Sunday, June 27, 2010
LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
What stakes Times of India has in Zakir Naik or Islam, to pose the questions to Muslims, if he is an asset or a liability for Islam?
Times of India, Mumbai’s print edition has never been known to harbour any sympathy for Indian Muslims, Islam and Muslim world. Time and again it has blackened its pages with stark calumnies against Muslims. The British Government’s ban on Zakir Naik’s scheduled visit to UK after the new Jewish Prime Minister David Cameron took over the Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition, has given Times of India another opportunity to play its dirty news and views management game to malign and de-legitimize the rampant anti-western sentiments that are natural to all Muslims around the world over America’s illegal and brutal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the massacres of millions of innocent Muslim civilians, men, women and children. America and its allies who are helping in these murderous forays into weekly defended Muslim nations are in fact guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Times of India, becomes a willing tool to spread US propaganda over its ‘war against terror’ media campaign without having any moral standard to justify the invasions per se. It chooses to demonise the victimize Muslims and side with the aggressors, all for the possible benefit of financial bonanza.
In the article: The controversial PREACHER (TOI, June 27, 2010), TOI’s favourite hatchet man, Mohammed Vajihuddin, gathers the usual suspects from among the Left-liberals who are on the very fringe of Indian Muslim mainstream and who are known to be cowards not standing up to take the heat over acknowledging the crux of the whole matter and rather fashion their slick comments on tangential matters about Zakir Naik’s personality, his past and his worldwide popular following, to conveniently ignore the 800 pound gorilla of US imperialist menace looming large even on India’s own midst, setting and imposing its own agenda on the supposedly democratic nation, that elects an oligarchic cabal of politicians to perpetuate the new reign of democratic feudalism.
Times of India cannot fool the people that the war on terror is a legitimate war being fought over religious divide and while the West is clean, the Muslim nations are dirty. It may be TOI’s own communal bias that is getting better of its editorial judgment. The issue that should be addressed whether the West has not invaded two UN member nations, on spurious pretexts, but in fact in a concerted and well-publicized campaign (Remember Neo-con American Century plans) to control and usurp their oil wealth and other vital strategic resources of the Third World, especially the Middle East and Central Asia. The Islamisation of the legitimate resistance, in whichever form it is coming forth from a fragmented and weak polity of the third world countries, so holistically targeted by the brute force of world’s only superpower, is a fraud designed to preempt any religious backlash that is not being seen coming in any menacing proportion. The panic that minor incidents of amateurish bombings in Western cities are no comparison with the devastation unleashed by US and British forces in Iraq, and US, UK and other EU countries in Afghanistan. It is not a coincidence that the German President had to resign, when he admitted that his nation’s participation in Afghan has nothing to do with hunting Al-Qaida, but to secure strategic interest in that country. He severely dented America’s propaganda around the world that they are in Afghanistan hunting for Al Qaida. New York Times story of trillions of dollar worth of mining of precious metals further puts stamp on the greedy imperialist designs of the western marauders.
Times of India, underestimates its readership’s intelligence when it plays on the always running under-current of communal prejudices in Indian polity and thus is guilty of dividing the nation on communal lines, while openly supporting and sympathizing with Western imperialist agenda.
Knowledgeable people are not blind to the dirty game played by a few writers in TOI’s Mumbai editorial board with or without the owners’ approval.
Times of India’s hatchet job against Dr. Zakir Naik has wider linkages and it is time India’s more sober and mature media, place the wider perspective in public domain.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com
www.GhulamMuhammed.Blogspot.com
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http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Daily/skins/TOINEW/navigator.asp?Daily=TOIM&showST=true&login=default&pub=TOI&AW=1277618133453
PROFILE
The controversial PREACHER
Is Dr Zakir Naik, who has been refused entry into two foreign countries, an asset or a liability for Islam?
