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?
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