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

[Pawan Durani]

Dear Anupam Ji ,

NamaskAr

The said article has appeared in a national paper from what i assume a
respectable author. The source is given in my mail.

If you disagree with any content , there is a comment section on the
web page where you can share your views.

Or you can debate the content here , with those who would be interested in.


Thanks & regards

Pawan Durani


On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 6:27 PM, anupam chakravartty <c.anupam at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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