Mohammed Wajihuddin
TNN
At the crowded press conference in Mumbai after his exclusion order by the UK government last week, Islamic preacher-televangelist Dr Zakir Naik appeared a man badly stung. When asked if the UK ban had given him a megaphone to advertise his “victimisation’’ by the Islamophobic West, Dr Naik said he didn’t crave publicity. But the smirk on his face, as he enunciated this, said it all. The televangelist was enjoying the unprecedented media attention the ban had earned him.
While the controversial preacher suns in the publicity—he was subsequently banned from entering Canada too—many ardent followers of Islam talk about the “disservice’’ he is doing to the religion. Naik may rubbish this as yet another attempt to malign him, as he did after the British government’s June 16 exclusion order which pronounced his scheduled visit to the UK as “not conducive to the public good’’. But the fact is that barring the band of Muslims whose bruised egos Naik suitably massages through his Islam supremacist talks, most rational Muslims and non-Muslims find his brand of Islam a travesty of the faith.
One of the reasons for the UK ban on Naik is a gem he once uttered when asked whether Osama bin Laden was a terrorist: he said that since he didn’t know him personally, he couldn’t say whether Osama was a terrorist or a saint. His other comment was, “I tell Muslims that every Muslim should be a terrorist. Terrorist means a person who terrorises. When a robber sees a policeman he’s terrified. So for a robber, a policeman is a terrorist. So in this context every Muslim should be a terrorist to the robber...Every Muslim should be a terrorist to each and every anti-social element.’’
Scholars are unimpressed. “A police officer is authorised by the state to create terror among anti-social elements. Who has authorised Muslims or civilians of any faith to terrorise criminals?,’’ asks veteran scholar Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, whose mission is dawah (spreading Islam’s message). “Dawah, which Naik also claims to be engaged in, is to make people aware of the creation plan of God, not to peddle some provocative, dubious ideas as Naik does,’’ he adds.
The Maulana attempts an explanation for the popularity of Naik, who claims he has delivered 1,300 public talks across the world and has a following of 150 million. “In the past few centuries, Muslims have lost empires across the world. Even spiritually the community has degenerated, practising political instead of spiritual Islam. The wave of Islamophobia in the aftermath of 9/11 and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have only added to the Muslims’ sense of injury. In such a situation, when a debater like Zakir Naik, in eloquent English, takes on preachers of other faiths and defeats them during debates, the Muslims’ chests puff with pride,’’ the Maulana explains. A community nursing a huge sense of betrayal and injustice naturally lionises anyone who gives it a sense of pride. Never mind if it’s false pride.
Liberal Islamic scholar Asghar Ali Engineer, while opposing the ban on Naik’s visit to the UK as undemocratic, finds faults with his conduct. Engineer recently watched Naik on Peace TV, a channel whose legality in India is questionable as it is yet to be registered with the I&B ministry. “The way he moved to the opulent stage to deliver his talk, the laudatory introduction his brother Dr Mohammed Naik gave him and the aggressive style of his speech left me wondering if I was watching a preacher or an arrogant orator,’’ he says.
Urdu columnist Sajid Rashid first met Naik two decades ago when the latter had just completed his MBBS from Mumbai University. Rashid and everybody who knows a bit about Naik’s rise as a preacher say he is a clone of India-born South African Islamic apologist-preacher Ahmed Deedat (1918-2005). During the last year of his MBBS course, Naik heard Deedat at a conference in Mumbai. Mesmerised by his grasp over the Bible and the Quran, he resolved to become the Ahmed Deedat of India.
Rashid reminisces about a multi-faith dialogue held at the Bombay Union of Journalists hall at Fort in the ’80s. “Dr Naik, who had reached the venue with his videographers, spoke last and tried to demolish all other faiths, claiming that Islam alone was Allah’s chosen path,” he says. “The hall shuddered in disbelief. I could sense the birth of a famous future Islamic supremacist preacher.”
The Wahabi-Salafist brand of Islam, bankrolled by petro-rich Saudi Arabia and propagated by preachers like Naik, does not appreciate the idea of pluralism. But Muslims must ponder over a question: Is Dr Zakir Naik an asset or a liability for Islam?
