A Pawn In The Game
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

“No!” Naphta continued. “The mystery and precept of the age is not liberation and the development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, and what it will create for itself, is – terror”.

(from “the Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann, 1924)

The first time I met Tourson, a muslim from Xinjiang, I had no inkling of the terrible fate that he had just escaped from. He sat patiently outside my clinic as he waited for me to finish seeing those with regular appointments. He was a gentle, relatively big man who easily broke into a smile, I guess partly to make up for his inadequate English at that time. He was still a little weak and drained from a major operation soon after his arrival in Kuala Lumpur. He had been recommended to me by an old friend who had been instrumental in providing his passage to Malaysia. The circumstances of his situation and his long term plan were not disclosed to me. Tourson had come to ask a favour from me, something so small that I had thought nothing of it. I have written many such letters before – asking for children with heart disease to be exempted from sports, recommending their families walk-up flats on the first floor or explaining why their parents should not be transferred to a place where medical access is difficult. I only became aware how much it meant to him when his family was about to leave Malaysia for Canada some months ago for a final resettlement as “political” refugees.

On that first visit, Tourson showed me a medical report of his little boy named Maimate (he told me this is how “Muhammad” is pronounced and spelled in China) who was still in Urumqi with his wife and 2 older children. The report was mainly in Mandarin but it has enough information in english to give me an idea of his medical condition. At his request, I duly wrote a simple letter stating that his son’s medical condition, a form of a hole in the heart, can be treated at our institution in Kuala Lumpur. He told me that the letter, simple as it may sound, was needed for the authorities in Urumqi to allow his family to leave and join him in Malaysia. I did not know at that time that he could practically never return to Xinjiang. More than 6 months later Tourson came back to my clinic, this time with his family in tow, profusely grateful, his english and bahasa much improved. He seemed to me a keen learner of languages from the progress that he had made, using his time well and taking the opportunity that his new environment provided. What evaded me at that time was the sense of relief from the terrible anguish over the possibility that he might never see his wife and children again. Tourson, with his sparse goatee beard, has more Chinese features, but his wife, with her skin complexion and facial features typical of Central Asian of women of Turkic stock, looked distinctively non Chinese, especially with her muslim dress and head scarf. As for Maimate, the subject of my professional concern, his hole in the heart was fortunately not big, obviating any need for urgent treatment.

I followed them up for nearly 2 years or so after that first visit, making sure that the hole in the heart was not interfering with his growth and physical activities. As his real reason for coming to Malaysia in the first place never crossed my mind, I did not probe too much into his personal background, trying to keep my relationship with him strictly professional. Still, we talked quite a bit about Xinjiang, Urumqi and Islam in China. Having watched a BBC series many years ago made by travel writer Colin Thubron about travels in exotic, remote parts of the world which included his homeland, I have some knowledge of it and harbour a faint wish of visiting. One episode in the series was about the famed Silk Road whose towns and cities owed their existence and importance to that ancient trade route, notably Kashgar, Turfan and Urumqi, which today remain culturally distinct even as westward, forced migration of the Chinese during the cultural revolution has diluted its muslim, central asian character. What I did not know was that despite Tourson’s pride in his city, his people and their Islamic heritage, he could no longer remain there and will not likely see it again. In the climate of post September 11, the “war on terror” has given despots and authoritarian governments a more stretchable excuse to persecute their muslim citizens without having to look over their shoulder. It could even earn them brownie points from the warriors of the war on terror. The peace and security of the world is hardly the objective, much less “the liberation and development of the ego”. To be simply a devout muslim in these times in these places can be a dangerous thing. Getting caught in this very fine net cast by the “war on terror by terror” (coined by Fred Halliday, opendemocracy contributor and professor of international relations at the London School of Economics) sums up Tourson’s sudden change of fortune and exile from his beloved homeland, at least as I had understood it. One reads of stories on human right abuses, unlawful detentions, of families being separated, of wives rendered widows and children orphans, simply because they are muslims who take their faith a bit more seriously, making them a fair game in the war on terror, but seeing them in front of me as they try to piece together their broken lives again is very sad and unsettling.

The realization that Tourson was one such pawn in the game came to me when he requested another letter, this time for the Canadian Embassy. Until that point I did not know that he was a “political” exile, and that Malaysia was only a temporary place of refuge. I duly wrote the letter, stating that Maimate’s heart condition will not be a huge burden to the canadian tax payers. That concern on the part of the Canadian government is quite understandable as some children with complex cardiac problems require multiple, major operations.

In Urumqi, Tourson taught Islamic studies at the university. Coming from a religious family, the love of his faith and his desire to see the young people remain faithful to their religion and cultural traditions beyond the scope of his tightly restricted professional duties unfortunately drew the attention of the authorities in these security – sensitive times. For his religious activism beyond what is officially sanctioned by the state, he was imprisoned, part of which in solitary confinement, and was subjected to physical torture. I was told that the abdominal surgery that he underwent upon arriving in Malaysia was a consequence of this. Xinjiang is one of those restive regions where the Chinese authorities has been trying to quel ethnic separatist tendencies, at times using heavy handed and violent means. It might have been true that some of the more extreme groups may have been emboldened and inspired by the Al Qaeda ideology but the blank cheque for the use of coercive means is perhaps less aimed at these tiny extremist bands but more for those people like Tourson who wish to practice their faith more fully than what is officially sanctioned, thus becoming irritants to a state power with deep distrust for religions of whatever persuasion.

When approval was finally given by the Canadian authorities, he invited my family and our mutual friend for dinner at his humble dwelling. He was living in a low cost flat located off the busy Jalan Gombak. Typical of such dwellings, the flat was small, poorly ventilated and constructed from poor quality materials, and the block having the overall look of being poorly maintained. To top all that, it is in an area where a malay kampung has been reluctantly dragged into the 21st century – haphazard planning, uncollected rubbish and the incessant din of traffic squeezing thru roads under perpetual state of being repaired. He must be quite glad to escape all this. In Malaysia, he was barely making ends meet, teaching mandarin at private Islamic schools among other things. I imagine that he is very anxious to get his eldest boy into the educational mainstream, having been out of it for nearly 2 years. He has turned into a handsome and tall teenager, drawing the mischievous attention of the girls in the block who slipped their phone numbers and messages through the window panes even while we were having dinner. I imagine Tourson must be quite desperate to settle down somewhere, anywhere for the sake of his children. At the same time, he must have been heavy-hearted to leave for a place where the lure of its youth culture and erosion of his children’s Islamic identity and cultural pride will be very difficult to resist, if what he has seen among Kuala Lumpur’s youth is but a prelude. After all, instilling this cultural awareness and religious practice among the youths of his home city was his life’s mission that led him to exile in the first place.

It must be a great relief for him that all those uncertainties were finally coming to an end. He told us that they were going to be settled in Quebec and they have even found him a job in a halal butcher’s shop to help him start life anew in Canada. To prepare them for life in that French speaking part of Canada, the embassy sent a French teacher to their humble dwelling every week for a number of months already to teach the whole family the rudiments of communication in that language. I thought that was awesome, and some of those shameful incidents in the way we had treated the Vietnamese boat people and more recently, the Rohingya refugees flashed in my mind.

Anyway, upon learning this, I switched into French in the middle of our conversation and I could see Tourson’s face lighted up as he struggled to do the same.

At the end of the evening, as we were saying our good byes and wishing each other well, standing at the doorway with Maimate in his arms, I could see a tinge of sadness in Tourson’s eyes behind his wistful smile. Much as he looked forward to finally settle down in Canada for the sake of his children’s future, he is leaving behind friends and a society to which at least he has some religious bonds. Not that things in his homeland are going to improve anytime soon, but at least here the geographical distance is not so daunting. It will be a totally alien society that he and his family would have to now re-adapt. More difficult than surviving Canada’s long frozen winters would be keeping the right balance and having his children reconcile their Islamic faith with life in the post-modern west. That would be his real test.

