[A-List] Fw: [pakhtu] Guardian: The west, not Islam, is the real enemy of democracy

["Tariq Mahmood" <zaogir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here is another view about the Muslims, a people who are the main target of
world imperialism as well as most blame them for they being the cause for
it. The following an inside and realistic view. Muslims constitute to be
about a quarter of world population, custodian to large and strategically
important tracts of land and much natural wealth. They in addition to
probably Black Africans, the Dalits of India and indigenous people of
different continents 'feel' to be the most oppressed. In a way I agree with
this view hat their oppression is primarily perpetrated by their own elite.
They certainly deserve to be understood if not helped.

Tariq
======================
"M. Othman" <mm1582@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 The west, not Islam, is the real enemy of democracy

 The warmongers encourage secular autocrats to suppress the Muslim world

 Faisal Bodi

 Monday January 13, 2003
 The Guardian

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,873553,00.html

 How did it come to this?" asks Theoden, King of Rohan, as he gazes down on
the massed ranks of evil beleaguering his fortress in Hollywood's adaptation
of Lord of the Rings.

 The words may be fictional but, as we count down to Washington's second
instalment in the real-life epic that is the the war on terror, an honest
examination of what has brought the civilisations of Islam and the west to
this critical pass is long overdue. For despite the seemingly unassailable
sway of the clash of civilisations thesis - in some quarters more a desire
than a forecast - there is hope and it lies in the fact that the differences
are less intractable than the forces of darkness would have us believe.

 Five years ago, the Iranian president Mohammed Khatami called for a
"dialogue of civilisations" before a meeting of the UN. The speech was an
encomium to liberty, articulating what progressive Islamists have been
advocating for years as the key to peace: emancipation from despotism. The
major obstacle to peace, goes the theory, is not terrorism or religious
obscurantism but the enslavement of hundreds of millions of Muslims, who
continue to be denied the fundamental right of being free to choose their
own leaders and systems of government.

 The warmongers have made sure the message has remained outside mainstream
debate so they can forge ahead unimpeded. Using their agents and
sympathisers in the mass media to blanket all Islamist politics as
fundamentalist, and by excluding its fluid, nuanced discourse from the
international conversation, they have rendered voiceless a full quarter of
humanity.

 Because most Muslim politics is Islamist the political and media blackout
has meant the grievances of subject Muslim populations have failed to reach
their free counterparts in the west. How many on the Clapham omnibus know
that France actively supported the Algerian government's annulment of
elections that Islamists were poised to win in 1992, plunging the country
into a savage civil war? Or that in Egypt, whose single-party regime
qualifies in Washington as the second most-favoured tyranny after Israel,
religious parties are banned, as they are in Turkey, and political
dissidents tortured? Or that since the "accession" of the Palestinian
National Authority, Palestinian newspapers critical of Arafat have been
banned and their editors spirited away to jail in the middle of the night to
be flogged back into line? Or that in Jordan political activity in mosques
is outlawed?

 The governments of the west decree that liberty is not a fundamental right
for Muslims; it is a privilege to be extended in proportion to the degree to
which they conform to their prescriptions, especially that of
secularisation. The war on terror is part of a campaign to wrench Muslim
societies from their religious roots, a phenomenon that has best been
explained by Rachid Ghannouchi, a Tunisian Islamist ideologue now exiled in
Britain.

 For Ghannouchi the war against Islam began with Napoleon's invasion of
Egypt in 1798 and continued through the era of colonialism when opposition
was monopolised by a secularised elite that eventually supplanted the
colonial regimes. However, instead of actualising the Koranic principle of
shura (community consultation) to build democratic polities in which the
will of the majority is recognised, they set about doing violence to the
faith in the mistaken belief that progress and development could only be
achieved by aping the west.

 But there was a crucial difference in the secularism enshrined in western
polities and the aggressive totalitarian variant imposed in the Muslim
world. While the former merely separated the religious from the mundane
leaving some space for religion as in Britain, Arab pseudo-secularism sought
to take control of the institutions and symbols of Islam. Resistance was met
with state repression and violence.

 Ghannouchi lists how Tunisia's post-independence autocrat Habib Borguiba
tried to sever ties with its Islamic past, abrogating sharia law, removing
religion from the curriculum of Zaytuna University before closing it down
altogether, and nationalising mosques and the awqaf (relig-ious endowments
that gave religious institutions such as schools and charities
indepen-dence). He also issued a fiat ordering state employees to break the
Ramadan fast and restricted the number of pilgrims performing the Hajj. For
Tunisia you could substitute almost every other Arab nation-state.

 Pseudo-secularism was necessary to remould the Muslim mind into accepting
the western separation of church and state. There was no theoretical basis
in Islam to render the political sphere unto Caesar. To the contrary -
Muslims had to be forced by the state to adopt it. Anybody who believes the
age of desacralisation has passed need only look at the demands being made
by the US on Pakistan's General Musharraf and Indonesia's President
Sukarnoputri to "reform" the Islamic schooling system, or madrasa, as a
check against "extremism".

 That secularism has been placed ahead of liberty is, says Ghannouchi, the
result of malevolence but also a mis-conception in the western mind that
sees in all religion the European struggle against a church that in the
Middle Ages opposed the ability of reason to explain the universe and to
organise life.

 Since Islam has no inherent objection to reason - a facet demonstrated by
the wealth of scientific knowledge it bequeathed to the Renaissance - it is
inappropriate to view it through this lens. What we did have in the Muslim
world was no end of autocracy. While the ulema (scholars who interpret the
religion) shielded religious institutions from the state's will to power by
anchoring them in civil society, they failed to develop a theory of
governance rooted in the democratic practice of the early community in the
city state centred on Medina.

 Like many Islamists, Ghannouchi insists on the compatibility of democracy
with Islam. Controversially for some Islamists, he advocates British-style
secular democracy as a step to a democracy rooted in the divine law, since
any type of democracy is better than the despotism that is Muslims' lot
today.

 "The conflict is not a religious one," he writes. "Nor is it even a
conflict between religion and the western concept of secularism. It is a
political conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed. It is about
legitimacy and whom it belongs to. It is about the nature of government, the
choice between autocracy and democracy."

 Last week Jack Straw took the war on Iraq to the world's most populous
Muslim nation, Indonesia, claiming that Saddam posed as great a threat to
Muslims as he did to the west. Nice try, mate. Autocratic Saddam poses the
same threat to Muslims as the "autocratising" west.

 · Rachid Ghannouchi - A Democrat within Islamism by Azzam S Tamimi is
published by Oxford University Press.

 · Faisal Bodi is a writer on Muslim affairs and editor of ummahnews.com.

 comment@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx