WORLD FAMOUS ISLAMIC SCHOLAR SPEAKS OUT
Briton’s most important Muslim leader, who master-minded the “Muslim Parliament” in London and gave a shock to the world, Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, answers the question raised in Dalit Voice (March 16, 1992 DV edit): “Why the Whole World Hates Muslims and Islam?”. He is connected with the fortnightly English journal Crescent International, a revolutionary journal of Muslims.
Dr. Kalim Siddiqui
During the past year we have once again witnessed the West’s open enmity of islam and Muslims. The ‘Gulf War’ was little short of yet another Crusade. The West’s triumphalist propaganda and claims to have created a ‘new world order’ are uiter nonsense or, at best, imaginative thinking. The Gulf War has merely confirmed everything we have always known. this can be summarized as follows:
- That all Muslim and Arab nation-States serve the regional and global interests of the West. There were nо exceptions to this rule before the Gulf War and there are none now.
- That the West would kill any number of Muslims, or indeed any other peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America, in pursuit of its imperialist interests.
- That the Soviet Union is (has always been) a fully paid-up member of the Western alliance against Islam and Muslims.
- And that the United Nations has always been and will always remain an instrument of the West
However , there is one revelation of new is none the less important . The Gulf War has once again revealed what may be called the soft belly of the otherwise impregnable West; it is called the ‘Vietnam syndrome’. Before the war the phrase that was on the lips of the U.S. president most often was that ‘the war in the Persian Gulf will not be another Vietnam’. Well, of course, Vietnam itself is a long way away from the Persian Gulf. What did George Bush mean? Clearly he did not mean that the U.S. was not going to be defeated by Saddam Husayn’s Iraq. There was never any likelihood of that. The U.S. and Western allies, having planned, financed, supplied and supported Saddam Husayn’s war against Islamic Iran for eight long years, knew Saddam Husayn’s fighting capability. There was no danger from him. Where, then, was ‘Vietnam’ in the Persian Gulf? George Bush was clearly referring to Iran. When he said that there would not be another Vietnam, what he meant was that the U.S. and the Western alliance would not provoke a fight with Iran. In the event, with more than 750,000 troops and the greatest land, air and naval power ever assembled available to them, the Westem leaders made sure that not a single one of their aircraft even accidentally flew over Iran.
Fear of Iran: The Western air forces did not chase fleeing Iraqi planes into Iranian airspace. Perhaps Saddam, by using Iranian airfields as a ‘safe haven’ for his aeroplanes, was hoping to provoke the West into bombing Iran. But the West refused to be provoked. What did the West fear? Surely not Iran’s air power, or Iranian anti-aircraft capability. Iran had precious little of these. The West feared the power of Islam that is Iran today. They realized that if they ventured into Iran, that would be their Vietnam and Waterloo. Imam Khumayni, by prolonging the war with Iraq for eight years, had signalled to the West and other potential invaders, that Iran would be their graveyard if ever they were foolish enough to invade the Islamic Republic. The West now likes to fight short, sharp technological wars against weak enemies. Any engagement with the Muslim soldiers of Iran would be a long drawn-out affair with hand-to-hand fighting. In this type of warfare, American Grils clutching photos of their girl friends would be no match for the soldiers of Islam clutching copies of the Qur’an and seeking “shahadah”.
In Jan. 1989, less than six months before his death, Imam Khumayni delivered another body-blow to the progress of the secular civilization. In a letter to Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, the Imam prophesied the demise of communism.
Collapse of communism: Within a year, the vast communist empire collapsed like a pack of cards. The Imam invited Gorbachev to examine Islam as the only alternative. He even offered to welcome Soviet scholars to study in Qum. This was Imam al-hujjah on the part of the greatest hujjat al-‘Islam who ever lived! The Imam’s strictures against communism apply equally to social democracy and capitalism. Communism collapsed because it was the ultimate form of capitalism, with the State playing the role of the capitalist. Corporate capitalism that has developed under the guise of social democracy is ultimately just as inefficient, wasteful and morally bankrupt as communism had become in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. Indeed, the democratic governments in such countries as Britain, France and Germany have created larger public sectors in their economies than the Soviet Union ever achieved. The factors that led to the collapse of communism are all present in the so-called capitalist/ democratic systems as well. The militaristic arrogance of the West is partly designed to hide the void at its core. In time the capitalist monolith will collapse just as surely as the communist one has done. The West knows this.
Deep down in its historical consciousness the West also knows that the Islamic civilization will ultimately replace it as the world’s dominant civilization. It is this knowledge that compels the West to try to damage Islam, the world of Islam and the Muslim people of the world as much as possible in the hope that this will at least delay their own inevitable defeat and humiliation at the hands of Islam.
This is why the Western intellectual tradition has invested so heavily in an outright attempt to try to distort and mutilate the message of Islam. This is why there is so much rubbish written and spoken against Islam and Muslims every day everywhere in the West.
Satanic Rushdie: In sentencing the author of The Satanic Verses to death, the judgement of the Imam was faultless. He saw The Satanic Verses as part of a conspiracy to open Islam and the Prophet of Islam upto ‘immaginative thought’ of the kind one A.N. Wilson has now applied to the production of a highly pernicious ‘biography’ of Jesus Christ, upon whom be peace. If he had not been stopped in his tracks, Salman Rushdie might now be writing a similar ‘literary’ biography of the Prophet of Islam. A British government minister has recently admitted that a book like The Satanic Verses would never be written again. Good. Let us hope that, for their own sake, no one ever forgets the fate of Rushdie.
