The international Mosque imbroglio - By Ghulam Muhammed

Monday, September 06, 2010

The international Mosque imbroglio

Much that US writers would prefer to localize the issue of Mosque at Ground Zero, or anywhere else on mainland US, there is a wider perspective that cannot be ignored if the drift of events have to be forewarned and foretold.

As I see it, the Mosque problem starts with Al Aqsa Mosque that is believed to be built over the Jewish Temple, destroyed by Romans. The Wall is still there for all the world Jewry to remind that there was once a grand Temple there. The Jews are reasonably aspiring to rebuild the old temple, preferably at the same site. The problem is that the site is now occupied for over a 1000 years by a Mosque that is the third most sacred Mosque for 1.5 billion Muslims of the world, after that of Mecca and Medina Harams(Mosque). The Aqsa Mosque was Muslim's first Qibla, the direction to which they faced while praying five times a day. Even though in 1967, Jordan lost control of the site, the city of Jerusalem; the holy sites of the 3 Abrahamanical religions are internationally recognized as disputed land. Short of getting outright and full effective control of the Al Aqsa Mosque, Israelis have to do with all kinds of ruse to make life difficult for Muslims of the city so that they should hopefully, eventually, leave the place and let Jews built its old Temple. That just is not possible in these times and age. Israel has big power, but it cannot withstand the backlash if any damaged to Al Aqsa Mosque is even rumored. Enter conspiracies. Jewish conspirators had spotted that India too has a similar case of a Mosque having been built supposedly on a site widely believed to be the site of the birth of Hindu avatar/God Ram. A doctoral thesis from US was sent over to L. K. Advani, a onetime Home Minister of a coalition government led by the extremist Hindutva politic0-religious group, who took the doctoral strategies to heart and converted 'aggression over the Mosque to translate into political power'. L. K. Advani, in one of his interviews with The Economic Times, has publicly acknowledged receiving the blue-print and adopted it to raise a grand nation-wide campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid. A big conspiracy between the two major political parties, allowed over a lakh of rabble-rouser to demolish the 500 year old structure, though in fact through implosions inside the old Mosque that caved in just like the two World Trade Center Buildings, all in heap and dust. The world media made it out that it was the sole work of demolition by an enraged mob, the Kar Sevaks. The civil suit over the ownership of the 500 year site is in the court for last decade and over, and a ruling is expected this month, September 16, 2010, probably. Big trouble is expected. But the political consideration in India may preclude major disaster, as that will deeply damage the ruling Congress Party's prospects in the coming general elections.

Zoom away from India and focus on Ground Zero. Nobody knows whose idea it was to build an 'Islamic Center' or Mosque near Ground Zero. An educated guess is that it has something to do with Democratic Party's effort to reclaim US goodwill with Muslim World, severely eroded during Bush/Cheney period. Imam Rauf is in full cooperation with US State Department and had made trips abroad pumping for US overtures to Muslim World. Naturally, all this is anathema to Republicans in general and American Jewish Neo-Cons in particular. They have wasted no time in making a big scandal about the Mosque project with a view to reposition Republicans once again in mainstream public gaze. The political fight between Democrats and Republicans has made Muslims a reluctant scapegoat and they have to assert their rights as American citizens to avail of the full freedom of religion.

It is worth noting, that in all the 3 centers of conflicts, Al Aqsa, Babri and Ground Zero, the legal land rights are all with the Muslims.

The media and mass agitation is organized and mobilized, especially by Jewish proxies, to scare Muslims in giving up their legitimate rights.

Both in India and in Jerusalem, Muslims have not given in to the arm-twisting. One hopes that American Muslims too would stand up for their constitutional rights and not be cowed down by the organized mob actions unleashed by their detractors.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

<http://www.ghulammuhammed.blogspot.com>

A clash between two Americas over the Ground Zero Mosque - BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA - THE FREE PRESS JOURNAL

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

THE FREE PRESS JOURNAL

A clash between two Americas over the Ground Zero Mosque



The battle between the lofty embellishments of Republicanism and populist democracy has re- surfaced in the passionate controversy over the proposed construction of an Islamic Centre, better known as Ground- Zero Mosque, on a site a stone’s throw from where the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre stood till that horrible September 11 morning.

BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA

IN an essay published in 1985, Irving Kristol, the ‘godfather of the Neoconservative movement’, quoted a political scientist as saying American democracy is based on one key assumption: “that the people are usually sensible, but rarely wise.” The American system of government, with its elaborate checks and balances and separation of powers, he contended, was geared towards ensuring that the popular will would ultimately prevail.

