Gaza: The Killing Zone - Israel/Palestine

The true history of the Koran in America By Ted Widmer - The Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/12/the_true_history_of_the_koran_in_america/?page=full

People of the book

The true history of the Koran in America

By Ted Widmer

September 12, 2010

Nine years later, we are still haunted by Sept. 11, and in some ways it’s getting worse. All summer, a shrill debate over whether to build a mosque near the Ground Zero site was fueled by pundits on the right, who drummed up a chorus of invective that made it impossible to focus on the modest facts of the case. Then in the days leading up to the 11th, a church in Gainesville, Fla., sparked a firestorm — almost literally — by inviting Christians to come by on the anniversary for a ceremonial burning of the Koran. The Dove World Outreach Center — a misnomer if ever there was one — has made a cottage industry of its Islam-bashing, promoting its old-fashioned hate crusade with the most modern weapons — YouTube, podcasts, Facebook, and blogs (“Top Ten Reasons to Burn a Koran”).

Obviously, this was an act of naked self-promotion as much as a coherent statement about religion. Its instigator, the church’s pastor, Terry Jones, based his crusade on a series of mind-bending assumptions, including his belief that Muslims are always in bad moods (he asks, on camera, “Have you ever really seen a really happy Muslim?”). But for all of its cartoonish quality, and despite his cancellation under pressure Thursday, the timing of this media circus has been a disaster for US foreign policy and the troops we ask to support it. At the exact moment that we want to act as the careful steward of peace in the Middle East, minds around the world have been filled with the image of Korans in America being tossed onto pyres.

For better or worse, there is not much anybody can do about religious extremists who offend decency, yet stay within the letter of the law. The same Constitution that confirms the right to worship freely protects the right to worship badly. But September is also the anniversary of the 1787 document that framed our government, and in this season of displaced Tea Party anger, it is worth getting right with our history. There is nothing wrong with the desire to go back to the founding principles that made this nation great — but we should take the time to discover what those principles actually were.

For most Americans, the Koran remains a deeply foreign book, full of strange invocations. Few non-Muslims read it, and most of us carry assumptions about a work of scripture that we assume to be hostile, though it affirms many of the earlier traditions of Christianity and Judaism. Like all works of scripture, it is complex and sometimes contradictory, full of soothing as well as frightening passages. But for those willing to make a genuine effort, there are important areas of overlap, waiting to be found.

As usual, the Founders were way ahead of us. They thought hard about how to build a country of many different faiths. And to advance that vision to the fullest, they read the Koran, and studied Islam with a calm intelligence that today’s over-hyped Americans can only begin to imagine. They knew something that we do not. To a remarkable degree, the Koran is not alien to American history — but inside it.

No book states the case more plainly than a single volume, tucked away deep within the citadel of Copley Square — the Boston Public Library. The book known as Adams 281.1 is a copy of the Koran, from the personal collection of John Adams. There is nothing particularly ornate about this humble book, one of a collection of 2,400 that belonged to the second president. But it tells an important story, and reminds us how worldly the Founders were, and how impervious to the fanaticisms that spring up like dandelions whenever religion and politics are mixed. They, like we, lived in a complicated and often hostile global environment, dominated by religious strife, terror, and the bloodsport of competing empires. Yet better than we, they saw the world as it is, and refused the temptation to enlarge our enemies into Satanic monsters, or simply pretend they didn’t exist.

Reports of Korans in American libraries go back at least to 1683, when an early settler of Germantown, Pa., brought a German version to these shores. Despite its foreign air, Adams’s Koran had a strong New England pedigree. The first Koran published in the United States, it was printed in Springfield in 1806.

Why would John Adams and a cluster of farmers in the Connecticut valley have bought copies of the Koran in 1806? Surprisingly, there was a long tradition of New Englanders reading in the Islamic scripture. The legendary bluenose Cotton Mather had his faults, but a lack of curiosity about the world was not one of them. Mather paid scrupulous attention to the Ottoman Empire in his voracious reading, and cited the Koran often in passing. True, much of it was in his pinched voice — as far back as the 17th century, New England sailors were being kidnapped by North African pirates, a source of never ending vexation, and Mather denounced the pirates as “Mahometan Turks, and Moors and Devils.” But he admired Arab and Ottoman learning, and when Turks in Constantinople and Smyrna succeeded in inoculating patients against smallpox, he led a public campaign to do the same in Boston (a campaign for which he was much vilified by those who called inoculation the “work of the Devil,” merely because of its Islamic origin). It was one of his finer moments.

Other early Americans denounced Islam — surprisingly, Roger Williams, whom we generally hold up as a model of tolerance, expressed the hope that “the Pope and Mahomet” would be “flung in to the Lake that burns with Fire and Brimstone.” But Rhode Island, and ultimately all of New England, proved hospitable to the strangers who came in the wake of the Puritans — notably, the small Jewish congregation that settled in Newport and built Touro Synagogue, America’s oldest. And in theory — if not often in practice (simply because there were so few) — that toleration extended to Muslims as well.

This theory was eloquently expressed around the time the Constitution was written. One of its models was the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which John Adams had helped to create, and which, in the words of one of its drafters, Theophilus Parsons, was designed to ensure “the most ample of liberty of conscience” for “Deists, Mahometans, Jews and Christians.”

As the Founders deliberated over what types of people would ultimately populate the strange new country they were creating, they cited Muslims as an extreme of foreign-ness whom it would be important to protect in the future. Perhaps, they daydreamed, a Muslim or a Catholic might even be president someday? Like everything, they debated it. Some disapproved, but Richard Henry Lee insisted that “true freedom embraces the Mahometan and Gentoo [Hindu] as well as the Christian religion.” George Washington went out of his way to praise Muslims on several occasions, and suggested that he would welcome them at Mount Vernon if they were willing to work. Benjamin Franklin argued that Muslims should be able to preach to Christians if we insisted on the right to preach to them. Near the end of his life, he impersonated a Muslim essayist, to mock American hypocrisy over slavery.

Thomas Jefferson, especially, had a familiarity with Islam that borders on the astonishing. Like Adams, he owned a Koran, a 1764 English edition that he bought while studying law as a young man in Williamsburg, Va. Only two years ago, that Koran became the center of a controversy, when the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, asked if he could place his hand on it while taking his oath of office — a request that elicited tremendous screeches from the talk radio extremists. Jefferson even tried to learn Arabic, and wrote his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”

Jefferson and Adams led many of our early negotiations with the Islamic powers as the United States lurched into existence. A favorable treaty was signed with Morocco, simply because the Moroccans considered the Americans ahl-al-kitab, or “people of the book,” similar to Muslims, who likewise eschewed the idolatry of Europe’s ornate state religions. When Adams was president, a treaty with Tripoli (Libya) insisted that the United States was “not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion” and therefore has “no character of enmity against the laws, religion and tranquility of Mussulmen.”

There was another important group of Americans who read the Koran, not as a legal sourcebook, or a work of exoticism, but as something very different — a reminder of home. While evidence is fragmentary, as many as 20 percent of African-American slaves may have come from Islamic backgrounds. They kept their knowledge of the Koran alive through memory, or chanted suras, or, in rare cases, smuggled copies of the book itself. In the 1930s, when WPA workers were interviewing elderly African-Americans in Georgia’s Sea Islands, they were told of an ancestor named Bilali who spoke Arabic and owned a copy of the Koran — a remarkable fact when we remember that it was a crime for slaves to read. In the War of 1812, Bilali and his fellow Muslims helped to defend America from a British attack, inverting nearly all of our stereotypes in the process.

In 1790, as the last of the original 13 states embraced the Constitution, and the United States finally lived up to its name, George Washington visited that state — unruly Rhode Island — and its Jewish congregation at Newport. The letter he wrote to them afterwards struck the perfect note, and drained much of the antiforeign invective that was already poisoning the political atmosphere, only a year into his presidency. Addressing himself to “the children of the Stock of Abraham” (who, in theory, include Muslims as well as Jews), the president of the United States offered an expansive vision indeed:

“May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

For democracy to survive, it required consent; a willingness to surrender some bits of cultural identity to preserve the higher goal of a working community. Washington’s letter still offers a tantalizing prospect, especially as his successor turns from the distracting noise of Gainesville to the essential work of building peace in the Middle East, for all of the children of the Stock of Abraham.

Ted Widmer is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

 

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

AN OPEN LETTER TO SUDHEENDRA KULKARNI on his article: Kashmiriyat, Pakistaniyat and Indutva

AN OPEN LETTER TO SUDHEENDRA KULKARNI

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Dear Mr. Sudheendra Kulkarni,

This is refers to your Indian Express column: Thinking aloud – Sep 19, 2010:

Kashmiriyat, Pakistaniyat and Indutva

You have every right to present the historical facts as you read them and interpret them. However, it is sometimes important that you should keep your mind open to contrary opinions on the subject in discussion.

I have serious differences on your presentation of the facts.

You write:

For all his greatness and sterling service to the nation, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minister, failed to show the kind of steely firmness and statesman’s foresight that were required to effect the complete integration of the whole of Jammu & Kashmir with the rest of the Indian Union in 1947-48. His failure left behind an unfinished agenda of India’s Independence, which Pakistan cunningly interpreted as an unfinished agenda of India’s Partition. After all, Pakistan’s claim on Kashmir is nothing but an extension of the Two-Nation theory that carved it out as a separate Muslim nation. The theory was conceived by a communal mindset and successfully executed by causing a communal holocaust. And, truth to tell, Pakistan’s birth was mid-wifed by a colonial power that did not want to quit India before dividing it. India could not foil the triumph of this poisonous theory only because of the weaknesses of our national movement. We cannot have any excuse to let it triumph again.

GM writes:

I would question your idea of the unfinished business of partition.

If land grab was the unfinished business of partition, why Nehru and Congress leadership agreed to the partition of India in the first place?

 I would put it, that Congress leadership agreed to partition and the idea of throwing all Muslims out, so as to rule India with a free hand according to their own Idea of India.

(Others later, like Bhutto and even Mujeeb too were prepared to cede territory to rule their parcel of land, with a free hand.)

For Congress, the 30% Muslims in United India would have been constant headache.

When British colonialist insisted to partition India, as you correctly said, for their own reasons, as they wanted to hold on to their Indian connections in some way so as to safeguard their future strategic interests in the Great Game being played against emerging Soviet Russia and when Nehru refused to have any link with the Crown, British used Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan as an excuse to ‘keep a part for us’ (as Churchill advised Lord Wavell – refer to Narender Singh Sarila’s book: The Untold story of India’s partition).(Even Jinnah could not believe his sudden windfall. The partition proposal went through within a brief period from mid 1946 to August 1947.)

 Nehru and Patel were helpless in coming to terms with British and had to accede to British terms to gain independence for a ‘truncated India’.

They found merit in getting a cleansed India --- cleansed from a 30% Muslim presence in Indian armed forces and a proportionate presence in all security agencies. (Patel is reported to have got detractors on his side, by promising that in time, we will take back all area ceded to Pakistan. But that was just a ruse. Patel was aware that the land given to Jinnah had no resources to become a nation and it is only US and UK funding that propped that country.)

In all this monkey business, Muslim masses suffered. Their total strength of around 30% in Undivided India, in any democratic set-up would have given them the leverage to fashion India in a more multicultural Idea of India, than the Hindutva’s Idea of India, that Sunil Khilnani laid out.

You have tried to use Indutva, as a dishonest exercise to camouflage the Hindutva part of the fundamental formation. India for all practical purposes, is not a secular country, but a bigoted Hindu nation, that the 3% Brahmins have come to dominate and virtually own!.

The minority oligarchs are so entrenched that they were ripe for take over by stronger colonizing powers that were fully aware of the illegitimacy of Brahmin rule in India. The entry of US, through both Brajesh Mishra and Narasimha Rao, is most serious subversion of India and would once again make India a slave nation, in the full grip of western imperialists. And the greatest danger to the Brahmin hegemony will come from its ostracization of Muslims that will be picked up once again by the western colonialists to stage another big regime change in India. Once again they will resurrect a new Jinnah and through that vehicle rid Brahmins of their control on India. Brahmins will lose, but so will India.

 If history should teach any lessons to the people of India, especially to the ruling minority, it is to warn them against the repeat of the same partition game and force them to come to terms with Muslims and not marginalize them as they did prior to partition. Muslims will suffer, but India too could not remain what its will-wishers and nationalists would rightly aspire to.

In this context, India should move fast to redress the grievances of Kashmiri Muslims and try to put the Musharraf plan in immediate action, as that is the best vehicle to wipe out the mistakes of the past and open a new chapter for a new vigorous subcontinent, that can come up as a powerhouse, on its own volition, and not as a satrap for the fast deteriorating economies of the West, out to suck the blood of the less defended, so as to ensure their own survive. India united against the colonizer cannot continue to give a raw deal to 450 million Muslims of the sub-continent. It must think and plan on global scale and not remain shackled to its parochial and pathological compulsions.

By sabotaging Musharraf deal with Vajpayee, L. K. Advani will be remembered as the enemy no. 1 of India.

That man’s ego gets better of his judgment. Again and again he has succumbed to his narrow mindset and in fact weakened the foundations of India by his narrow-minded obsessions.  He should be last person to offer any objective advice on Kashmir.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

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

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/kashmiriyat-pakistaniyat-and-indutva/683658/0

Kashmiriyat, Pakistaniyat and Indutva

Sudheendra Kulkarni

Posted: Sun Sep 19 2010, 01:39 hrs

As India experiences yet another edition of a self-inflicted cyclical crisis in Kashmir, it is impossible not to be reminded of the profound truth of the Urdu couplet by Muzaffar Azmi: Yeh Jabr Bhi Dekha Hai Tareekh Ki Nazron Ne, Lamhon Ne Khata Ki Thi Sadiyon Ne Saza Payee (History is witness to mistakes that were committed in split seconds for which entire generations had to pay the price for centuries). For all his greatness and sterling service to the nation, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minister, failed to show the kind of steely firmness and statesman’s foresight that were required to effect the complete integration of the whole of Jammu & Kashmir with the rest of the Indian Union in 1947-48. His failure left behind an unfinished agenda of India’s Independence, which Pakistan cunningly interpreted as an unfinished agenda of India’s Partition. After all, Pakistan’s claim on Kashmir is nothing but an extension of the Two-Nation theory that carved it out as a separate Muslim nation. The theory was conceived by a communal mindset and successfully executed by causing a communal holocaust. And, truth to tell, Pakistan’s birth was midwifed by a colonial power that did not want to quit India before dividing it. India could not foil the triumph of this poisonous theory only because of the weaknesses of our national movement. We cannot have any excuse to let it triumph again.

