Khaled Ahmed's excellent op-ed on Pakistan and the London bombings
The bombings in London
Khaled Ahmed’s A n a l y s i s
he London bombings of 7 July 2005 have not aroused the kind of analysis in Pakistan it deserved. Opinions expressed on TV channels and the Urdu press were routine: the UK is to blame because it radicalised the UK Muslims by taking part in the invasion of Iraq. One TV channel was discussing mazloom (persecuted) Muslims of the world even as 55 innocent citizens died at the hands four suicide bombers (three out of them of Pakistani origin) in London. No forum in Pakistan had any in-depth knowledge about the 1.6 million Muslims living in the UK. They knew even less about the Pakistani community which forms a majority among Muslims there. But they spoke authoritatively on the subject, denying Muslim culpability even while showing sympathy to the British public.
BBC (16 July 2005) interviewed half a dozen boys together at Luton in London. All of them were wearing shalwar-kurta and were extremely angry about UK’s participation in the Iraq war. On the bombings of 7/7 they were united in condemning extremism and were of the opinion that the suicide-bombers had probably fallen into the clutches of the extremists already present in the UK. But they linked it to the outrage in Iraq where the UK and the US were killing ‘our brothers’. One boy got up and advanced on the interviewer saying he was as much a British citizen as the interviewer was and he had to say that prime minister Blair had hurt the Muslims of the UK by killing women and children in Iraq.
Focusing on Iraq: CNN (15 July 2005) interviewed Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid who said (confirmed on the 19th by President Musharraf) that there were seminaries in Pakistan who would recruit terrorists from the UK. But a British citizen and member of a Muslim organisation in London, Mr Tamimi, disagreed and said that the seminaries had no role to play in the conversion of the British Muslim youth. He said in Leeds, where the youth was radicalised, was besieged by British racists who threatened them with violence. He said the Muslim boys constantly asked questions about Iraq, but prime minister Blair was in denial of this reality. He said the Muslims were being victimised in such places as Afghanistan, Palestine, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and the only solution for the UK was to change its Iraq policy.
The discussions in the UK had rare liberal Muslims owning up to the flaws in the community itself while the conservatives who outnumbered them continued to say the same thing: that Blair’s invasion of Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks. It was also apparent that the liberals were tentative in their opinion while the conservatives were forceful and aggressive. One could see that there was tension between the two opinions and that the liberals were likely to retreat from their stance out of fear. Most of the Muslims who offered comment were conservative and said more or less the same thing as was said by Muslims all over the world even before 7/7. On 4 July 2004, just three days earlier, at a seminar in Jordan titled The Reality of Islam and its Role in the Contemporary Society , Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi of Qatar had blamed ‘injustices done to Muslims by the West’ as a reason for the growth of Muslim extremism. The truth is that Qaradawi’s earlier fatwa of death against the British could have actually triggered the 7/7 terror.
State and jihad in Pakistan: In Pakistan, the vast underworld of jihad is still functioning, not least because the ‘jihad option’ against India has been retained, and the training camps in Mansehra once again field militias that take the cue from their Arab masters. There is no measure to quantify the salafist influence on Pakistan’s Islam but it is generally accepted that jihad has further stiffened the faith and that the jihadi militias have absorbed a lot of their new worldview from their Arab sponsors. There is a generally felt devotion for the ‘true’ Arab faith because it is not diluted by the ‘Hindu-influenced’ culture of Pakistan. At least two well known Urdu columnists wrote wistfully about the late Saudi cleric whose ‘hate literature’ has been poisoning the mosques all over the world.
Journalist Mustafa Sadiq wrote in Jang that when he was saying his prayer in a mosque in Dipalpur in Punjab he discovered pamphlets there penned by the great late Saudi scholar Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz. He was greatly impressed by the pamphlets and remembered that Bin Baz was rector of the Madina University and wielded a lot of authority with the Saudi royalty. The columnist went to Saudi Arabia in 1966 and interviewed Bin Baz, which he published on one full page of his paper Wafaq . Bin Baz could actually undo the punishments given out by the princes. He was so powerful he could open the door of the crown prince, the most powerful man in the kingdom, and enter at will. He wore his usual long robe but kept a big pocket in it. In the pocket was a mohur (stamp). Whenever he wanted to give an order that the kingdom had to obey he took it out of his robe and used it as a stamp.
