Friends,

When about a dozen reviews, ranging from the Toronto Star to the Ottawa Citizen praised my book, I felt a bit uneasy. Praise from the Huffington Post in LA to the Arab American in Detroit, made me feel I was being treated with kid gloves.

So I asked Justin Podur, who is a fine writer with an admirable sense of social justice, to take a read and review it from a left wing perspective. He took up my offer and his verdict is harsh and at times ’jarring’, which is the word he uses to describe my writing :-)

Since I have shared all the positive reviews do far, I feel obligated to share this less than favourable verdict on me from someone I respect and admire.

Here is Justin Podur dissecting my work, which he labels as “flawed,” but “worth reading”.

Read and reflect.

Tarek

---

 On a quest for secular piety:: Reviewing Tarek Fatah’s “Chasing a Mirage”

By Justin Podur

The Killing Train

Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: the tragic illusion of an Islamic State (CM). With a book being favorably reviewed in the Canadian (and US and UK) media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian, and the Asper-family owned newspapers (Ottawa Citizen and National Post, which also published long excerpts of CM and frequently runs op-eds by Tarek), CM hardly needed a review from me to get attention. I therefore took the request as a signal of a serious desire to engage with people who might disagree about the ideas of the book.

CM’s basic thesis is that religion and politics should be separated in Islam. Although it has major flaws, it also has many attributes of interest and will be thought-provoking on the relationship between religion and politics, and between Islam and the West.

A flawed book with some thought-provoking ideas

The experience of reading the book is a jarring one. Tarek frequently overreaches, making claims beyond what the evidence provides. “the pain we suffer is caused mostly by self-inflicted wounds, and is not entirely the result of some Zionist conspiracy hatched by the West.” (pg. xi) How IMF restructuring or repeated US bombings, invasions, and occupations are “self-inflicted” is unexplained. Sentences like that also put all Muslims together, though the politics and problems in different Muslim societies are different. CM includes preposterous statements about “nations such as India and China, with few natural resources other than their burgeoning populations” (pg. 325). India and China in fact have tremendous natural resources (especially agricultural resources) that are exploited to the fullest because of their large populations.

Tarek also says “being Canadian has had the most profound effect on (his) thinking”, and lists his Canadian heroes, which include both men and women, French and Anglo-Canadians. But his list does not have Louis Riel or Joseph Brant or any other indigenous person. Tarek’s references to “ordinary Canadians” don’t include the country’s indigenous people or the crimes that were done to them. It is striking though, given his emphasis on Canadian-ness and his expressed desire to hold a mirror up to the Muslim community, that he shows a blind spot for Canada’s disgraceful colonialism.

The book is also jarring because of bombast and cliche. Phrases like “the Palestinian movement cannot be allowed to degenerate into a fad for out-of-luck leftists in search of a cause... When these rich armchair anti-imperialists spout on Palestine, they seem to do it out of an addiction, not a commitment” (pg. 74) occur throughout, and make the whole book very demoralizing to read. The use of phrases like “the new found love affair between the left and the Islamists” (pg. 318) make a case by insinuation, a problem found throughout the book, especially when describing Muslim organizations in the West and money they receive from Saudi Arabia and other places. His newspaper columns are no different, and are part of what makes it an easier choice to simply discard what he has to say.

On the other hand, CM also offers interesting information, especially about Islamic history and recent debates in the West. His attacks on rigid doctrine, internalized racism, and illiberal politics are valid and important. He has more than once presented me with obvious things I hadn’t thought about. When Maher Arar was being tortured in Syria, for example, he wondered why people didn’t demonstrate at the Syrian consulate, but only the US and Canadian consulates. To be sure, to send someone somewhere to be tortured was horrific, but shouldn’t some anger be directed at the torturer?

When a Palestinian refugee was threatened with deportation for having been a member of the PFLP (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist Palestinian formation that Canada has deemed “terrorist”), Tarek wrote an open letter to the Canadian Prime Minister saying he, too, had been a member of the PFLP and so if al-Yamani was going to be deported, so too should he be. For reasons like these, Tarek deserves better than casual dismissal. If the flaws can be filtered out, what remain are important questions on very serious matters worthy of debate.

Tarek divides his target audience in five parts. First, Muslims, who he hopes to persuade of his central thesis: that being a good, pious Muslim, to follow the Qur’an and the five pillars, does not require a particular form of state, and that trying to create an Islamic state can only lead to calamity.