As India grapples with the latest wave of separatist violence in Kashmir, it is important for our political establishment not to repeat the mistakes of the past. This means, above all, that the Congress party, which is India’s most important political party, must realise that the Nehru government’s original mistake helped Pakistan implant the virus of separatism in a section of the Kashmiri population. If this virus has survived, and become periodically more virulent, it is thanks mainly to the machinations of the military-Islamist alliance in Pakistan and, secondarily, to the mistakes committed by several governments in New Delhi and Srinagar.

It is perhaps too much to expect the Congress leadership to publicly acknowledge Nehru’s original mistake. But the nation certainly expects it to publicly declare that its government will never surrender before the demand of Kashmir’s secession in any form. The absence of such a categorical articulation of its resolve has created much confusion and concern in the minds of ordinary Indians, besides encouraging many vocal liberals in the media and public life (who are Congress supporters) to ask: “What’s wrong if Kashmir secedes? If Kashmiris want azaadi, why should we forcibly deny it to them?” Myopia of this kind will surely make India pay a higher price for safeguarding its national unity in the future than it has done so far.

Is there any philosophical, historical, social or cultural legitimacy for the demand for azaadi? None. On the contrary, Kashmiriyat, the so-called distinctive identity of Kashmir or the Idea of Kashmir which is routinely touted as the legitimiser of the demand for its independence from India, actually cements its unbreakable bond with India. Harmonious co-existence between Muslims and Hindus, and the spiritual-cultural syncretism between the two faiths, is the quintessence of Kashmiriyat. This syncretism has been celebrated by all the great personalities in Kashmir’s history—from its greatest Sufi mystic Sheikh Nooruddin (Nand Rishi), its greatest poetess Lal Ded (Lalleshwari), its greatest ruler Zain-ul-Abidin (Bud Shah), to its greatest 20th century poet Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor, who wrote: “Muslims are milk and Hindus sugar; Mix milk and sugar in sweet accord/As Kashmiris you share the same land, ethos; Don’t alienate one another for naught”.
But, then, what is so unique about this Idea of Kashmir? Isn’t equal respect for all faiths also the cornerstone of Indutva or the Idea of India? (I have deliberatively avoided using the term Hindutva, which has acquired restrictive and communal connotations.) The Idea of Kashmir, therefore, is nothing but a subset of the Idea of India. Indeed, both are the antithesis of Pakistaniyat. For it is the Idea of Pakistan—and also the Reality of Pakistan —that has denied dignified space for both non-Muslims and ‘minorities’ within the Muslim community. It will be the death knell for Kashmiriyat if it succumbs to Pakistaniyat.

At a time when there is a mountain of evidence to show that Pakistan-sponsored jihadi campaign has completely taken over the azaadi campaign in Kashmir, any weak-kneed response by the UPA government to this secessionist challenge would be disastrous. Those who are attacking our armed forces, and their mentors across the border who are plotting these attacks, must be dealt with in a manner adequate to the task of safeguarding India’s unity. Of course, the response of the governments in New Delhi and Srinagar should also be adequate to the task of alleviating the suffering of our sisters and brothers in Kashmir (including the displaced Kashmiri Pandits), as behoves a nation that protects and cares for all its people.

With unyielding firmness towards the enemy, active empathy towards our own brethren in Kashmir, and limitless perseverance that the mission of nation-building always demands, India will certainly succeed in defanging the evil snake of secessionism.

sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com

1 | Kashmir’s Forever War | Granta 112: Pakistan | Magazine | Granta Magazine

1 | Kashmir’s Forever War | Granta 112: Pakistan | Magazine | Granta Magazine

Hashim Ansari

The Man who says No to New Delhi - How defiance made Syed Ali Geelani relevant in Kashmir - By Mehboob Jeelani - CARAVAN Magazine, Delhi

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story.aspx?Storyid=464&StoryStyle=FullStory