Conversion to hate: Columnist Irfan Siddiqi wrote in Nawa-e-Waqt (1 April 2005) an account of his visit to Madina in Saudi Arabia. At Madina he visited the famous Madina Islamic University set up 45 years ago with the advice of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi and Maulana Daud Ghaznavi of Pakistan. It was headed by its first vice chancellor the great Sheikh Bin Baz. It welcomed 6,000 foreign students forming almost 80 percent of the total student population. It gave generous scholarships plus an air ticket back home during vacations. Pakistani students came from Lahore, Faisalabad, Turbat, Mamo Kanjan, Karachi, Qasur, Gujranwala, Peshawar, Nowshehra, Haripur, Gilgit and Mekran. There used to be 300 Pakistanis in the university but now it was less than 200. Before 9/11, teachers of the university used to spread around the world picking up students but now that has ceased. Pakistan was no longer issuing no-objection certificates to its students for this university.
The three Pakistani-origin bombers visited Pakistan approximately for three months. The pattern is very much like the one followed by the suicide bombers of 9/11: they had visited Pakistan before going to the US and had touched base with someone in Karachi and Afghanistan. This time the one seminary investigated is Lahore’s Manzurul Islam. It was noticed earlier by American scholar Jessica Stern in her book Terror in the Name of God and the director she had met was named Pir Saifullah Saif. In the jihadi underworld this name will immediately ring a bell: it is a nom de guerre . This time the director of the seminary was differently named, and there was no trace of Mujibur Rehman Inqilabi who had bragged all sorts of jihadi derring-do to Stern.
Psychology of denial: The general behaviour of the Pakistani population is not extremist, but its opinion is. Pakistan is under siege from people who think extremist thoughts. The consequence of this state is expression of extreme helplessness accompanied with moral outrage. The next stage among the ‘select’ earmarked by Al Qaeda is suicide. Not even politicians feel satisfied unless they borrow from the vocabulary of extremism. Also, there are centres of radical action funded from abroad, stoking the fire of revenge against the West and inspiring sectarian violence and even training people for acts of terrorism.
An entire population is completely untouched by this extremism of action but it helps terrorism through the mass psychology of denial and through extreme formulations of thought. The psychology of denial is created by closing the mind against information and any data related to the subject of terrorism. On the other hand, much is picked up from Western sources critical of the policies followed by governments in the West. Those who have specialised in the jihadi underworld are intellectual pariahs and will not be published in the more popular Urdu press. The English-speaking elite avoids jihadi data because of the outlandish Urdu vocabulary of jihad.
What UK is to blame for: If the UK is to blame, it is for neglecting the way the Muslims in general and the Pakistanis in particular were turning their face away from integration. In April 2001 Professor Muhammad Anwar of the University of Warwick, revealed for the first time the alarming picture of the largest Muslim minority in the UK. According to him, the Pakistanis living in the UK were 700,000, the third largest minority community. (There are a million Indians in the UK.) The majority of these British Pakistanis are Kashmiris, including those displaced by Mangla Dam in Azad Kashmir. They are concentrated in four regions: 30 percent in and around London, 22 percent (100,000) in Birmingham, 20 percent (65,000) in Bradford, 20,000 in Manchester and 15,000 in Glasgow. The figure of 700,000 had grown from 5000 in 1951. Because of high birth-rate, fully 47 percent of them were under the age of 16, as compared to 17 percent for whites. They had the highest unemployment rate, five times more than the British average; and a crime rate higher than in any other community. Fully 2 percent of the prisoners rotting in British jails were Pakistanis, the highest for any one community.
