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Monday, October 12, 2009
Kerala studies Islamic finance options - Arab News
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Times of India flashing of Pew Report on global Muslim population becomes Talk of the Nation - By Ghulam Muhammed
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Times of India flashing of Pew Report on global Muslim population becomes Talk of the Nation
Providentially it was Friday, the most auspicious day of the week for the Muslims, when India’s largest circulation daily newspaper, The Times of India came out with its report headlined: One in four people worldwide is Muslim.
Any news about Muslims, good or bad, in India can never be ignored. But thanks to constant propaganda by Hindutva Parivar about Muslims multiplying like rabbits and eventually taking over the world, if not India by the sheer number of its population; the newspaper readership in India made the news the most talked about news item in the nation. The dread of ‘the Muslims are coming’ seems to have gripped entire length and breadth of the nation with some unknown uncertain feeling of unease. A question seems to hit the most worried of the lot: how this will end. The stunning silence in the media, after publication of the report was ample sign that the entire nation is stunned into silence. At TOI website, not a single comment was posted by its readers.
On the other side, Indian Muslims gathered for Friday prayers, had nothing but the news item to discuss and congratulate each other. Indian Muslims are a forlorn lot. For the last 63 years, the Brahminical political strategies had virtually reduced 150 million of them to an unknown entity within their own country. Congress Brahmins were the most successful with keeping India Muslims on tenterhook and compel them to vote for it, with a combination of promises that are rarely fulfilled and touting of its pseudo –secularism, that guaranteed them physical protection, though hundreds of thousands of communal riots would clearly belie their secular bona fides.
A new topic of discussion following the population tally of the 3 sub-continental neighbours, India – Pakistan – Bangladesh coming up to a grand figure of 450 million, took up from where recently Jaswant Singh has started with his new evaluation of the role of Jinnah in India’s partition.
Indian Muslims are aware that even when British were playing its game over granting freedom of British India, those that passionately called for United India, within Muslim community were not insignificant and infinitesimal in numbers. With PEW figures, it is not hard to imagine, how Muslims would have fared in United India, with such a huge number and percentage dominating the nation in every sphere of its existence.
There is no qualms for some to speculate that Muslim unity was deliberately divided in the subcontinent, to render Muslims incapable of any political weightage in the new politics of democracy, especially when it comes to counting of heads.
It is in this perspective that Indian Muslims are once again forced to reiterate their belief that Jinnah had seriously erred in his judgment when he collaborated with the British and agreed to procure a ‘part of India’ for them to base their military outpost when India goes free.
Sixty year down the line, Pakistan is still in the grip of western strategies playing the Great Game.
The way the US-backed army has been humiliated in their own General Head Quarters in Rawalpindi, shows that both West and Jinnah have failed to grasp the real genius of the people of the region. There will never be peace in the region, until and unless the people are masters of their own destiny and not sold out to the interest of the Western colonization.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Network of Militants Is Robust After Mumbai Siege - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/
Network of Militants Is Robust After Mumbai Siege
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
An Indian soldier took cover as the Taj Mahal hotel burned during a gun battle between Indian military and militants inside the hotel in Mumbai in November 2008.
Mohsin Raza/Reuters
Hafiz Saeed in May.
Michael Kamber for The New York Times
A Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is said to have organized the Mumbai attacks in Millat Town, a suburb of Karachi. Hammad Amin Sadiq, described in a Pakistani dossier as a committed militant, was seen by neighbors riding around the streets on his motorbike.
Roshan Mughal/Associated Press, 2008
Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, center, known as the chief of operations for Lashkar, is among those the Pakistani authorities have arrested.
Sebastian D’souza/Mumbai Mirror, via Associated Press, 2008
According to an Indian document, Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving gunman, implicated Hafiz Saeed in the Mumbai attack.
Roshan Mughal/Associated Press
Pakistani authorities have arrested seven men linked to the Mumbai attack, including Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi.
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Indian and Pakistani dossiers on the Mumbai investigations, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times, offer a detailed picture of the operations of a Lashkar network that spans Pakistan. It included four houses and two training camps here in this sprawling southern port city that were used to prepare the attacks.