But the Imam’s fatwa did more than that; it brought forth to the surface the deep-seated hatred of Islam that is an essential part of the West’s make-up. The fatwaignited the West’s barely disguised hatred of Islam. They called us barbarians, but in the heat and violence of their own anger and frustrations the Western governments, elites, intellectuals, media and the literate bared their own barbaric past and their present and future intentions for all to see. Muslims living in Britain had a ringside view of this spectacle. This was a drama in which we were heroes, villains, innocent victims and spectators all at once.
Role of Khumayni: Imam Khumayni’s greatest achievement is that he has restored to Islam its original revolutionary zeal and purpose. The debilitating effects of colonialism, nationalism and Westem political culture have been banished, at least from Iran. The late Imam has also caused the political thought of Shi’i and Sunni schools to converge. (This was the subject of my paper here two years ago.) A rolling programme of Islamic revolutions will rid the entire Islamic world of this Western contagion. Islam is now in the driving-seat of history, pressing for change. The West is on the defensive, protecting the status quo of a colonial and imperial legacy of plunder. This legacy is consolidated in a worldwide capitalist system and legitimized by such slogans as ‘social democracy’, Fukuyama’s ‘End of History?’, and now a ‘new world order’. The struggle between the emergent civilization of islam and the decadent civilization of the West will occupy the centre stage of history for most of the 21st century.
What West wants: It is essential, therefore, that Muslims should develop a better understanding of the West. The western civilization’s highest value is the ‘standard of living’ of the western man. It is also a complex civilization consolidating the enormous advances made by man in science, the technological wonders of the space age and the awesome power of modern weapons. It has produced the complex human organizations of the modern nation- States and the business acumen and efficiency of the multinationals. The genius of the western civilization has made everyone ‘equal’ while making inequality permanent. The so-called ‘sovereign equality’ of nation-States is an example. When ‘aid’ is given to the poor it is only to allow the rich to export more at higher prices, ultimately making the poor poorer and the rich richer. When protection is extended to the weak, it is to prevent the weak from trying to overcome their weakness. A ‘democratic’ oligarchy is created to confine the use of power and the management of resources in the hands of the same people, organized into ‘competing’ parties. An ‘education’ is given which first makes the individual insecure, and then he or she is equipped to pursue selfish goals in controlled ‘systems’. The resultant commercialism has been given the values of ‘freedom’ and ‘competition’.
Greed & profit: This has created a culture of institutionalized greed leading to high mass-consumption. Profit maximization has been made respectable by economic theory; but at the same time wage maximization is ‘immoral’. Companies can ‘regulate’supplies to raise prices, but labourers must not withhold labour or else they are causing ‘disruption’. Women must be sex objects at home, in the streets, in the world of entertainment and at work, but they may not forget to take the pill or else they are being ‘irresponsible’ by bringing ‘unwanted children’ into the world. The West now has a thriving abortion industry to meet the needs of a sexually greedy civilization which, at the same time, does not want too many people to share in the goods and services they produce. ‘The poor are poor because they have too many children’, is a commonly held aphorism; ‘there are too many poor because they breed like rabbits’, is another.
The western civilization only believes in a change which serves the interests of the west. The rest of the world is told to ‘catch on’ while the West also insists on its right to ‘pull away’ as a reward for its superior technological and organizational skills. The West’s real motives for keeping the poor poor, or making them even poorer, are now widely recognized by many in the West itself. The ‘left’ and the ‘third world’lobbies have produced a good deal of literature on the theme of exploitation, new-colonialism and imperialism. But the ‘left’, the liberals’, and those who set up such cosmetic operations as Oxfam, War on Want, Christian Aid and the Third World Foundation, etc ., are quite ineffectual and succeed only in giving the West an undeserved image of caring for its victims. They operate on the fringes of the symptoms, while themselves being part of the disease.
West is a plague: The position that has to be taken, and only Islam can take it, is that the western civilization is in fact a plauge and a pestilence. It is no civilization at all. It is a disease. The West today is qualitatively no different from the Jahiliyyah, the primitive savagery and ignorance, that prevailed in Arabia and the rest of the world at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace. The Jahiliyyah also called itself a ‘civilization’, it had its ‘values’, it had its centres of knowledge and gave education to its children. It was strong in its trading relations and had a rich culture. The people of Makkah were renowned for their hospitality and poetry, and other forms of art also thrived there and elsewhere. That Jahiliyyah also had its ‘gods’. (Al-Tawhid, Iran, April-June 1992)
HINDU TORCH DALIT VILLAGE
Bijapur : Police fired in the air to disperse a Hindu mob which set fire to 12 huts in the Dalit locality of Tamba village, 37 Km from here, on July 6. The mob violence was touched off by a petty quarrel at the borewell pump in the village. A Dalit boy allegedly removed a vessel kept under the tap. A man belonging to the Jhada caste objected to this. This soon led to a quarrel between two groups. (Deccan Herald July 8).
India punished for human rights violations
Washington : India was at the receiving end on June 25 in the House of Representatives of the United States Congress for what the American lawmakers said was abuse of human rights of the people of Kashmir and Punjab by the Indian security forces. As a culmination of the Indignation of the House, it adopted an amendment to the Foreign Aid Appropriations Act for 1993 that would cut US development assistance to Third World countries by $ 24 million from a budget of $ 1,037 billion. The amendment was proposed as a punishment for India.
However, we need to admit that India’s image abroad is being seriously damaged by reports of human rights abuses in Kashmir and Punjab by the security forces. (Deccan Herald July 1).