The Right to Rule Ourselves
by Dr. Azzam Tamimi

For nearly a century, democracy has been denied to the Arabs by the west. There is little sign of that changing

Azzam Tamimi
Friday January 7, 2005
The Guardian

Arabic-speaking peoples from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf suffer one common chronic ailment, namely oppressive despotism. Most of the states that stretch between the two water basins came into being less than a century ago; many were former colonies of one or other of the European powers. France and Britain in particular were instrumental after the first world war in shaping the entire map of what is today the Middle East and North Africa. These two ageing imperial powers were also responsible for creating and, until the US took over, maintaining systems of governance in these newly emerging entities – providing ruling elites with moral, material and military support. Little has changed since then, apart from the imperialist master and the fact that the advance in technological warfare has enabled this master, so far, to maintain the status quo with ever greater vigour.

Unlike other parts of the world, and in contrast even to the norm in some neighbouring states, the Arab peoples ruled by these regimes have had very little say, if any, in the manner in which their affairs are run. While some analysts find it convenient to blame Arab or Muslim culture for this lack of democracy, I would argue that it is only the stringent control imposed from outside that denies to the peoples of this region what has readily been recognised as a basic human right elsewhere in the world.

The Algerian example of 1991-92 has been carved in the memory of Arabs and Muslims across the globe. Democracy is not on offer to whoever wishes to have it, and the Arabs – many Muslims too, for that matter – do not qualify to join the privileged club. More than 10 years ago France was horrified at the prospect of an Islamic government in its closest former colony, Algeria. The rest of the western world agreed and coalesced to abort the democratic process before it delivered the reins of power to the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front).

The Iraqi people suffered all forms of repression at the hands of the (until 1990) pro-western Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein. But it was far from being a unique despotic regime in the region. As far as the democratic powers of the west were concerned, it did not matter what any of those despots did to their own people, so long as their regimes posed no threat to what were seen as western interests – namely oil and Israel – and still better so long as these regimes were loyal allies.

Preparations are now under way for elections in Iraq. But few in Iraq or the region believe these elections are aimed at producing a truly representative government. The US did not invade and occupy Iraq to allow a genuinely free election that risked producing a government that might tell the Americans to leave. The purpose of the Iraqi elections is simply to try to bestow some spurious legitimacy on a regime that is as unrepresentative and as oppressive as Saddam’s.

Does anyone really believe that former Ba’athist Ayad Allawi, America’s stooge in Baghdad, who gave the orders for the total destruction of Falluja, has the interests of Iraqis at heart? How different is this from what Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad did to the city of Hama in the early 80s or from what Saddam himself did to the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs?

This weekend the Palestinians are to be given the right to elect a new leader, they say, for a change. However, if peace-making is to be resumed and if Israel is to agree to talk to the Palestinians, they can only choose Mahmoud Abbas – hence the international pressure to eliminate the popular Marwan Barghouti from the race. The fact that many Palestinians do not see Abbas as representative of their aspirations or willing to defend their rights does not matter to Israel or its western allies. Nor is it of any concern to the US and the EU that Hamas has increasingly strong support among Palestinians (as highlighted by their recent performance in municipal elections); they still will not talk to its representatives. It is fully acceptable for Israelis to elect whomever they deem fit to lead them, even a war criminal like Ariel Sharon. No Arab people are allowed the same luxury.

Who would free Arabs be likely to choose to speak for them? President Mubarak of Egypt is reported to have said to some western guests “don’t talk to me about democracy; through democracy the Muslim Brotherhood will rule Egypt”. The Arabs have experienced all sorts of political and ideological groups over the past century. But there is little doubt that if free elections were held today in the Middle East, Islamic movements would reap the fruits. It is not of course that these Islamists are anything like the media usually portray them: fundamentalist, backward or even terrorists. It is simply that they are honest, serious and more interested in the public good than personal interests. Thus democracy is denied to the Arabs.

And who is the real victim in all of this? It is none other than democracy itself, whose name has been tarnished and whose values are increasingly associated in the minds of many Arabs and Muslims with military invasion to replace one corrupt despotic secular regime with another more willing to bend the knee to US and western diktat.

· Azzam Tamimi is spokesman of the Muslim Association of Britain and director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought

Renungan Ramadhan by Dr. Hj. Omar bin Yaakob

A Preview of : The Power of Nighmares (BBC)
by Dr. Azzam Tamimi

Adam Curtis BBC three-part series “The Power of Nightmares, the Rise of the Politics of Fear” promises to be one of the best documentaries on the roots and interconnections of ‘Islamic extremism’ and ‘neo-conservatism’ ever shown on British television. “Baby it’s cold outside” is the title of the first part, which will be shown on BBC2 at 21:00 (9 pm) on Wednesday 20 October. The one-hour long programme begins with a brief introduction, which will then be repeated at the start of each of the other two one-hour long programmes, that sums up the theme of the entire series: Having miserably failed to provide their peoples with the dreams they always promised, rulers, viewers are told, have turned to promising the ruled protection from incredible nightmares that in reality simply do not exist.

The story begins with the arrival in the United States of America in the late forties of the 20th century by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian educationist who had come to learn the American approach to education. Part One tells the story of Qutb’s disillusionment with liberal individualist America. Then it parallels that with telling the story of Leo Strauss who was equally disturbed by the corruption of the liberal system. Upon his return to Egypt, Qutb endeavours to protect his home country from the encroaching liberalism of the West while Strauss in the USA initiates a philosophical school that advocates the employment of powerful myths, namely religion and the role of the missionary state, in order to combat the corrupting influences of liberalism. Sayyid Qutb ends up in prison where he is severely tortured and then executed. After his death, he becomes the inspiration for a new breed of Islamists that see themselves right while everybody else is wrong. In the U.S., Strauss becomes the mentor and spiritual father of a new generation of thinkers knows as Straussians. The Islamist and Straussian schools give rise to two strands of radicalism: one Islamic led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri who claimed to be the rightful heir to Qutb, and one neoconservative led by the likes of Pearl and Wolfowitz, who take pride in bringing about a materialization of Strauss’s philosophy and who climb up the ladder of power in the USA in order to change the world. While the contrasts between the two sides are what people tend to emphasize, the similarities are no less striking even if not much attention is give to them. The alleged followers of Qutb and the loyal disciples of Strauss both claim to be the vanguards whose mission is to fight evil and rescue the world from its claws.

The second part, which will be shown on BBC2 at the same time on Wednesday 27 October, is entitled “The phantom victory.” It is the story of the ‘Jihad’ in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, a jihad that brought the two poles of radicalism together. What was seen by the Muslims as a noble cause and a religious duty in aid of their vanquished and oppressed brethren in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan was to the American establishment a golden opportunity to defeat and humiliate the rival superpower. The neoconservatives, who had joined the Reagan administration, pressed for unconditional and unlimited support for the jihad in Afghanistan. The documentary highlights the role played by Abdullah Azzam in mobilizing young Arab mujahidin while maintaining a moderate ideological stance. The role of the CIA in arming, training and funding the jihad is also documented. One of the people Azzam had influence on was Osama bin Laden who soon afterwards was attracted by a rival camp led by a late arrival in the front, the radical Zawahiri. The defeat of the Soviets and their retreat from Afghanistan was hailed by both the Islamists and the neoconservatives alike as a vindication of their respective ideologies though experts maintain that the communist superpower had been eroding and collapsing due to domestic factors that were only augmented by the war in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the liberation of Afghanistan both Islamists and neoconservatives suffered setbacks. The coup against democracy in Algeria to strip FIS of its electoral win and the campaigns of persecution against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt both led to a surge in the use of violence by the likes of GIA in Algeria and Al-Jihad in Egypt. However, the violence backfired on the groups that resorted to it. Having lost the war against the Egyptian regime and the sympathy and support of many former followers, Zawahiri forged an alliance with Bin Laden and decided to go after the United States itself instead of its regional lackeys. The neoconservatives, on the other hand, were disarmed when George Bush senior settled for liberating Kuwait and refused to go after Saddam. With his failure to be re-elected as president their crusade was turned against President Clinton who embodied the evil they sought to destroy through attacks on his personality and integrity.