Second, “ordinary, well-meaning, but naive non-Muslims of Europe and North America”, who he hopes to persuade that Islamists are not authentic anti-imperialists. (pg. xiv)

Third, “conservative Republicans in the United States and their neo-conservative allies in the West” who he hopes to persuade that “dropping bombs helps the foe, not the friend.”

Fourth, Arabs, “who have suffered at the hands of colonialism”, whose “cause is just”, but who “need to recognize that... the plight of the Palestinians has been abused and misused by their leadership for ulterior motives. They also need to fight internalized racism that places darker-coloured fellow Muslims from Africa and Asia on a lower rung of society.” (pg. xvi)

Last, “Pakistanis who deny their ancient Indian heritage”, and who, as a consequence, “have become easy pickings for Islamist extremist radicals who fill their empty ethnic vessels with false identities that deny them their own ethnic heritage.” (pg. xvii)

Because I suspect I have only limited access to only the second part of Tarek’s target audience, this review will focus on what is of interest to the “liberal and left-leaning”.

The premises of Chasing a Mirage

CM’s explicit thesis, that religion and politics ought to be separated in Islam, rests on several implicit theses. The most important of these is that Islam, or political Islam, is the major reason for what is wrong in places like Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Iran, Palestine, and immigrant Muslim communities in the West. Tarek sometimes acknowledges colonialism and occupation (though he is more dismissive of the idea that there might be racism against Muslims in the West), but also blames Islamist doctrine and ideology as a cause (as opposed to primarily an effect, to which we will return).

From this flows the second implicit thesis, that there is something unique about Islam in this respect. When Europe went through Renaissance and Enlightenment, Christianity and Judaism advanced, and Islam remained behind. “While most of humanity has come to recognize the futility of racial and religious states, the Islamists of today present (the) sordid past as their manifesto of the future.” (pg. 19) Failure to separate religion from politics in culture and theory left the way open for Islamists (Syed Qutb, Abul Ala Maudoodi) to create doctrines based on the politicized use of religion.

The third implicit thesis is that in politics, Western-style democracy is the best form. Tarek is a Canadian by choice, he reminds the reader, and cherishes the freedom that he finds in the West, where “the only Arabs who today vote without fear of reprisal” live (pg. xvii). Islamism is bad for the West and for Muslims in part because it causes Muslims to “refuse to integrate or assimilate as part of Western society, yet wishes to stay in (its) midst” (pg. xiv). Also, there is nothing wrong with Islam itself, nor any other religion. Only the combination of religion and politics is undesirable, and CM remains constantly respectful of the basic tenets of Muslim religion.

From these premises, Tarek in Part 1 goes through a series of case studies. Pakistan’s politics have been distorted by Islamism and were distorted from the start. The Saudi regime, with the US guaranteeing its safety in power and its unimaginable oil wealth, reaches out and sponsors Islamism all over the world. Iran’s Islamists destroyed the leftist revolutionaries who they came to power with, and then imposed their will on a reluctant society in brutal and totalitarian ways. And Palestine has been hijacked by Islamists within and without. Next, in Part 2, Tarek reads medieval Islamic history from the death of the prophet Muhammad through to the Damascus, Baghdad, and al-Andalus caliphates.

The point of this reading is to show that this past provides no useful guidance for political conduct in large, complex, industrial societies. In Part 3 he moves on to contemporary case studies: He concludes that the recent attempt to apply Sharia law in Ontario for personal disputes between Muslims was a very bad idea. Democratic laws have to apply to everyone and everyone must receive equal protection.

He concludes that the doctrine of jihad in Islamism, which, he says, is not about inner struggle but about war, should be discarded. And while he supports the right to wear the hijab, he argues that it is an arbitrary convention without a solid basis in the Qur’an or core Muslim religion. Finally, he concludes that Islamists and Islamism should be strongly confronted in the West, by democrats of all kinds, Muslim and non-Muslim. Since they hold illiberal views, Islamists should not be allowed to use liberalism to undermine its foundation.

Before assessing CM’s conclusions, it may be useful to state my own rather different premises, for understanding the problems experienced by the societies CM discusses (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine, and the Muslim diaspora) as well as some of those he does not.

An alternative set of premises

I agree that religion and politics ought to be separated. But I believe that political Islam is primarily an effect of what is wrong in Muslim societies, not a cause. Explaining the causes of the problems of the third world is beyond the scope of a book review. But a “left-leaning” explanation would look for causes related to economic and political inequalities within and between societies.

