April 2011 
Year 17    No.156
Fundamentalism



 

Thank god my name is not Khan

I am writing this column even before the finals begin so my apologies for not congratulating all DNA readers on India’s victory (that’s how bullish I am in assuming we will win).

Now let me make your Sunday coffee a little bitter. All of us told you and showed you how several Muslims were praying for India before the India-Pakistan semi-final in Mohali. Many of us must have been happy to read that, see those images.

Well, I was a little sad. Didn’t I like Muslims praying for India against arch-rivals Pakistan? What’s wrong with that, you might ask? But ponder over this… did you see Indian Christians praying for India before we played against England or Australia? They didn’t have to do that. This is not to say they didn’t pray or they didn’t want India to win. Of course they did. But we want Indian Muslims to wear their patriotism on their sleeves. And for the record, the British plundered our nation and yet we don’t hold that against England or the English team.

One of my former sports journalist colleagues once told me how Azhar was always tense during an India-Pakistan match, especially during the World Cup. Despite being one of the best fielders of his time, Azhar always feared he would spill a catch and further feared how it would be viewed by the media and even more, the fans (fan is short for fanatical, if I am right).

It reminds me of a great scene in the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Chak De! India. SRK’s friend is urging him to forget the past (when he missed scoring off a penalty stroke against Pakistan in a hockey match and was labelled a traitor ever since). He tells SRK: “Ek galti toh sabhi ko maaf hoti hai (everyone is allowed one mistake)…” SRK, who plays the role of Kabir Khan in the film, turns to him with pain in his eyes and asks, after a dramatic pause: “Sabhi ko (Everyone)?”

Perhaps Azhar always feared he would not be pardoned if he made this ‘ek galti’ against Pakistan. For the last two decades or so a large section of the vocal majority views Muslims in India as silent Pakistani supporters. Muslims are asked why their leaders did not condemn Godhra. To ensure that the entire community is not branded, community leaders now quickly issue condemnations and that helps cool tempers. And they offer prayers before an India-Pakistan match. Why are we placing the proverbial chip on their shoulders?

It was heartening to see both MS Dhoni and Shahid Afridi showing remarkable poise before and after the match. Both were superbly restrained and Afridi’s appeal to fans in Pakistan applies to us in India as well. He asked them to see the India-Pakistan match as a game and not a war. Afridi has matured. When will we?

Deepak Lokhande in DNA, April 3, 2010
www.dnaindia.com

When women change, everything changes

Among the most prevalent western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?

In both countries, women protesters were nothing like the western stereotype: they were front and centre, in news clips and on Facebook forums and even in the leadership. In Egypt’s Tahrir Square, women volunteers, some accompanied by children, worked steadily to support the protests – helping with security, communications and shelter. Many commentators credited the great numbers of women and children with the remarkable overall peacefulness of the protesters in the face of grave provocations.

Other citizen reporters in Tahrir Square noted that the masses of women involved in the protests were demographically inclusive. Many wore headscarves and other signs of religious conservatism while others revelled in the freedom to kiss a friend or smoke a cigarette in public. But women were not serving only as support workers. Egyptian women also organised, strategised and reported the events. Bloggers such as Leil-Zahra Mortada took grave risks to keep the world informed daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

The role of women in the great upheaval in the Middle East has been woefully under-analysed. Women in Egypt did not just “join” the protests – they were a leading force behind the cultural revolution that made the protests inevitable. And what is true for Egypt is true to a greater and lesser extent throughout the Arab world. When women change, everything changes, and women in the Muslim world are changing radically.

The greatest shift is educational. Two generations ago, only a small minority of the daughters of the elite received a university education. Today women account for more than half of the students at Egyptian universities. They are being trained to use power in ways that their grandmothers could scarcely have imagined: publishing newspapers (as Sanaa El Seif did, in defiance of a government order to cease operating); campaigning for student leadership posts; fund-raising for student organisations; and running meetings. Indeed a substantial minority of young women in Egypt and other Arab countries have now spent their formative years thinking critically in mixed-gender environments and even publicly challenging male professors in the classroom. It is far easier to tyrannise a population when half are poorly educated and trained to be submissive. But, as westerners should know from their own historical experience, once you educate women, democratic agitation is likely to accompany the massive cultural shift that follows.