The third and last programme, which will be shown at the same time a week later, is entitled “The Shadows in the Cave.” It tells the story of the revival of both groups of radicals. Although recruited by George W. Bush upon his assumption of his presidential responsibilities, the neoconservatives could only secure the President’s support for their agenda after the attacks on 11 September. This time it is not the Soviet Union that is seen as the embodiment of evil nor President Clinton but the Islamic radicals who waged war on America. The enormity of the attack provided the neoconservatives with the power to deliberately exaggerate and sometimes entirely invent reports or claims about the dangers Islamic groups posed to the United States. Increasingly, and more convincingly than ever before, the United States was being portrayed as the power of good fighting the power of evil, which inevitably meant Islam and the Muslims. The truth, as the documentary shows, is that much of what the world has been told by the neoconservatives is totally false especially about the myth that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or the myth that Al-Qaeda was a global network of terrorist groups and ‘sleeping’ cells that could hit America and its allies at any time or the myth that Saddam and Al-Qaeda were in anyway linked. While the neoconservatives trumpeted the Islamic threat to justify the ‘war on terror’ radical Islamists found this to be self-serving since it brought them to the fore and put them under the spotlight. Even the so-called ‘dirty bomb’ was the figment of the imaginations of both radical trends. The politics of fear, or the claim that the ruling elite in Washington and London were protecting the masses from an imminent attack that was no more than a myth, was the best justification for the drive by the neoconservatives to implement their plan to change the world and re-formulate it according to their own ideology.

This three-part documentary is a must for anyone that wishes to understand better both phenomena of ‘Islamic radicalism’ and ‘neo-conservative radicalism’ and is the best piece of TV documentary ever prepared on the subject.

Arafat’s Legacy
by Dr. Azzam Tamimi

It is not without good reason that the world has been so intensely focusing on the death-illness of Yassir Arafat and on his multi-national multi-stage funeral. The seventy five year old founder of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) and its head since 1957, the Chairman of the PLO since 1968 and President of the Palestinian Authority since 1994 has for the past forty years been recognized worldwide as the unrivalled Mr. Palestine. In spite of having been placed under virtual house arrest and in total isolation from the outside world for the past three years he continued, until air-lifted to a French hospital, to be the man in charge. For many years after his departure people will talk and write about his extraordinary career and adventurous journey through the wilderness of Middle East politics.

The most amazing aspect of his illness and death has been the obscurity that shrouded his two weeks stay at the Paris hospital. From the time he arrived there until just about twenty four hours before he was eventually – officially – pronounced dead, conflicting statements from Paris and Ramallah kept people guessing. As journalists could no longer hide their frustration at the unexplained blanket of silence, Palestinian streets had already become filled with all sorts of rumors. Initially it was thought the matter had to do with an ongoing power struggle within the leading ranks of the Fatah, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. However, Suha Al-Tawil (Mrs. Arafat) suddenly put an abrupt end to all speculations by appealing to the Palestinian people via a TV broadcast (aired by Aljazeera) to be alert to a conspiracy hatched by the top leaders of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority to allegedly bury Yassir Arafat alive. Surprisingly enough her suspects flew to Paris only to return a few hours later to Ramallah to set in motion the preparations for meticulous and elaborate funeral preparations for the leader who every one still maintained had not died yet. An Arabic internet news service by the name Filastin Press informs us now that this whole fiasco had been about concluding a deal with Suha Al-Tawil over an ongoing dispute over Arafat’s millions (some say billions) in numerous European secret bank accounts. Upon reaching a deal, we are informed, it became possible to allow Arafat to die. The specifics of the deal are not known for certain but according to rumors it involves a payment to Suha of twenty million dollars in addition to the eleven millions she had already taken plus a monthly stipend for herself and her daughter of around fifteen thousand dollars.

Marrying Suha Al-Tawil, a woman who is far removed from anything that can, even remotely, be identified with the plight or struggle of the Palestinian people, was not, as future generations will discover, Arafat’s only sin. His entire adult life has by all accounts been a struggle in pursuit of prominence, which he successfully achieved but not without incurring disaster after disaster upon the Palestinian cause itself. Acquiring fame by claiming to himself the success of others at times and by portraying defeat as victory at another, future generations of Palestinians will not be barred from seeing Arafat’s responsibility, even if partially, for Jordan’s Black September 1970 or for the many crises that gripped Lebanon throughout the seventies and part of the eighties until he and his forces were forced out.

One of his other sins, future generations will also discover, was his collusion with the Israelis and the Americans to end the Palestinian people’s 1987 Intifada by agreeing to peace-making on Israeli terms because he feared the emergence of an alternative leadership of the Palestinian people within Palestine. Furthermore, his insistence on monopolizing the Palestinian people and their cause brought about the severing of ties between the two Banks of the River Jordan the ramifications of which are still suffered by many Palestinians. It was such claimed monopoly that ended up with the Palestinians paying for his unwise siding with Saddam Hussein as the latter invaded Kuwait and pillaged it. On a more conceptual level, the national Palestinian identity he is widely accredited for led to the isolation of the Palestinian people and the dwarfing of the cause of confronting the Zionist project from being an Islamic and Arab cause to a mere ‘Palestinian’ one. Reshaping the Palestinian struggle in a nationalistic format has been the one single most damaging act to the cause. The problem of Palestine is not caused by the lack of Palestinian nationhood but is the symptom of the Western Zionism colonial project whose manifestation is the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine.

Arafat’s most immediate sinful legacy, which will be the talk of the Palestinians and observers alike for a while, will be the shambles in which he left his own organization after several decades of tribal rule. Having insisted throughout his life to name no deputy or successor, and by virtue of the whimsical manner in which he ran his organization since it was set up about forty five years or so, Arafat’s death will inevitably cause more than one tremor. On the one hand, his departure will mark the end of an era and of an entire generation. Of those who co-founded Fatah with him in 1957 only three men remain alive and are still part of the organization: Mahmud Abbas, Salim Al-Za’nun and Faruq Qaddumi. The word is already out that the former is likely to be the leading contender for the presidential elections that will take place on 9 January 2005 to replace Yassir Arafat. However, having been the discredited Oslo architect and failed ‘first’ prime minister, Abu Mazin, as he is also known, is unlikely to fill the shoes of the departed leader. The other most powerful old guard remaining is Qaddumi who, until appointed head of Fatah upon the death of Arafat, has been acting as the de facto ceremonial head of the foreign affairs department in exile. Observers seem to agree that none of those who are above the age of sixty in Arafat’s close entourage is capable of steering the ship that Arafat leaves stranded in the shallow waters of Palestinian politics.

