[Reader-list] Sinister face of Islamofascism

[Pawan Durani]

*
http://www.dailypioneer.com/266765/Sinister-face-of-Islamofascism.html

Sinister face of Islamofascism*

*Kanchan Gupta*

We Muslims are one community... (*my goal was to*) injure people or kill
people... One has to understand where I’m coming from, because… I consider
myself a *mujahid*, a Muslim soldier.” It’s unlikely the American judge
presiding over Faisal Shahzad’s arraignment was quite prepared for such a
candid admission of Islamism *über alles* by the would-be Times Square
bomber. But this is not the first time that the *jihadi* impulse has been so
baldly stated by those who believe that bloodshed serves the cause of Islam
— the more horrific the bloodletting, the greater the piety of the
perpetrator of what others consider to be both a crime and a sin.

The Fort Hood killer had no qualms about killing fellow soldiers; the
underpants bomber was prepared to die to bring down a trans-Atlantic
passenger plane, and Faisal Shahzad was comfortable with the idea of blowing
up innocent people in New York’s fashionable Times Square. Before them,
Mohammed Atta al-Sayeed had led a dozen hijackers on a suicide mission to
terrorise America; in London, young Muslims of Pakistani origin had stuffed
their backpacks with explosives and pulled the trigger in crowded
compartments of underground trains.

We in India have known for long what the West has discovered to its horror
after the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center were felled on 9/11.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s sophistry was useful distraction from the Muslim
League’s coarse politics of separatism premised on the fundamentals of
Islamic exclusivism, intolerance bordering on hatred of the ‘other’, the *
ummah*’s presumed right to rule the world and hoist the banner of Islam atop
every capital.

Tragic as the violence that accompanied partition may have been, far worse
has since been witnessed. Islamists from Pakistan have struck again and
again, in more ways than one, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. When excessive
attention is focussed on 26/11 because it was *jihad*brought live on
television screens, their other crimes tend to be glossed over. For instance
the ethnic cleansing of Kashmir Valley. Or the subversion of the Indian
Muslim’s mind.

Jinnah was given to lofty speech if not noble thought, but the lesser among
the ranks must have sniggered when he declared on August 11, 1947, in a
speech that is often quoted by those untutored in Islamism: “You are free;
you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to
any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any
religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the
state... You will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be
Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense,
because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political
sense as citizens of the state.”

That state is today rapidly sinking into the quagmire of Islamist
fanaticism. Pakistan’s citizens have neither ceased to be Hindus and Muslims
“in the political sense” nor has the Pakistani state steered clear of
religion. The degeneration began within months of the Quaid-e-Azam’s death;
a decrepit, derelict Islamic Republic of Pakistan, variously described as
the “most dangerous place in the world” and an “international headache”, is
now engulfed in the very *jihad* which it thought would destroy India.

Jinnah was able to wrench out of India what he despairingly (some would say,
disparagingly) described as “a moth-eaten Pakistan”; what remains of
Pakistan is being gnawed at from within by those who are so consumed by hate
that they find the idea of Muslims cohabiting with Muslims an intolerable
idea. Nothing else explains why suicide bombers should target worshippers at
Daata Darbar, an acient Sufi shrine in Lahore, drenching a saint’s
*dargah* with
the blood of the innocent last Thursday, or kill believers gathered at a
Rawalpindi mosque. Since by law Ahmediyas are not considered to be Muslims
in Pakistan and treated as heretics by *mullah*s, their slaughter while at
prayer, as it happened on May 28, is considered to be nothing extraordinary
in the ‘land of the pure’.

So, when Faisal Shahzad says, “One has to understand where I’m coming from,”
he means one has to look at Pakistan to understand what drives Pakistanis to
kill with such ferocity and cite Islam as the reason. But Pakistan alone
does not breed such monsters; look around and you will find that rare is the
Muslim-majority country untainted by the violence propagated by Islamism and
perpetrated by Islamists. Secular Egypt thought it would render the seeds of
Islamism planted by Syed Qutb sterile by executing the man who called for
“offensive *jihad*” as the true assertion of the Islamic identity. But the
Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen has flourished, carrying forth Qutb’s message that “true
Islam will transform every aspect of society, eliminating everything
non-Muslim”, and that Islam is the “ultimate solution”.

It would be a folly to believe that every Muslim subscribes to Qutb’s
interpretation of Islam or that behind every Muslim name lurks a terrorist
waiting for an opportunity to strike. For evidence of the deep schism that
sets Faisal Shahzad and his ilk apart from those who just want to get on
with their lives and live in peace we just need to look at Pakistan. For
every suicide bomber there are thousands who are repelled by his act of
terror, who weep at the sight of so much blood being shed for nothing.
Muslims in Mumbai, let us not forget, refused to allow the bodies of Ajmal
Kasab’s slain colleagues to be buried in their graveyards. Such examples
abound.

Yet, it would do us no good if we were to gloss over the reality.
Islamofascism exists and those who subscribe to it are unfortunately also
those who are fashioning policy and influencing society in Islamic countries
— individually and collectively. The Organisation of Islamic Conference
bears evidence to this: Every time it demands the criminalisation of
criticism of Islamist excesses and crimes against humanity because it
allegedly “defames Islam”, it strengthens those very elements whom it should
be condemning before anybody else does so but won’t because it conflates
Islamism and Islam and views the former as a triumphalist, faith-driven
assertion of the latter.

It’s easy to demonise critics of Islamism as ‘Islamophobes’ and call for
global legislation to curb free speech. But if conceded, this will embolden
the Faisal Shahzads and the suicide bombers and the fanatics for whom hate
is a virtue and tolerance a sin. Rather than lash out at those who find
Islamism abhorrent, its champions should ask themselves a simple question:
After “eliminating everything non-Muslim”, what shall happen to ‘everything
Muslim’? The terrible sight of Muslims killing Muslims in Pakistan, which
was supposed to be the homeland of the Indian sub-continent’s Muslims,
should provide a clue to the answer to that question.

-- Follow the writer on: http://twitter.com/KanchanGupta. Blog on this and
other issues at
http://kanchangupta.blogspot.com<http://kanchangupta.blogspot.com/>.
Write to him at kanchangupta at rocketmail.com < kanchangupta at rocketmail.com>