Book Review: Islam & Muslims in the 21st Century
Book
Review: Islam & Muslims in the 21st Century by Abdus
Sattar Ghazali (2017)
By
Habib Siddiqui
In 1978 Professor Edward Said’s book – Orientalism – was published. It was a
groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions
of the East by the (late) Columbia University professor. Nearly four decades after its first publication, the book
remains a modern classic. In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study,
Professor Said traced the origins of "orientalism" to the
centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East
and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as
"other than" the occident.
In August 2003, nearly 23 months after 9/11, writing for the Al Ahram (weekly online), Professor
Said wrote, “I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East,
the Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it
really hasn't.” He was referring to his seminal work, Orientalism.
The trillion-dollar question that we must ask today is: has
the situation improved since 2003? The answer is provided by veteran journalist
and author of half a dozen books - Abdus Sattar Ghazali in his book - Islam & Muslims in the 21st
Century. He shows that our world is more divided politically and
ideologically today than ever before even though we are more connected
virtually via electronic alternative media.
American forces are still in Afghanistan, some 16 years after
the country was invaded and occupied. Iraq is in a gargantuan mess since
American invasion and subsequent occupation, defying world opinion including
the UN, in 2003 with millions of displaced folks everywhere. Thanks to the neo-imperial manipulation, the
country may eventually get divided along
ethnic lines with Kurds getting their own state in the north, creating further
tension in the region, esp. with Turkey which has a sizable number of Kurds
living in the east. Syria is under civil war where its majority Sunnis have
been bearing the brunt of Assad’s mass murder. Millions of Sunnis have been
forced to seek refuge in nearby countries, including western Europe. A new
nemesis – Daesh (or ISIS), replacing Al Qa’eda – falsely claiming to be Islamic
and religious – has appeared in the bloody scene to further complicate the
scenario and resurrect old Orientalism with the fabric of Islamophobia. Like
the RAND-robots in the USA, the ISIS-robots are doing their best to terrorize
everyone, redefining the clash of civilizations – ‘us’ against ‘them’. Not
accidentally, the vast majority of the victims have been Muslims.
The extremist, ultra-nationalist and fascist forces are on the
rise in many parts of our world (including the USA) and are even running
governments in places like Austria, Poland, India, Myanmar, the Philippines,
Hungary, Bulgaria and (arguably) the USA.
America has a new president in Donald J. Trump who purportedly
wants to make America great again whatever greatness means to him. He won by
stoking fear much like fascist leaders of the past. Many experts, thus, see him
as a fascist-in-making. He has proven himself to be arrogant, confrontational,
vulgar, rude, egotistic, self-contradictory and twitter-crazy – just to name a
fraction of his long list of depraved attributes that includes lying. He is
also hostile to the Blacks, Hispanics and esp. Muslims. He wants to ban Muslims
from immigrating into or taking refuge in the USA. Recently, he has decertified
the Iran nuclear deal – a stupid proposition that is making every world leader nervous. Although
he has replaced or removed some white supremacists from his inner circle of the
White House advisers (e.g., Bannon and Gorka), Trump remains a very
temperamental world leader and, as such, is the most dangerous person on earth who
can do the greatest harm to humanity.
Sitting in the citadel of worldly power, surrounded by empire-dreaming
neoconservatives and lunatics, the temptation to be a neo-Pharaoh in our age is
often too great to rewrite history by ignoring the mere fact that history
cannot be white-washed or swept clean like a blackboard so that "we" in
the Christian Occident might engrave our own future in ‘them’ - the
non-Christian Orient - and impose our own forms of life and culture, including
polity, for these ‘lesser people’ to follow.
During the Bush Jr. era of ‘global war on terror’, esp. after 9/11,
we heard the high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map
of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and innumerable peoples with their myriad
sediments of history, which include countless histories – good and bad, great
and ugly – and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and
cultures, don’t matter and can simply be swept aside or ignored like rubbish, or
tossed around like a pile of playing cards or peanuts in a jar. Haughty and
irrational though it may seem, the sad fact is, as Ghazali shows in his book,
there has not been any shortage of such ‘civilizational’ plans and attempts
since the dawn of this new century.
Libya’s Gaddafi was lynched to death and replaced in 2011 turning
the once stable, desert oasis, people’s republic into a failed and fractured state
of two competing governments each vying for legitimacy. Egypt’s former dictator
Mubarak had a better luck, albeit replaced through a popular revolution that
brought a civilian government – the first in Egyptian modern history – that was
soon to be violently replaced in a military coup via courtesy of the corrupt regimes
in the Gulf
(namely, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE). While murderous Mubarak’s death
sentence was commuted to prison time to be ultimately released free, the
popularly elected President Dr. Morsi and thousands of leaders and members of
the Ikhwan-al-Muslimin are rotting in the prisons awaiting execution, with many
already being executed, in Sisi’s Egypt – the new Pharaoh.