France’s Gilles Kepel studied the UK Pakistanis in his Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe (Polity Press, 1997) but apparently London paid no attention to it. According to him, in the United Kingdom, Islamisation of the immigrant Muslim community was an early post-colonial trend stemming from the British experience in India. Communalisation rather than integration suited the UK because it could then farm out the menial jobs to a community formed specially for them. Workers’ mosques came up in the 1950s in the industrial areas of the UK, as opposed to France where this trend started only in the 1970s. Out of the 55 mosques serving the 85,000 Muslims of Birmingham in 1985 nearly half were set up before 1970. In the 1950s and 1960s, the mosques were divided against each other on the basis of Barelvi-Deobandi religions. There were even Pathan and Punjabi, Mirpuri, Bengali and Gujrati mosques.
World of the UK Pakistani: The first central mosque in Birmingham was built in 1971 but its first Barelvi khateeb was so favoured by the Muslims that the Deobandi khateeb was not allowed his turn. Individual charismatic figures like Barelvi Pir Maroof Shah who built a number of mosques for his followers in Bradford, founding the World Islamic Mission in 1973. Sufi Abdullah built himself a similar Barelvi empire in the area in the early 1980s. The Bradford Council of Mosques in the 1980s was already ‘separating’ the community on such questions as halal and girls’ education, and Labour Party was the popular party for the Muslims. Then came the Rushdie Affair in 1988, almost coinciding with the explosion caused by the Islamic scarf affair in France a year later. The protest that was organised against Rushdie’s Satanic Verses united the fragmented Muslim community in the UK while toppling its less educated leaders in favour of the anglophone radical ones inspired by the Islamic Revolution of Imam Khomeini in Iran.
The Islamic Foundation of Leicester sent out the call against Rushdie’s blasphemy, but the man who finally ran away with the collective Muslim response was ex-journalist, Kalim Siddiqi, of Jamaat-e-Islami background, who set up his Muslim Parliament and issued what was termed the Muslim Manifesto in 1990, actually challenging the British system. This caused Labour politician Roy Jenkins, who had described the British policy of integration as ‘equal opportunities with cultural diversity’ in 1965, to say in 1989 that the policy had failed to effect any integration of the Muslim culture and religion within the British society. London looked at Kalim Siddiqi as some kind of a crazy person and ignored him. It ignored others like Abu Hamza Al Masri and Umar Bakri (whose ultra-radical Al Muhajirun outfit came to Pakistan in 2000 together with Hizb al-Tahrir) later on too, while the Muslims retreated further from British society. The climax of this failure to integrate came in the shape of the conversion of the British mosque to Deobandi and Ahle Hadith identity during the 1990s.
The Arab injection: Kepel, introducing a reprint of his old book The Roots of Radical Islam (Saqi 2005) noted that the Finnsbury Mosque cell of Al Qaeda was run by Abu Hamza Al-Masri, an Egyptian who had lost an arm and an eye fighting in Afghanistan, whose journal al-Ansar glamorised the murderous GIA in Algeria, and who got his son to abduct British tourists in Yemen for the sake of jihad. (Al Masri is in British jail since 2004, but perhaps a little later than he should have been.) Another Egyptian, Yasser al Sirri, headed the London-based Islamic Media Observatory, the news agency that provided letters of accreditation to a pair of suicide-bombers posing as journalists who killed Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Northern Areas of Afghanistan three days before 9/11.
The government in London must accept responsibility for providing a crucial input into international terrorism as well as radicalising an already brutalised Pakistani community in the United Kingdom. It turned a deaf ear to protests made about its export of radical British youth into Pakistan and other regions of the world. It turned its face away equally from protests against its policy of giving out visas to people in Pakistan (ex-ISI chiefs included) and elsewhere known for inciting violent reactions among Muslim communities in the West. It created the ‘Londonistan’ it is now faced with, as graphically described by French journalist Muhammad Sifaoui in Inside Al Qaeda: How I Infiltrated the World’s Deadliest Terrorist Organisation.
