[Reader-list] Common sense under attack - Mahir Ali (DAWN Dec 5, 2007)

[Kshmendra Kaul]

Dear Shuddha
   
  I found the article significant and that is why I posted it. Your spin on it is on a different track from mine.
   
  The significance, for me, was not in the contents which are well known and extensively commented upon but in who had written the piece (Mahir Ali - a Muslim) and where it was published (DAWN - a leading Pakistani newspaper).
   
  Mahir Ali also cuts through sectarian bias by being equally critical of such incidents in both Saudi Arabia and Iran. Admittedly, Mahir Ali being Sydney based might feel insulated from any backlash but it took courage from DAWN to publish.
   
  The well known (or notorious) Ayaan Hirsi Ali  is much more strident (blasphemous indeed) in her castigation over the same incidents (and the Taslima Nasreen affair). In an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times she writes:
   
  """"""" It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.
   
  But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?"""""""
   
  She ends her opinion piece with the pointed admonition:
   
  """"""When a “moderate” Muslim’s sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking."""""
   
  I thought Mahir Ali's article was one example of compassion and conscience taking precedence over anything else.
   
  I firmly believe that such introspection and correction in a society should be undertaken  preferably from within (as by Mahir Ali or Ayaan Hirsi Ali) and 'outsiders' should not interfere. "Outsiders", very often, have a unidimensional understanding depending on who has been most successful in selling a viewpoint. There are enough "social" and "political" examples of such "mess created by outsiders" situations both within India and Internationally.
   
  Kshmendra Kaul
   
  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/opinion/07ali.html?ei=5070&en=82ea8ff7f2fff4c9&ex=1197694800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print
   
  Islam’s Silent Moderates
  By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
   
    The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. (Koran 24:2)
   
  
  IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror.
   
  A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called “mingling”: when she was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.
   
  Two hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man. Women usually receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven weeks the “girl from Qatif,” as she’s usually described in news articles, will dread her next session with Islamic justice. When she is released, her life will certainly never return to normal: already there have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her because her “crime” has tarnished her family’s honor.
   
  We also saw Islamic justice in action in Sudan, when a 54-year-old British teacher named Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail before the government pardoned her this week; she could have faced 40 lashes. When she began a reading project with her class involving a teddy bear, Ms. Gibbons suggested the children choose a name for it. They chose Muhammad; she let them do it. This was deemed to be blasphemy.
   
  Then there’s Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who bravely defends women’s rights in the Muslim world. Forced to flee Bangladesh, she has been living in India. But Muslim groups there want her expelled, and one has offered 500,000 rupees for her head. In August she was assaulted by Muslim militants in Hyderabad, and in recent weeks she has had to leave Calcutta and then Rajasthan. Taslima Nasreen’s visa expires next year, and she fears she will not be allowed to live in India again.
   
  It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.
   
  But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?
   
  Usually, Muslim groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference are quick to defend any affront to the image of Islam. The organization, which represents 57 Muslim states, sent four ambassadors to the leader of my political party in the Netherlands asking him to expel me from Parliament after I gave a newspaper interview in 2003 noting that by Western standards some of the Prophet Muhammad’s behavior would be unconscionable. A few years later, Muslim ambassadors to Denmark protested the cartoons of Muhammad and demanded that their perpetrators be prosecuted.
   
  But while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now. 
  I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up. 
   
  Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above: more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme.
   
  If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?
   
  When a “moderate” Muslim’s sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking. 
   
    Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch Parliament and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Infidel.” 


  

shuddha at sarai.net wrote:
  Dear Kshemendra, 

Thank you for this forward. Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan are
indeed sad spectacles of the depths to which theocracies and dictatorships
will descend. The recent sad spectacle of a kindergarten teacher having to
go to prison because of the teddy bear episode in Sudan indicates the moral
bankruptcy of islamist regimes.

Incidentally, Indian public and private sector companies, especially in the
Petro Chemicals sector are a big player in Sudan, even though the Sudanese
state is implicated in gross abuses, especially in the Darfur region.

I think that a concerted effort to expose the level of official and
corporate Indian backing for corrupt Islamist regimes such as those that
rule in Sudan would be timely. I think that the extent of influence that
the Saudi regime has purchased in India (in cold hard cash) also needs to
be thought about. I am sure that if tomorrow an Indian university decided
to name its library after George Bush there would (rightly) be a furore,
and yet, I was dismayed a few months ago to discover, that Jamia Millia
Islamia (a university where I studied) had decided to name its library
after the corrupt Saudi Monarch King Abdullah, who presides over the most
sexist regime on earth. Every self respecting woman student of Jamia Millia
Islamia should could consider herself personally insulted whenever she has
to enter this library building.

It is sad that no Indian newspaper or television channel has ever thought
it necessary to send journalists to probe the extent to which the Indian
state provides aid and succor to such brutal regimes and their clients, be
they in Burma or in Sudan.