The Man who says No to New Delhi
How defiance made Syed Ali Geelani relevant in Kashmir By MEHBOOB JEELANI Published :1 September 2010 PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMI SIVA Syed Ali Geelani on the grilled-in staircase in his home in south Srinagar. ON THE MORNING OF 12 JUNE 2010, Rubina Mattoo, a 40-year-old housewife, stood outside her two-storey house in Saida Kadal in central Srinagar. The neighbourhood was drowned in deafening wails. A grieving circle of family, relatives, and neighbours filled the lawn. A large procession of men walked in, carrying a wooden coffin. In it, Rubina’s slain son. She had cried through the long night, wailing, beating her chest, pulling her hair, and singing eulogies for her dead child. “Walo maine maharazoo (Come my beloved groom),” she cried, “maenz heath ha chesai payaraan (I am waiting for you with henna).” On 11 June, her 17-year-old son, Tufail Mattoo, an 11th standard student, was returning home from a private tutor when his head was hit by a tear-gas shell fired by police to quell a protest. A group of women stood on the Mattoos’ balcony, straining themselves for a glimpse, tears rolling down their faces. Across the lawn men carrying the coffin on their shoulders burst into chants: “We want freedom! Punish the murderers!” A group of Mattoo’s teenage friends stood sullen, silent; others, staring, prepared for the burial. Rubina couldn’t believe her son was dead. She kept repeating that a few days previous her son had chosen a car to buy. Tufail’s father, Muhammad Ashraf, looking dazed on the patio, was chewing his nails. “I was in Bombay,” Ashraf said, “I didn’t know I would come home to bury my son.” Kashmir exploded in anger. Thousands of young men took to the streets with rage in their steps in condemnation of the killing, shouting slogans of independence. Indian troops and police opened fire on them in response. Protests followed killings and killings followed protests. A curfew was imposed and defied. In the two months since Mattoo’s death, 60 young Kashmiri protesters have been killed by police and paramilitary bullets. As of 19 August, the last one to die was a nine-year-old boy who was shot at Harnag on 10 August in southern Kashmir’s Anantnag district. Doctors confirmed it was a bullet that pierced his skull and damaged his brain. The Jammu and Kashmir government dealt with the uprisings by using even more force. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah sought help from the army, who marched through the streets of Srinagar. But the resentment continued to burn. Kashmir resonated with the old refrain: Azadi!—Freedom. The boys continued to come out into the streets, defiant, with stones in their hands. The government found an unusual benefactor in the tense situation: the separatist hawk, Syed Ali Geelani. The Islamist patriarch is often taken into custody or put under house arrest—the police had arrested Geelani after Mattoo’s death—and on most Fridays, police restrict Geelani from delivering sermons to sizeable and eager gatherings at any mosque in Kashmir. During these detentions, the police seal the entry and exit points of his house in south Srinagar, creating a human fence around the compound. Any time things get tense in Kashmir, and the likelihood of Geelani addressing a rally or making a speech attacking government policies or mentioning the latest tragedy increases, the police show up at his door. The old hawk steps out of his home willingly, to be whisked off to a VIP prison near the banks of Dal Lake. On 4 August 2010, Geelani was released from another stay in prison. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had sent one of his advisors to meet Geelani in jail and seek his help in calming tempers in Kashmir. Soon after his release, Geelani faced TV cameras outside his house. A slight man with a neatly trimmed white beard, he wore a kurta-pyjama and a light brown lamp-cap. He asked the people not to throw stones at police and army blockades. “I understand the passion for freedom you have,” Geelani said, “I am as passionate as you are, but we will fight peacefully. If they (police) stop you, you sit down and ask them to open fire.” Such a call for peace from a man who has long supported militancy surprised New Delhi. After weeks of unrest, the valley went silent. The protesters seemed to be listening to Geelani. They respect him for standing up to—and not backing down from—the government. A slogan often repeated at Geelani’s rallies goes: “Na Jhukne Wala Geelani! Na Bikne Wala, Geelani! (The one who doesn’t bow, Geelani! The one who can’t be bought, Geelani!)” I spoke to some protesters about Geelani’s call to stop throwing stones. “It was hard to stop,” a 20-year-old stone thrower said over the phone, “but we have to listen to him.” GEELANI OWES HIS POPULARITY TO ONE WORD: defiance. Many young Kashmiris refer to him as Bab, the father, or toeth, the beloved. His hardline politics have earned him a reputation for being the representative of the masses. Unlike the moderate separatists of Kashmir, Geelani detests the prospects of dialogue with New Delhi. “His inflexible attitude has made him credible,” explained Dr Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a political analyst and law professor at Kashmir University. “Because Kashmiris have seen their tallest leaders crumbling before India.” Hussain was referring to Sheikh Abdullah, who after serving around 20 years in various jails, gave up and compromised on questions of Kashmir’s autonomy by signing with Indira Gandhi the Sheikh-Indira accord of 1975. A story often repeated in Kashmir, is that several young men tore down a poster of Sheikh Abdullah in Srinagar after stepping out of a cinema where they had watched a movie about Libyan guerrilla leader Omar Mukhtar’s fight against Mussolini’s Italy. Mukhtar didn’t give up until he was hanged. Geelani wants to be Omar Mukhtar, the anti-Sheikh Abdullah. In the past 20 years he has been consistent in refusing any proposal from the Government of India or even Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir dispute. His preferred solution: the United Nations’ guaranteed plebiscite, which doesn’t include the option of independence or Azadi, but a choice to join either India or Pakistan. Once the British had left the subcontinent, Partition occured and the dispute over Kashmir came into existence, Geelani was 18. He began his political life in the pro-India camp in Kashmir, but soon dedicated his life to spread the philosophy of the Islamist organisation, Jamaat-e-Islami. When militancy intensified in 1989, he became a kind of quasi-spiritual leader to members of the Hizbul Mujahideen (Hizb), the armed wing of Jamaat with pro-Pakistan leanings. Besides Geelani, there are other dissenting voices in Kashmir—those who demand complete statehood, those who advocate autonomy within the Indian Union, and people who only speak out against human rights abuses. Today, the 81-year-old Geelani is the most hardline figure among Kashmiri separatist leaders, who says openly that he would campaign for Kashmir joining Pakistan if ever a plebiscite were to be carried out in the Valley. This makes him the most out of favour Kashmiri in India. His Islamist worldview may not have a large following in secular, Sufi-influenced Kashmir, but his firm political position in matters of Kashmir makes him the most popular among the region’s leadership. How useful his extreme stance can be in solving the Kashmir issue is the real question. PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMI SIVA Stone pelters chasing Jammu and Kashmir police officers out of Srinagar’s old town in a barrage of projectiles. On a Sunday afternoon in late May this year, I met Geelani in his living room. The floor had a red woollen carpet, a five-person sofa set, and a 14-inch TV placed on a footlong table. The TV looked broken; it didn’t have a cable connection. Moments earlier, I’d heard the door creak and saw Geelani peeping in. “Just give me a few minutes,” he said. It took him about five minutes of talking to broach his signature issue. “Both parties, the oppressor and the oppressed, have to agree on some terms,” he said. “In our case, the oppressor is not ready to accept any term. We are being asked to weaken our stand. They must accept Kashmir as a disputed territory, which they don’t,” he continued. “They must demilitarise this whole region, revoke black laws, and release prisoners.” “And what do you have to offer?” “We’ve been telling them that we will help to solve this issue peacefully, according to the UN’s resolution of plebiscite.” IN THE IMAGINATION OF YOUNGER KASHMIRIS, Geelani’s extreme views have always been counterbalanced by his unflinching critiques of Indian human rights violations in Kashmir. But he didn’t always think this way. In fact, Geelani underwent a fascinating  evolution before arriving at his present ideology. Born on 29 September 1929, Geelani came from a poor family in northern Kashmir’s Baramulla District, in a village called Zoori Munz. His father, Syed Peer Shah Geelani, worked as a labourer, maintaining the canals near the village. Geelani attended a government school ten miles away. In 1945, he graduated from high school, and went to Lahore to study the Qur’an. A year later he returned to his village when his father fell ill. He became an imam in a nearby mosque while pursuing a Bachelors degree in Persian literature. One day in 1949, Maulana Muhammad Syed Masoodi, the General Secretary of the National Conference (NC), Sheikh Abdullah’s party, came to Zoori Munz. Geelani was conducting Friday prayers at the local mosque. Though Geelani was just 20, his oratory skills deeply impressed Masoodi. Masoodi, a pro-India Muslim, soon became Geelani’s idealogical mentor. He brought Geelani to Srinagar as his assistant and gave the young man a place to sleep at Mujahid Manzil, NC headquarters. For four years, Masoodi groomed him as a secularist. To earn money, Geelani taught in a government-run primary school. He also wrote op-eds for the Daily Khidmat, the mouthpiece of the Indian National Congress in Kashmir. In one editorial, he praised India’s secular democracy. He would also debate with Kashmir’s communists. They would come up with an argument like “there is no God,” and Geelani would counter them by saying, “but Allah!” “Seeing me punctual in all the religious practices, they [communists] thought I was overdoing it to defy them,” Geelani writes in one of his publications, “but I never took them seriously.” In 1954, Geelani met Qari Saifuddin. Saifuddin was one of Jamaat-e-Islami’s co-founders in Kashmir, and he introduced Geelani to the work of Maudoodi. Gradually, Maudoodi’s philosophy replaced the secularist teachings of Masoodi in Geelani—who soon offered his life to strengthen Jamaat in Kashmir. The primary objective of Jamaat is to implement global Islamic law. Founded in 1941 by Abul Ala Maudoodi in Lahore, Jamaat advocates Jihad against the ‘enemies’ of Islam. In the 1950s and 60s, Jamaat’s ideology blanketed the subcontinent. As a Jamaat foot solidier, Geelani returned to northern Kashmir. He gave sermons on Fridays in local mosques, preached in madrassas, and taught Persian at a local middle school. In those days, it wasn’t easy to be a Jamaat man because secular Sufism dominated the valley. Since the elites were preachers of Sufi Islam, Maudoodi cast Sufism as a philosopy of the privileged. This resonated with the youth of Kashmir’s rural districts, who were entirely dependent on farming, and had already grown disillusioned with the Valley’s feudalism. They took refuge in Jamaat’s ideology. By the beginning of the 1970s, Geelani decided to enter electoral politics—an audacious gamble, as Jamaat believed in sharia law. Pursuing a state seat meant supporting the Indian