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Was British Colonial management more accommodative and less cruel than the US invasions for world’s resources? - By Ghulam Muhammed
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Was British Colonial management more accommodative and less cruel than the US invasions for world’s resources?
In as much as US forays into Middle East and West Asia, is directly related to American Jewish Neo-con’s theorizing about the New American Century and how US can use its newly find uni-polar super power and its immense armed resources to corner world’s resources, just to sustain its own extravagant and credit ridden economy, there are signs that its neo-colonialism has transformed into a monstrous vehicle of Zionist subjugation of the world that has entirely different dimensions than the 18th century colonialism of say the British kind. A comparative study would bring out the most grotesque nature of hijacking of a great nation with high ideals of freedom, human rights and justice as its founding principals by unscrupulous Zionist operators, deeply embedded in the US polity and now even in UK and Europe. It is not a coincidence that the Prime Minister of UK and the President of France are both Jewish and have an abiding commitment to promote the New Zionist World Order, with as much relentless cruelty and inhuman blood-shedding, that the European history is already lagging behind in comparison as far as bloodshed in wars are concerned.
The New York Times’ ‘startling’ disclosure of Afghanistan’s immense resources are nothing but the captive media’s contribution to the neo-con driven agenda’s need to calm the detractors at home in the US, who want American troops to pull out. The neo-con Jewish planners have projected the bogey of ‘clash of civilization’ and 9/11, just to find a convenient excuse to hoodwink American people who may not be as greedy as the gnomes of Wall Street, to send out American boys to fight un-winnable wars in distant land which cannot be sustained except through imposing a long term colonial rule on foreign lands. While the American soldiers are dying in the war fronts of Iraq and Iran, the money grabbers at home, were busy milking the US economy of as much moolah, as the system can carry and/or till it collapsed and they will reap further fortunes for reestablishing the tottering financial markets. The same robbers will become whitewashed as saviors.
Even if there are no moral standards applied to the inhumanity of colonial system of world governance, it would appear that the British colonialism was least in a hurry of loot and scoot than the US would appear to be. A fine example is how British have managed Persian/Arabian Gulf emirates by judiciously overcoming their initial distrust and apprehension and quietly transforming the whole region into an area of prosperity and peace. British were able to ensure security in the Gulf with a small but efficient presence in just a small emirate of Bahrain. One night’s journey for a small contingent from the British fleet from Bahrain to Kuwait and Iraq’s Abdul Kareem Qasim pulled back his blanket over his head and went to sleep. British san British Jewry were most efficient and unobtrusive in bringing regime changes in the Gulf. The favourite method was to send the ruler out for medical tests while a new ruler took over in blood less palace coup. In contrast, US cannot manage the ‘security’ without having thousands of forces in all locations from Saudia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar that create the sense of most oppressive imperialist control over the area in a post colonial era. A regime change by the US in Saudia was engineered through an assassin.
Obama has worked on the systems with a longer term reforms in mind. He should come out with new institutions that will demote armed forces and make them subservient to diplomatic initiatives around the world. Hillary does not have to warn nations against ‘consequences’ in public. Let all understand and observe the rules of the game. May be the age of media and communication will find clients other than the unscrupulous politicians and warmongers of the world. And people will live in peace, real or imagined.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
Reading the Riot Act - By Arati R. Jerath - The Times of India - The Crest Edition
http://epaper.timesofindia.
Reading the Riot Act |
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Bikini or headscarf -- which offers more freedom? - By Krista Bremer , O, The Oprah Magazine
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/
Bikini or headscarf -- which offers more freedom?
By Krista Bremer, O, The Oprah Magazine
June 9, 2010 -- Updated 1609 GMT (0009 HKT)
Krista Bremer holds her daughter Aliya in the scarf the child decided she wanted to wear
(OPRAH.com) -- Nine years ago, I danced my newborn daughter around my North Carolina living room to the music of "Free to Be...You and Me", the '70s children's classic whose every lyric about tolerance and gender equality I had memorized as a girl growing up in California.