While these may have pre-existed colonial encounters (Jared Diamond’s “Guns Germs and Steel” is devoted to explaining why the geography of Europe gave it certain advantages for conquering the rest of the world) they were intensified by them.

Millions of indigenous people of the Americas died building wealth for Europe and the American states (see Eduardo Galeano, “Open Veins of Latin America”). Millions of Africans died in slavery and colonialism (see Basil Davidson, “The African Slave Trade”). Throughout Asia, lands and resources were taken over through military conquest, or sometimes through finance, without firing a shot. These encounters distorted the colonizers: they lost their ethical sense, they developed doctrines of racism and exclusive notions of religion, and locked the world into constant warfare.

But by far the greatest trauma was suffered by the colonized These societies were not perfect before colonialism destroyed them: they too were full of caste (see BR Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste”) and class hierarchy, patriarchal traditions and religion, and militarism and violence of their own. But colonialism intensified all of these and used them to its own ends. The former colonies tried to make sense of what had happened to them and how to free themselves from it (one one very important aspect of this attempt, see Vijay Prashad’s “Darker Nations”). Their responses included nationalism and communism, both of which were brutally attacked by the Western powers (on these attacks, see William Blum’s “Killing Hope”). Religiously based nationalism in these parts of the world was often seen as less threatening by the West.

This is where political islam enters the picture in Muslim societies. Tarek is right that it does not provide the freedom and equality so badly needed to address the other urgent problems of our societies. But without a comparative perspective (which is adopted for example by Eqbal Ahmad, one of Tarek’s heroes and one of my own) one is left thinking there is something especially bad about Islam or Muslim societies. This is a convenient belief for Western readers who want to believe the current “war on terror” might be justified. But an equally strong case could be made, and has been, about the caste, irrational belief, and hierarchy in East Asian cultures, or African cultures, or Indian culture, or East Europe, or Latin America, or Europe or America itself - and if the West were at war with these societies such cases would receive greater attention here.

I do not believe that Islam has a monopoly over the failure to separate religion and politics. I believe that all religions are systems of authority, based on irrational belief, that mostly cannot meet the burden of proof for the demands they make of their believers. A distorted, politicized Christianity is a clear and present danger in the United States (see Chris Hedges’ “American Fascists”, Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas? and watch”Jesus Camp“). Similar problems exist with Israel and Zionism (see Michael Warchawski’s”Towards an Open Tomb“, or Uri Davis’s”Apartheid Israel“). As a result I disagree with Tarek’s statement that” most of humanity has come to recognize the futility of racial and religious states". If only it were so.

I believe that the rest of the world, including the Muslim world but especially indigenous peoples and Africans, have paid a blood price so that those in the West could live in comfort and freedom. Democracy in the West is worth defending to the degree that it can look in the mirror of these atrocities, condemn them, and redress them. Self-congratulation about Western achievements, freedoms, or superiority in rewarding itself with what it stole from others is harmful to this necessary self-examination. Massive inequalities in Western societies and between the West and the rest of the world distort democracy, ethics, and the possibilities for decent survival on the planet. Dealing with these distortions is the most urgent political task at hand.

We all grow up and live in a world of traumas, hierarchies, and inequalities, and we all rebel against these in different ways (see Bruce Levine’s “Commonsense Rebellion” for a diagnosis of everything alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling, sex addiction, and workoholism as problematic ways of rebelling against meaninglessness and lack of control in daily life). Constructive, collective, political rebellion is what many of us strive to do and hope to see. But there are more problematic ways of rebelling, some of which can sometimes have perverse effects, and these are sometimes better rewarded by the institutions that produce the ills we’re rebellin against.

Because it is usually the oppressed who have to free themselves (and their oppressors), and because many of those powerless and under attack and fighting back (sometimes in ways that are themselves distorted) are Muslims, an examination of the current role of Islam, and religion in general, in politics is important. So, too, is thinking about what that role could or should be. CM’s value is in contributing to that debate.

Assessing the conclusions of “Chasing a Mirage”

Starting from these somewhat different premises, how do the conclusions of CM appear? Take the Sharia law debate in Ontario. Some Muslim organizations argued that Islamic law be used in binding arbitration to settle disputes between parties. Their principal argument, which CM does not mention, was that those principles were already being used in Jewish and Christian communities: if religious arbitration was okay for some religions, why not all? In the event, the Ontario government’s decision was the best one possible: rather than allowing it for all religions, Ontario struck religious arbitration down for all.

