have not entirely disappeared, they are largely confined to football stadiums, where celebration (and disappointment) can quickly boil over in violence and resentment.
Populist demagogues blame political, cultural, and commercial elites for the anxieties of the modern world. They are accused, not entirely without reason, of imposing mass immigration, economic crisis, and loss of national identity on ordinary citizens. But if the elites are hated for causing our modern malaise, theMuslims are envied for still having faith, for knowing who they are, for having something that is worth dying for.
It is unimportant that many European Muslims are just as disenchanted and secular as their non-Muslim fellow-citizens. It is the perception that counts. Those soaring minarets, those black headscarves, are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith.
It is not surprising that anti-Muslim populism has found some of its most ferocious supporters among former leftists, for they, too, have lost their faith – in world revolution, or whatnot. Many of these leftists, before their turn to revolution, came from religious backgrounds. So they suffered a double loss. In their hostility to Islam, they like to talk about defending "Enlightenment values," whereas in fact they lament the collapse of faith, whether religious or secular.
There is, alas, no immediate cure for the kind of social ills exposed by the Swiss referendum. The Pope has an answer, of course. He would like people to return to the bosom of Rome. Evangelical preachers, too, have a recipe for salvation. Neo-conservatives, for their part, see the European malaise as a form of typical Old World decadence, a collective state of nihilism bred by welfare states and soft dependence on hard American power.Their answer is a revived western world, led by the United States, engaged in an armed crusade for democracy.
But, unless one is a Catholic, a born-again Christian, or a neo-con, none of these visions is promising. The best we can hope for is that liberal democracies will muddle through this period of unease – that demagogic temptations will be resisted, and violent impulses contained. After all, democracies have weathered worse crises in the past.
That said, it would surely help if we had fewer referendums. For, contrary to what some believe, they do not strengthen democracy. They weaken it by undermining our elected representatives, whose job is to exercise their good judgment rather than voice the gut feelings of an anxious, angry people.
• Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.

Babri Masjid demolition was planned: Liberhan - By Vidya Subrahmaniam - THE HINDU - Chennai -INDIA




http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article53941.ece

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Babri Masjid demolition was planned: Liberhan

VIDYA SUBRAHMANIAM


A file photo of kar sevaks trying to hoist a VHP'ssaffron flag atop the dome of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.

Justice M. S. Liberhan had submitted his findings to the government on June 30 this year after an inquiry spanning nearly 17 years. The report recommends a law providing for exemplary punishment for misusing religion to acquire political power.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid was planned, systematic, and was the intended outcome of a climate of communal intolerance deliberately created by the Sangh Parivar and its sister affiliates, including the Bharatiya Janata Party.
This is the key finding of the nearly 1000-page-long report of the one-man Liberhan Commission on the catastrophic events of December 6, 1992.
The report places individual culpability for the demolition on a total of 68 persons, the bulk of them drawn from the extended Parivar clan comprising the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and the BJP. The BJP contingent includes not just Hindutva ideologues Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manhohar Joshi, but, surprisingly, also the party’s celebrated moderate face, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Cataclysmic circumstances
Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan reserves the brunt of his searing commentary for then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh, under whose watch the 16th century mosque met its calamitous end: “Kalyan Singh, his Ministers and his hand-picked bureaucrats created man-made and cataclysmic circumstances which could result in no consequences other than the demolition of the disputed structure… They denuded the State of every legal, moral and statutory restraint and wilfully enabled and facilitated the wanton destruction and the ensuing anarchy.”
Justice Liberhan, who took 16 years and six months to compile the meticulously assembled report — comprising 16 chapters including conclusions and recommendations, besides maps, an afterword and a list of witnesses — is unsparing of the BJP’s central leadership, calling the triumvirate of Mr. Vajpayee, Mr. Advani and Mr. Joshi pseudo-moderates who constantly “protested their innocence and denounced the events of December 6.”
However, says the judge, “having analysed many hours of audio and video recordings and having observed the witnesses, [the commission] is unable to hold even these pseudo-moderates innocent of any wrongdoings.”
Party to decisions
Justice Liberhan goes on to say, “It cannot be assumed even for a moment that L.K. Advani, A.B. Vajpayee or M.M. Joshi did not know the designs of the Sangh Parivar. Even though these leaders were deemed and used by the Parivar … to reassure the cautious masses, they were [in fact] party to the decisions which had been taken.”