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| The Perils of Turkification |
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| WhatDFish |
| 07/10/02 at 12:10:37 |
| The Perils of Turkification. by Abid Ullah Jan Pakistan's General Musharraf has joined the ranks of those who have been promising peace with the end of religious influence for the last few centuries. If we can take a lesson from history, one of the most important one from the last 500 years is that a flight from religion pushes human societies even deeper into various problems. The wild expectation that as a result of modernization, human society would outgrow the "theological stage" of social evolution and the science of sociology would replace religion as the basis for moral judgments could not get translated into reality so far. The history can help us predict that the newly declared war would definitely fail in diluting Islam, but would surely succeed in putting a dirty show of Muslims on the throats of their fellow Muslims with secular fundamentalists sitting on the sidelines watching the "war within Islam." The idea of fanning a "war within Islam" goes back to the time of Salah uddin Ayubi, but in the modern age its earliest proponents seem to have been British, as the Restoration in 1660 led to an era during which militant attacks on faith were quite popular among fashionable Londoners. Interesting to note is the fact that secular fundamentalists have also failed in their efforts to eradicate Christianity. They have only succeeded in taking it off the public square at a great social and moral cost to the society. Failure of the wishful thinking to neutralize Islam within a few years can well be judged from the statement of Thomas Woolston who, writing in about 1710, expressed his confidance that Christianity would be gone by 1900. Half a century later Frederick the Great thought this was much too pessimistic, writing to Voltaire that "the Englishman Woolston . . . could not calculate what has happened quite recently. . . . It [religion] is crumbling of itself, and its fall will be but the more rapid." In response, Voltaire ventured his guess that the end would come within the next 50 years. Subsequently, not even widespread press reports concerning the second "Great Awakening" could deter Thomas Jefferson from predicting in 1822, "there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian." Of course, a generation later, Unitarians were as scarce as ever, while the Methodists and Baptists continued their spectacular rates of growth. The collapse of Communism further reveals the abject failure of several generations of dedicated efforts to indoctrinate atheism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. As Andrew Greeley put it, "never before in human history has there been such a concerted effort to stamp out not merely a religion, but all trace of religion." And the results? Atheists are few, not more prevalent than in Western Europe or, indeed, in the US. Enforcement of secularism in Egypt, Algeria and Turkey, when defined in western terms, is nothing short of religious persecution. We are set to face the same problems in Pakistan very soon. Our lives would be made miserable without any tangible advantage to the proponents of "war within Islam." The US Freedom From Religious Persecution Act calls for economic and non-economic sanctions on foreign countries that oppress believers. Its original backers were most concerned with the plight of Christians in China and Sudan, but the content of the bill applies equally to the persecuted Muslims in the Muslim states struggling to impose Turkification. Soon after the madrassa, there would be a crackdown on journalists, government servants and religious parties in Pakistan. They would be banned from taking part in elections and anything remotely linked to Islam would be hunted under the label of fighting extremism. When religion has no role in politics, so would the religious parties lose every justification for their existence. The US would fully support such actions just as it does elsewhere. Authoritarian leaders in Muslim states are quick to blame Islam for their problems, but fail to point out Israel, where the whole country is officially organized to privilege Judaism over other religions, and Orthodox Judaism over the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructivist branches. Leaving aside the West Bank Palestinians for a moment, are not the "Palestinian Israelis" systematically discriminated against in myriad ways? After all, if they abandoned Islam and Christianity for Judaism, their status would change overnight. Similarly, non-Orthodox Jews, praying at the Wailing Wall in accordance with the tenets of their faith--which permit women rabbis and in which men and women praying together is the norm-have been violently dispersed by the police, as part of the Israeli government's pandering to the ultra-Orthodox. Incredibly, women are now forced to sit in the back of certain buses routed through ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods-a clear violation of the religious rights of non-Orthodox women, whose faith forbids treating women the way blacks were in the US. And the future may be even worse: women barred from working in ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods (one post office branch only ended its ban on hiring women after a public outcry), non-Orthodox rabbis barred from performing conversions and legitimating marriages. However there should be no calls for a war within Judaism or moderation of its extremism. Still, Israeli government needs not be demonised like the Taliban, let alone hitting it with cruise missiles, daisey cutters and other state of the art bombs. Thomas Friedman is quick to call Musharraf's speech a "potential breakthrough from Pakistan" (NY Times, Jan. 21, 2002) but fails to point out the bitter fruits of US sponsored extremism in Israel. The Muslim countries are being forced to live in the new dark ages where the believers would be as vigorously persecuted as it used to be in the early days of Islam in Mecca. The darkness increases as the New Barbarians move from the position of strength to strength. Today the prevailing attitude is one of relativism, i.e., the belief that there is no morally binding objective source of authority or truth above the individual and the western capitals. The fact that this view tosses aside 2,500 years of accumulated moral wisdom, a rationally defensible natural law, and the moral law revealed by God seems to bother very few. Relativism and individualism need each other to survive. The marriage of extreme individualism and relativism, however, has produced a new conception of "tolerance." The word tolerance sounds great from the lips of on-sale leaders of the Muslim states, but this is really tolerance with a twist; it demands that everyone has a right to express his or her own views as long as those views do not contain any suggestion of absolutes that would compete with the western standard of relativism, or challenge the supremacy of Washington and London. Usually those who promote tolerance the loudest also proclaim that the motives of religious people are suspect and that, therefore, their views on any matter must be disqualified. Strangely, socialists, Nazis, sadomasochists, paedophiles, homosexuals, spiritualists, or worshipers of Mother earth would not be excluded. Their right to free expression would be vigorously defended by the same cultural elite who are so easily offended when religious people express their views. Saad Mehio, writing in the NY Times, December 2, 2001, pointed out that more Taliban and more Osama would come after the present ones are finished because they "are not isolated cases but manifestations of a complex and potentially durable, socio-political phenomenon...