Should jihad be discarded, and hijab recognized as an arbitrary cultural convention and not a religious requirement? Yes, in the same way that all doctrines should be subjected to tests of ethics and reason and discarded if they fail those tests. The same is true for using the distant past, described in Part 2 of CM, as a political guide for the future. If some political idea, from history or elsewhere, will have good effects from a perspective of universal human values, then it should be used. If not, it should be rejected. These conclusions are similar to Tarek’s, though they come from different premises.

And what of the importance of challenging the illiberalism of the Islamists in the West? Here we have a more serious disagreement, not on the question of whether illiberalism should be challenged, but on where the illiberalism comes from and what should be done about it. Tarek, like Ed Husain in the UK (author of “The Islamist”) attributes the strength of Islamists in the West to the tolerance of “bleeding heart liberals” and “the left”. In doing so, he attributes more power to this social force than it actually has. Liberals are on the defensive everywhere in the West, and leftists are so marginal that one can only read about us as rhetorical foils in books on political topics. Decency and internationalism have plenty of followers in the West, to be sure. But it is not tolerance, but intolerance and the exploitation of legitimate grievances that others have failed to answer, that has strengthened religious politics.

How can we assess CM’s analysis of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Palestine? Pakistan was indeed founded on a religious basis, and the partition and confrontation between India and Pakistan did incredible damage to both societies over many decades. Saudi Arabia is ruled by a monarchy held up by the US military, that in exchange controls the population and uses its wealth to divert politics in religious directions. CM presents Iran from the perspective of some of its defeated leftists, who helped overthrow the Shah only to be destroyed politically (and, ultimately, physically, in mass murders of political prisoners in the 1980s).

CM’s chapter on Palestine, by contrast, is wholly without merit. Tarek offers the chapter as if it is strategic advice to the Palestinians, but like reading much of the North American media, one can come away thinking Israel’s occupation is a minor issue and that the central conflict is between lslamists and others. This is one of the confusions of Tarek’s politics in general. At times he adopts the tone of a self-critical leftist, who leftists ought to take seriously, at other times the self-congratulation of Western pundits, who leftists would normally dismiss because of lack of time. From both postures, he blasts leftists and anti-imperialists with, at times, ugly rhetoric. What’s more, since the cause of Palestine should be based on universal human rights and self-determination and Islamists (indeed Muslims, or Jews) have no special right to comment on it, Tarek’s dissident Muslim position adds nothing of interest to the debate.

Those concerned about the Palestinian cause could, no doubt, benefit from serious examination of how Hamas came to power and the Palestinian left became so marginal. It is important to think about how best to resist the agendas of Israel and the US (and Canada) for the Palestinians - an agenda of starvation and murder, it bears repeating - and how to relate to the significant social force that Hamas now represents in Palestine, for better or worse. But for that examination, one will have to look elsewhere - perhaps to Azzam Tamimi’s “Hamas: A history from within”, to some of Amira Hass’s reporting since the 2006 election, or Adel Samara’s critiques of “NGO-ization”.

Leftists I’ve spoken to were dismissive. They disliked Tarek’s frequent and sweeping attacks on what he calls “the left” (I prefer to use the term “leftists”, since “the left” does not really exist in any organized form in North America in any case). Another anti-Muslim book, they guessed, part of a cottage industry designed to demonize the selected victims of Western foreign policy. Iraq is occupied, a million people killed. Palestine is occupied, starved, choked to death. Afghanistan is occupied. Iran is threatened. Deportations of Muslims are rampant in Western countries. Secret trials are occurring.

The Egyptian regime receives billions in weaponry and subsidies in exchange for support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and suppression of the population. Other dictatorships in Muslim countries receive similar largesse. Of course, to do all this to a group of people requires an industry to produce convenient stories about them. Anyone who can produce such stories will be rewarded handsomely, with sympathetic reviews, prominent placement in bookstores, and high sales for telling convenient things to people about what they are doing.

Irshad Manji’s “Trouble With Islam” was part of this industry, and many might assume CM is as well. While Tarek refused Manji’s acknowledgement of him in her book, he called her “courageous” and expressed sympathy that she was being called opportunist and her message ignored in his own, a fate his book will share, in some quarters.

A better comparison than Irshad Manji might be to black conservatives in the US, such as Shelby Steele or John McWhorter, who draw on a worthy tradition of black self-help but emphasize it out of context to the degree that the central problem of institutional racism is lost.