The operative term was “ultimately”. “ Short of the ultimate”, Kristol wrote, “ the Founders thought it appropriate that popular sentiments should be delayed in their course, refracted in their expression, revised in their enactment, so that a more deliberate public opinion could prevail over a transient public opinion.” Kristol was addressing a debate then raging in the US over school prayer and crime and liberal fears of a rampaging populism that would brush aside the principles on which the Republic had been founded. The debate, in any case, was not new. Throughout its history, the US has led a schizoid existence. Till the defeat of the southern Confederacy in the Civil War, its lofty espousal of freedom jarred against the reality of slavery; and till President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights legislation, some Americans could well have been said to be more equal than others.

Nor was it a case of some white bigots in the southern states violating the enlightened principles that shaped the US Constitution.

Dixieland’s resistance to the complete abolition of slavery was based on the principle that individual states of the Republic had a right to choose their own course of action, unhindered by Federal intrusiveness and Yankee notions of correctness. Both sides in the Civil War could fall back on both public opinion and the Constitution.

The dispute was, quite predictably, settled by force- not merely in the battlefield of Gettysburg but again a hundred years later in Birmingham, Alabama, when federal forces were dispatched to escort a handful of scared Black students to a de- segregated school.

The battle between the lofty embellishments of Republicanism and populist democracy has re- surfaced in the passionate controversy over the proposed construction of an Islamic Centre, better known as Ground- Zero Mosque, on a site a stone’s throw from where the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre stood till that horrible September 11 morning. Coming in the wake of the mid- term elections to the US Congress, the controversy has escalated into a clash between two Americas- one which ostensibly swears by the Constitution and one which waves the Flag.

If the editorial columns of the ‘ respectable’ media are any indication, it is a simple battle between ( pro- mosque) enlightenment and ( anti- mosque) bigotry.

The former has the unequivocal backing of intellectuals, the First Amendment and critical endorsements from President Barak Obama and the Mayor of New York.

The latter may be burdened by the philological clumsiness of Sarah Palin, the Islamophobia of Newt Gingrich and absence from the soirées of Manhattan, but it has the endorsement ( or so the polls say) of nearly two- thirds of America. This has been compelling enough, particularly in an election year, for Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and New York Governor David Paterson to call for a review of the project. The force of public indignation against Cordova House, as the Islamic Centre will be called, was also sufficient to transform Obama’s categorical support at the White House "iftar" into evasive waffle a day later, prompting one writer to dub him a “ stubborn man without conviction”. On the face of it, the pro-mosque lobby is on strong grounds. The US Constitution allows every citizen the unhindered right to both preach and practice faith, without any interference from the state. The rigid separation of state and faith, which was originally intended to forestall any partiality to or discrimination against non- conformist Christian sects, has now come to the aid of a religion that is outside the Judaeo- Christian framework. The universalism of their Constitution has now come to haunt Americans.

The opposition to Cordova House isn’t based on a challenge to the constitutional right of Muslims to build either a mosque or a community centre. The issue is the alleged ‘ insensitivity’ ( some would say provocation) of building it so close to a place where 3,000 people were killed by terrorists claiming to speak for Islam. Would it be proper, ask the sceptics, to build a Japanese war memorial at Pearl Harbour? The promoters of the project have claimed that Cordova House is aimed at promoting inter- faith understanding. However, this has been greeted by scepticism on account of a history of Islamic triumphalism and the tendency of Muslim rulers in distant lands to build a mosque to commemorate a victory. Regardless of the intentions of the Imam in charge of the project, and even his reputation as an authority on Sufism, the fear is that sooner or later the building will come to symbolise a victory monument and become a hub of Islamist extremism. Sinister meaning has even been attached to the use of Cordova, a city that once symbolised Islam’s inroads into the Christian world.

Curiously, one facet of the controversy appears to be troubling both the liberal, non- Muslim supporters of the mosque and their flag- waving opponents. Both fear that whatever the final outcome, the controversy will sharpen the polarisation between Islam and the West and have a negative impact on US foreign policy in the Islamic world. The fear is justified although, ironically, the debate over Cordova House is only peripherally a tussle between Islam and America. The controversy is really another chapter in the battle between the Republic and democracy.

Americans, a historian presciently observed, “ Americans erected their constitutional roof before they put up their national walls... and the Constitution became a substitute for a deeper kind of national identity.” The problem was initially addressed by two filters: the first by an enforced compromise between the brash ‘ frontier spirit’ and lofty ‘ aristocratic’ values, and secondly, by forcing newcomers into a melting pot of Judaeo- Christian values. However, the evolution of the American ‘ nation’ appears to have been derailed by the emergence of a new, disparate America which may in time resemble an ethnic menagerie, bound by a Constitution that was written with a relatively cohesive society in mind.

The groundswell from below over the Ground Zero sacrilege constitutes the spirited protest of an older and somewhat endangered ‘ national identity’ which appeared to have been subsumed by the Obama landslide of 2008 but is actually alive and kicking. It is basically a plea to the governing elites - where the liberal self- image counts for too much - to not allow permissiveness to override common decencies.