On the other hand, the Fatah movement, which only Arafat could keep together for so long, has for some time been on the brink of imploding. Rampant corruption, the failure of the peace process and the rise of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) as a credible and serious alternative have collectively contributed to the emergence of angry and frustrated clusters within the Fatah ranks. Mahmud Abbas, the current head of the PLO, and Ahmad Quray’, the current Prime Minister, will initially work together to fill the vacuum but eventually neither will be able to hold Fatah together and avert an imminent split. There is so much boiling underneath the surface within Fatah. The boiling has been fueled further by the failure of the peace process and the crippling corruption. Apart from the circle of the old guards, two opposing trends can be identified: a pro-settlement security-minded trend under the leadership of Israel’s favorite Muhammad Dahlan, former head of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza, and a pro-resistance anti-Israel trend led by the detained field commander Marwan Baghuti. The latter trend is commonly identified with the Fatah military wing Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades that came to being with the eruption of the second Intifada (uprising) on 28 September 2000.

However, despite any clever arrangements that Israel, Egypt and Jordan may seek singularly or collectively, with or without U.S. participation, the most important factor that makes the post-Arafat era a completely different one is the emergence of Hamas as the leading resistance movement among the Palestinians not only within the occupied territories but worldwide. In pursuit of an accomplished policy and in accordance with an established tradition Hamas is expected to stay out of any power struggle within the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the internal feud that will escalate to ever higher dimensions within the Fatah movement. While calling for unity and peaceful resolution of disputes, Hamas will maintain that the power struggle is none of its business. The Islamic organization has never agreed to join the PLO in the distant past and remained adamant in rejecting all calls to join the PA in more recent years. Furthermore, it has passed the test of resisting the temptation to respond to provocations by the PA’s various security instruments with violence focusing instead on its objective of forcing the Israelis out of the territories occupied in 1967 while maintaining the popular Palestinian position, long forfeited by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, that Israel is an illegitimate entity created on Palestinian land that one day will be free and independent.

Insisting that Hamas is a terrorist group with which no business can be done, the Israelis and their U.S. friends will be hoping that Arafat’s disappearance will pave the way for the resumption of peace negotiations with the Israelis. The assumption that Arafat has been the obstacle to peace prompted the Israelis and the Americans to stop talking to him and to even punish him severely until his health deteriorated and his life was lost. This is where they went miserably wrong; for this is not how the Palestinians analyze the situation. Yassir Arafat will be remembered by most Palestinians as someone who gambled and lost; he conceded more than enough and crossed all lines in compromising with the ‘enemy’ in the hope of getting something. He agreed to transform himself from a defender of his people’s rights to a politician whose primary concern was to remain afloat and stay politically alive. Prior to the eruption of the Second Intifada he was being pressed to pay the last two installments of the debt he owed to his ‘peace partners’ in Israel: give up the right of the Palestinian refugees to return home and give up Islamic exclusive rights to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. He knew, as every Palestinian, Arab and Muslim knew, that any compromise on these issues would have meant only one thing: his political demise. His refusal to sign at Camp David after marathon negotiations with former Israeli Prime Minister Barak and former U.S. president Clinton revived him and restored some of the loss in credibility and authority he incurred as a result of traveling the path of peace-making with Israel. His position also made it possible to bolster the unity and solidarity among various Palestinian factions and groups and turned the hostility between him and Hamas into a national alliance against ‘the one enemy’ of the Palestinian people.

The world is witnessing the beginning of a new era in post-Arafat Palestine. It is an era that demands a fresh start. Having suffered so much at the hands of Ariel Sharon, the Palestinians are not in the mood for peace making with the Israelis on terms dictated by the Israelis or the Americans. Therefore, if a fresh start is to be attempted an entirely new formula will have to be presented; a formula that emanates from an initiative whose underpinning assumption is the fact that the Palestinians are victims of occupation and oppression and that their struggle for freedom and independence is not terrorism. However, no such initiative will ever be successful if it excludes the major powers in today’s Palestinian society including Hamas.

HIV/AIDS
by Dr. Musa Mohd. Nordin

The current discourse on HIV/AIDS in the mainstream media seems to suggest an obsession with the condom culture and safe sex paradigm. The libertarian occident in no uncertain terms advocates this as their main thrust in their crusade against HIV/AIDS and have seduced a substantial volume of support for this strategy elsewhere. To indiscriminately ape this modus operandi and transplant them piecemeal into our national HIV/AIDS programs may turn out to be a folly.

Some 22 years into the syndrome complex, the WHO global summary document of the HIV/AIDS epidemic estimates 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). Dr. Nafis Sadik, Kofi Annan’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Asia Pacific, said that (in stark contrast), the prevalence of HIV/AIDS remains low in the Muslim world with rates well below 1% in countries with a Muslim majority and similarly in Muslim minorities in other countries.

These figures would therefore suggest that the infusion and practice of universal values derived from the Quran and prophetic teachings in individual, family and societal life must have endowed considerable prophylaxis against this deadly disease.

On the whole, I believe our citizenry continue to cherish the universal values of self discipline, chastity, morality, decency and family centricity. A whole host of human values, code of conduct and ethics shared and guarded enviously by the believers in our nation, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs or other religious persuasions.

Addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic demands a comprehensive and integrated response which prioritises preventative strategies, provides therapeutics, care and support to the afflicted and their families and puts in place long term macro-economic and social interventions to redress the socio-economic impact of HIV/AIDS.

The preventative strategies advocated by Islam and shared by virtually all other religious denominations emphasises the A for Abstinence from sex, the B for Being faithful in marriage, the C for Condom use, the D for Drug abuse avoidance and the E for Education of the public on the disease complex and her myriad of repercussions.

The avoidance of zina (fornication) and adultery is fundamental in the injunctions of the shariah (and I believe most other religions too) to preserve the sanctity and purity of virginity, progeny and family. How may I ask would you respond to a speaker at the International Muslim Leaders Conference on HIV/AIDS (IMLC) who arrogantly said “.how empty religious platitudes are in addressing the problem and how, even when those responses are based on the Quran and Sunnah they are ineffective to resolve the problem”. And with impunity she adds “In effect, what I present here emphasizes the ways that Islam and Muslims exarcebates the spread of AIDS .” Farish Noor in his current column on HIV/AIDS would therefore be well advised to be prudent and careful in his baseless accusations or is he, like the associate professor of Islamic studies oblivious of the ABC of the priorities of the shariah (Maqasid as-Shariah) and Islamic family Law!

There are obviously circumstances when condom use is indicated but to suggest a national policy of liberal condom use would only unleash a culture of sexual promiscuity and permissiveness. And we need to be reminded that the vast majority, in excess of 75%, of our PLWHA are intravenous drug users (IVDU). The government and all her agencies have failed miserably to diminish, if not eradicate this social scourge in our society. This however did not attract the press attention during World AIDS Days – a stale and non-sensational issue by comparison with the 46% rise in heterosexual transmission. I think a careful analysis of the women affected heterosexually is in order. Complete and comprehensive data collection is unfortunately not a forte of our major stake holders in HIV/AIDS work. Our experience with the well over 70 women whom we have sheltered in our Rumah Solehah (Islamic Medical Association of Malaysia Half Way Home for Women & Children with HIV/AIDS) showed that the majority acquired the virus heterosexually from their IVDU husbands or partners. And without exception all the affected children in our care acquired HIV vertically from their mothers who were themselves heterosexually infected by their IVDU husbands. This is the domino effect of the heroin culture in our society which the main players need to address equitably and judiciously.

Many of our western counterparts are beginning to awaken to the wisdom of this time tested and best practice strategy. The leading editorial in the British Medical Journal, 21st June 2003, entitled “Preventing HIV : Time to get serious about changing behaviours” writes; “But if behaviour cannot be changed then no amount of money is going to make a big difference in prevention because every successful form of prevention requires change in behaviour”. Arthur J. Ammann, president of Global Strategies for HIV prevention further writes “Data from developed and developing countries show that programs that incorporate abstinence, mutual monogamy, delayed sexual intercourse and condom work together to reduce the number of new HIV infections.”