In any case Tarek and CM should not be quickly dismissed. For all the book’s flaws, it does at times deal with serious issues seriously. It raises important questions about politics in immigrant communities and in poor countries. And although Tarek sometimes lacks compassion, makes cases by insinuation, ignores or blows off key parts of the story, misses crucial context, and makes claims well beyond his evidence, he also presents interesting arguments about history, discusses some neglected crimes whose main victims, after all, are Muslims, and is worth reading on contemporary debates even when you disagree.

Unfortunately, to disagree with Tarek is to invite bombastic and overblown replies, but he also at times seriously attempts to engage in a way that might actually advance the debate on how best to advance decent values in both Western and Muslim societies. To advance that debate, it is worth assuming Tarek’s good faith and giving “Chasing a Mirage” a careful reading to separate the parts that are without merit from the parts that have some.

* From: http://www.killingtrain.com/chasingamiragereview

* Justin Podur is a toronto-based writer. He can be reached at justin killingtrain.com

---

POLITICS AND RELIGION: The state of Islam

June 21, 2008

– Chasing a Mirage

The Tragic Illusions of an Islamic State

By Tarek Fatah

Wiley, 410 pages, $31.95

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State

By Noah Feldman

Princeton University Press,

189 pages, $23

Islam and the Secular State

Negotiating the Future of Shari’a

By Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im

Harvard University Press,

324 pages, $35

Emran Qureshi

Globe and Mail

Tarek Fatah is a larger-than-life figure on the Canadian media landscape. A former leftist in his native Pakistan, he became a media pundit and, now, a Muslim reformer. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the London and Madrid bombings, he has written prolifically on the failure of Canadian Muslim institutions and their leaders, and on Islamism, the politicization of Islam.

Chasing a Mirage is dedicated to the memory of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto and Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, both brutally murdered by Pakistani jihadis. He describes his plural Muslim identity as shaped by Islam, Hinduism and other religious and secular traditions. He identifies himself as a secular Muslim. He laments how his plural South Asian heritage is being effaced by “Arab Islam.” By that he means to say the late 20^th-century effacing of South Asian Islamic heritage (Sufi and syncretic) by a more recent imported Arab fundamentalist version.

In this book, one part memoir, one part Islamic history lesson and one part polemic, he offers up his understanding of what’s wrong with Islam today. His righteous anger is directed at the idea of an Islamic state, a cherished utopian goal of Islamist ideologues for the better part of the 20^th century.

Fatah begins by turning his attention to the murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the democratically elected prime minister of Pakistan and father of Benazir Bhutto. It was a sad day for Pakistan. However, Fatah asserts that “the Islamists” were responsible for Bhutto’s hanging in a Rawalpindi jail cell in 1979. They were not. Zia ul Haq, Pakistani military dictator, was responsible. To be sure, ul Haq was backed by the Jamaat-e Islami (JI), a Pakistani Islamist party, but he was also backed financially by American benefactors. It was during this era of an Afghan anti-Soviet jihad that the jihadi paramilitary movements took root in the soil of Pakistan.

One modern ideologue who constructed the ideological façade of an Islamic state was Abul Ala Maududi, an Indian Muslim who was initially opposed to the creation of Pakistan. He eventually emigrated and became the founder of JI. Many of the modern understandings of an Islamic state are due to Maududi’s tireless theorizing: that non-Muslim minorities have limited rights, women cannot be the head of an Islamic polity, gender segregation is good and proper, and sovereignty belongs to God (and those who best understand God, such as himself).

Maududi, like other Islamist ideologues, put forth his understandings of Islam during the period of European colonization and decolonization. Hence, within the DNA of these ideas is a deeply xenophobic understanding of Islam and a hostile conception of the West. Ironically, his ideas have become popular within diaspora Muslim populations of the West, especially those in Britain.

One assumption that permeates Fatah’s book is that Islamism is a throwback to a medieval past. Hence his need to show that the Islamic past was never as glorious as the glorious present. Nevertheless, Islamist ideology owes as much to Western ideas as it does to Islamic ideas. In fact, Maududi’s ideas were so alien to some traditional Indian Muslim scholars that they called them “Maududism,” and one scholar went so far as to say, “Maududi is not even qualified to be an interpreter of Islam.” He returned the compliments by denouncing the traditional religious scholars.

Interestingly enough, Maududi died in upstate New York, where he was treated for a heart condition. During the 1940s and 1950s, he was animated more by fear of godless communism and criticized the United States for providing insufficient support to existing Muslim regimes in their fight against socialist movements and ideologies.