However violent the immediate future in the Middle East may be, the historical record of what happens when educated women participate in freedom movements suggests that those in the region who would like to maintain iron-fisted rule are finished. Time and again, once women have fought the other battles for freedom of their day, they have moved on to advocate for their own rights. And since feminism is simply a logical extension of democracy, the Middle East’s despots are facing a situation in which it will be almost impossible to force these awakened women to stop their fight for freedom – their own and that of their communities.

Naomi Wolf on Al Jazeera; March 4, 2011
http://english.aljazeera.net

 

A perfect ambassador for fear

There are just 13 months to go until the French presidential election and Le Phénomčne Marine Le Pen, as it is called here, is getting spooky. Not so long ago, the 42-year-old daughter of Jean-Marie, now leader of the French National Front herself, was regarded as something of a joke – albeit quite an intelligent one. But now her detractors are taking her seriously. The last national opinion poll placed her first, with Nicholas Sarkozy trailing in third place. A quarter of Sarkozy’s former supporters are thought to have abandoned him for this twice-divorced mother of three and it is becoming increasingly hard to dismiss her chances of becoming the next French president.

Having taken over as party leader in January, she still has a novelty factor – she is a regular on the sofas of French television shows. Many French analysts refused to believe her surge in the opinion polls and are trying to find methodological inconsistencies. Le Monde went as far as to launch an investigation into the pollsters and their tactics. But there is no mystery as to why she jumps out as a candidate. Her main rival on the right is the increasingly unpopular Sarkozy while on the left she faces the austere Martine Aubry, socialist party leader and daughter of Jacques Delors, and the priapic bon viveur, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former finance minister.

Small wonder that the colourful Mme Le Pen is on something of a roll. She is, alas, no monster. She has a polished, winning charm. She has always made herself accessible, pitching herself as a woman of the people – in contrast to the haughty Sarkozy who annoys the French with his nervous tics, his sweating and his hastily acquired supermodel wife.

Mme Le Pen gains popularity by whipping up the xenophobic French into a fervour over immigration issues and the endlessly debated question of national identity. Polls suggest some 40 per cent of the French population regard Islam as the enemy within – and Muslims account for two-thirds of immigrants. The 1995 Paris Metro bombings – by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group – still loom large in the national memory. In a country with unemployment at 10 per cent, there are constant complaints about how immigrants “take all the jobs”. The turmoil in the Arab world has added to these fears.

Le Pen, presenting herself as moderate, has played on these anxieties, saying France should give refugees food and water but by no means allow them to land…

Unlike her father, Le Pen is careful not to say or do anything that could easily be labelled “racist”. She has drilled party members not to employ objectionable terms. She is canny about avoiding explosive far-right issues. She has made it clear that she does not share her father’s anti-Semitism. (The 82-year-old Le Pen notoriously dismissed Hitler’s gas chambers as a “detail of history”.) She instead stresses her party’s core agenda: halting immigration and ending citizenship by birthplace.

One could almost call her a proponent of Fascism Light, a Facebook-generation right-winger. She is a far better judge than her father of where to draw the line between nationalism and obvious extremism. It also helps that she is telegenic, intelligent, interesting, outgoing, self-deprecating and modern. She is no Sarah Palin.

Her declared tactic is to reach out to younger voters and women – and so far it is working.

Jean-Marie Le Pen’s secret was to harness fear and exploit France’s long-standing fear of immigration. His daughter, who has learnt from her father’s mistakes, is gaining a popularity that the old demagogue could never have achieved. With her blonde bob, her wide smile and her anti-Islamic views, Marine Le Pen has become a perfect ambassador for fear.