A mosque overlooking the scene of the 9/ 11 won’t reinforce America’s image as a haven of enlightened tolerance; it may set it apart as a country unable to distinguish between right and wrong.

Willaim Dalrymple's NYT article - Muslims in the middle - falls in the muddle

Thursday, August 19, 2010


Letter to the editor

The New York Times, NY, NY
editorial@nytimes.com.

RE: Willaim Dalrymple's article - Muslims in the middle

William Dalrymple has missed the point by writing about the Sufis and differences in Islamic communities. He should have focused on the bigger picture of how 9/11 is being converted into a new religion promoted by Republicans and American Neo-con. If there is no quarter granted to Islam itself, what defending Sufism can achieve against the die hard mischief mongers who are bent on hijacking the mosque issue to de-legitimize the entire Muslim Americans' very existence in the US. A scholar like him, should have realized if the situation requires defending Islam/Sufism or focusing on the menacing agenda of the fascist forces that are on the ascendant in America.

Dalrymple writes: The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan.

So far so good! However, his analysis of differences in both sides misses the 800 pound gorilla in the discussion, as to the motive of such virulent and vigorous confrontation. When he writes that if Bush had known about the finer details of the fractures in Muslim polity, he naively believes that Bush has invaded Iraq for reasons other than for its oil resources. Bush can fool the entire world, but if an intelligent scholar like Dalrymple too falls for Bush propaganda, other mortals must be excused.

Ghulam Muhammed

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

-------------------------------------------------

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/opinion/17dalrymple.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all


Op-Ed Contributor


The Muslims in the Middle

By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Published: August 16, 2010

comments (319)
New Delhi

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.

Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors.

Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion.

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.

While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.

This was only the latest in a series of assaults against Pakistan’s Sufis. In May, Peeru’s Cafe in Lahore, a cultural center where I had recently performed with a troupe of Sufi musicians, was bombed in the middle of its annual festival. An important site in a tribal area of the northwest — the tomb of Haji Sahib of Turangzai, a Sufi persecuted under British colonial rule for his social work — has been forcibly turned into a Taliban headquarters. Two shrines near Peshawar, the mausoleum of Bahadar Baba and the shrine of Abu Saeed Baba, have been destroyed by rocket fire.

Symbolically, however, the most devastating Taliban attack occurred last spring at the shrine of the 17th-century poet-saint Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass in northwest Pakistan. For centuries, the complex has been a place for musicians and poets to gather, and Rahman Baba’s Sufi verses had long made him the national poet of the Pashtuns living on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “I am a lover, and I deal in love,” wrote the saint. “Sow flowers,/ so your surroundings become a garden./ Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet./ We are all one body./ Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.”

THEN, about a decade ago, a Saudi-financed religious school, or madrasa, was built at the end of the path leading to the shrine. Soon its students took it upon themselves to halt what they see as the un-Islamic practices of Rahman Baba’s admirers. When I last visited it in 2003, the shrine-keeper, Tila Mohammed, described how young students were coming regularly to complain that his shrine was a center of idolatry and immorality.

“My family have been singing here for generations,” he told me. “But now these madrasa students come and tell us that what we do is wrong. They tell women to stay at home. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they just encounter more problems.”

Then, one morning in early March 2009, a group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn and placed dynamite packages around the squinches supporting the shrine’s dome. In the ensuing explosion, the mausoleum was destroyed, but at least nobody was killed. The Pakistani Taliban quickly took credit, blaming the shrine’s administrators for allowing women to pray and seek healing there.

The good news is that Sufis, though mild, are also resilient. While the Wahhabis have become dominant in northern Pakistan ever since we chose to finance their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, things are different in Sindh Province in southern Pakistan. Sufis are putting up a strong resistance on behalf of the pluralist, composite culture that emerged in the course of a thousand years of cohabitation between Hinduism and Islam.

Last year, when I visited a shrine of the saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in the town of Sehwan, I was astonished by the strength and the openness of the feelings against those puritan mullahs who criticize as heresy all homage to Sufi saints.

“I feel that it is my duty to protect both the Sufi saints, just as they have protected me,” one woman told me. “Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is heresy. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the prophet.”

There are many like her; indeed, until recently Sufism was the dominant form of Islam in South Asia. And her point of view shows why the West would do well to view Sufis as natural allies against the extremists. A 2007 study by the RAND Corporation found that Sufis’ open, intellectual interpretation of Islam makes them ideal “partners in the effort to combat Islamist extremism.”

Sufism is an entirely indigenous, deeply rooted resistance movement against violent Islamic radicalism. Whether it can be harnessed to a political end is not clear. But the least we can do is to encourage the Sufis in our own societies. Men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should be embraced as vital allies, and we should have only contempt for those who, through ignorance or political calculation, attempt to conflate them with the extremists.