Constitution, secular by its very definition. “It was a collective decision taken in Jamaat,” Geelani says, “to get the party recognised.” In 1972 Geelani became an MLA for Sopore. Eighty thousand people voted for him. He served two more terms. “His morale was always up,” recalled Ghulam Rasool Kar, a 90-year-old Congress leader, whom Geelani defeated in those first elections. “He would often pump up his cadre saying things like ‘we have come close to the people... we have firm contacts with them… and we are keeping pace,’ he was an optimist and things worked for him.” But Geelani also began practicing the politics of division. “While campaigning, I remember he used to describe secularism as un-Islamic,” Kar continued, “in this way he played on people’s secular conscious.” Over the last 40 years, Geelani has remained faithful to Jamaat–e–Islami. They provide him his home, the large but basic three-storey brick house in a wealthy neighbourhood near the Srinagar airport. For the last 20 years, he has lived there with his 65-year-old second wife. His worldview is shaped by Jamaat, but his idea of implementing Islamic law carries little weight in a heavily Sufi-influenced Kashmir, whose people picked up weapons to fight India in 1989 not for religion, but for their dream of an independent Kashmir. K ASHMIR'S INSURGENCY WAS TRIGGERED by elections in March 1987, which were widely believed to be rigged. In one contest, Syed Yousaf Shah, the Muslim United Front’s candidate for MLA in Srinagar’s Amira Kadal constituency, said he won the election and reportedly signed papers certifying the election in the counting station. But later, Radio Kashmir declared the National Conference’s candidate, Ghulam Mohuddin Shah, as the winner. After disputing the results, Syed Yousaf Shah and his polling agents were imprisoned without trial. After his release from prison, Shah crossed over to Pakistani-Occupied-Kashmir (POK). Based in Muzafferabad, POK’s capital, he took on the nom de guerre of Salahuddin. He now heads 23 millitant outfits. He is still at large. Geelani was elected an MLA in those same elections. But he resigned on moral grounds in 1989 as the militancy gathered steam. Thousands of Kashmiri youth crossed over to Pakistan and returned with AK-47s to fight India. The Indian security establishment came down heavily on the citizenry, turning a land often called heaven on earth into the world’s most militarised zone with a ratio of one Indian military man for every ten civilians. By comparison, Iraq, during the height of the US occupation, had a ratio of just one soldier for every 186 civilians. As the troop presence increased, so did human rights abuses. A 2008 Amnesty International letter to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh listed India’s alleged rights abuses in Kashmir and called for an independent inquiry, claiming that “grave sites are believed to contain the remains of victims of unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other abuses which occurred in the context of armed conflict persisting in the state since 1989.” Against this backdrop, militants soon became folk heroes to many young boys in Kashmir. Neighbourhoods in Srinagar featured gun-toting militants controlling the streets, becoming as much a part of daily life as the mosque, the butcher shop and the local corner store. Geelani was, at first, tentative about supporting the militants. “But a few months later, he argued in Jamaat that we cannot disown our men fighting at the front,” said Sheikh Muhammad Hassan, the current head of Jamaat. The men Geelani referred to belonged to Jamaat-e-Islami Tulba, the organisation’s student wing. They leaned towards accession to Pakistan and represented the militant outfit Hizb. To insurgents willing to give their lives for the cause, Geelani was the one man worthy of offering prayers at their funerals. He often did. “We always loved him,” Zaffer Akbar Bhat, former Divisional Commander of Hizb, said when I met him at his Sanat Nagar residence in Srinagar. “When he was underground, we would often meet him, and ask him to pray for our success.” Zaffer became a militant in 1988 and fought for 12 years. In 2002, he shunned violence and joined the moderate separatists. Geelani also distrusts India because he has frequently accused the government of targeting him. He says that in the last 20 years, he has survived 12 assassination attempts. Since the back-door diplomacy failed to convince him to come to the bargaining table, he considers the attacks inevitable. In one of his publications, he writes, that on 1 October 1996, the ‘Indian security forces’ fired two rocket launchers at the top storey of his house. “It crashed in, went through the cement wall, and exploded inside the room,” said advocate Altaf Ahmed, Geelani’s son-in-law who witnessed the incident. “Allah saved us.” Altaf was shot by unidentified gunmen in 2005. The bullet pierced his neck, but he survived. “I just heard the sound,” he said. Such incidents only hardened Geelani’s resolve and he continued questioning India’s legitimacy over Kashmir. He had a haunting history to underscore this view: 80,000 deaths, several thousand disappearances, imprisonments, custodial killings and mass graves. “Our history is cruel,” said Altaf, “I am ready to die a hundred times.” G EELANI'S PRINCIPLED STANDS have earned him ideological enemies. As a member of the Hurriyat Conference—a conglomerate of 26 separatist groups formed to realise the plebiscite—he was always at loggerheads with Hurriyat decision makers. During the 2002 state elections, he accused leader Sajjad Gani Lone of participating in the elections indirectly and lobbied to get him expelled from the Hurriyat. Differences grew and culminated in the group’s split. Geelani became the chairman of what he called Hurriyat (G) and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Kashmir’s head cleric, helmed his faction, Hurriyat (M). Sajjad proved Geelani’s accusation right when he contested the Indian parliamentary elections in 2009. Before expressing his wish to participate in the elections, he spewed venom at Geelani. “While Geelani is alive,” Sajjad said at a press conference in November 2008, “Kashmir will never achieve freedom.” Like Geelani, Sajjad is also counted among the best orators of the Kashmiri leadership. On the morning of 18 May 2010, I met Sajjad at his residence in Sanat Nagar, a posh Srinagar neighbourhood. “I have no issues with Geelani,” said Sajjad, “but let me tell you something, the problem is that for the failures of separatist leadership, whether it was my father or Geelani sahib, they don’t have to pay, it is the people who pay.” PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMI SIVA An armoured Indian military vehicle blocks the road in Sopore, where Geelani served three terms as MLA through the 1970s and 80s. Sajjad said that his father, the murdered separatist leader Abdul Gani Lone, was Geelani’s best friend. “My father and Geelani together tried to move the internal autonomy resolution in the state assembly,” said Sajjad, sitting in his study. “If he was not old, he would have fought the elections again… I know him very well.” Sajjad is a big man, and his frame is dominated by a bulky-shouldered trunk perched on long, plump legs. He has studied in Britain and has a degree in Psychology. He also has business interests in Dubai. He is married to Asma, the daughter of Amanullah Khan, who heads the separatist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front in POK. “I want to see Geelani go down in history with some achievement,” said Sajjad. “The minimum the people of Kashmir deserve is reality. He should tell them what the truth was, why did he fail? Who helped us, who didn’t, and he knows it all.” He was referring to Pakistan’s role in Kashmir. He believes that Pakistan has harmed the freedom struggle of the Kashmiri people. “He just wants to die a martyr’s death,” Sajjad concluded. BUT GEELANI HAS BEEN EQUALLY TOUGH on Pakistan whenever he thought their leaders spoke short of plebiscite. Pervez Musharraf, former president of Pakistan, was keen to resolve the Kashmir issue through dialogue. On 7 April 2005, both the Indian and Pakistani government agreed to open the first passenger bus service since the 1947 invasion, between Indian controlled Kashmir and Muzafferabad—the mountainous region administered by Pakistan. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq welcomed the initiative. Geelani denounced it. “These measures are cosmetic,” he said in the press. Nine days later, on 16 April, Pervez Musharraf visited India. On 18 April, he met Geelani at Pakistan House in New Delhi. A close aide of Geelani, privy to the meeting, said, “(Geelani) was on the offensive, right from the beginning.” PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMI SIVA Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, head cleric of Kashmir and chairman of Hurriyat (M) addressing his congregation in Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid. He offered this account of their conversation: “The situation has changed, Geelani sahib,” Musharraf said. “Yes, situations keep changing, but the stand doesn’t change,” Geelani replied. “We want you to be a part of the peace building measures. Without your support, nothing will happen.” “What do you think will happen?” Geelani asked. “There is a need to build a consensus.” “Let India accept Kashmir as a disputed territory, demilitarise the region, release all the detainees, and revoke black laws, only then can we think over talking, and yes, talking shall be trilateral where you, me, and them (India) will be sitting at one table.” The source said that Malik Noor Fayaz, the General Secretary of Jamaat in Kashmir’s Doda district, walked in to greet Musharraf. Fayaz offered Musharraf a handshake, but was reportedly ignored. “General Sahib, this gentleman is a graduate, he is not Taliban,” Geelani told Musharraf. The meeting ended without any real progress. Geelani also questioned Musharraf over his pro-American policies. This reportedly unnerved Musharraf. He told Geelani not to be bothered about the internal issues of Pakistan. After this, the aide said, Musharraf snubbed Geelani. Mirwaiz was now Musharraf’s man in Kashmir. “At that juncture, he (Geelani) safeguarded the Kashmiri movement,” said analyst Sheikh Showkat Hussain. “He proved that he is not a stooge of Pakistan.” Mirwaiz began to pursue Musharraf’s Four Point Formulae. The formulae suggested that there should be self-governance in Kashmir, India and Pakistan should make the borders irrelevant and encourage trade and people to people contact. A MONG THE YOUNG LEADERS, Mirwaiz is the most recognisable. In the first week of June, I met Mirwaiz at his Nigeen residence, a pristine neighbourhood famous for its eponymous freshwater lake. An Indian paramilitary guard was positioned in the picket atop the gateway, and some plainclothes inside the compound were waiting on the road leading to the garden. Mirwaiz was sitting on a chair on the patio, receiving his supporters. A skull-capped, clean-shaven man wanted him to deliver a sermon in his village. Mirwaiz asked his secretary to find out whether he was free that day. “We cannot assure [that he can make it], but we can try,” the secretary told the man. Mirwaiz signed some documents, handed over the papers to his secretary and turned towards me. “I don’t understand why New Delhi has no policy vis-à-vis the Kashmir dispute,” Mirwaiz said, sounding agitated. In 2004, Mirwaiz went to New Delhi to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. This was the first high-profile contact between the Kashmiri separatist and India since the beginning of the 1987 armed rebellion. But the talks failed to deliver any results. “Geelani sahib has taken a position where