Janine di Giovanni in Deccan Chronicle, March 23, 2011
www.deccanchronicle.com

Burning of Koran condemned

The US has strongly condemned the burning of the Koran by a radical pastor in Florida and said the Obama administration is deeply concerned about all deliberate attempts to offend members of any religious minority.

“We condemn such acts as disrespectful, intolerant and divisive. We are deeply concerned about all deliberate attempts to offend members of any religious or ethnic group,” the state department spokesman, Mark Toner, told reporters at the start of a special briefing on Libya on March 25. “Public condemnation of burning the Koran has come from a variety of organisations, including the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Anti-Defamation League,” he said.

“We believe firmly in freedom of religion and freedom of expression, they are universal rights, enshrined in the US Constitution and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Toner said. “We reaffirm our position that the deliberate destruction of any holy book is an abhorrent act,” he said, adding that “religious freedom and religious tolerance are fundamental pillars of US society”.

“President Bush added a copy of the Koran to the White House library and a member of Congress took his oath of office on a Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson – one of America’s founding fathers,” Toner said.

In Florida last week, the controversial pastor, Terry Jones, had overseen the burning of the holy Koran by an evangelical preacher pastor, Wayne Sapp, in a local church after the holy book was put on trial and was convicted of crime. Jones had said that trial of the holy Koran was held by a jury of 12 church members and volunteers, with a Dallas imam as a defence lawyer.

“We had a court process. We tried to set it up as fair as possible which, you can imagine, of course, is very difficult,” Jones had told USA Today. Jones however considered the burning of the Koran a one-time event and said that he had no plans to do it on a mass scale.

The Muslim community in the US has declined to respond to such an act by Jones and his small group of followers.

PTI News, March 26, 2011

 

Dutch look to ban hijab

In a new move against a woman’s right to wear the hijab, the Islamic headdress, a Dutch member of parliament has called for a ban of the hijab from public places in the country. Jeanine Hennis, a member of the liberal VVD party, said in an interview with De Pers newspaper that the country should move to start a debate on banning the dress.

“I would very much like to have that debate about when you can wear a headscarf,” Hennis said on March 15. The People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) is a liberal conservative party that shares a coalition government with the Christian Democrats. The VVD has six ministers in the current cabinet, including the prime minister, Mark Rutte.

Local Dutch newspapers reported that in the provincial elections campaign earlier this month, Machiel de Graaf, PVV party leader for the Senate, also called for banning the hijab.

The feud between Europe and the Islamic headdress has been the subject of intense debate following the ban France imposed on the headscarf in public places in 2004. Many European countries have followed Paris’s example in imposing laws that ban the hijab from public places and government educational facilities.

Hennis, joined by other lawmakers, argued that it is a matter of separation of state and church. “I would like to hold a more reflective debate about the separation of church and state,” Hennis said. “We talk a lot about the separation of church and state but the church has become involved in the state in a lot of ways,” she added to the newspaper. She also claimed that the Christian right was against the debate, as they see it as part of freedom of religion. “They regard it as an infringement on freedom of religion,” she added.

In January (2011), a young student won a complaint filed against her school for not allowing her to attend classes while wearing her headscarf. According to Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW), student Iman Mahssan, 15, asked the school for permission in February 2010 to wear her headscarf but her request was met with silence. At the beginning of the new school year Mahssan decided to wear her everyday piece of clothing, a move that was met harshly by the school, which imposed a ban on the Islamic dress in the school. Mahssan filed a complaint against the school with the Equal Treatment Commission and the committee ruled in her favour on January 7. Yet the school is continuing to refuse to implement the committee’s decision and has maintained its ban.

Manar Ammar, March 15, 2011
http://bikyamasr.com/wordpress


[ Subscribe | Contact Us | Archives | Khoj | Aman ]
[ Letter to editor  ]

Copyrights © 2002, Sabrang Communications & Publishing Pvt. Ltd.