regards

Shuddha


On 7:25 pm 12/08/07 Kshmendra Kaul wrote:
> Common sense under attack
> By Mahir Ali
>
> http://www.dawn.com/weekly/mahir/arc-mahir.htm
>
>
> WHEN she arrived in Khartoum four months ago, Gillian Gibbons
> couldn’t possibly have had any inkling that she’d be headed back to
> England some four months later, following a stint in prison.
>
> In a statement issued last Saturday, the incarcerated 54-year-old
> Liverpudlian said she wasn’t keen to leave Sudan and would much rather
> return to work. “The Sudanese people in general have been pleasant and
> very generous,’’ she noted, “and I’ve had nothing but good
> experiences during my four months here.”
>
> What makes the level of equanimity and goodwill remarkable is that
> the previous day, following Friday prayers, there were mobs baying for
> her blood, demanding that the 15-day prison sentence handed down by a
> Khartoum court be upgraded to death by a firing squad. So, what exactly
> did Gibbons do to inspire such demands for vengeance?
>
> Well, a month into her stint as a teacher at the Unity School, where
> she was in charge of seven-year-olds, she came up with a device for
> engaging the kids’ interest in one of the designated topics: bears.
> One of the children brought her teddy bear to school and her classmates
> were assigned the task of taking the teddy home, one by one, and
> writing about their experiences.
>
> Before the project got underway, Gibbons asked the kids to choose a
> name for the cuddly toy. There were various suggestions, including
> Abdullah and Hassan. A little boy called Mohammad put forward his own
> name for consideration. The teacher arranged a class vote and Mohammad
> won hands down. She accepted the democratic verdict. Reasonably enough,
> the idea that anyone would find this objectionable appears not to have
> so much as crossed her mind. Two months later, police arrived at the
> Unity compound to arrest Gibbons for insulting Islam. The school’s
> director, Robert Boulos, was told that some parents had complained to
> the ministry of education. It subsequently turned out that the sole
> complainant was in fact an office assistant at the school, who served
> as the main witness for the prosecution - or, to be more precise,
> persecution.
>
> The verdict of 15 days in prison followed by deportation occasioned
> sighs of relief, given that it could have been worse: six months in
> prison and 40 lashes. At the weekend, two Muslim British peers were
> engaged in negotiations with the Sudanese authorities in Khartoum, and
> they were expected to fly back to London with Gibbons after obtaining a
> presidential pardon. That’s all very well, but the point remains that
> the only insult in this case - an insult to common sense, if not to
> Islam - came from those who pursued a vendetta on patently absurd
> grounds. It has been argued that Gibbons erred inadvertently, that as a
> novice in Sudan she was unaware of cultural sensitivities. That’s an
> unnecessarily patronising point of view; I suspect she erred only in
> failing to make an allowance for the idiocy of some Muslims. It has
> also been suggested that the Sudanese government stoked the controversy
> in order to draw international attention away from the monumental
> tragedy in Darfur. There may be some truth in that, but there’s
> probably more logic in sheeting home the blame to sheer dogmatic
> blockheadedness.
>
> An example of considerably more egregious judicial malice has,
> meanwhile, surfaced in Saudi Arabia, where a victim of gang rape has
> been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison. The supposed
> logic behind this punishment illustrates the extent to which the
> kingdom operates in a different time zone from much of the world - in
> terms of centuries rather than hours.
>
> The unnamed, recently married 19-year-old, who has been dubbed the
> Qatif girl in a reference to her mainly Shia hometown, apparently
> wished to retrieve a photograph of herself from a former male
> acquaintance before she moved in with her husband, so she arranged a
> meeting with the young man. While the two of them were in a car, they
> were accosted by a couple of men armed with knives, who took them to an
> isolated area. The young woman was violated 14 times by seven men,
> three of whom also raped her companion.
>
> When the case came before a Qatif court, the judges sentenced four of
> the assailants to terms ranging up to five years for kidnapping, but
> also sentenced the Qatif girl and her male friend to 90 lashes each for
> the ‘crime’ of being in each other’s company. Her lawyer, a human
> rights advocate by the name of Abdul-Rehman al-Lahem, filed an appeal
> and also brought the case to the notice of the media. He was
> consequently stripped of his licence, and his client’s sentence was
> more than doubled to 200 lashes plus six months in prison.
>
> There are grounds for assuming that officially sanctioned crimes
> against humanity along these lines are not exactly a rarity in Saudi
> Arabia, although they don’t always attract international attention.
> Queried on the subject during his Annapolis trip last week, Prince Saud
> al-Faisal commented: “What is outraging about this case is that it is
> being used against the Saudi government and its people.” In fact, what
> is ‘outraging’ about this case is that the victims of an abominable
> crime have been sentenced to humiliating and painful punishments on
> utterly frivolous grounds, and that too on the basis of depositions by
> their assailants.
>
> Such instances make it extremely difficult to take Islamic justice
> seriously. The Saudi justice ministry has sought to malign the Qatif
> girl by saying that she has confessed to having an extramarital affair
> - which, apart from probably being untrue, is neither here nor there.
>
> The only hopeful signs in this context are al-Lahem’s endeavours,
> plus the fact that the Qatif girl’s husband has chosen to serve as a
> pillar of support instead of divorcing her. What’s more, at least a
> couple of Saudi columnists have dared to raise their voices against
> their nation’s system of injustice. Much of the West, meanwhile,
> continues to court Riyadh as if it were a bastion of sanity and
> stability in an otherwise turbulent region.
>
> Inanities in the name of Islam are not restricted to Sudan and Saudi
> Arabia, of course. Pakistan frequently emerges as a venue for all
> manner of excesses. Recent examples from a few neighbouring countries,
> however, should suffice to bear out this contention.
>
> In Iran, 27-year-old Dr Zahra Baniyaghoub died while in the custody
> of the morality and virtue police after she and her fiancé were
> arrested for chatting to each other in a public park. The authorities
> claimed she committed suicide, but Baniyaghoub’s family doesn’t
> accept this explanation, evidently for very good reasons, and has
> engaged the services of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi to
> press for an inquiry. In India, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen
> continues to be hounded by Muslims for her supposed blasphemy, while in
> Turkey Erol Karaaslan, the translator and publisher of Richard
> Dawkins’ atheist treatise The God Delusion faces charges of inciting
> religious hatred.
>
> Karaaslan is about as guilty as Gillian Gibbons. It should be clear
> to even the meanest intelligence that the dimwits engaged in turning
> molehills into mountains are doing a monumental disservice to the faith
> they purport to uphold.
>
> The writer is a journalist based in Sydney.
>
> mahir.worldview at gmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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