Khaled Ahmed’s A n a l y s i s
he London bombings of 7 July 2005 have not aroused the kind of analysis in Pakistan it deserved. Opinions expressed on TV channels and the Urdu press were routine: the UK is to blame because it radicalised the UK Muslims by taking part in the invasion of Iraq. One TV channel was discussing mazloom (persecuted) Muslims of the world even as 55 innocent citizens died at the hands four suicide bombers (three out of them of Pakistani origin) in London. No forum in Pakistan had any in-depth knowledge about the 1.6 million Muslims living in the UK. They knew even less about the Pakistani community which forms a majority among Muslims there. But they spoke authoritatively on the subject, denying Muslim culpability even while showing sympathy to the British public.
BBC (16 July 2005) interviewed half a dozen boys together at Luton in London. All of them were wearing shalwar-kurta and were extremely angry about UK’s participation in the Iraq war. On the bombings of 7/7 they were united in condemning extremism and were of the opinion that the suicide-bombers had probably fallen into the clutches of the extremists already present in the UK. But they linked it to the outrage in Iraq where the UK and the US were killing ‘our brothers’. One boy got up and advanced on the interviewer saying he was as much a British citizen as the interviewer was and he had to say that prime minister Blair had hurt the Muslims of the UK by killing women and children in Iraq.
Focusing on Iraq: CNN (15 July 2005) interviewed Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid who said (confirmed on the 19th by President Musharraf) that there were seminaries in Pakistan who would recruit terrorists from the UK. But a British citizen and member of a Muslim organisation in London, Mr Tamimi, disagreed and said that the seminaries had no role to play in the conversion of the British Muslim youth. He said in Leeds, where the youth was radicalised, was besieged by British racists who threatened them with violence. He said the Muslim boys constantly asked questions about Iraq, but prime minister Blair was in denial of this reality. He said the Muslims were being victimised in such places as Afghanistan, Palestine, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and the only solution for the UK was to change its Iraq policy.
The discussions in the UK had rare liberal Muslims owning up to the flaws in the community itself while the conservatives who outnumbered them continued to say the same thing: that Blair’s invasion of Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks. It was also apparent that the liberals were tentative in their opinion while the conservatives were forceful and aggressive. One could see that there was tension between the two opinions and that the liberals were likely to retreat from their stance out of fear. Most of the Muslims who offered comment were conservative and said more or less the same thing as was said by Muslims all over the world even before 7/7. On 4 July 2004, just three days earlier, at a seminar in Jordan titled The Reality of Islam and its Role in the Contemporary Society , Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi of Qatar had blamed ‘injustices done to Muslims by the West’ as a reason for the growth of Muslim extremism. The truth is that Qaradawi’s earlier fatwa of death against the British could have actually triggered the 7/7 terror.
State and jihad in Pakistan: In Pakistan, the vast underworld of jihad is still functioning, not least because the ‘jihad option’ against India has been retained, and the training camps in Mansehra once again field militias that take the cue from their Arab masters. There is no measure to quantify the salafist influence on Pakistan’s Islam but it is generally accepted that jihad has further stiffened the faith and that the jihadi militias have absorbed a lot of their new worldview from their Arab sponsors. There is a generally felt devotion for the ‘true’ Arab faith because it is not diluted by the ‘Hindu-influenced’ culture of Pakistan. At least two well known Urdu columnists wrote wistfully about the late Saudi cleric whose ‘hate literature’ has been poisoning the mosques all over the world.
Journalist Mustafa Sadiq wrote in Jang that when he was saying his prayer in a mosque in Dipalpur in Punjab he discovered pamphlets there penned by the great late Saudi scholar Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz. He was greatly impressed by the pamphlets and remembered that Bin Baz was rector of the Madina University and wielded a lot of authority with the Saudi royalty. The columnist went to Saudi Arabia in 1966 and interviewed Bin Baz, which he published on one full page of his paper Wafaq . Bin Baz could actually undo the punishments given out by the princes. He was so powerful he could open the door of the crown prince, the most powerful man in the kingdom, and enter at will. He wore his usual long robe but kept a big pocket in it. In the pocket was a mohur (stamp). Whenever he wanted to give an order that the kingdom had to obey he took it out of his robe and used it as a stamp.