William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.”

Build that mosque - Economist

http://www.economist.com/node/16743239



Lexington

Build that mosque

The campaign against the proposed Cordoba centre in New York is unjust and dangerous

Aug 5th 2010


WHAT makes a Muslim in Britain or America wake up and decide that he is no longer a Briton or American but an Islamic “soldier” fighting a holy war against the infidel? Part of it must be pull: the lure of jihadism. Part is presumably push: a feeling that he no longer belongs to the place where he lives. Either way, the results can be lethal. A chilling feature of the suicide video left by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the band that killed more than 50 people in London in July, 2005, was the homely Yorkshire accent in which he told his countrymen that “your” government is at war with “my people”.

For a while America seemed less vulnerable than Europe to home-grown jihadism. The Pew Research Centre reported three years ago that most Muslim Americans were “largely assimilated, happy with their lives… and decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes.” Since then it has become clear that American Muslims can be converted to terrorism too. Nidal Malik Hassan, born in America and an army major, killed 13 of his comrades in a shooting spree at Fort Hood. Faisal Shahzad, a legal immigrant, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square. But something about America—the fact that it is a nation of immigrants, perhaps, or its greater religiosity, or the separation of church and state, or the opportunities to rise—still seems to make it an easier place than Europe for Muslims to feel accepted and at home.

It was in part to preserve this feeling that George Bush repeated like a scratched gramophone record that Americans were at war with the terrorists who had attacked them on 9/11, not at war with Islam. Barack Obama has followed suit: the White House national security strategy published in May says that one way to guard against radicalisation at home is to stress that “diversity is part of our strength—not a source of division or insecurity.” This is hardly rocket science. America is plainly safer if its Muslims feel part of “us” and not, like Mohammad Sidique Khan, part of “them”. And that means reminding Americans of the difference—a real one, by the way, not one fabricated for the purposes of political correctness—between Islam, a religion with a billion adherents, and al-Qaeda, a terrorist outfit that claims to speak in Islam’s name but has absolutely no right or mandate to do so.

Why would any responsible American politician want to erase that vital distinction? Good question. Ask Sarah Palin, or Newt Gingrich, or the many others who have lately clambered aboard the offensive campaign to stop Cordoba House, a proposed community centre and mosque, from being built in New York two blocks from the site of the twin towers. Every single argument put forward for blocking this project leans in some way on the misconceived notion that all Muslims, and Islam itself, share the responsibility for, or are tainted by, the atrocities of 9/11.

In a tweet last month from Alaska, Ms Palin called on “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the “ground-zero mosque” because it would “stab” American hearts. But why should it? Cordoba House is not being built by al-Qaeda. To the contrary, it is the brainchild of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a well-meaning American cleric who has spent years trying to promote interfaith understanding, not an apostle of religious war like Osama bin Laden. He is modelling his project on New York’s 92nd Street Y, a Jewish community centre that reaches out to other religions. The site was selected in part precisely so that it might heal some of the wounds opened by the felling of the twin towers and all that followed. True, some relatives of 9/11 victims are hurt by the idea of a mosque going up near the site. But that feeling of hurt makes sense only if they too buy the false idea that Muslims in general were perpetrators of the crime. Besides, what about the feelings, and for that matter the rights, of America’s Muslims—some of whom also perished in the atrocity?

Ms Palin’s argument does at least have one mitigating virtue: it concentrates on the impact the centre might have, without impugning the motives of those who want to build it. The same half-defence can be made of the Anti-Defamation League, a venerable Jewish organisation created to fight anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. To the dismay of many liberal Jews, the ADL has also urged the centre’s backers to seek another site in order to spare the feelings of families of the 9/11 victims. But at least it concedes that they have every right to build at this site—and that they might (only might, since the ADL hints at vague concerns about their ideology and finances) genuinely have chosen it in order to send a positive message about Islam.

The Saudi non-sequitur

No such plea of mitigation can be entered on behalf of Mr Gingrich. The former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives may or may not have presidential pretensions, but he certainly has intellectual ones. That makes it impossible to excuse the mean spirit and scrambled logic of his assertion that “there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. Come again? Why hold the rights of Americans who happen to be Muslim hostage to the policy of a foreign country that happens also to be Muslim? To Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second. Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.

Mr Gingrich also objects to the centre’s name. Imam Feisal says he chose “Cordoba” in recollection of a time when the rest of Europe had sunk into the Dark Ages but Muslims, Jews and Christians created an oasis of art, culture and science. Mr Gingrich sees only a “deliberate insult”, a reminder of a period when Muslim conquerors ruled Spain. Like Mr bin Laden, Mr Gingrich is apparently still relitigating the victories and defeats of religious wars fought in Europe and the Middle East centuries ago. He should rejoin the modern world, before he does real harm.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington

[This article attracted 448 comments from readers.]