one1india

continued from the myth of islam as a religion of peace - 1

Mr Harris’s article was criticised by an Anthony Galli,
Anthony Galli, The myth of islam as a warrior cult, June 2006

This is Mr Harris’s response.

Ray Harris, Reply to Anthony Galli, June 2006

I welcome Tony’s response The Myth of Islam as a Warrior Cult. It might surprise him he to know that I accept much of what he says. It seems to me that the main criticism he has is that I place too negative a spin on Islam and that he needs to respond by a corrective positive spin. Fair enough. The reader can read both and decide for themselves where the balance lies.

So I’m not going to comment on many of his points because I think they are fair corrective criticisms. I don’t think I was too harsh, but that is for others to decide.

However, there are some things I want to correct and to comment on, in no particular order.

The first thing I note is that Tony seems to agree with me quite a bit, he simply reiterates my points with a more positive spin. But in some areas he makes assumptions about what I think about Islam in its totality. I can assure him that I find much to admire in Islam. One of my favourite philosophers is Ibn Arabi and I studied Siddha Yoga which speaks highly of many Sufi saints. He mentions my Temenos system. I had intended to write a book about it called ‘Upon the Wings of Gabriel’, which is a reference to a treatise by the Sheik al Ishraq, Suhrawardi. Indeed, I first studied Islam by studying Sufism and the work of Henry Corbin.

However, my studies into Sufism also uncovered the fact that Sufis were persecuted by hardline, ‘legalist’ Muslims. This is a point Anthony neglects to mention. The Wahhabi and Deobandi sects regard Sufis as apostates. They are banned in Saudi Arabia and were banned under the Taliban in Afghanistan, they have also faced persecution in other countries from time to time. So I came to understand that Islam had both a light, moderate, progressive and syncretic side and a dark, hardline, regressive and intolerant side.

Of course I side with the progressives and I have to admit that my most recent articles have been targeted primarily at naïve Westerners who mistakenly buy into the bullshit put forward by regressive Muslims and Muslim apologists trying to make out there is no problem (or that it is all the West’s fault). And the main reason I’m angry (in a sense) is that these obscurantists cloud the issue and prevent many Westerners from hearing the voices of the true Muslim progressives, those the integral community would naturally ally themselves with.

In other words – I think I’ll puke the next time I hear a Muslim offer the weak excuse that Islam means peace. As Tony agrees, it does not. It means surrender. Islam can only move forward by honestly confronting its past and admitting that the Koran can indeed be interpreted in a violent way. Let’s cut the crap about the ‘true’ Islam and admit that there are many Islams, some of which are indeed peaceful and others which are violent. The Koran would not be interpreted violently if it could not be so interpreted – rather easily, as it turns out.

Tony agrees with me and admits that the Muslim expansion into the Sasanian and Byzantine empires was wrong.

This is a good point. Muslims should not justify what were clearly offensive wars. What happened was a regrettable development in Islamic history. After a new and fragile unity on the Arabian Peninsula, restless warriors, who did not recognize kingship, looked to generals as leaders after the death of Muhammad.

What Tony does here is gloss over just who these generals were. They are called the ‘Rightly Guided’ Caliphs (al-Khulafa’ur Rashidun), the Companions of the Prophet himself. Three of them were his relatives; the first, Abu Bakr, was his father-in-law, as was the second, Umar. The fourth, Ali, was both his cousin and son-in-law, having married his daughter Fatima. So it was something a family franchise. What this means is that these ‘generals’ knew Mohammed on an intimate basis and would have known his mind. This ‘regrettable development’ was condoned by Mohammed’s own family members. Might this not suggest that they were simply following his wishes? (It is worth reading about the Companions and the intrigues within the inner circle. Umar was assassinated and Uthman’s kinsmen were involved in the murder of one of Abu Bakr’s sons – a peaceful religion you say, or standard Arab tribal and family politics?)

One of the very early conquests was the land of Palestine, which had been under the rule of the Christian Byzantine empire. This has relevance to the contemporary conflict because the Muslim claim to Palestine is in fact based on offensive conquest. It has some bearing on the long standing desire of various Christian rulers to take back what was originally theirs, culminating in the Crusades (the straw that broke the Camel’s back was the restrictions placed on pilgrims by the Seljuk Turks, so it was eventually decided to try and return Jerusalem to Christendom). But this is the way of conquest. I don’t want to suggest Islam was any worse than anyone else – I just don’t want to hear that they were any different, when quite clearly they were not. So, when Tony says

Islam is involved in that Muslims are allowed, even obligated, to fight back when their lands or property are stolen

we encounter a legal problem. If Palestine was conquered illegally, stolen by Muslims, is it really their land? This is not a moot point because the conflict is about competing claims as to whose land it is.