Conversion to hate: Columnist Irfan Siddiqi wrote in Nawa-e-Waqt (1 April 2005) an account of his visit to Madina in Saudi Arabia. At Madina he visited the famous Madina Islamic University set up 45 years ago with the advice of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi and Maulana Daud Ghaznavi of Pakistan. It was headed by its first vice chancellor the great Sheikh Bin Baz. It welcomed 6,000 foreign students forming almost 80 percent of the total student population. It gave generous scholarships plus an air ticket back home during vacations. Pakistani students came from Lahore, Faisalabad, Turbat, Mamo Kanjan, Karachi, Qasur, Gujranwala, Peshawar, Nowshehra, Haripur, Gilgit and Mekran. There used to be 300 Pakistanis in the university but now it was less than 200. Before 9/11, teachers of the university used to spread around the world picking up students but now that has ceased. Pakistan was no longer issuing no-objection certificates to its students for this university.
The three Pakistani-origin bombers visited Pakistan approximately for three months. The pattern is very much like the one followed by the suicide bombers of 9/11: they had visited Pakistan before going to the US and had touched base with someone in Karachi and Afghanistan. This time the one seminary investigated is Lahore’s Manzurul Islam. It was noticed earlier by American scholar Jessica Stern in her book Terror in the Name of God and the director she had met was named Pir Saifullah Saif. In the jihadi underworld this name will immediately ring a bell: it is a nom de guerre . This time the director of the seminary was differently named, and there was no trace of Mujibur Rehman Inqilabi who had bragged all sorts of jihadi derring-do to Stern.
Psychology of denial: The general behaviour of the Pakistani population is not extremist, but its opinion is. Pakistan is under siege from people who think extremist thoughts. The consequence of this state is expression of extreme helplessness accompanied with moral outrage. The next stage among the ‘select’ earmarked by Al Qaeda is suicide. Not even politicians feel satisfied unless they borrow from the vocabulary of extremism. Also, there are centres of radical action funded from abroad, stoking the fire of revenge against the West and inspiring sectarian violence and even training people for acts of terrorism.
An entire population is completely untouched by this extremism of action but it helps terrorism through the mass psychology of denial and through extreme formulations of thought. The psychology of denial is created by closing the mind against information and any data related to the subject of terrorism. On the other hand, much is picked up from Western sources critical of the policies followed by governments in the West. Those who have specialised in the jihadi underworld are intellectual pariahs and will not be published in the more popular Urdu press. The English-speaking elite avoids jihadi data because of the outlandish Urdu vocabulary of jihad.
What UK is to blame for: If the UK is to blame, it is for neglecting the way the Muslims in general and the Pakistanis in particular were turning their face away from integration. In April 2001 Professor Muhammad Anwar of the University of Warwick, revealed for the first time the alarming picture of the largest Muslim minority in the UK. According to him, the Pakistanis living in the UK were 700,000, the third largest minority community. (There are a million Indians in the UK.) The majority of these British Pakistanis are Kashmiris, including those displaced by Mangla Dam in Azad Kashmir. They are concentrated in four regions: 30 percent in and around London, 22 percent (100,000) in Birmingham, 20 percent (65,000) in Bradford, 20,000 in Manchester and 15,000 in Glasgow. The figure of 700,000 had grown from 5000 in 1951. Because of high birth-rate, fully 47 percent of them were under the age of 16, as compared to 17 percent for whites. They had the highest unemployment rate, five times more than the British average; and a crime rate higher than in any other community. Fully 2 percent of the prisoners rotting in British jails were Pakistanis, the highest for any one community.