Among the organizers, the Pakistani document says, was Hammad Amin Sadiq, a homeopathic pharmacist, who arranged bank accounts and secured supplies. He and six others begin their formal trial on Saturday in Pakistan, though Indian authorities say the prosecution stops well short of top Lashkar leaders.
Indeed, Lashkar’s broader network endures, and can be mobilized quickly for elaborate attacks with relatively few resources, according to a dozen current and former Lashkar militants and intelligence officials from the United States, Europe, India and Pakistan.
In interviews with The Times, they presented a troubling portrait of Lashkar’s capabilities, its popularity in Pakistan and the support it has received from former officials of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment.
Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligencedirectorate, or ISI, helped create Lashkar two decades ago to challenge Indian control in Kashmir, the disputed territory that lies at the heart of the conflict between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
Pakistani officials say that after Sept. 11, 2001, they broke their contacts with the group. No credible evidence has emerged of Pakistani government involvement in the Mumbai attacks, according to an American law enforcement official.
But a senior American intelligence official said the ISI was believed to maintain ties with Lashkar. Four Lashkar members, interviewed individually, said only a thin distance separated Lashkar and the ISI, bridged by former ISI and military officials.
One highly placed Lashkar militant said the Mumbai attackers were part of groups trained by former Pakistani military and intelligence officials at Lashkar camps. Others had direct knowledge that retired army and ISI officials trained Lashkar recruits as late as last year.
“Some people of the ISI knew about the plan and closed their eyes,” said one senior Lashkar operative in Karachi who said he had met some of the gunmen before they left for the Mumbai assault, though he did not know what their mission would be.
The intelligence officials interviewed insisted on anonymity while discussing classified information. The current and former Lashkar militants did not want their names used for fear of antagonizing others in the group or Pakistani authorities.
But by all accounts Lashkar’s network, though dormant, remains alive, and the possibility that it could strike India again makes Lashkar a wild card in one of the most volatile regions of the world.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they were created by the bloody partition of British India in 1947. Whether they begin again the long journey toward peace or find themselves eyeball to eyeball, nuclear arms at the ready, depends in no small measure on the actions of this shadowy group.
A new attack could reverberate widely through the region and revive nagging questions about Pakistan’s commitment to stamp out the militant groups that use its territory.
It could also dangerously complicate the Obama administration’s efforts in Afghanistan. Success there depends in part on avoiding open conflict between India and Pakistan, so that Pakistan’s military can focus on battling the Taliban insurgents who base themselves in Pakistan.
Even so, American diplomatic efforts to improve India-Pakistan relations have been stillborn. So delicate is the Kashmir issue that Indian officials bridle at any hint of American mediation.
Meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the two sides failed to restart talks last weekend, with India demanding greater steps by Pakistan to prosecute those responsible for the Mumbai attacks.
The dossiers show that at the level of the police, the two countries can cooperate, and have exchanged DNA evidence, photographs and items found with the attackers to piece together a detailed portrait of the Mumbai plot.
But the files are laced with barbs and recriminations, reflecting the increasingly acid tenor of their relations. Despite pledges to work together to fight terrorism, the Pakistani and Indian intelligence services are not on speaking terms, according to officials in both countries and the United States.
The gaps heighten the risks of a new attack substantially, American officials fear.
“The only cooperation we have with the Pakistanis is that they send us their terrorists, who kill our people, and we kill their terrorists,” a senior Indian intelligence official said in an interview.
Asked how much his agency communicated with its Indian counterpart, a senior Pakistani intelligence official made an O with his thumb and forefinger.
“Zero,” he replied.
Brazen Planning
The Pakistani investigation concludes “beyond any reasonable doubt” that it was Lashkar militants who carried out the Mumbai attacks, preying on their victims in a train station, two five-star hotels, a cafe and a Jewish center over three days starting last Nov. 26.