The thing about history is that it can be interpreted quite differently depending on what facts you choose to leave in or edit out. I don’t claim to be immune from this and I do appreciate it when it is pointed out to me. One could never write a comprehensive history, rather, one would have to rely on a multi-perspective history. A daunting task. But sometimes people leave out rather glaring and telling, and awkward facts.

I wonder how the integral community might handle the Israel/Palestine conflict? Would Jewish members of the integral community accept this statement from Tony?

Palestinians have their own proud history. For thousands of years, Semitic peoples in this region have cultivated vegetation with sophisticated farming techniques. Jewish immigrants into Israel would have had to learn from them.

But Tony, there have always been Jews in Palestine, even under Muslim rule (although the Crusaders massacred tens of thousands – Jews were a majority in Jerusalem). In any case it’s very clear that Jewish immigrants bought new techniques to Palestine and created an agrarian revolution, from which the locals; Christians, Jews, Muslims, Druze, etc, benefited greatly. In fact many Arabs immigrated to Palestine to take part in the economic boom and the Palestinian economy is now almost wholly dependent on Israel and foreign aid. In many ways there is no Palestine without Israel. Palestinian nationalism arose as a reaction to Zionism, prior to Zionist immigration Palestine was divided into four provinces without a distinct ‘national’ identity. So your comment that ‘Palestinians’ have their ‘own proud history’ is somewhat misleading as prior to Zionism the various peoples of the region would not have defined themselves as Palestinians, but rather as a Christian from Jerusalem, a Jew from Bethlehem, a Muslim from Ramallah (or from such and such a tribe), a Druze from such and such a village in such and such a province, or a nomadic Bedouin, etc. Israeli and Palestinian nationalism/identity arose at the same time.

You also say that:

Religious Zionists and fundamentalist Christians claim the nation of Israel has biblical authority, which takes precedence over Palestinian rights.

Except that the Koran quite clearly accepts the biblical story as well. Mohammed clearly accepted Moses as a prophet and acknowledged that Allah gave Israel to the Jews. So the argument can get very messy, especially now that Hamas, an Islamist party, refuses to recognize Israel. Why? A complex answer, but one that goes back to Muslim anti-Semitism. After the so-called betrayal by the Jewish tribes of Medina there has been a form of Muslim anti-Semitism not dissimilar to Christian anti-Semitism. All Jews are to be condemned either because they betrayed the Prophet or because they are Christ killers. The Koranic acceptance of the Jew’s rightful claim to Israel has been negated because Muslims conveniently regard them to be unworthy of returning due to their betrayal of the prophet. But surely, in a religious sense, it is Allah who decides? And wouldn’t Israel’s military dominance, in Islamic terms, be explained through Allah’s favour? Just as Allah supported Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, isn’t Allah supporting Israel today?

Incidentally, it’s interesting hearing the Jewish side of the Mohammed story. According to their version there was quite an extensive Jewish presence in Arabia going back to Solomon’s time. Of course, one of the first things Abu Bakr did was expel all the Jews from Arab lands.

But that’s the religious argument. The nationalist argument is similarly complex.

Tony, there are areas where you gloss over some important and damning history. The most egregious of these is your treatment of the Muslim invasions of India.

It is no secret that fundamentalists distort and degrade other religions. But what is Harris doing if not regurgitating anti-Muslim propaganda? The truth is that Muslims and Buddhists have lived peacefully for most of the time they have been in contact.

In India, there is a record of one attack by Muslims on a Buddhist monastery. This incident appears to be an isolated occurrence, not part of a large-scale campaign to destroy Buddhism.

Well, no, there wasn’t a large scale ‘conscious’ campaign to destroy Buddhism, it was just that the north of India was the epicentre of Buddhism and Buddhist temples and monasteries, just like Hindu temples and monasteries, were kind of in the way and fair game for looting.

In 1193 Nalanda university was sacked and burned by Muslim invaders under Bakhtiyar Khalji, the monks were massacred. It would be drawing a long bow to say that the loss of this important institution was not a bitter blow to Buddhism, after all, this was where Nagarjuna taught. But this is not the only Buddhist centre that got in the way of iconoclastic Muslims.