The Arab Spring – the popular Arab uprising against the autocratic
and repressive regimes that was supposed to better the life of hundreds of
millions of ordinary Arabs - was torpedoed by world powers (all paragons of
democracy) and their client
(undemocratic) states in the Gulf (except Qatar) that wanted to weaken the
Arabs by letting them kill
each other or maintain the status quo, respectively. Yemen and Syria are in
a mess with hundreds of thousands killed and millions of people displaced from
their bombed and burned out homes, towns and cities.
The drone attacks by the US and NATO forces are a daily
nuisance in some
parts of the Muslim world traumatizing millions of innocent civilians, esp.
children. None of the policy makers in Washington and Brussels is willing to
discuss the consequence
of such attacks until a suicide bomber blows himself up somewhere because of
being self-radicalized through social media.
Seemingly, the life of an ordinary Muslim has become so cheap
that no one really cares about it any longer. Every new day is proving to be a
worse day than the day before. Even Muslims living far away from the Middle
East in places like Myanmar,
the Philippines,
China
and India
are not safe from repressive, ultra-nationalist – or more correctly, fascist –
governments who are exploiting the terror card to kill and/or evict
Muslims from their ancestral homes.
In India, under the name of protection of the cow, Hindu
vigilantes and Hindutvadi fascists are lynching Muslims even on the suspicion
of herding, transporting, storing and eating beef.
Taj
Mahal, one of the finest examples of Islamic
architecture that is visited by hundreds of thousands of international tourists
each year generating hundreds of millions for the Indian treasury, was recently
removed from an official booklet on the State of Uttar Pradesh’s tourist
destinations. This comes on the heels of the State’s Chief Minister, Yogi
Adityanath, declaring that the Taj Mahal does not “reflect Indian culture.” The
monument’s Muslim-ness or Islamic character is unacceptable to the Hindu
fascists of the BJP. Adityanath’s initiation into the broader Hindu Nationalist
clique – which includes the militant Sangh Parivar/Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh
(RSS) and umbrella Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) – began with an act of
iconoclasm. He was also an activist behind the Ram
Temple that saw the demolition of the historic Babri mosque (a 16th
century house of worship built by the Mughal dynasty’s founder, Muhammad Babar)
in Ayodhya.
If these be the new faces of secular India under
the rule of Hindutvadi
fascists what can Muslims expect in Suu Kyi’s Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) in which
they face extinction
as part of a very sinister national project to wipe out Muslim identity! Denied
of any right, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Muslim
minorities, esp. the Rohingya,
there are victims of a ‘slow-burning’ genocide
that has seen in the last few weeks alone the forced exodus of more than
530,000 of this ‘most persecuted’ people to Bangladesh, let alone the wholesale
destruction of all their worldly possessions. Their males, including children
have been killed, women raped
and properties looted before their homes, schools, shops, business centers,
madrasas and mosques are burned
down.
As we have repeatedly seen in matters relating
to Kashmir, Palestine, East
Turkestan and Chechnya
– just to name a few – when it comes to saving Muslim lives in harm’s way, the
United Nations have failed them miserably. One can only wonder what stops the
UNSC to take punitive actions against the savages inside Suu Kyi’s government
and security forces for their crimes against humanity! Don’t the Rohingyas
qualify for the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) that was unanimously adopted by
all members of the United Nations General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit?
Do they have to be children of a ‘higher’ God to
qualify for such protection?
What future awaits humanity, including the
Muslims, in this age of social media and information superhighway?
Knowing the value of controlling the mind, as
Ghazali duly notes, the return of orientalism is currently taking
place more in popular literature than in academic works in the US and western
Europe. The shock and impact of 9/11 has created a fertile ground for the
proliferation of what can be called an alarmist literature that are filled with
shabby screeds bearing screaming
headlines and titles about Islam
and terror. There is such a mushrooming of pseudo-experts, polemicists
and pundits
on Islam who cares to learn the truth about Islam and Muslims from its original
sources and writings of Islamic savants – like Rumi, Ghazali or Sa’di – and
genuine experts or witnessing the lives of the pious believers!
While covering Islam and Muslims, the western media continue
to apply negative images and characterization for Muslims to widen the clash of
civilizations – ‘us’ against ‘them’.
Islamophobia
has become a big business and is sold as an elixir these days by those who want
to expedite the Armageddon.
President Eisenhower’s fear of ‘industrial military complex’ is no longer a
myth but has become a reality. Regional unrest is not only tolerated but it is
encouraged to solidify the control of all those involved with the war industry.