from he could not come down,” said Mirwaiz. “Let New Delhi prove him wrong. When New Delhi doesn’t move forward then he is proven right and he becomes stronger day by day.” Many times Mirwaiz has insisted Geelani to speak with politicians in New Delhi. During a serious agitation in 2008, according to Mirwaiz, it nearly happened. “I told him [Geelani] let’s do it, we are strong this time,” Mirwaiz said, “but he said ‘No, [we want] complete freedom, India has to leave.’” Geelani has often accused Mirwaiz of ‘selling out,’ on the issue of the plebiscite. That was also the time Islamabad (with Pervez Musharraf in power), and New Delhi came closer in their discussions about Kashmir, and Mirwaiz was seen as their choice contact from the separatist camp. But Geelani would not let that happen. In summer 2008, thousands of Kashmiri people poured into the streets of Srinagar. A joint separatist rally took place at the Tourist Reception Centre, and the newspapers estimated the audience at half a million. Aside from Geelani, speakers included Mirwaiz and other moderate separatists. Geelani was blunt and attempted to make Mirwaiz and other moderates irrelevant in separatist politics. He began the speech: “I’ve got good news for you.” The crowd went silent. After a brief pause, he went on, “Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani general, has been removed from the presidential seat.” This was not what the people had gathered for. Some clapped, some remained silent. Mirwaiz and other separatists were embarrassed. Geelani was resolute, however, and asked the crowd: “Do you accept me as your leader?” Slowly, a large number of attendees raised hands with their index fingers pointed toward the sky—a symbolic gesture in Islam to bear witness. Ashok Bhan, a diplomat who conducted secret meetings with Geelani, told me Mirwaiz had agreed not to provide any room to ‘extreme political rhetoric’ in Kashmir. (This presumably means sidelining Geelani.) Bhan, a soft-faced Kashmiri pandit, met Geelani in 2002 at New Delhi’s Jammu and Kashmir House. The Hurriyat was about to split. “We told him Jamaat in Pakistan, his shrine, hasn’t even won a single seat in the national elections.” Bhan said. “We told him ‘don’t die as an obscurant force, die as a living example in history, we will provide you an opportunity, solve this issue through negotiations.’ But he doesn’t have that strength. Where can a person get such a historical opportunity?” Secular-nationalist Muslims like journalist Bashir Manzar, the editor of the daily newspaper, Kashmir Images, also feel that Geelani is out of step with reality. Manzar has been vehemently criticising Geelani since 1998. “The problem with Geelani is [his] I, me, and myself [attitude],” said Manzar when I met him at his office in Srinagar. Manzar had acted as Publicity Chief for Muslim Janbaaz Force (MJF), a pro-independence militant outfit, from 1989 to 90 in Tangmarg, northern Kashmir. For his involvement with MJF he was imprisoned for eight months before being released and becoming a journalist. “By using beautiful phraseology, no one becomes a leader. Above all, I think age is not on his side otherwise no resistance leader can be so unrealistic, unimaginative that he would continue supporting the UN’s plebiscite.” Today, Geelani has a long line of critics: the Indian government, Kashmiri pandits, secular-nationalist Kashmiri Muslims, Pakistani secularists, moderate separatists, pro- India Kashmiri politicians, and even members of Jamaat. After the book Qaid-e-Inquilaab (Leader of the Revolution) reported that Jamaat forced Geelani to join electoral politics in the 1970s, the organisation expected him to refute this assertion. But he didn’t react. Jamaat suspended Geelani in early April 2010. “He knows the fact that the message of Jamaat is much bigger than its messenger,” Advocate Zahid Ali, the spokesman of Jamaat, said when we met at his party headquarters in Batamaloo. “The author of the book is wrong, we take collective decisions in Jamaat, he knows it, he should have clarified in the press.” But Ali still holds him in high regard. When Geelani was a Member of the Legislative Assembly in the late 1980s, Ali was his personal assistant. Since Geelani was struggling with heart disease, Mir Mustafa, an independent MLA, would often mock him saying, “Are you sure you are carrying your medicine?” Geelani would never react; instead he would walk past him quietly. “He never bitched about people,” Ali said. S PEND SOME TIME WITH GEELANI and it’s obvious how much his dedication to his struggle has cost him. When he was imprisoned for the first time in 1962, his wife Fatima developed heart disease. The schooling of his children—six daughters and two sons—has suffered. Shafeeqa, Geelani’s oldest daughter who was in eighth grade when her father was arrested, left her studies to help her ailing mother. “I didn’t get to know my father, but I know his cause,” Shafeeqa told me when I met her at her Sopore residence in northern Kashmir. “Whenever we needed him, he was either in jail or working for Jamaat.” In February 1970, Fatima passed away, leaving behind her ten month old son, Naseem. Naseem was adopted by a childless couple in Bandipora—a district close to Sopore. He is now 41 years old. He is cleanshaven, wears a well-trimmed moustache, and dresses similarly to his father: a white kurta-pyjama and a collarless waistcoat. He hasn’t inherited Geelani’s politics, however, or even his second name. Geelani never told Naseem that he was his father. One day, Naseem overheard his aunt telling her neighbours that he was Geelani’s son. Since then, he has tried to build a relationship with his father. In 1991, he was admitted to the Kashmir University and visited Geelani on weekends. This way he tried to create a space for himself in a family where he had a stepmother. “He (Geelani) never ever explained the reason for leaving me,” said Naseem. Naseem has been alienated on account of his father. After the outbreak of armed rebellion in 1989, Naseem has faced many hurdles. He has been attacked by unidentified gunmen several times and has had trouble getting a job. He prefers to hide his father’s identity, and his last name. Instead of Naseem Geelani, he is Naseem Zaffar. An assistant professor at the Agricultural University, he has a wife, a daughter and a son. Both children study at Christian missionary schools. Naseem’s family lives just five kilometres away from his father. I asked Naseem if he favours accession to Pakistan like his father. “I just want peace,” he said. A N HOUR BEFORE DAWN ON 7 JUNE 2010, the day Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was scheduled to visit Kashmir, I drove to Geelani’s home to meet him again. It was 4 am and Geelani was about to begin his morning prayers. A white-bearded man opened the gate and led me to a mosque just inside Geelani’s compound. Inside, there was a small gathering of bearded men, some old, some young, waiting for Geelani to lead their prayers. I heard some tentative footsteps approaching the mosque. It was Geelani. His nicely trimmed beard, not the kind attributed to fundamentalists, complimented his subtle expression and appearance. He looked extraordinarily fresh when he gazed at me through his moist green eyes. PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMI SIVA Protesters clashing with police has become all too common. Geelani finished his prayers and led me inside his study room. He took down the Qur’an from the bookshelf, sat down cross-legged, and began reading the Arabic text until the morning sun breached the edge of the white curtains. He slowly guided his index finger along the written verses. “Each time you study the Qur’an, you find new things, new inspirations.” Geelani said. “This book guides you on how you walk, how you treat your neighbours, your friends, your parents, your brothers, your sisters.” “Is there any important political decision the Qur’an has helped you to make?” I asked. “Yes, in every aspect,” he said. “It says sovreignty lies with almighty Allah. Sovreignty is not for the people, not for any dignity, or any family. It only lies in the hands of Allah.” For a moment, the fiery old man seemed like an obedient student. Then the conversation turned back to politics. His demeanour changed. His body stiffened. “Just recently, I heard the news that some 12 years ago, two persons were arrested and put inside the Tihar jail,” Geelani said. “Now they have been proven innocent. Is this a law? Is this justice? It is very unfortunate that Islam is not seen as a complete way of life.” He was advocating sharia law. “How do you see the Taliban?” I countered. “They say that they also follow Islam.” “No, no, no... not at all,” Geelani said. “The Taliban does not represent Islam. Their actions are based on revenge.” He took a deep breath. “Islam doesn’t allow the killing of innocent people.” He raised his arm toward the ridge of the wall and grabbed a portable radio set. It was now 7:30, and he tuned into a news bulletin from Pakistan. With his head down, he listened intently. As in India, the stories covered shortages of electricity, a water crisis, unemployment, etc. He turned off the radio. PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMI SIVA Geelani takes his morning dose of medication in the study of his Srinagar home. His health has been failing him for the last four years. He paused for a moment to finish his breakfast, two boiled eggs and milk custard. He has a history of chronic illnesses—kidney cancer, heart disease and bronchitis. He often wears a surgical mask to avoid the dust. He began reading a newspaper before I again interrupted him. “What is your stand on militancy?” I asked. He paused for a few minutes, seated in his centrally heated room, facing his bookshelves. He finally spoke. “India denied Kashmiris their right to self-determination by using their military power,” he said. “Our peaceful efforts were rejected. What alternative is there apart from fighting with guns?” I asked him about the many foreign militants active in Kashmir. He invoked Bangladesh’s war of independence: “You know, once upon a time there was East Pakistan, do you remember? They raised the voice for Independence from West Pakistan, and India sent a regular army to help them. What is the justification? When we people do it, how is Pakistan wrong?” Then the conversation turned to Pakistan’s covert actions in Kashmir and the idea that the UN’s plebiscite had become irrelevant. “What else do we have without the UN’s promise?” he asked, “and Pakistan is in that promise…” He looked angry as he stood up and asked me to excuse him for a while. Soon he re-entered: “Those people [who given up on the plebiscite] are tired, it’s not their fault. Such things happen in a freedom struggle, that doesn’t mean we alter our history.” A group of young men entered the room. They shook hands with Geelani. A short-bearded man began to speak, but Geelani cut him short. “Last Friday, you misbehaved in the gathering, you chanted slogans despite the fact I was speaking at the microphone. You actually disrupted my speech.” In a few moments, Geelani seemed happy again, as if nothing had happened. His back was touching the wall. Behind him hung a calendar inscribed with a promise from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, to the people of Kashmir. It affirmed their right to the plebiscite. I LEFT KASHMIR IN THE MIDDLE of yet another cycle of unrest and followed the news from New Delhi. On 6 August, two days after Geelani asked Kashmiri youth to refrain from stone pelting, Home Minister P Chidambaram offered Geelani a meeting. On 9 August, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did the same—the third invitation from New Delhi in the past two months. As usual, Geelani snubbed both offers.