The Muslim invasions and expansions into India began in 711 and continued in waves under different rulers; the Ghaznavids from 977 to 1040, the Ghurids from 1186 to 1206, the Delhi sultanates from 1206 to 1526, the independent Muslim regimes from 1356 to around 1601, and finally the Mughals from 1526 to 1757, when the British finally gained control. This history is hotly contested with Hindu nationalist ideologues exaggerating the extent of Muslim atrocities and Muslim ideologues attempting to minimise them. Whatever the final case there is no doubt the conquest of India was achieved violently with Indian kings resisting all the way.

The Muslim historian Ferishta says that in 986 the Ghaznavid general Sabuktigan

girded up his loins for religious war (jihad) and ravaged the provinces of Kabul and Punjab.

Ferishta describes the various battles using typical Muslim rhetoric. Allah ordains that no mercy is to be shown to the infidels. His account tells how Sabuktigans army

Butchered the idolaters, fired their temples and plundered their shrines; such was their booty, it was said, that hands risked frostbite counting it.

In 1025 the Ghaznavid general Mahmud continued further into India, in one campaign he returned with 53,000 slaves and a massive amount of booty. At Somnath he attacked a major Shaivite temple, killing over 50,000, sacking it of its gold, silver and gems and desecrating its great gilded lingam.

I think you get the picture. Just how extensive the destruction was is disputed and perhaps always will be. But just as we must honour all sides of the debate in the Israel/Palestine conflict, we have to honour what Buddhists and Hindus say about their own history. Just as I asked how a Jewish member of the integral community might respond to Tony’s description I would also ask how a Buddhist or Hindu might respond to this statement?

Those who entered India, whether by migration or invasion, were eventually absorbed by its culture; a facet of the subcontinent that is a source of strength and pride for its people.

There is no doubt that there are many Muslims and Hindus who get on well, but I’m just not sure about the true success of the absorption. It is a convenient ploy to blame it on a British policy of divide and conquer, but a closer analysis might suggest this could not have been possible if there had not been significant problems to begin with. Islam needs to confront its legacy in India. And as for Buddhism – what happened to Buddhism in Afghanistan? If Muslims and Buddhists got on well together then why aren’t there any Buddhists in Afghanistan? Last I heard the Taliban were intent on destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Okay, now to some small stuff. Tony says

The Old Testament seems pretty clear about the use of violence. Here are just a few examples: the courts must carry out the death penalty of stoning (Deuteronomy 22:24), the courts must hang those stoned for blasphemy or idolatry (Deuteronomy 21:22), destroy the seven Canaanite nations (Deuteronomy 20:17) and do not let any of them remain alive (Deuteronomy 20:16), wipe out the descendants of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:19), do not offer peace to Ammon and Moab while besieging them (Deuteronomy 23:7) and do not panic and retreat during battle. (Deuteronomy 20:3)

All true. However, Mohammed was also inspired by the Torah and he does not question it, in fact he emulates it. Here’s a quote from the Koran.

Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides… (5:35)

Sharia law follows the Torah in prescribing some particularly gruesome punishments. But I’m not going to defend either Christianity or Judaism in this regard. All of them have a poor record in regard to the use of violence. If we were to make a useful comparison I would suggest it would be against Buddhism as an exemplar of a peaceful religion. As for Christianity and Islam – in the words of Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, “a plague on both your houses”.

If the majority of practicing Muslims do not lead violent lives, they are justified in saying their religion is peaceful. If Harris is going to stigmatize an entire population, the question is quite relevant.

This does not follow logically. They are only justified in saying they personally, are peaceful. What are we to make of Muslims killing fellow Muslims and non-Muslims, or calling for their death, whilst shouting the words ‘Allah al Akbar’ – God is great? If we are to say that at its bare minimum Islam is the Koran, then there can be no doubt the religion advocates violence. Read the Koran carefully. You may not kill a righteous man but an unrighteous man is fair game, it’s all in the definition of righteous. Buddhism in contrast is very clear that killing is not permitted, no exceptions. The simple fact is that the primary document of the religion is wide open to a violent interpretation, we could not have the problem with jihadis today if it were not so. They quote it all the time to justify their actions. Fortunately for us most Muslims want a quiet life.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If Muslims claim that terrorists do not represent the true Islam, the response is that either there is no true Islam, or if there is, then the fundamentalists are more correct in their understanding.