My Libyan-born husband, Ismail, sat with her for hours on our screened porch, swaying back and forth on a creaky metal rocker and singing old Arabic folk songs, and took her to a Muslim sheikh who chanted a prayer for long life into her tiny, velvety ear.
She had espresso eyes and lush black lashes like her father's, and her milky-brown skin darkened quickly in the summer sun. We named her Aliya, which means "exalted" in Arabic, and agreed we would raise her to choose what she identified with most from our dramatically different backgrounds.
I secretly felt smug about this agreement -- confident that she would favor my comfortable American lifestyle over his modest Muslim upbringing. Ismail's parents live in a squat stone house down a winding dirt alley outside Tripoli. Its walls are bare except for passages from the Quran engraved onto wood, its floors empty but for thin cushions that double as bedding at night.
My parents live in a sprawling home in Santa Fe with a three-car garage, hundreds of channels on the flat-screen TV, organic food in the refrigerator, and a closetful of toys for the grandchildren.
I imagined Aliya embracing shopping trips to Whole Foods and the stack of presents under the Christmas tree, while still fully appreciating the melodic sound of Arabic, the honey-soaked baklava Ismail makes from scratch, the intricate henna tattoos her aunt drew on her feet when we visited Libya. Not once did I imagine her falling for the head covering worn by Muslim girls as an expression of modesty.
Last summer we were celebrating the end of Ramadan with our Muslim community at a festival in the parking lot behind our local mosque. Children bounced in inflatable fun houses while their parents sat beneath a plastic tarp nearby, shooing flies from plates of curried chicken, golden rice, and baklava.
Aliya and I wandered past rows of vendors selling prayer mats, henna tattoos, and Muslim clothing. When we reached a table displaying head coverings, Aliya turned to me and pleaded, "Please, Mom -- can I have one?"
She riffled through neatly folded stacks of headscarves while the vendor, an African-American woman shrouded in black, beamed at her. I had recently seen Aliya cast admiring glances at Muslim girls her age.
I quietly pitied them, covered in floor-length skirts and long sleeves on even the hottest summer days, as my best childhood memories were of my skin laid bare to the sun: feeling the grass between my toes as I ran through the sprinkler on my front lawn; wading into an icy river in Idaho, my shorts hitched up my thighs, to catch my first rainbow trout; surfing a rolling emerald wave off the coast of Hawaii. But Aliya envied these girls and had asked me to buy her clothes like theirs. And now a headscarf.
In the past, my excuse was that they were hard to find at our local mall, but here she was, offering to spend ten dollars from her own allowance to buy the forest green rayon one she clutched in her hand. I started to shake my head emphatically "no," but caught myself, remembering my commitment to Ismail. So I gritted my teeth and bought it, assuming it would soon be forgotten.
That afternoon, as I was leaving for the grocery store, Aliya called out from her room that she wanted to come.
A moment later she appeared at the top of the stairs -- or more accurately, half of her did. From the waist down, she was my daughter: sneakers, bright socks, jeans a little threadbare at the knees. But from the waist up, this girl was a stranger. Her bright, round face was suspended in a tent of dark cloth like a moon in a starless sky.
"Are you going to wear that?" I asked.
"Yeah," she said slowly, in that tone she had recently begun to use with me when I state the obvious.
On the way to the store, I stole glances at her in my rearview mirror. She stared out the window in silence, appearing as aloof and unconcerned as a Muslim dignitary visiting our small Southern town -- I, merely her chauffeur.
I bit my lip. I wanted to ask her to remove her head covering before she got out of the car, but I couldn't think of a single logical reason why, except that the sight of it made my blood pressure rise. I'd always encouraged her to express her individuality and to resist peer pressure, but now I felt as self-conscious and claustrophobic as if I were wearing that headscarf myself.