[which] involves the immoral unscrupulous and irreligious exploitation of Islam as a political weapon by everyone." Before ignoring the root causes, like sidelining Islam and repressing Muslims all over the world, one may ask: what the Israelis are doing with the active assistance of the US if not exploiting and using their religion for political ends? Forcing Muslims to run away from Islam is not an answer to any of the local or global problems. Secularisation has, in fact, become part of the western strategy to save the oppressors from facing the collective wrath of the systematically segregated and oppressed Muslims in a global apartheid regime. Do we really need to sideline religion as prescribed by the General on behalf of the US? This question is of supreme importance for Pakistan and other Muslim states and the answer goes far beyond the number of time the authoritarian rulers sprinkle their speeches with reference to Quran and Ahadis. Although General Musharraf used only six words, "religion has no role in politics," to unveil his future plan, but Pakistan may never be the same when these words are materialized. Following Turkey as a role model, we would soon have to start sentencing writers, like Nureddin Sirin, editor of the Selam, to 17-years in prison for condemning the Zionist occupation of Palestine. We would have to deny our women the right to wear hijab. It would be compulsory for all women going to college, national or provincial assembly to either leave their seats like Safa merve kavakci, or throw away hijab. We would have to come down hard on even the mildest manifestations of Islamic awareness. Keeping beard in military would be considered as much a crime as reading a 1920 Islamic poem by Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Washington Post would then have the right to criticize us if we changed working hours during Ramadan (Lally Weymouth, March 4, 1997). Despite brutal crackdown, situation in Pakistan would get volatile when the future plan kf Turkification unfolds before our eyes. It is an undeniable historical fact that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam, as no other slogan could have united the millions of Indian Muslims. Contrary to the long and short claims by the secularists, the real motivating force behind the movement for independence, instead of pure religious fervour, was the burning desire on the part of the Indian Muslims to preserve their distinct identity, which is now under systematic threat. The crucial question to ask before getting into the mire of secularisation is: what was the basis of the separate nationhood and distinct identity of the Indian Muslims? Their sense of being a unique nation was neither racial or linguistic in origin, nor based upon any common homeland, but was, in fact, founded upon their ideology and religion. According to W. C. Smith, it was not a territorial or an economic or a linguistic or even, strictly speaking, a national community that was seeking a state, but a religious community. Thus, we find that the motifs of Islam, Islamic state, and Islamic Law were quite prominent in the speeches and statements made by the Muslim League leaders during the height of the freedom movement, including those made by Quaid-e-Azam himself. It is very strange to find General Musharraf closing his speech for launching secularism with a verse from the Allama Iqbal, who in his famous 1930 address is very revealing as far as the Islamic dimension of the Pakistan movement is concerned. He said: "Is religion a private affair? Would you like to see Islam, as a moral and political ideal, meeting the same fate in the world of Islam as Christianity has already met in Europe? Is it possible to retain Islam as an ethical ideal and to reject it as a polity in favour of national polities, in which religious attitude is not permitted to play any part?... The proposition that religion is a private individual experience is not surprising on the lips of a European... The nature of the Prophet's religious experience, as disclosed in the Qur'an, however, is wholly different.... It is an individual experience creative of a social order. Its immediate outcome is the fundamentals of a polity with implicit legal concepts whose civic significance cannot be belittled merely because their origin is revelational. The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other..." Irrespective of the past experimentation, we need to keep in mind that any systematic attempt to secularise Muslim states would further polarize our societies. The conflict between pro-Islam and pro-secular forces would intensify. It must go without saying that the various Islamic movements, after failing in their efforts to realize their goals through political and democratic means, would increasingly turn to considering offence as the best defence. We know from the experience of Egypt, Algeria, and other countries that such an approach could bring nothing but disaster for both Islam and the Muslims. This is what the western analysts call a "war within Islam." But even they would not remain immune from the Muslim suffering that would further spread beyond boundaries. What is urgently required on the part of all the workers and well-wishers of secularism is to take a step back and consider dispassionately what they are going to bring upon the Muslim societies for the sake of their petty personal gains. We need to urgently start working for equal status for the Muslims in the world affairs by challenging the global apartheid. |
| Re: The Perils of Turkification |
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| humble_muslim |
| 07/10/02 at 12:39:29 |
| AA Turkey is one of the most disgusting places on earth. I was reading the other day about a 72 year old woman who was denied life savign surgery because her medical card photo had a picture of her wearing hijab. How low can you get ? |
| NS |
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