This is a deliberate distortion of my argument. I’ve gone to considerable length to explain the many ways the Koran is interpreted using the rules of abrogation and contingency. The Koran is a unique document. It is the record of the words of a man who says it is the direct word of God. The Torah is a collection of stories collated over time. The Gospels are a second-hand account of what Jesus is purported to have said and done. The question of literalism and fundamentalism is different in each case. There is far more room in Judaism and Christianity to say that a passage is not the direct, literal word of God. This is not possible with the Koran. Every sentence, every word and letter is the literal word of God. The first ayat of the Koran says

This book is not to be doubted. (2:1)

Another passage says:

It is He who has revealed to you the Book. Some of its verses are precise in meaning – they are the foundation of the Book – and others are ambiguous. Those whose hearts are infected with disbelief observe the ambiguous part, so as to create dissension by seeking to explain it. (3:5)

It can be argued that the literalists follow the precise passages and the moderates invent complex arguments to excuse the difficult passages away. I would argue that the reason so many Muslims are orthodox and strict is because that indeed, is the correct way to interpret the Koran – that is, if you believe it is the direct word of God and ‘not to be doubted’.

There’s a final thing I want to say about Islam. It’s in response, obliquely, to Tony’s point that I did not go into the issue of honour killings, etc. I thought about it but decided it would make the essays too long. What I will say is this: it’s a strange argument to say that these things are not really the fault of Islam, that these things are not in the Koran, they are a part of traditional, patriarchal culture.

Ahem, excuse me? If this is the case then Islam has been a complete failure in reforming these practices. How long has Islam been on the planet? You bet you can blame Islam – for failing to stop these practices, for being an utter, dismal failure.

Except it’s something of a different story. Over the years Muslim scholars have been complicit in keeping these practices alive. How? By arguing that the Koran does not clearly and unambiguously prohibit these customs. Sharia is decided by using four sources of wisdom; the Koran, the Hadith, the consensus of scholars and local custom. Each of the maddhab give different weightings to these four sources. So, if the local council of scholars can argue that the local custom of honour killings does not contradict the Koran or the Hadith then they allow it. In this way the clerics protect and preserve patriarchal values. Two examples can be mentioned: Pakistan’s notorious Hudood laws, in which women who have been raped have to produce four eye-witnesses and if they fail can be jailed for adultery or promiscuity; and the apparent fact that under the Shafia’a maddhab women have to be circumcised (a practice that originated in Africa but which has spread throughout the Islamic world under the Shafiya). The debate about the Hudood laws continue with hardline clerics arguing that it is clearly Islamic and moderates arguing it is not. I should add that slavery still exists in some parts of North Africa precisely because local clerics have refused to outlaw it. The provisions permitting slavery have still not been excised from Sharia. Which reminds me – Tony is being somewhat disingenuous in saying the Koran does not advocate slavery. Not in so many words, but what are we to make of this passage, and others like it?

Prophet, we have made lawful for you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave-girls whom God has given you as booty (33:50)

Anyway, enough said on this part. I’ll respond, briefly, to Tony’s other essay in a week or so….

Ray Harris, June, 2006

IslamIslamismislam myths

why do I quote this article on a site about one India?
as India was cut to pieces because of the inherent intolerance preached in Islam.

THE MYTH OF ISLAM AS A RELIGION OF PEACE

Ray Harris - Integral World | August, 2005

In seeking to defend Islam against the claim that it promotes violence many Muslims have said that ‘Islam’ means peace, or that Islam is a religion of peace. Unfortunately this is just plain wrong.

Islam

Islam is derived from the Arabic aslama, which means ’surrender’ (to the will of Allah). Muslim means ‘one who has surrendered to the will of Allah’. And unfortunately, violence, under certain conditions, is a legitimate means to affect that surrender.

The argument that Islam means peace is based on a three-fold interpretive error.

1. Arabic is based on consonantal roots. Islam is derived from the root SLM. Arabic is also a poetic language that uses words derived from the same root as similes that are used to deepen the meaning of other words. SLM is also the root for the words salim, which means ’safe’, saleem, ‘perfection’, sallama, ’salvation’, salama, ‘blameless’ and salaam, ‘wellbeing’. Using all of these words gives an expanded meaning to the word Islam: ‘when one surrenders to the will of Allah (as revealed by His Prophet) one will find salvation, perfection, safety and wellbeing.’
2. The word salaam is often translated as ‘peace’, but this is only one of several meanings. It’s primary meaning is actually ‘wellbeing’. It can also mean health, soundness, wholeness, safety and serenity. A common Arabic greeting is as-sallam alaykum, which is usually translated as ‘peace be upon you’, but it’s extended meaning is ‘may wellbeing, wholeness and tranquility be upon you’.
3. The English word ‘peace’ has two meanings. The first and primary meaning is derived from its Latin root pax. This is translated as ‘cessation of conflict’. The term pax Romana described the peace secured by surrendering to Roman law. The second meaning of peace is derived from the Latin serenus, meaning serenity/tranquility - when one is serene one can also be said to be peaceful. The word salaam is actually synonymous with the second meaning of peace, serenity. The first meaning is better served by the Arabic word sulh (root SLH), from salaha, meaning; reconciliation, to make peace, or peace treaty.