In the Food Lion parking lot, the heavy summer air smothered my skin. I gathered the damp hair on my neck into a ponytail, but Aliya seemed unfazed by the heat. We must have looked like an odd pair: a tall blonde woman in a tank top and jeans cupping the hand of a four-foot-tall Muslim. I drew my daughter closer and the skin on my bare arms prickled -- as much from protective instinct as from the blast of refrigerated air that hit me as I entered the store.
As we maneuvered our cart down the aisles, shoppers glanced at us like we were a riddle they couldn't quite solve, quickly dropping their gaze when I caught their eye.
In the produce aisle, a woman reaching for an apple fixed me with an overly bright, solicitous smile that said "I embrace diversity and I am perfectly fine with your child." She looked so earnest, so painfully eager to put me at ease, that I suddenly understood how it must feel to have a child with an obvious disability, and all the curiosity or unwelcome sympathies from strangers it evokes.
At the checkout line, an elderly Southern woman clasped her bony hands together and bent slowly down toward Aliya. "My, my," she drawled, wobbling her head in disbelief. "Don't you look absolutely precious!" My daughter smiled politely, then turned to ask me for a pack of gum.
In the following days, Aliya wore her headscarf to the breakfast table over her pajamas, to a Muslim gathering where she was showered with compliments, and to the park, where the moms with whom I chatted on the bench studiously avoided mentioning it altogether.
Later that week, at our local pool, I watched a girl only a few years older than Aliya play Ping-Pong with a boy her age. She was caught in that awkward territory between childhood and adolescence -- narrow hips, skinny legs, the slightest swelling of new breasts -- and she wore a string bikini.
Her opponent wore an oversize T-shirt and baggy trunks that fell below his knees, and when he slammed the ball at her, she lunged for it while trying with one hand to keep the slippery strips of spandex in place. I wanted to offer her a towel to wrap around her hips, so she could lose herself in the contest and feel the exhilaration of making a perfect shot.
It was easy to see why she was getting demolished at this game: Her near-naked body was consuming her focus. And in her pained expression I recognized the familiar mix of shame and excitement I felt when I first wore a bikini.
At 14, I skittered down the halls of high school like a squirrel in traffic: hugging the walls, changing direction in midstream, darting for cover. Then I went to Los Angeles to visit my aunt Mary during winter break. Mary collected mermaids, kept a black-and-white photo of her long-haired Indian guru on her dresser, and shopped at a tiny health food store that smelled of patchouli and peanut butter. She took me to Venice Beach, where I bought a cheap bikini from a street vendor.
Dizzy with the promise of an impossibly bright afternoon, I thought I could be someone else -- glistening and proud like the greased-up bodybuilders on the lawn, relaxed and unself-conscious as the hippies who lounged on the pavement with lit incense tucked behind their ears. In a beachside bathroom with gritty cement floors, I changed into my new two-piece suit.
Goose bumps spread across my chubby white tummy and the downy white hairs on my thighs stood on end -- I felt as raw and exposed as a turtle stripped of its shell. And when I left the bathroom, the stares of men seemed to pin me in one spot even as I walked by.
In spite of a strange and mounting sense of shame, I was riveted by their smirking faces; in their suggestive expressions I thought I glimpsed some vital clue to the mystery of myself. What did these men see in me -- what was this strange power surging between us, this rapidly shifting current that one moment made me feel powerful and the next unspeakably vulnerable?
I imagined Aliya in a string bikini in a few years. Then I imagined her draped in Muslim attire. It was hard to say which image was more unsettling. I thought then of something a Sufi Muslim friend had told me: that Sufis believe our essence radiates beyond our physical bodies -- that we have a sort of energetic second skin, which is extremely sensitive and permeable to everyone we encounter. Muslim men and women wear modest clothing, she said, to protect this charged space between them and the world.
Growing up in the '70s in Southern California, I had learned that freedom for women meant, among other things, fewer clothes, and that women could be anything -- and still look good in a bikini. Exploring my physical freedom had been an important part of my process of self-discovery, but the exposure had come at a price.