American Muslims nine years after 9/11 - By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

American Muslims nine years after 9/11

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

The seven-million strong American Muslim community, under siege since the ghastly tragedy of 9/11, is challenged in recent months with a growing anti-Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry sparked by the opposition to the planned Park51 project popularly known as the Ground Zero Mosque in Manhattan, New York. The inflammatory rhetoric surrounding the project, actually a cultural center and already approved by the New York City Planning Commission, has stirred hatred toward Muslims in America.

There has been so much fear-mongering and so much misinformation in the debate peddled by bigots and rightwing politicians. The constant vilification of Islam and Muslims over the air on radio talk shows, in newspapers and the Internet is contributing to the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment across the country.

The hate speech and fear-mongering has resulted in hate crimes against Muslims and their prayer centers. At least three anti-Muslim acts were reported in one day, on August 24. In New York, taxi driver Ahmed H. Sharif was stabbed after the passenger asked the driver "Are you Muslim?" When the driver said yes, the man slashed him with a knife on the throat, arm and face. The same night a drunk man barged into a Queens (New York) mosque and shouted anti-Muslim slurs at the congregation during the nightly Tarawee prayers. He then proceeded to urinate on the prayer rugs. Anti-Muslim acts are not limited to New York. Several thousand miles away in Madera, California, a mosque was vandalized with a sign reading 'Wake up America, the enemy is here.' Tellingly, earlier last month, a mock pig inscribed with "No Mosque in NYC" was left at a California Islamic center. It was also inscribed with "Remember 9-11" and "MO HAM MED the Pig."