According to testimony by the only surviving attacker, Ajmal Kasab, 22, Lashkar recruits were vetted and trained around the country, including at well-established camps in Muzaffarabad, in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, as well as in Mansehra, in North-West Frontier Province.
A core group, the 10 chosen for the Mumbai assault, was eventually moved to Karachi and its suburbs, where the real drilling began and where Pakistani investigators later retraced the plotters’ steps.
Beginning as early as May 2008, the group trained and planned brazenly while living in various neighborhoods in and around Karachi. They made scores of calls using cellphones, some with stolen numbers, starting in August. They set up voice lines over the Internet.
At one water sports shop, they bought inflatable boats, air pumps, life jackets and engines. One of their training camps, with five thatched rooms and a three-room house, was located near a creek, where they conducted water drills in the open.
The police later recovered an abundance of evidence: militant literature, pocket diaries, spent and live ammunition, empty gun magazines, life vests and receipts for supplies, including distributed weapons and explosives, the Pakistani dossier says.
At the other camp, which they named Azizabad, the group and their trainers set up a classroom.
Using handwritten manuals, the recruits were trained how to use cellphones to keep in contact with their handlers during the attack. They pored over detailed maps of the Indian coastline, plotting the course they would take to Mumbai. They learned how to use global positioning devices.
Working from Millat Town, a dusty, middle-class Karachi suburb on the eastern edge of the city, Mr. Sadiq organized the cadre. Neighbors described him as quiet and pious, riding around the streets with his two young sons perched on his motorbike. The Pakistani dossier says he was a committed Lashkar militant.
In an interview, his uncle, Lala Yasin, said the same thing, adding proudly that Mr. Sadiq was willing to do anything to liberate Kashmir from India’s grip.
“Lashkar-e-Taiba does not kill people without reason,” Mr. Yasin said at his home in Karachi, a few blocks from where his nephew planned the Mumbai attacks.
“It is the champion of jihad,” he explained. “Muslims are like a body and if one part of your body is aching, the entire body may be jeopardized.”
A Limited Crackdown
Pakistani authorities have arrested seven men linked to the Mumbai attack, including Mr. Sadiq and Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a man well known as the chief of operations for Lashkar. They are searching for at least 13 other suspects.
But their investigation has come up short of the founder of Lashkar, Hafiz Saeed, the man Indian and Western officials accuse of masterminding the attacks.
In June, a Pakistani court freed Mr. Saeed from detention, declaring that it did not have enough evidence to hold him.
Under continuing pressure, Pakistani authorities this month confined his movements once again. But they say they have no new evidence against him.
Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister, said that there was simply not enough evidence to charge Mr. Saeed with a crime, and that all the evidence pointed to Mr. Lakhvi as the mastermind.
“Lakhvi was the head, and that is why he has been taken into custody,” Mr. Malik said in an interview. “He has been charged and now they are all under trial.”
Indian officials say they have sent Pakistan a six-page summary of evidence of Mr. Saeed’s complicity in the Mumbai attacks, a copy of which was given to The Times. The document, based on India’s own intelligence and testimony from Mr. Kasab, quotes Mr. Saeed giving detailed instructions to the group that carried out the attack.
“One Hindustani boat has to be hijacked for going to Bombay from Karachi,” the document says, using Mumbai’s former name. Mr. Saeed also told the group that it should aim to begin the assault around 7:30 p.m.
“At this hour there is considerable crowd at the places of our target,” the document quotes him as saying.
Pakistani officials and legal experts say the evidence is not as clear-cut as India says. The case against Mr. Saeed rests almost entirely on the testimony of Mr. Kasab, the surviving attacker, and serious questions remain about the way the Indian police obtained his statements, they say.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the organization Mr. Saeed now leads, bills itself as a charity and denies any links with Lashkar. Abdur Rahman Makki, Mr. Saeed’s deputy and brother-in-law, called any accusations against Mr. Saeed baseless.
“I do not think that there is anything left to talk about after the High Court’s decision that Hafez Saeed has no link to the Mumbai incident,” he said in an interview.