Since that day in Venice Beach, I'd spent years learning to swim in the turbulent currents of attraction -- wanting to be desired, resisting others' unwelcome advances, plumbing the mysterious depths of my own longing.
I'd spent countless hours studying my reflection in the mirror -- admiring it, hating it, wondering what others thought of it -- and it sometimes seemed to me that if I had applied the same relentless scrutiny to another subject I could have become enlightened, written a novel, or at least figured out how to grow an organic vegetable garden.
On a recent Saturday morning, in the crowded dressing room of a large department store, I tried on designer jeans alongside college girls in stiletto heels, young mothers with babies fussing in their strollers, and middle-aged women with glossed lips pursed into frowns. One by one we filed into changing rooms, then lined up to take our turn on a brightly lit pedestal surrounded by mirrors, cocking our hips and sucking in our tummies and craning our necks to stare at our rear ends.
When it was my turn, my heart felt as tight in my chest as my legs did in the jeans. My face looked drawn under the fluorescent lights, and suddenly I was exhausted by all the years I'd spent doggedly chasing the carrot of self-improvement, while dragging behind me a heavy cart of self-criticism.
At this stage in her life, Aliya is captivated by the world around her -- not by what she sees in the mirror. Last summer she stood at the edge of the Blue Ridge Parkway, stared at the blue-black outline of the mountains in the distance, their tips swaddled by cottony clouds, and gasped. "This is the most beautiful thing I ever saw," she whispered. Her wide-open eyes were a mirror of all that beauty, and she stood so still that she blended into the lush landscape, until finally we broke her reverie by tugging at her arm and pulling her back to the car.
At school it's different. In her fourth-grade class, girls already draw a connection between clothing and popularity. A few weeks ago, her voice rose in anger as she told me about a classmate who had ranked all the girls in class according to how stylish they were.
I understood then that while physical exposure had liberated me in some ways, Aliya could discover an entirely different type of freedom by choosing to cover herself.
I have no idea how long Aliya's interest in Muslim clothing will last. If she chooses to embrace Islam, I trust the faith will bring her tolerance, humility, and a sense of justice -- the way it has done for her father. And because I have a strong desire to protect her, I will also worry that her choice could make life in her own country difficult. She has recently memorized the fatiha, the opening verse of the Quran, and she is pressing her father to teach her Arabic. She's also becoming an agile mountain biker who rides with me on wooded trails, mud spraying her calves as she navigates the swollen creek.
The other day, when I dropped her off at school, instead of driving away from the curb in a rush as I usually do, I watched her walk into a crowd of kids, bent forward under the weight of her backpack as if she were bracing against a storm. She moved purposefully, in such a solitary way -- so different from the way I was at her age, and I realized once again how mysterious she is to me.
It's not just her head covering that makes her so: It's her lack of concern for what others think about her. It's finding her stash of Halloween candy untouched in her drawer, while I was a child obsessed with sweets. It's the fact that she would rather dive into a book than into the ocean -- that she gets so consumed with her reading that she can't hear me calling her from the next room.
I watched her kneel at the entryway to her school and pull a neatly folded cloth from the front of her pack, where other kids stash bubble gum or lip gloss. Then she slipped it over her head, and her shoulders disappeared beneath it like the cape her younger brother wears when he pretends to be a superhero.
As I pulled away from the curb, I imagined that headscarf having magical powers to protect her boundless imagination, her keen perception, and her unself-conscious goodness. I imagined it shielding her as she journeys through that house of mirrors where so many young women get trapped in adolescence, buffering her from the dissatisfaction that clings in spite of the growing number of choices at our fingertips, providing safe cover as she takes flight into a future I can only imagine.
Krista Bremer is the winner of a 2008 Pushcart Prize and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She is associate publisher of the literary magazine The Sun, and she is writing a memoir about her bicultural marriage
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