Amid growing anti-Muslim sentiment—stirred up by a raging debate over the Ground Zero mosque, at least two more incidents were reported till August 31. In New York State’s tiny town, Carlton, five teenagers harassed worshippers at the town mosque. The teenagers were charged with disrupting religious services at the mosque after they honked their car horns and yelled obscenities during one prayer service, and fired a weapon outside of another. In the Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro (Tennessee) a fire was reported at the site of a planned Islamic center and mosque. More alarmingly, gunshots were fired when the community members arrived to inspect the site.

All these hate incidents come in an atmosphere of near anti-Muslim hysteria that is currently being generated by the feverish discourse and manufactured controversy over the Ground Zero mosque. It is generating anti-Muslim and anti-Islam public sentiments. A poll on August 29 by the extreme right San Diego, California 760 KFMB AM talk radio station indicated that 70% of those polled are in favor of forced registration for American Muslims in a national database. The same day a poll conducted by Chris Matthews show at the MSNBC revealed that more than half of Republicans polled say they have a negative attitude toward Islam, this compared to only 27% of Democrats. A  PEW Institute poll result released on August 24 corroborated the findings of Chris Mathews show. By more than two-to-one (54% to 21%), Republicans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Islam and by more than four-to-one (74% to 17%), Republicans say they agree more with those who object to the building of the Ground Zero Mosque. By contrast, more Democrats agree with the center’s supporters than its opponents (by 47% to 39%).

One may ask. If the feverish discourse about the so-called Ground Zero mosque is only about the building of a new mosque or something else? To borrow, Stephan Salisbury of Tom Dispatch, the mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it’s about the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety and fear that now dominate the nation’s psyche. The dark stain of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry or Islamophobia had spread far and wide long before the controversy erupted. As Salisbury pointed out, “those opposing the construction of the center in New York City are drawing on what amounts to a decade of government-stoked xenophobia about Muslims, now gathering strength and visibility in a nation full of deep economic anxieties and increasingly aggressive far-right grassroots groups.”

Since 9/11, there has been a steady rise in Islamophobia, however recent months have seen exponential rise of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry. Many Religious Right leaders and opportunist politicians assert over and over that Islam is not a religion at all but a political cult, that Muslims cannot be good Americans and that mosques are fronts for extremist ‘jihadis.’ Over the course of the past year there has been a substantial increase in the number of political candidates using Islamophobic tactics in an effort to leverage votes, and use such tactics as a platform to enhance their political visibility.

Few examples: A Minnesota Republican congressional candidate, Lynne Torgerson, says that the religion of Islam cannot be protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, one of three Republican candidates running for governor, says Islam may be called a “cult” instead of a religion. Ron McNeil, a Florida congressional candidate tells local high and middle class students that Islam is against everything America stands for. Another Florida Republican candidate for Congress, Dan Fanelli, runs television ads in which he points to a white man and asks, "Does this look like a terrorist?" and then turns to an Arab-looking man and asks, "Or this?" A Texas congressional hopeful, Canyon Clowdus, wants no more Muslim immigration to America. The American Family Association also wants a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S. to “protect our national security and preserve our national identity, culture, ideals and values.” In Oklahoma an anti-Muslim measure is being pushed for November ballot.

Alarmingly, allegations of anti-Muslim bias are being leveled against the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, that advises the president and other government officials on issues related to religious freedom worldwide. The Washington Post has quoted some past commissioners, staff and former staff of the Commission as saying that the agency is rife, behind-the-scenes, with ideology and tribalism, with commissioners focusing on pet projects that are often based on their own religious background. In particular, they say an anti-Muslim bias runs through the commission's work.

Burning of the Quran stunt

Desecration of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, is another method of bigotry. Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim Pastor Terry Jones of a tiny Florida Church, known as the Dove World Outreach Center, planned to commemorate 9/11 by burning copies of the Holy Quran. He abandoned the Quran burning stunt when US Secretary of Defense phoned him saying that his provocative act would inflame the Muslim world and jeopardize the lives of American troops now deployed in many Muslim countries. However, Jones message was not lost to many. Torn pages of the Quran were found on Saturday (9/10) at the front of the Islamic Center of East Lansing, Michigan. Some of the pages appeared to be smeared with feces.

Amid heightened hate speech and fear-mongering mosques in California, Tennessee, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Texas, and Florida have faced vocal opposition or have been targeted by hate incidents in recent months. In the most recent incidents, on 9/11 eve, vandals spray-painted "9-11" on windows and countertops at the Muslim owned Jaffa Market in Columbus, Ohio. Some cash and a laptop computer were stolen, while several display cases were vandalized. Just after midnight on Wednesday (9/8), back wall of the Hudson Islamic Center in New York was pained with slur "sand n**gers" and an obscenity. Last week also, a Phoenix mosque under construction was vandalized. Paint was spilled on the floor and several tall, arched glass windows were broken by what appeared to be gunshots. There was also anti-Muslim graffiti. The same mosque was vandalized in February last.

The presence of mosques and the building of new mosques have become a divisive issue in several communities across the country in recent years. A church may be a church, and a temple a temple, but through the prism of emotion that grips many Americans, a decade after 9/11, a mosque can apparently represent a lot of things.

Eid Al Fitr celebrations scaled back

This year the seven million strong American Muslim community scaled back the Eid Al Fitr celebrations at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, which fell just one day before the 9/11 anniversary. Islamic civic advocacy groups worried that the proximity of Eid Al Fitr with 9/11 anniversary will increase suspicion and hostility towards Muslims at a time when feelings towards their religion are already running high.

The Council of Muslim Organizations in Washington DC called on all US Islamic centers, schools and organizations to refrain from holding Eid Al Fitr celebrations. The Council said the move was out of respect for the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Muslim leaders feared that the celebrations might have been mistakenly -- or deliberately – misconstrued. "Definitely there are people who would like to make us look like we are celebrating on 9/11 and we are not going to let them," said Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, Director of Outreach at the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center, Washington DC.

Many Muslims believed that sensitivity toward the anniversary of September 11 is crucial since this has been a tense summer for Muslims in the US due to the controversy over the Grand Zero mosque.

The Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, California announced cancellation of its Eid al-Fitr carnival on Sept. 11. For the past several years, the Islamic Cultural Center had celebrated Eid al-Fitr with a carnival on the first Saturday after the holiday, when the potential is greater for large attendance. Center officials said the cancellation was an acknowledgment that any celebration could be misinterpreted and also could be seen by some as insensitivity to the remembrance of 9/11.

With anti-Muslim rhetoric reaching epic proportions in broader U.S. society -- largely tolerated, rarely condemned – the American Muslim community remains optimistic that the current campaign which is partly driven by the forthcoming elections will eventually subside since the

religious freedom is a founding principle of this country and the main catalyst for its origins in the early seventeenth century. This principle was emphatically reiterated by President George Washington in his 1790 letter to the Jews of Rhode Island who built the Touro Synagogue:

"The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy -- a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship….The Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

When President Washington wrote this letter 220 years back, he must have been aware of the effect it would have on the fledgling nation.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com Email: asghazali786@gmail.com