Fatah makes no mention of Fazlur Rahman, one of the 20^th century’s great Muslim modernist intellectuals and Maududi’s ideological nemesis. Rahman, a modernist Islamic scholar fluent in Greek, Arabic, Urdu and Persian, was intimately conversant with both the classical Islamic theological and philosophical traditions. He offered a modernist exegesis of the Koran and was able to offer a critical interrogation of Islamist understandings of Islam. Embroiled in controversy, he was later forced to flee Pakistan, and took refuge at The University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.

What explains the appeal of Islamism today? Fareed Zakaria, in the aftermath of 9/11, penned an astute and widely read Newsweek essay, The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us? He made a simple observation that still is not sufficiently acknowledged. In much of the Arab Middle East, states are ruled by secular autocrats who have sidelined democracy, the rule of law, dissent and human rights. Some secular Muslim autocrats (Hosni Mubarak in Egypt is one excellent example) have been so successful in shutting down democracy that the only serious opposition is the mosque and the Islamists. Where democracy has flourished, the Islamists for the most part have had to temper their ideology to achieve electoral success.

The Islamists are not the only figures that draw political legitimacy from Islam. King Abdullah II of Jordan and King Mohammed VI of Morocco both claim to be direct descendents of the Prophet Mohammed. Ironically, their political legitimacy is derived from Islam on grounds similar to those of their Islamist opposition.

In Pakistan, a partially functioning democracy, the JI Islamist political party has never won a plurality in a federal election. How have they managed to get their agenda adopted?

Successive military and secular regimes have attempted to use Islamic ideology to subsume nationalist and separatist identities (Bengali, Baluchi) or to obtain the support of smaller Islamist political parties. It was the populist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, for example, who had the heterodox Ahmadiyya Muslim sect officially declared non-Muslim. Later, the JI would support a genocidal military campaign against separatist Bengali Muslims and claim that they really were not good Muslims.

Fatah’s strongest and most charged material is on his insider-outsider status as a Canadian Muslim observing the pathologies of Canadian Muslim organizations or Western Muslim organizations, especially in Britain. The charge sheet is something like this: They are covertly sympathetic to Islamist movements, they hate the society they live in and they espouse values that are contradictory to life in a multicultural democracy.

What is disturbing is the large number of grotesque examples he can effortlessly draw on: Toronto-area imam Ali Hindy defending violent jihad; the Canadian Muslim leader who says Muslims opposed to the introduction of sharia law in Ontario are non-Muslims; the Kuwaiti politician speaking before a Toronto Muslim audience, saying, “Western civilization is rotten from within and nearing collapse.” In one breathtaking incident, Toronto-area Muslim university students offered a defence of the Taliban.

In this section, I wish that Fatah had not written with such polemical ferocity, only so that his arguments would not be dismissed out of hand by his fellow Canadian Muslim critics. He raises important questions on the role of Muslim public figures in Canada and the West. The West is to be criticized for its shortcomings, to be sure, especially the United States and Israel. Yet these same figures appear incapable of adopting the same critical distance regarding Islamist regimes, movements and thinkers.

More recently, the Canadian branch of the Islamic Society of North America invited Qazi Hussain Ahmed, head of the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami party, to speak in Toronto at an Islamic conference titled Our Youth, Our Future. One consequence of a politicized Islam and Wahhabi primitivism is modern Muslim illiteracy of a rich theological and philosophical tradition. Great sages such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Baja, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Tufayl and al-Farabi are today virtually unknown.

Noah Feldman, in his thought-provoking The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, asks the intriguing question: What explains the rise of popularity and support for sharia? He answers that in the case of autocratic Middle Eastern rulers, sharia is viewed as a check against absolutist power. In theory, it is a nice idea, but in practice, it has not materialized quite that way, if one examines the cases of Sudan or Pakistan.

However, Feldman’s broader point is important: The rule of law existed prior to the advent of Western colonial domination, and ignoring the rich Islamic legal tradition is folly. As well, approximately 57 Muslim-majority countries use some subset of sharia-inspired legal code. It thus cannot be ignored for pragmatic reasons. Sharia in the West and in Western parlance is akin to Islamic brutalism. In the Islamic world, it has a more variegated meaning. For most Muslims, it means the metaphysical path of God. For Islamists, it means God’s commandments that an Islamic regime must enforce.