Yet he was not shy about admitting that Mr. Saeed, a fiery preacher, regularly exhorted young people to fight in Kashmir. “Hafiz Saeed always speaks and discusses about the jihad that is mentioned in the Holy Koran,” Mr. Makki said. “Not only Pakistanis, any Muslim has the duty to support the oppressed Kashmiris.”
All parts of India where Muslims are a majority must be freed, he said.
Meanwhile, despite promises to crack down on terrorists, Pakistan’s government has taken few concrete steps.
The former director of Pakistan’s elite national investigative force was appointed to lead the country’s new counterterrorism body in January. But it took seven months to get any money to get the agency moving, and only now is it beginning to hire staff members and flesh out its mission, law enforcement officials said.
Cracking down on Lashkar and other groups linked to the Kashmir struggle, and who do not explicitly seek to overthrow Pakistan’s government, was not urgent, they said.
“I have many other things that are higher priority now,” said one senior police official in Punjab, the province where DNA tests pinpointed the families of the Mumbai attackers, according to the dossier. “Why would a case in Mumbai be so important when Pakistan is the front line of the war on terror?”
Links to Intelligence Agencies
For Pakistani authorities, the political problems posed by arresting Mr. Saeed, or undertaking a broader crackdown on Lashkar, may outstrip the legal ones.
The organization and its cause — to “free” Kashmir — remain close to the hearts of the Pakistani public as well as the military and intelligence establishment.
Since the Mumbai attacks, “our funds increased and more people wanted to join us,” a senior Lashkar operative in Karachi said in an interview. A midlevel ISI officer told The Times this year that Lashkar’s membership extended to 150,000 people.
Despite official denials, Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, maintains links to Lashkar, though the current level of support remains murky, according to the senior American intelligence official interviewed by The Times, as well as Pakistani analysts, retired military officials and former Lashkar members.
“Hafiz Saeed is the army’s man,” said Najam Sethi, an analyst and newspaper editor in Lahore, Pakistan. He and other analysts said the ISI was in no hurry to discard a group it helped create for a covert war against India.
“They have not abandoned it altogether,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a military analyst in Lahore. “It is not a total reversal; it is a realization that this is not advisable at this time.”
Senior ISI officials disputed the view. While acknowledging that the ISI had worked closely with Lashkar-e-Taiba in the past, they said things were different now.
“Prior to 9/11, we had a very strong contact with L.E.T., even on the leadership level,” one senior Pakistani intelligence official said in an interview. “But after 9/11, we broke our contacts with not only L.E.T. but also the Taliban.”
“Today we think that it would have been better if we had not cut our ties with them the way we did,” the official added, “so that we could control them more.”
A senior Lashkar militant said the group was divided — with the operational wing, led by Mr. Lakhvi, chafing for more attacks on India, and the spiritual wing, led by Mr. Saeed, advocating a more cautious approach.
The senior Pakistani intelligence official said that some within Lashkar might aspire to a more ambitious agenda, and suggested that parts of the group might have acted on their own.
“Lashkar went rogue,” the Pakistani intelligence official said. “Perhaps L.E.T. or dissident factions wanted to emerge as a global player,” like Al Qaeda.
New Attacks Expected
Even as new details emerge about the Mumbai attacks, senior American military, intelligence and counterterrorism officials express grim certainty that Lashkar is plotting new attacks.
The United States warned Indian officials this year about a Mumbai-style attack by Lashkar against multiple sites in India, according to a senior Defense Department official and a senior American counterterrorism official.
The counterterrorism official said the information, gleaned from electronic intercepts and other sources, was not specific and apparently did not result in any arrests. But it was significant enough for American officials to alert their Indian counterparts.
“There were indications of possible terrorist activity in the run-up to the Indian elections,” in May, “and that information was shared promptly with Indian officials,” said the counterterrorism official.
Pakistani officials, however, say they have been kept in the dark. “We heard that the Americans have warned the Indians that something in Mumbai might happen, but no one informed us,” a senior Pakistani intelligence official said.
