[Reader-list] Islamism, modernity & Indian Mujahideen - PRAVEEN SWAMI

[anupam chakravartty]

Pawan,

I must praise you for being a chalta pheerta advertisement for
extremism. you have successfully advertised all forms of extremism on
this list. good going.

anupam

On 3/24/10, Pawan Durani <pawan.durani at gmail.com> wrote:
> "“Haven't you still realised that the falsehood of your 33 crore dirty
> mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute and naked idols
> of Ram, Krishna and Hanuman”, the venomous Indian Mujahideen manifesto
> released to media as bombs went off across Ahmedabad read, “are not at
> all going to save your necks, Insha-Allah, from being slaughtered by
> our hands.”
>
>
> Islamism, modernity & Indian Mujahideen - PRAVEEN SWAMI
>
> http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article267670.ece?homepage=true
>
> Many believe the jihadist movement in India to be driven by religious
> fanaticism. There is little doubt that the idiom of the Indian
> Mujahideen drew on Islam, or at least a certain reading of Islam. The
> manifestos the organisation released after its operations sought
> religious legitimacy for the jihadist project.
>
> Days before 21 improvised explosive devices ripped through Ahmedabad
> on July 26, 2008, a young cleric from Azamgarh arrived to offer
> religious instruction to the Indian Mujahideen's bombers.
>
> Sheikh Abul Bashar hoped, Gujarat Police investigators say, to deepen
> the bombers' theological understanding of the war they were engaged
> in. He came armed with Salamat-e-Kayamat, an evangelical video replete
> with scriptural prophecies of the triumph of Islam before the day of
> judgment. He also acquired a copy of Faruk Camp, a paean to Taliban
> rule in Afghanistan, from Usman Aggarbattiwala, a young commerce
> graduate from Vadodara's Maharaja Sayaji University who allegedly
> programmed the integrated circuits used as timers for a separate set
> of bombs planted in Surat.
>
> Bored by the religious polemic, though, Bashar's students turned
> instead to Anurag Kashyap's movie Black Friday — a riveting account of
> just how a group of hard-drinking, womanising gangsters carried out
> the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai to avenge the anti-Muslim riots
> that that tore apart the city after the demolition of the Babri
> Masjid.
>
> It seems improbable that the earnest cleric approved of these
> decidedly irreligious role-models — and the Indian Mujahideen's
> aesthetic choices — may point us in the direction of important
> insights into the jihadist movement in India.
>
> Many believe the jihadist movement in India to be driven by religious
> fanaticism. There is little doubt that the idiom of the Indian
> Mujahideen drew on Islam, or at least a certain reading of Islam. The
> manifestos the organisation released after its operations sought
> religious legitimacy for the jihadist project. They also point to
> specific secular political problems facing India's Muslims,
> specifically communal violence. Bashar's Black Friday story helps
> debunk notions that the jihadist movement in India is spearheaded by
> madrasa-educated fanatics indoctrinated in something called “extreme
> Islam.” Both SIMI, and the Jamaat-e-Islami from which it was born,
> would rail against watching films; Indian Mujahideen terrorists
> revelled in them. Many seminaries are still struggling with modernity;
> India's jihadists are natives of the new world.
>
> Azamgarh and the Indian Mujahideen: Early last month, police in Uttar
> Pradesh arrested Salman Ahmad, one of a string of alleged jihadists
> associated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba's so-called “Karachi Project”: an
> enterprise run by Karachi-based fugitive Indian jihadists Riyaz Ismail
> Shahbandri, his brother Iqbal Shahbandri, and Abdul Subhan Qureshi to
> execute a renewed wave of bombings across the country. Police say
> Ahmad, who was arrested after the Research and Analysis Wing
> intercepted phone calls he made from Nepal to Pakistan, had received
> training at a Lashkar camp in Karachi before being tasked to set up a
> safe-house in Kathmandu for routing new recruits to the Lashkar. Just
> 15, his lawyers claim, when he was alleged to have participated in the
> 2008 bombings in New Delhi, Ahmad studied at a government-run high
> school and had enrolled for a computer-applications course at a
> Lucknow college.
>
> Ahmad's profile closely resembles that of many Azamgarh jihadists —
> which, along with Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Bhatkal, near Mangalore,
> served as a core recruitment base for the Lashkar-e-Taiba — linked
> jihadist cells which are today collectively referred to as the Indian
> Mujahideen.
>
> Data obtained by The Hindu for 10 individuals alleged to be key
> members of the Azamgarh jihadist cell show that just two individuals —
> Bashar himself and Mohammad Arif Badruddin — had spent any length of
> time in madrasas. Many likely received some religious education in
> their spare time, in common with many small-town children of all
> faiths, but their aspirations appear to have been decidedly
> middle-class. Zeeshan Ahmad, one of the suspects involved in the 2008
> shootout with the Delhi Police at Batla House, was pursuing a business
> administration degree. His flat-mate, Mohammad Saif, a history
> graduate, also hoped to secure an MBA. Mohammad Zakir Sheikh was
> studying for a Master's degree in Psychology in Azamgarh. Sadiq Israr
> Sheikh, who spent two years in an Azamgarh madrasa as a child, was
> enrolled in a computer-educaiton course.
>
> Bashar's story casts some light on just how the jihadist cells in
> Azamgarh in fact formed. In the wake of the demolition of the Babri