Sharia’s recent introduction in Sudan and Pakistan came through the military, not from some populist Islamist democratic groundswell for justice. Sharia was introduced to Pakistan on the watch of Zia ul-Haq, who directly appointed judges to a newly created Federal Shariat Court, thus bypassing an independent judicial appointment process. It is worth pointing out that the introduction of sharia law in Pakistan, especially hudood ordinances, have meant that hundreds of women were arrested for zina (sexual intercourse outside of marriage).

Curiously, Feldman views the Saudi jurists as the closest exemplar of the classical Islamic juridical tradition. This is awfully generous. As well, the claim that the jurists in the desert kingdom maintain judicial independence from the House of Saud is also contestable. Osama bin Laden complained about the Saudi jurists being subservient to the rulers and allowing U.S. troops to be stationed in the desert kingdom during the first Gulf War.

In Islam and the Secular State, Abdullahi An-Na’im, an Emory University law school professor, former director of Human Rights Watch/Africa Watch, and a former dissident in Sudan who once faced execution, says bluntly that the Islamic state never existed and has no future. An-Na’im has the unenviable task of arguing that, as a Muslim, he requires a state that is secular (neutral) and that sharia, when enacted by the state, is not God’s law but state law enacted by legislators.

An-Na’im lays out with candour and elegance the need for the state to be secular for all citizens, and explores Muslim polities in Indonesia, India and Turkey. An-Na’im is not above interrogating secularism, and finds the French and Turkish model not to his liking. He calls Turkish secularism authoritarian and views the Turkish Justice and Development (AK) Islamist political party as the harbinger of secularism in Turkey. Feldman also has high praise for the Turkish AK party. To further muddy the waters, this is an Islamist party that does not wish to introduce sharia law, but has the look and feel of a European Christian Democratic Party. Its stance on minority rights in Turkey is more nuanced than that of its secular opponents, and its policies are in stark contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the JI in Pakistan.

Tarek Fatah has provided a substantial contribution to the critique of the Islamic state and the state of Islam, especially in Canada. Islamist thinkers, for the most part, have not displayed the sophistication, the subtlety, the understanding of running a complex pluralist society, one in which citizens share equal and inalienable rights. But Fatah’s argument is marred by gratuitous polemics. His scattershot approach strikes innocent bystanders, thus limiting the receptivity and effectiveness of his critique, which is a pity. Are Muslim women who wear hijab really Islamists, as is implied by one careless chapter title? Are North American Islamic institutions an Islamist peril to the West?

Chasing a Mirage seems not to have been fact-checked carefully. The broader arguments aren’t affected, but the sloppy errors are a bit jarring. Maududi died in 1979, not 1976. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto died in Rawalpindi not Rawaloindi (a typographical error). The Turkish Caliphate was abolished in 1924, not 1925. Ali Abd Al-Raziq (1888-1966), who provided a deeply influential critique of the Caliphate and espoused the separation of mosque and state in 1925, did not have his book burned, nor was he declared an apostate. He was not a secular critic of a return to radical Islam; he was a senior sharia court judge in Cairo and the scion of a prominent Egyptian landowning family involved in liberal politics. To be sure, he was censured and defrocked by the Grand Council of the Ulema at al-Azhar University, and subsequently lost his judgeship. But when his older brother became Sheik of Al-Azhar, he returned to good grace. His seminal text is widely available and widely discussed.

Fatah shows discernment in his references to the late Eqbal Ahmad, a brilliant Pakistani progressive, anti-imperialist, activist intellectual. A cross between Antonio Gramsci and Hannah Arendt, he explored some of the most vexing problems confronting the Muslim and third worlds. Almost a quarter of a century ago, he wrote: “Never before in the history of Islamic peoples had there been so total a separation of political power and civil society. In the breach there is a time bomb. ... For the majority of Muslim peoples, the experienced alternative to the past is a limbo of foreign occupation and dispossession, of alienation from the land, of life in shantytowns and refugee camps, of migration into foreign lands, and, at best, of permanent expectancy. Leaning on and yearning for the restoration of an emasculated, often idealized past is one escape from the limbo; striking out in protest and anger for a new revolutionary order is another.”

Not much has changed. The restive Muslim masses are ignored by the secular elites who rule their societies, and the war on terror has in large part distracted them from addressing pressing needs. One should not be surprised at the outcome.

* From http://www.theglobeandmail.com/serv...

* Emran Qureshi is a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

---

 Muslim author speaks out against ’Islamo-fascism’

Wally Keeler

Northumberland Today

June 20, 2008

Quick! What is the difference between an Islamic state and a state of Islam? The answer is spread over more than 400 pages of Tarek Fatah’s recently released book, Chasing a Mirage.