France’s Gilles Kepel studied the UK Pakistanis in his Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe (Polity Press, 1997) but apparently London paid no attention to it. According to him, in the United Kingdom, Islamisation of the immigrant Muslim community was an early post-colonial trend stemming from the British experience in India. Communalisation rather than integration suited the UK because it could then farm out the menial jobs to a community formed specially for them. Workers’ mosques came up in the 1950s in the industrial areas of the UK, as opposed to France where this trend started only in the 1970s. Out of the 55 mosques serving the 85,000 Muslims of Birmingham in 1985 nearly half were set up before 1970. In the 1950s and 1960s, the mosques were divided against each other on the basis of Barelvi-Deobandi religions. There were even Pathan and Punjabi, Mirpuri, Bengali and Gujrati mosques.
World of the UK Pakistani: The first central mosque in Birmingham was built in 1971 but its first Barelvi khateeb was so favoured by the Muslims that the Deobandi khateeb was not allowed his turn. Individual charismatic figures like Barelvi Pir Maroof Shah who built a number of mosques for his followers in Bradford, founding the World Islamic Mission in 1973. Sufi Abdullah built himself a similar Barelvi empire in the area in the early 1980s. The Bradford Council of Mosques in the 1980s was already ‘separating’ the community on such questions as halal and girls’ education, and Labour Party was the popular party for the Muslims. Then came the Rushdie Affair in 1988, almost coinciding with the explosion caused by the Islamic scarf affair in France a year later. The protest that was organised against Rushdie’s Satanic Verses united the fragmented Muslim community in the UK while toppling its less educated leaders in favour of the anglophone radical ones inspired by the Islamic Revolution of Imam Khomeini in Iran.
The Islamic Foundation of Leicester sent out the call against Rushdie’s blasphemy, but the man who finally ran away with the collective Muslim response was ex-journalist, Kalim Siddiqi, of Jamaat-e-Islami background, who set up his Muslim Parliament and issued what was termed the Muslim Manifesto in 1990, actually challenging the British system. This caused Labour politician Roy Jenkins, who had described the British policy of integration as ‘equal opportunities with cultural diversity’ in 1965, to say in 1989 that the policy had failed to effect any integration of the Muslim culture and religion within the British society. London looked at Kalim Siddiqi as some kind of a crazy person and ignored him. It ignored others like Abu Hamza Al Masri and Umar Bakri (whose ultra-radical Al Muhajirun outfit came to Pakistan in 2000 together with Hizb al-Tahrir) later on too, while the Muslims retreated further from British society. The climax of this failure to integrate came in the shape of the conversion of the British mosque to Deobandi and Ahle Hadith identity during the 1990s.
The Arab injection: Kepel, introducing a reprint of his old book The Roots of Radical Islam (Saqi 2005) noted that the Finnsbury Mosque cell of Al Qaeda was run by Abu Hamza Al-Masri, an Egyptian who had lost an arm and an eye fighting in Afghanistan, whose journal al-Ansar glamorised the murderous GIA in Algeria, and who got his son to abduct British tourists in Yemen for the sake of jihad. (Al Masri is in British jail since 2004, but perhaps a little later than he should have been.) Another Egyptian, Yasser al Sirri, headed the London-based Islamic Media Observatory, the news agency that provided letters of accreditation to a pair of suicide-bombers posing as journalists who killed Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Northern Areas of Afghanistan three days before 9/11.
The government in London must accept responsibility for providing a crucial input into international terrorism as well as radicalising an already brutalised Pakistani community in the United Kingdom. It turned a deaf ear to protests made about its export of radical British youth into Pakistan and other regions of the world. It turned its face away equally from protests against its policy of giving out visas to people in Pakistan (ex-ISI chiefs included) and elsewhere known for inciting violent reactions among Muslim communities in the West. It created the ‘Londonistan’ it is now faced with, as graphically described by French journalist Muhammad Sifaoui in Inside Al Qaeda: How I Infiltrated the World’s Deadliest Terrorist Organisation.
posted by India News Watch at 3:49 PM
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