> Masjid, the Jamaat-e-Islami came under intense pressure from
> hardliners calling for militant action. The party, deeply entwined in
> mainstream politics and suspicious of a confrontation with the Indian
> state, resisted. Maulana Abdul Aleem Islahi — a prominent
> Hyderabad-based cleric who had graduated from Azamgarh's well-known
> Madrasat-ul-Islah — earned the party's wrath by authoring an
> inflammatory tract challenging its line. Expelled from the
> Jamaat-e-Islami, Maulana Islahi became an ideological mentor to many
> young radicals who played a key role in the jihadist movement in India
> — among them, fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Abdul Subhan
> Qureshi.
>
> In the summer of 2005, Maulana Islahi offered Bashar a job at the
> Jamaiat Sheikh ul-Maududi, a seminary named for the founder of the
> Jamaat-e-Islami. The cleric and Bashar's father had been friends and
> political allies in the Jamaat; their relationship evidently survived
> his expulsion.
>
> Later, though, Bashar was increasingly drawn to the jihadist project
> advocated by Maulana Islahi's son, Salim. He left his job, began
> addressing gatherings of the pro-jihadist organisations like the
> Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahadat and Tehreek Tahaffuz-e-Sha'aire Islam, and
> edited the Islamist magazine Nishaan-e-Rah, which drew its name from
> the seminal ideologue Syed Qutb's key work, Milestones. Salim Islahi
> introduced Bashar to Sadiq Israr Sheikh, a Mumbai-based SIMI radical
> with Azamgarh roots who had studied at a madrasa there for some years
> as a child. Sheikh, who was linked through SIMI to the Indian
> Mujahideen's fugitive commanders Qureshi and Shahbandri, in turn
> recruited jihadists in Azamgarh — key among them Atif Amin, who was
> killed in the 2008 shootout.
>
> The “Islamist Class”: Clearly, a complex matrix of factors — among
> them, personal friendship, kinship networks and ideology — helped
> build the Indian Mujahideen's networks. Madrasas or traditional
> Islamist affiliations were not among them. Bashar, for example, did
> not draw on students of the Madrasa Sheikh ul-Maududi for recruits.
> Nor did he seek out students at the Azamgarh seminary where he and his
> employer were educated, the Madrasat-ul-Islah.
>
> Part of the reason for this may be that the jihadist movement, of
> which SIMI was the most visible face, stood in opposition to both the
> traditional clerics and organised Islamist politics. In his rich
> anthropological study Islamism and Democracy in India, the scholar
> Irfan Ahmad explored the frictions between the Jamaat-e-Islami
> establishment and SIMI at the Jamaat-e-Islami-run Jamiat-ul-Falah
> seminary in Azamgarh. Founded by the Jamaat-e-Islami to capitalise on
> the new political space that opened up after the Emergency, SIMI soon
> embarrassed the party's elders by its support for jihadists.
>
> SIMI mounted polemical attacks on the Jamaat-e-Islami scholar Maulana
> Mohammad Rahmani, and sought to take control of the Jamiat-ul-Falah's
> old-students' association. In 1999, a time when it had become
> increasingly vocal in its calls for jihad and support for
> organisations like the Taliban, SIMI members provoked a showdown with
> authorities at the Jamiat-ul-Falah. The Jamaat-e-Islami's official
> students' wing, the Students Islamic Organisation, responded by
> founding a parallel student body, the Tanzeem Tulba-e-Qadim, which
> charged SIMI with propagating “katta [gun] culture”, saying that its
> calls for jihad were “lethal for Islam, Muslims and the country.”
> Notably, SIMI was proscribed by authorities at the Jamiat-ul-Falah
> well before the Government of India finally acted against the jihadist
> organisation in the wake of the Al Qaeda's attacks on the United
> States on September 11, 2001. During the police crackdown that
> followed the SIO refused to join in protests against SIMI leaders from
> the Jamiat-ul-Falah.
>
> Dr. Ahmad points to the existence of what he describes as a distinct
> “Islamist class”. Unlike at some other seminaries, students living at
> Falah did not come from among the ranks of the poor. Fees, including
> food and incidental costs, ranged around Rs. 900 a month. Of 5,365
> students, 4,300 came from cities. But class, he noted was “not just
> based on monthly income and an urban location but, more crucial, the
> specific cultural capital.” Just as cultural capital of the
> Jamaat-e-Islami led its leadership to make specific political choices
> to the crisis with which the Muslim community has been confronted, so,
> too, did the jihadists linked to the institutions and organisations
> that broke with the structured Islamist movement. Both sides drew on
> Islam to legitimise their position — but their choices were shaped by
> the challenges of politics in a modern, plural society.
>
> “Haven't you still realised that the falsehood of your 33 crore dirty
> mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute and naked idols
> of Ram, Krishna and Hanuman”, the venomous Indian Mujahideen manifesto
> released to media as bombs went off across Ahmedabad read, “are not at
> all going to save your necks, Insha-Allah, from being slaughtered by
> our hands.”
>
> Below, though, were five demands, each entirely secular in character:
> demands for restitution against police outrages, the punishment of the
> perpetrators of communal violence, and the legal defence of terrorism
> suspects.
>
> Fighting the jihadists must obviously involve better policing and
> intelligence. But it also needs political interventions built around
> rights and justice — not the appeasement of religious neoconservatives
> and clerics, as successive Indian governments have seemed to believe.
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