If there is one thing on which intelligence agencies on both sides of the border agree, it is that the consequences of a new attack by Lashkar could be devastating.
“We do fear that if something like Mumbai happens in India again, there might be a military reaction from the Indian side and it could trigger into a war,” said a senior intelligence official in Pakistan.
“Right now we cannot guarantee that it will not happen again, because we do not have any control over it.”
Monday, September 28, 2009
The steady rise of Islamic finance - BBC - By Emily Buchanan and Bhasker Solanki
Page last updated at 12:01 GMT, Wednesday, 23 September 2009 13:01 UK |
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Printable versionThe steady rise of Islamic finance | |||||
London has become one of the biggest centres for Islamic finance in the world, with five Islamic banks, and many others in the high street offering Islamic financial products, or "windows" as they are known. The growth of Islamic finance has been an unexpected outcome of the attacks on the World Trade Center of 11 September 2001. Islamic finance is based on rules from Islam's holy texts - the Koran. Scholars claim the fundamental difference to conventional banking is that Islamic finance is more ethical. First it bans any form of "riba" or interest, preventing consumers being exploited by high rates of borrowing. 'Sinful' Secondly, it regards speculative trading as sinful. One of the world's leading experts on Islamic finance, Sheikh Hussain Hassan, argues the whole crisis in Western banking could have been avoided if these basic sharia principles had been followed. He said: "$600 trillion were wasted on options, futures and derivatives, all gambling. Sharia prohibited these kind of risks 14 centuries back."
Some Muslims regard ordinary mortgages as sinful. The idea is for the lender and the borrower to share the risk. There are now more products on the market which help Muslims buy a house without paying interest. The most common form of Islamic home purchase loan works like this: When a couple wants to buy a house, instead of borrowing the money, the Islamic bank buys 80% of the house for them. The couple puts down a deposit for the other 20% and then pays the bank rent, plus regular portions of the capital. During the fixed period, ownership gradually passes from the bank to the buyer. But if the borrower loses his job and defaults on the payments, under sharia law it is very difficult for the family to be thrown out of their home, as that would be seen as a creditor exploiting a debtor. These interest-avoiding transactions can work on a bigger scale as well. Farmida Bi explains why London is now attracting Muslim investment The old Chelsea Barracks in London was bought by the Qatari government for nearly £1bn - the biggest residential property deal in the UK. The entire transaction was done under sharia pinciples, with contracts drawn up by lawyers at Norton Rose. Farmida Bi, one of the law firm's partners, explained that London has attracted this kind of investment because the British government wooed Islamic money in the wake of 9/11, at the expense of the US. "It was really September 11th that made being a Muslim a political statement and not just a matter of personal faith," she said. "And with the Patriot Act, which made investments in the US difficult for many Islamic investors, there was a significant increase in Islamic investors choosing to invest in Islamic institutions and Islamic products." So while groups in the US were investigating terrorist connections with Islamic banks, Muslim investors pulled their money out of America. Some of the money got diverted to London, which had traditionally been a banking centre. The British government then helped further by changing regulations to give sharia-compliant funds a level playing field with conventional ones.
A spokesperson for the Financial Services Authority, the body which regulates UK financial services, said: "We have a policy of no obstacles and no special favours towards Islamic banking, or indeed any new financial company." The desire of British Muslim consumers to affirm their identity is also leading to a growth in new consumer services. Salaam Insurance has launched Europe's first sharia-compliant car insurance aimed at Britain's 700,000 Muslim drivers. Bradley Brandon-Cross, its non-Muslim chief executive, finds most Muslims do not yet understand the profit and loss sharing principles of "takaful" that it is based on. "There's clearly an education campaign we are undertaking for British Muslims, to help them understand what Islamic finance is and what it means for them," he said. Critics say the Islamic character of the products is merely window dressing to lure in Muslim customers. And others argue the scholars who authorise them are a narrow group whom financial institutions choose to support their new services. But this scepticism is unlikely to halt the inexorable growth of Islamic finance - as big investors and growing numbers of Muslim consumers demand it. | |||||
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