Ghazali quotes a Rand study (December 2004) that suggested
that Sunni, Shiite and Arab, non-Arab divides should be exploited to promote
the US policy objectives in the Muslim world.
For academics like Samuel Huntington, Islam is ideologically
hostile and anti-Western; it is also a military threat due to Chinese
(Confucian) arms supplies; Islam is bloody, with a long warring tradition
against the West (the fact that Muslims have often been the victims rather than
the perpetrators of violence from Bosnia to India hardly troubles him). As
such, Huntington justifies military solutions to bring about the ‘desired’
result. Suffice it to say that Huntington's entire argument about Islam and
civilizations is full of contradictions and superficialities; it is also
'culturally racist'.
According to Ghazali, “Islamophobia is systematically promoted
and financially supported in the United States in the form of books, reports,
websites, blogs, and carefully crafted talking points that are well funded by
hate groups. The project of Islamophobia which has cost more than $40 million
over the past ten years has been funded by seven foundations in the United
States: 1. Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation; 2. Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation; 3. Newton and Rochelle Becker; 4. Foundation and Newton and
Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust; 5. Russell Berrie Foundation, Anchorage Charitable
Fund and William Rosenwald; 6. Family Fund; 7. Fairbrook Foundation.”
Islamophobia
has essentially become the neo-orientalism of the 21st century. Not
surprisingly, the self-proclaimed Islamic expert Steven Emerson collected $3.39
million for his for-profit company in 2008 for researching alleged ties between
American Muslims and overseas terrorism. Even American politicians are banking
on it to draw bigoted supporters. “In late March 2015, Senator Ted Cruze
appeared at the New England Freedom Conference with anti-Muslim hate group
leader, Robert Spencer, a blogger whose work was cited approvingly by the
Norway terrorist Anders Breivik. Spencer’s organization, the American Freedom
Defense Initiative (AFDI), is the group behind controversial and provocative
anti-Islam metro and bus ads,” Ghazali writes (p. 145).
Ghazali shows that 39 years after the publication Professor
Said’s book - Orientalism – modern imperialism never ended. While its goal to
maximize benefits remains the same, its method to achieve that goal, however,
has changed. It wants division along the fault lines - territorial, tribal,
ethnic or whatever – so that the Muslim world remain ever weak and goes back to
the days of the pre-Islamic Jahiliya with never-ending wars while buying
weapons to fight each other. As events have proven, the scheme of the
neo-imperial masters and planners is working.
To schmooze, the Arabs and Muslims have been told that
victimology and dwelling on the depredations of empire is only a way of evading
responsibility in the present. “You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the
modern Orientalist.” But such a narrative would exhibit only a serious amnesia
about the reality of imperial intrusion that continues to work its way in the
lives of Muslims who comprise roughly 23% of world population.
Paul Wolfowitz, the former US Deputy Defense Secretary, a
leading neocon, confided
on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003: "We need an Islamic
reformation and I think there is real hope for one." Iraq became the first
casualty of that experiment. But the conspiracy lingers!
The Rand
Study, released on March 18, 2004, unveiled the neocons’ plan for global ‘revamping’
of Islam, which calls for a
strategy to distinguish between Muslims with whom peaceful relationships and
dialogue are possible.
As a result of the meticulously planned and organized onslaught
against Islam, Professor Sa’id observed that the Muslim world has slipped into
an “easy
anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the US is really
like as a society… The world-wide protests before the war began in Iraq would
not have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative communities
all across the world, informed by alternative information, and keenly aware of
the environmental, human rights and libertarian impulses that bind us together
in this tiny planet.”
Is there then a hope to defeat the merchants and profiteers of
war through alternative media? One must, however, be reminded here that massive
protest marches of millions of conscientious global citizens did not sway a bit
the Bush Jr. administration from manufacturing lies and carrying out its
planned war that killed nearly a million innocent Iraqis. As usual, the UN
failed to slow down Bush Jr.
In spite of the evil plan of its enemies to turn our world into perennial war zones and killing fields, the Muslim world needs serious introspection by its genuinely enlightened intellectuals that can diagnose its plethora of illnesses that had transformed it into a world of zeros with no voice in the global arena. The task is not easy though, as Ghazali reminds us of the peculiar way the political development has taken place in the Muslim countries that have created elite groups that care about only themselves in which there is no share for the ordinary masses. They are for self-aggrandizement and don’t mind selling the interest of the people and the country to the highest foreign bidder. No wonder the Muslim world has so many of these self-serving puppets, despots and autocrats ruling its people who has no fear of accountability either to God or His creation!
Will that scenario change any time soon?
Ghazail’s book is a treasure trove that delves into the problems and challenges faced by the Muslims of the 21st century by filling in the void left open after Professor Said’s death. I strongly recommend it.
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