An emotive issue as HIV/AIDS is bound to provoke a multitude of responses based on one’s religious, ideological and philosophical underpinnings. As Muslims, the Tauhidic paradigm envelops our responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It is simply put a “back to basics” wholesome blueprint of action which espouses and celebrates universal values of self discipline, chastity, morality, decency and family centricity and embraces a theology of mercy, care and compassion, forgiveness, healing, benevolence, brotherhood of humanity and belief in the hereafter.

Dr. Musa Mohd. Nordin

ILMC on HIV/AIDS
by Dr. Musa Mohd. Nordin

( IMLC ) held in Kuala Lumpur from 19-23 May 2003. I thank you in anticipation for your kind permission to share some of my personal perspectives of this universal predicament which permeates her obnoxious presence in virtually every aspect of our human endeavours

An outbreak of a rare form of opportunistic pneumonia, pneumocystis carinii, which hitherto only afflicted the severely immuno-compromised, among a cohort of healthy, young, gay men in Los Angeles, heralded the unwelcomed arrival of clinical AIDS in 1981.. Some 22 years into the syndrome complex, the WHO global summary document of the HIV/AIDS epidemic estimates 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). People newly infected with HIV in 2002 was 5 million and the AIDS mortalities in the same year exceeded 3.1 million. Kofi Annan’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Asia Pacific, Dr. Nafis Sadik in her evening address to the International Muslim Leaders Consultation on HIV/AIDS said that (in stark contrast) the prevalence of HIV/AIDS remains low in the Muslim world with rates below 1% in countries with a Muslim majority and similarly in Muslim minorities in other countries. Amina Wadud, a novice in the HIV/ AIDS frontline by her own admission “In 2002, I had my first encounter with constructive organizational level efforts to respond to the AIDS epidemic at a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya”, would therefore be well advised to be prudent and careful in examinig her basic facts and vocabulary of HIV/AIDS before advancing her unscientific and non-evidence based thesis.

The injunctions of the syariah was stipulated to preserve and protect the very essence of our humanity, namely religion, life, mind, progeny and property. Unless this is jealously guarded the HIV/AIDS scourge with all her ramifications will annihilate mercilessly all these five fundamentals of our human existence. Millions have died and millions more are doomed to this fatal outcome. As the virus create havoc with their immune systems, their bodies are rendered vulnerable to a whole hosts of potentially lethal microbes. Many of those affected are at the height of their prowessnes and the prime of their careers but are now reduced to a wasted and weakened anatomy. As their productivity drops, their incomes dwindle, assets shrink, they are further plunged into destitution and the horrid nightmare further unfolds with the choking and devastation of home and national economies. The family fabric is tragically dismantled as children are orphaned and young teens assume responsibility as household heads. Kids opt out of school to help with immediate food needs. The vicious circle linking poverty, food insecurity, illiteracy and HIV/AIDS can only perpetuate further social upheavals leading to chronic disruption of barely coping health, welfare and education systems. And left unchecked, they constitute the ideal ensemble for a desperate humanitarian crisis.

Addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic under no uncertain terms demands a comprehensive and integrated response which prioritise preventative strategies, provide therapeutics, care and support to the afflicted and their families and puts in place long term macro-economic and social interventions to redress the socio-economic impact of AIDS. As the figures suggests, the infusion and practice of universal values derived from the Quran and prophetic teachings in individual, family and societal life must have endowed considerable prophylaxis against this deadly disease. The preventative strategies advocated by Islam and shared by most if not all religious denominations emphasise the A for abstinence from sex, the B for being faithful in marriage , the C for condom use and the D for drug abuse avoidance. The Islamic approach dissects in no uncertain terms at the very aetiology of disease complexes and the complicating socio-economic pathologies and HIV/AIDS is no exception. Paraphrasing Dr. Sadik, HIV/AIDS thrive within the high risk groupings whose behaviour and lifestyle predispose them to infection. And this most commonly afflict the community of commercial sex workers, people of either sex with multipe sex partners, homosexuals and intravenous drug users

( IVDU ). The most recent editorial in the British Medical Journal, 21st June 2003, entitled preventing HIV : time to get serious about changing behaviour writes ” But if behaviour cannot be changed then no amount of money is going to make a big difference in prevention because every successful form of prevention requires change in behaviour”. Arthur J Ammann, president of Global Strategies for HIV Prevention further writes “Data from developed and developing countries show that programs that incorporate abstinence, mutual monogamy, delayed sexual intercourse and condom work together to reduce the number of new HIV infections”. The exclusive condom and safe sex paradigm has clouded the better judgement of many stake holders in HIV/AIDS work, many of whom subscribe slavishly to the modernist and liberal world views. This self fulfilling prophecy has blossomed the latex and rubber industry which runs into billions of dollars per annum and unleashed a pornographic culture of promiscuity and permissiveness.. It must be reasserted from the outset that a condom should not condone promiscuity nor clean needles or syringes be a justification for continued drug use.

An emotive issue as HIV/AIDS is bound to provoke a myriad of responses and ideological frameworks. As early as 1987, Peter Duesdberg, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, championed the view that HIV does not cause AIDS, but is a product of personal behaviour, notably drug abuse or the drugs used to treat AIDS. Together with Kary Mullis, a chemistry nobel laureate, they spearheaded the HIV denialist movement and repeated endlessly like a mantra, the claim that no single scientific paper offers proof that HIV causes AIDS. The architect of the polymersae chain reaction ( PCR ) which represents one of the major breakthroughs in biotechnology, Kary Mullis was reported by the Sunday Times of London in 1993 as saying “If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document”. Of late there has been a noisy resurgence of this viewpoint and the president of South Africa himself convened a Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel collecting some 52 scientists to discuss and exchange views on HIV/AIDS in 2000. A nation devoured by the AIDS epidemic, with every fifth adult South African carrying the virus, their ANC president was not convinced. Someone as powerful as President Thabo Mbeki, was sucked into the denialist mode and simply could not swallow the logic of blaming everything on a single virus. The HIV denialist movement claimed victory and in a response to the Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel Report from South Africa released on 5th April 2001, proclaimed arrogantly ” Why is it that we ask these very basic questions after almost 20 years of AIDS hysteria ? And what did we do during this time when we fought against HIV/AIDS ? ”

Their gross distortions of science have been debated and refuted repeatedly by mainstream peer reviewed scientific journals and the National Academy of Science assembled a special panel to debunk their claims. Mullis’s contention that his PCR technique was never designed to quantify viral load was empirically disproven when long term follow up of one of the largest and longest AIDS studies, the Multicentre AIDS Cohort Studies (MACS ) showed a profound and predictable relationship between viral loads, CD4+ cell counts and the progression of disease or AIDS death. On the political front it begged the likes of past-president, Nelson Mandela to come upfront to rectify and realign his successor’s faulty, misinformed and dangerous political mindset vis a vis HIV/AIDS.

And without exception, the IMLC was similarly faced with the daunting task of harmonising the multiple divergent views promulgated by various individuals or groupings. Many Muslim HIV/AIDS workers have been psychologically seduced and subdued by the libertarian values of the occident. They indiscriminately ape the modus operandi to combat HIV/AIDS as prescribed by their secular gurus or institutions of liberalism and transplant them piecemeal into their national programs. As perceived from writings in the national dailies, the few in Sisters in Islam ( SIS ) see this as another vehicle to ride on their rhetorics of gender, sexuality and feminism. The papers of Amina Wadud and Riffat Hassan regurgitates ad nauseam their feminist theology to the many unsuspecting IMLC crowd. Quite obviously, the Malaysian AIDS Council

( again with a considerable sprinkling of SIS heavyweights ) went to great lengths to secure the likes of Wadud, Riffat, Esack and Moosa from their adopted homeland, the USA , to the IMLC. Marina Mahathir, the IMLC chairperson has been oft quoted in the lay press that she would like to create space for the diversity of opinions in HIV/AIDS work approaches.Well assisted by the partial antics of her program chairperson and vice chairperson, they created a generous volume of space for these “revisionists” to advance their theology but was unequivocally adamant at not permitting time and space for the “traditionalist” physicians et al to rebut their contentious and perverted ideas. This abhorrent double standards of conference proceedings is unbecoming of any respectable international meet, let alone a Muslim Leaders Consultation, hence the walkout was inevitable. Anticipating a virtual collapse of what began as a cordial and brotherly consultation and intellectual discourse and hopefully too a realisation of the enormity of the profanities and abuses hurled at the Quran and Islam, the organisers hurriedly convened a one hour early morning session to debate the Wadud paper. The debate did not cease but instead spilled into the corridors and the media captured the unhappiness and unfairness that was pervasive in the conference ambience, much the opposite of the gaiety and fairplay of the organisation of the First IMLC in Kampala, Uganda in November 2001. A few others who participated have no direct involvement with HIV/AIDS patients, do not operate institutions which provide care and support to people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA ) and do not face the real risk of needle stick injuries in their daily round of duties, yet have the audacity to caricature others notably physicians from the various Islamic Medical Associations as obscurantic, archaic, bigots and uncharitable.

As Muslims, the Tauhidic paradigm envelops our response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It is simply put a “back to basics” wholesome blueprint of action which espouses and celebrates universal values of self discipline, chastity, morality, decency and family centricity. Yet again, another whole host of shared human values and code of conduct and ethics guarded enviously by all the major religions of the world. The Quranic and prophetic concepts of Islah ( transformation ) must be cherished in spirit and substance if this ummah is to mount a credible and sustenable response to the awesome challenge of HIV/AIDS. The Muslim

ummah’s response and this extrapolates well to most if not all followers of the great religions of the world, must embrace the theology of mercy, care and compassion, forgiveness, healing, benevolence, brotherhood of mankind and belief in the hereafter.

Dr. Musa Mohd. Nordin
Past President, Islamic Medical Association of Malaysia
Board Member, Muslim Professionals Forum
Consultant Paediatrician & Neonatologist
Damansara Specialist Hospital
Tel/Fax : 603-77293173
musa@mpf.org.my

Remembering Edward Said one year on : from Orientalism to humanism
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

For me, commemorating the passing of Edward’s Said comes automatically. Not so much out of the feeling that I owed him some kind of a debt, which is true, but for a mundane reason, that every September doctors in my field of subspecialization would gather in one of the major cities in the US for a conference which has become more or less our yearly highlight. It was on a trip home from last year’s meeting during a stop over in Tokyo that we learnt of his passing. One year on, the issues about which Said wrote with great erudition and passion – the naked imperialist zeal of the power elite in Washington, xenophobia and prejudice towards arabs and muslims, the absence of democracy in the 3rd world, the continuing injustice of Israel towards the Palestinian people – subjects which had developed out of his original thesis of Orientalism and later elaborated “Culture and Imperialism”, continue to animate political discussions.

One year later, I read again his last essay which he contributed to the August 2003 issue Le Monde Diplomatique one month before his death which is a way encapsulates the major themes of his writings as cultural critique. He was an occasional contributor to that monthly journal. As though aware of his imminent departure, in that final essay, “L’humanisme, dernier rampart contre la barbarie – vingt-cinq ans après la publication de l’Orientalism (Humanism, the last rampart against barbarism – 20 years after “Orientalism”) …” his revisited the original theme of Orientalism, the work that catapulted him to fame as a scholar and cultural critique, and distilled from his eclectic writings on the political implications of western colonialism and post-colonial domination, especially in the context of the muslim world, the reciprocal rise of religious fanaticism, the imperialist project of the present US administration, his moral stand on these issues and finally his suggested solution for a way out this historical-cultural mess. As many of the conflicts today involve the muslim world, that Orientalism is still very much alive – it is not difficult to perceive how public consent for the grotesque violence perpetrated on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq was wrung out using its tool of manipulative representation of the other, on the anniversary of his passing I thought it would be of benefit to bring to readers’ attention Said’s last essay, which essentially sums up his major ideas. Significantly in that essay, counterpoised to domination of the “other” for which Orientalism as an academic pursuit has become a political tool is Said’s proposition in mounting a resistance to it, the emphatic will to study the other through the proper historical and cultural contexts with the objective of mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence, an enterprise that he called humanism. This is something that he elaborates in the last chapters of culture and imperialism without clearly defining it as such. This is a after all a term that has different connotations to different people – for those with a religious outlook, this term is loaded with hubristic arrogance that has been as much responsible for our mess in its process of liberating man from the darkness of a God-centred world view. This commemorative piece is largely a translation and adaptation from the essay that appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique a month before his death, and I hope my less than perfect French does justice to it.

In introducing the essay, Said reminded us that he was jolted into political engagement after the catastrophic defeat of the arabs in the 6 day way of 1967 which finally marked the disappearance of the contradictory worlds that he grew up in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. >From that experience came the ground breaking work Orientalism. Many readers would agree that Orientalism is never far from the tumults of modern history. It opened with a description, written in 1975, of the Lebanese civil war, where a french journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown Beirut that “it had once seemed to belong to… the orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval”. The civil war ended in 1990, however the violence and blood bath in the middle east, of which it is part of the web, continues up to this day. The Oslo peace process floundered, the second Intifada exploded and the Palestinian endured terrible sufferings in occupied West Bank and Gaza. The phenomenon of suicide bombings came onto the scene with all its hideous consequences. Not less atrocious or apocalyptic were the events of 11 September and its consequences – the wars unleashed onto Afghanistan and Iraq.

Alas as he wrote these lines, the illegal imperialist occupation of Iraq by US and Great Britain was taking place, with its terrible consequences. “All this is supposed to be part of the clash of civilizations – interminable, implacable and irreversible. And I say this idea is false. I would have loved to affirm that the americans’ understanding of the Middle East, the arabs and Islam has progressed a little. But it is unfortunately not the case. For a number of reasons, the situation seems better in Europe. In the US, the hardening of positions, the shocking condescending generalizations and triumphalist clichés, the domination of a brutal power allied to a simplistic distrust for dissidents and the others are reflected in the pillage and destruction of the libraries and museums of Iraq. Our leaders and intellectuals seem incapable of understanding that history could not be effaced like a black board, in order that we could write our own future and impose our way of life on the inferior peoples”, he wrote.

When discussing domination, Said would regularly return to the theme of the academic discipline of Orientalism as a tool for european imperialism, where the history of a people is erased and rewritten, and their cultural representations distorted and deformed to better control and subjugate them. In other words, the serious study of other cultures is not with the objective of peaceful coexistence and widening one’s horizons, but rather to dominate them. That academic researchers sold themselves to power for this purpose is disgraceful. For Said, the latest imperialist war against Iraq – concocted by a small unelected elite against an already weakened third world dictator, for the ideological reasons of world domination and control of precious resources is certainly one of the intellectual catastrophes of history, as it is justified and precipitated by orientalists who have betrayed their vocation, citing Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami as having exerted a major influence on the Pentagon and the National Security Council of the Bush administration.

Without the carefully constructed impressions that those faraway people are not like us and do not accept our values, clichés that constitute the Orientalist dogma, the war could not have been unleashed. All colonial powers were surrounded by such researchers, he asserted – the Dutch in Indonesia, the British in India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and West Africa, the French in North Africa and Indochina. Every new imperialist always pretends that they are different from the predecessors, affirming that the circumstances are exceptional, that their mission is to civilize, establish order and democracy, and that they only use force as a last measure. The saddest thing is that they always have at their bidding intellectuals to find the soothing words and speak of the benevolent empire.

Against this will to dominate that is embedded in Orientalism, Said, employing the humanist critique, attempted to construct a reasoned resistance and replace the bursts of irrational anger that poison us with a more thoughtful and profound analysis. This resistance and alternative to cultural domination by the powerful, he named it humanism, a term that he continued to use despite the cynicism of sophisticated post-modernist critiques. Humanism for him is rather a project towards creating understanding between peoples, cultures and civilizations, cultivating the spirit of community among mankind as opposed to domination of the other that leads to injustice and suffering. This has to be based on a reasoned and historical reflection – the struggle against injustice must be inscribed within the context of history, culture and socio-economic reality, citing his own position that in his passionate defense of the rights of the Palestinian people for self-determination, he has always taken into account the sufferings and persecution of the Jewish people. For him, what is most important in the struggle for equality between Palestine and Israel is not to lose sight of the humane objective, the need for coexistence, and not the pursuit of elimination of one by the other. He demonstrated that Orientalism and modern anti-semitism share common roots, and it is vital that we elaborate models of cultural and intellectual exchange to replace the narrow and simplistic dogmas founded on mutual hostility that have been prevailing in the Middle East for too long.

Being a scholar in comparative literature, it is natural for Said to invoke this academic field as a fertile ground for the humanist project – through the study and interpretation of literature as a cultural output for an emphatic understanding of the other. In this respect, in a number of his writings he paid homage to Goethe as the most admirable example for his interest in Islamic literature, especially the poet Hafiz. The philosopher cultivated his interest after a german soldier who had been fighting in one of the Spanish campaigns in the early part of the 19th century brought back a page of the Koran for him. This devouring passion led Goethe to write a collection of poems about the other, the West-östlicher Diwan (West-eastern Diwan) and influence his ideas on weltliteratur, the study of literatures of the world as one total symphony where one can understand and appreciate the individuality of each work without losing view of the whole ensemble (In a bold experiment, Said, also an accomplished pianist, together with the Israeli conductor and pianist, Daniel Barenboim, gathered young musicians from Israel and the Arab world to form the West Eastern Diwan Orchestra to play in Weimar, the city of Goethe).

Sadly our globalized world advances relentlessly towards standardization, the homogeneity that Goethe through his ideas tried to steer clear from. In the study of literature as a world that opens up the possibility towards the objective of humanism, another great scholar that Said often cites in his many writings is Erich Auerbach, a german jew who took refuge in Istanbul during the second world war, teaching the romance languages and gathering ideas for his great saving work on western humanism, mimesis – a book that serves as a testament to the diversity and reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Wolf.

At one level, Said could fault Auerbach’s ethnocentrism and his pessimism about “new” languages and cultures of the non-european world that might signal a new level of cultural activity. But he greatly admired the latter’s attention to texts, his modes of examination, and penetrating in a subjective and emphatic manner the living material of the text, taking into account its socio-historical context. Said remarked that this sort of scrupulosity and care, which when applied to the study of world literature with generosity and hospitality reflects a profoundly humanist spirit. This opening up to the other who would otherwise remain distant and foreign, is an important dimension in the mission of the scholar-researcher. After the war Auerbach remarked with sadness that the standardization of ideas and increasing specialization of knowledge progressively shrinks the possibilities of this type of investigation and tireless quest for which he was an embodiment. More depressing, lamented Said, since Auerbach’s death in 1957, the idea and practice of humanistic research has lost its centrality. Instead of reading, in the true sense of the term, our students are constantly distracted by the fragmentary knowledge available on the internet and churned out by the mass media.

Towards the end of the essay, Said jumped rather abruptly from literature to today’s dangerous global politics where the menace of imperialist ambitions of an unimaginably powerful and technologically advanced america led by a handful of elite with a simplistic vision of the world is very real. He insisted that this is closely linked to the absence of the humanist spirit. In periods of crisis and insecurity, as after the September 11 attacks, a people with no emphatic understanding of the other are easily manipulated into hating an unknown enemy demonized by the media with labels of terrorists. Without this humanist spirit, we lose the sense of the density of interdependence of larger humanity. But this sad state of affairs is reciprocated in the muslim world. The region has slipped into an anti-americanism which demonstrates little understanding of what constitutes american society. Incapable of shaping the attitude of their people into their own mould, arab-muslim governments expend all their energies in repressing and controlling their populations. The failures and frustrations lead to anger and rising passions, sometimes fuelled by an understanding of Islam that is resentful of whatever that comes from the west and modernity.

This may be seen as lacking in nuance by muslims, but Said considered that the progressive disappearance of the Islamic tradition of ijtihad (learned interpretation) is one of the major cultural disasters of our era, which has led to the disappearance of critical thought on questions posed by the contemporary world. But there is still a glimmer of hope. It is not that the world of culture has completely regressed, ravaged on one side by an aggressive neo-orientalism and on the other by absolute intolerance. The conflicts evoked above, which force the populations under the falsely unifying banners of america, the west or Islam, must not be allowed to continue to ravage humanity. Against them, we have at our disposal our capacity for rational interpretation as the legacy of our humanist education, and we need to return to traditional and classical values infused with a secular and rational discourse.

For Said, his parting message as he lay dying is that humanism defined as emphatic understanding of the other is our last barrier against the inhumane practices and injustice that disfigure humanity’s history.

Dr. Mazeni Alwi

Reason for Our Existence Talk Writeup
by Azra Banu

Location : MNI Twins
Date : 15/9/04

The infamous KL rain and traffic struck again, determined to lay siege to an otherwise meticulously laid out evening. Nevertheless, spirits failed to be dampened as foul weather was no match for the enthusiasm shown by the guests, some as far as Johor Baru and Singapore.

MNI Twins proved to be an ideal location for many, sharing some limelight from the famed twins of KLCC, efficiently manned by very helpful and accommodating personnel and any inconveniences were quickly forgotten.

By a stroke of ingenuity, it was decided that light refreshment would be served before the talk, a decision truly appreciated as famished and battle weary guests enveloped the buffet counter.

After a brief introduction by our Chairperson for the day, Mr. Azman Sulaiman, Shaykh Khalid Yasin finally took to the podium. A native of Brooklyn, New York, now based in the U.K., he was a new face and voice to many that evening. Beginning by tossing the questions back to his listeners, he asked

“What is the reason for our existence? What is the purpose of life?”

Tracing the wonders of creation, from the human body with its miraculous organs, specifically focusing on the eye and the kidneys, to the vastness of the universe itself, he asked the most pertinent question.

“Could all this have come about on its own?”

No one; no person, no group has come into being on its own accord. Absolutely everything, time, gravity, age is under a power. Call it whatever you like, that power exists. Look closely and you will see design in everything. How can you deny the Designer? All that’s been designed is being sustained. Can you deny a Sustainer? The world in all its infinite diversity is being controlled, hence a Controller. The inexhaustible knowledge available indicates the existence of the One with Absolute knowledge. The laws of causeand effect attest to a higher power of accountability. How can we then fail to see there is an Owner and that Owner brought all of existence into being?

We have the responsibility to recognize and acknowledge that power. The responsibility to conform and establish a clear relationship with our Creator. And ultimately we have the responsibility to anticipate a final assessment by Him, our Lord, our Creator, our Sustainer, our Reckoner.

Visibly fatigued, Shaykh Khalid wasn’t his usual spirited self, but the question and answer session brought out the best in him, especially when asked why Islam? His answer touched many that night as he spoke about growing up in various foster homes and his exposure to six denominations of Christianity. He could never come to terms with the concept of Trinity and upon reading the Quran, found clean pure water after drinking contaminated water all his life. Ending with Surah Al Ikhlas it was the perfect note to end the evening on.

Complimentary copies of translations of the Quran for our non Muslim guests, generously donated by MACMA, were quickly snapped up and one hopes will bring enlightenment to those who read it.

Another MPF evening ended all too soon as we went through the familiar routine of thank you and farewell. What’s next? We’re working on it.

Exploiting the paranoia over “Islamic” terrorism
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

Bearing a muslim name on one’s passport especially those issued by certain countries can test one’s patience these days. On a recent trip to the United States, I took the family along including my 2 teenaged boys. On the threshold of adulthood, I thought it would be good for them to see a little bit of America and life in a big cosmopolitan city like Chicago. I know of many friends who would rather not travel to the US these days because of the difficulties some people have faced at the immigration counter due to the security measures enforced to prevent suspected, potential or imagined terrorist-types from entering the country. Fortunately I have never had such problems as my travels there have always been for the purpose of attending medical conferences and I don’t have the looks of someone from the middle-east.

Being in the relevant age bracket, I expected my 2 boys would have a little difficulty, just like their visa application which took 2 weeks to be approved. At Chicago’s O’Hare airport they had to register with the Department of Homeland Security, a process that involves filling out a form, making a declaration and answering many probing questions by an DHS official. This included checking out the contents of one my son’s e-mails. The official who interviewed my sons was firm but not at all discourteous, I suppose because they had everything in order – return air tickets, booking confirmation of the serviced apartment where we would be staying, and the scientific program of the conference that had my name as a speaker. But even then, they whole process took more than an hour. Anyway we took it all in good stride, knowing that he had a job to do, and such stringent measures could not be helped given what had happened 3 years ago in September, and most of all we had no more flights to catch. An arab man on the same British Airways flight from London was not so lucky. He missed his connecting flight to Houston because of the registration process and interview. Once passed that, everything was fine and we had a pleasant stay in Chicago. People we met were generally courteous and friendly, and there was not much indication that muslims are unwelcome. But Chicago, like all the big cities, is perhaps among the exceptions. After all, this is the city where Elijah Muhamad’s black muslim movement “the Nation of Islam” began. The city and its environs also has a large muslim immigrant population. Taking a few trips daily by taxi between the conference hotel and our apartment, most of the time the taxi drivers were muslim immigrants. A friend of mine, an Iraqi doctor at the Children’s Hospital affiliated to the University of Chicago, while accepting that there are some difficulties in being muslims in America, he nevertheless recognizes that the notions of liberty, openness and fairness still work for professionals like him in cosmopolitan Chicago. Ever since its founding, that aspect of america has been a source of her vitality – its ability to attract immigrants from all over the world, including muslims, that continue to enrich America with their talent and hard work.

But today much of that benign face of America which has earned it respect and admiration from the rest of the world is sadly overshadowed by the Bush administration’s paranoia over “Islamic terrorism”. It was while we were in Chicago that Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, was not allowed entry into the US after his plane was diverted to Maine, away from the densely populated North East, ostensibly to minimize american civilian casualties should the plane be turned into a terrorist weapon. Yusuf Islam, who during his musical career wrote memorable songs that express yearnings for spiritual solace and peace among mankind, since becoming a muslim he has been heavily involved in humanitarian work in the muslim world and establishing Islamic schools in Britain. He is among the high profile muslims in Britain and his views have never been known to be extremist, very much consistent with the theme of peace and humanity that used to be the message of some of his old songs. After the September 11 attacks, invoking his old song “Peace train”, he wrote that Islam is a religion of peace and expressed dismay at how the religion has been tainted by extremists who commit acts of violence with no regard for innocent human lives. At the height of the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, I saw him on british television as a panelist on a forum wearing a turban and a traditional arab robe. But he has shed that image for some years now, started recording songs again, and in fact he was on his way to Nashville on the occasion that he was denied entry.

It is very puzzling that a high profile muslim with a long history of commitment to world peace and to the alleviation of human suffering is on a terrorist watch list. Is it likely that among its stable of advisers in think tanks and academic institutions across the country, none of them could correctly advise the administration on Yusuf Islam’s background and credentials, that the British Foreign secretary was compelled to raise a mild comment on the incident.

Not long ago, Tariq Ramadan, another muslim public figure well known for his advocacy of moderation and peaceful co-existence was barred from taking up a teaching post at a US university when the US State Department revoked his visa at the last minute. Ramadan is grandson of Hassan Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. He teaches philosophy and Islamology in Geneva and Freiburg in Switzerland. His father, Said Ramadan is son in law and favourite disciple of Hassan Al Banna. With Nasser’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the family went into exile in Switzerland where Tariq was born shortly later. Despite his pedigree, Tariq Ramadan is not the typical Ikhwan activist. Growing up in Geneva, he was active in social and humanitarian organizations, and his academic specialization was Nietzche, before he seriously took up the cause of Islam in europe.

One could gain insight into Tariq Ramadan’s ideas on a range of contemporary issues concerning Islam in the book “l’Islam En Questions” (Actes Sud, 2002), where the journalist and expert in Middle East affairs, Françoise Germain-Robin paired him off with Alain Gresh, editor-in-chief of le Monde Diplomatique and passionate defender of the third world against the ravages of globalization, to deliberate on topics from the situation in the middle-east, Islamism, the new international order and globalization, to feminism and human rights in Islam, Islam in Europe etc. The exchanges and outright debates between the two became all the more interesting as each of them have egyptian connections, Tariq Ramadan with Hasan Al Banna, and Alain Gresh is from a bourgeois family in Cairo, the son of Henri Curiel, founder of the communist movement in egypt and a militant activist in leftist liberation movements especially in the arab world and Palestine.

Tariq Ramadan’s book “Les Musulmans d’occident et l’avenir de l’Islam” (Western muslim and the future of Islam – Sindbad – Actes lud, 2003) offers an insight on Ramadan’s thoughts on how european muslims should integrate, engage and contribute meaningfully to europe’s secular society while maintaining their muslim identity and culture, rather than retreating into the ghetto and nursing exaggerated feelings of victimization.

If the Bush administration is serious about seeking a solution to the present problem on terrorism, and about “winning the hearts and minds” of muslims to eschew violence and build bridges between East and West for world peace, the Yusuf Islam and Tariq Ramadan incidents prompt one to question its sincerity. Is the casting of too fine a net to combat terrorism the result of a genuine misjudgment, or is the administration held captive by the policies of Islamphobic neoconservatives, prodded on by rightwing zionists, whose dream is for the “clash of civilization” to become a reality by exploiting and exaggerating the paranoia of terror by a small fringe of extremists on the margins of mainstream Islam? In the long run, it would have a significant impact on america as shown by the rise of anti american sentiments around the world, eroding further remnants of its benign image in the eyes of fair-minded people who still maintain an admiration for the idea and ideals of america’s founding more than 200 years ago.

For muslims, that there is a seemingly deliberate attempt to exclude them from participating in the modern world, means that engagement, dialogue, and the struggle for global justice through shared values is the only realistic, workable way for a dignified place in the world commonwealth. We should not take the Islamphobes’ bait who want us all to become terrorists at the gates of civilization.