In the preface, Fatah establishes his “street cred” by enumerating the parts of his group identity; “an Indian born in Pakistan; a Punjabi born in Islam; an immigrant in Canada with a Muslim consciousness, grounded in a Marxist youth,” adding that “of all the ingredients that make up my complex identity, being Canadian has had the most profound effect on my thinking.”

What a winning combination that is in our multiculticentric homeland; it’s his vaccination against accusations that he has a racist or Islamophobic agenda.

Chasing a Mirage delineates two diametrically opposed visions of Islam. One vision has consistently brought violence and repression to the Muslim community; the other has enriched the community with a personal and universal spirituality.

A state of Islam flows from the jihadconcept of inner struggle, the self-appraisal that leads an individual to transcend the malignancies that life so often throws our way.

The Islamic state is political Islam that flows from thejihadconcept of physical war and oppression against non-believers until Islam rules the world with Allah’s perfection. Fatah astutely presents the political manoeuvring for power that ensued within hours of Mohammed’s death, and that reverberates to this day.

Political Islam currently is in a period of ascendancy. Fatah counsels that this must be rendered impotent and calls his co-religionists to task. He is convinced that the moderate Muslim community will succeed, but not without considerable peril to the world at large.

One of the most enriching aspects of Fatah’s book are his intimate insights into the Canadian experience. In this regard that he has been incisively critical of Canadian politicians, leftist political activists and Canadian media.

A year ago the front pages of Canada’s newspapers displayed the story of girls aged six to 12 who had been barred from a tae kwon do competition in Montreal because they were wearing the hijab. This was played to the hilt by Islamists as an example of discrimination and Islamophobia, Fatah asserts that a significant fact went unreported, "that even under the harshest interpretation of the sharia, Muslim girls below the age of puberty are not required to cover their heads.

Here was an eight-year-old girl forced to wear a hijab and not a single reporter or columnist dared to challenge the parents or the mosque.“In a further twist that went unreported, the parents were attendees of a mosque that”was a hotbed of pro-Hezbollah activity in Montreal.

Fatah goes on to say that “millions of Muslim girls are told very early in life by their mothers that their place in society is one of submission; submission, not to God, but to men. He continues,”Sadly, feminist groups in Canada, the United States and Europe have abandoned their duty to confront the growing acceptance of misogyny in Islamist circles."

Fatah borrows from many other secular mainstream Muslims. In Canada, feminist Farzana Hassan, author of Islam,Women and the Challenge of Today,has been a vocal critic of the Islamic proscription that the hijab is mandatory -in return she has earned death threats and accusations that she is an enemy of Islam and an apostate.

Fatah concludes that “As despicable as this blackmailing is, it pales in comparison to the fact that these men in robes are using young Muslim girls as shields behind which they pursue a political agenda.”

Fatah neatly ties the local to the global, declaring of himself that “It is only here in Canada that I can speak out against the hijacking of my faith and the encroaching spectre of a new Islamo-fascism.”

Sadly and pathetically, Canadian media, inhibited with their own subtle racism, would never publish the following comments if they came from a non-Muslim; they would be frozen with fear that they would be accused of Islamophobia.

Fatah asks, “How many more fellow Muslims in Iran need to die at the hands of these ayatollahs before you wake up from this fantasy love affair with men in flowing robes, well-groomed beards, and trimmed bangs peeping from under their turbans?”

Lest one imagines that Fatah loathes his Muslim culture and Islam, he pronounces his love for the “The rich heritage left behind by Muslim scientists, thinkers, poets, architects, musicians and dancers has been in spite of the Islamist extremists, not because of them.”

This is the Islam he wants to prevail in the hearts of Muslims. The state of Islam is a struggle to be led by Muslims, however, Fatah requests the assistance of non- Muslims, to at least deprive the political Islamists of the pulpitganda of their cause.

Fatah declares, “Counting on the sincere efforts by many governments in the West to embrace diversity, Islamists have draped themselves in the garb of multiculturalism and diversity to position their agenda as mainstream. This is nothing more than hypocrisy masquerading as diversity.”

Political Islam shares many of the characteristics of the Christian right, “the relentless and continuous attack by Islamists on all aspects of spontaneous happiness and merriment.”

Tarek Fatah’s book is a call to enlightenment for non-Muslims and a stiffening of spine for Muslims.

* Fro http://www.northumberlandtoday.com/...