In saying that Islam means peace Islamic apologists are simply indulging in word play in order to put as positive a spin on things as they can. It is an attempt to argue that Islam promotes non-violence. As we will see such a peace is only available to one who has first surrendered to Allah and it is denied to those who refuse to surrender. Mohammed would sign his treaty offers with the words, aslem taslam, ’surrender and you will be safe’.

Jihad

The key problem now revolves around what it means to surrender to Allah’s will. Here we need to introduce another controversial Arabic word, jihad. Jihad is derived from the root JHD. Many of the words derived from this root connote the idea of effort, exertion and struggle. Jihad is a derivative of jahada, to struggle or strive. Thus jihad is taken to mean the struggle to surrender to Allah’s will. The word mujahid means ‘one who struggles’, mujahideen is the plural. The root JHD also creates the word ijtihad, which means intellectual struggle.

Jihad is sometimes translated as ‘holy war’. Again apologists indulge in word play by arguing that the literal translation of holy war into Arabic, harb muqaddasah, gives a different meaning. This is perhaps true in Arabic but not true in English, where holy war is a reasonable translation of ’spiritual struggle’.

There have been two meanings given to jihad. The original concept has been called the ‘lesser’ (asghar) jihad. This is the use of violence to defend Islam. We will have cause to examine this further. However many Muslim apologists now argue that the ‘real’ jihad is the ‘greater’ (akbar) jihad, an inner, or spiritual struggle to purify oneself. David Cook, author of Understanding Jihad says this:

Others have fallen into this error as well. They comprise two basic groups: Western scholars who want to present Islam in the most innocuous terms possible, and Muslim apologists, who rediscovered the internal jihad in the nineteenth century and have been emphasizing it ever since as the normative expression of jihad – in defiance of all the religious and historical evidence to the contrary. (my emphasis)

The idea of the greater jihad is linked to Sufism, which emphasizes the mystical or inner identification with Allah. However, mainstream Islam has often been hostile to Sufism and it prefers a literal and legalistic interpretation of the Koran and hadith (the collected saying of Mohammed). It is therefore somewhat intriguing to see orthodox clerics now argue that a Sufi concept is the real meaning. David Cook goes on to say:

There is no lack of evidence concerning the Muslim practice of jihad. The classical and modern works on the subject are voluminous, and they are documented by an examination of Muslim actions as recorded by historians. There can be no reasonable doubt that jihad is a major theme running through the entirety of Muslim civilization and is at least one of the major factors in the astounding success of the faith of Islam.

And,

….after surveying the evidence from classical until contemporary times, one must conclude that today’s jihad movements are as legitimate as any that have ever existed in classical Islam…

One such piece of evidence is the writing of Ibn Taymiyya who is favoured by many mujahideen. The scriptural authority of the concept of the greater jihad is supposedly based on a particular hadith. It is not based on the Koran. Ibn Taymiyya says:

“There is a hadith related by a group of people which states that the Prophet…said after the battle of Tabuk: ‘We have returned from jihad asghar to jihad akbar.’ This hadith has no source, nobody whomsoever in the field of Islamic knowledge has narrated it. Jihad against the unbelievers is the most noble of actions, and moreover it is the most important action for mankind.”

Thus Ibn Taymiyya rejects the tradition of the greater jihad in its entirety. So who are we to believe? This question is actually irrelevant for it is sufficient that enough Muslims follow the tradition of Ibn Taymiyya to challenge the Sufi tradition. In fact the four schools (madhhab) of Sunni jurisprudence as well as the Shia tradition only refer to the lesser jihad. This means that for many Muslims the concept of the greater jihad is unorthodox and heretical.

Dar al’harb

The language of the Koran separates the world into Muslims and kufir (infidels, unbelievers). It is quite clear about the fate of infidels, they will burn for eternity in Hell.

…then guard yourself against the Fire whose fuel is men and stones, prepared for the unbelievers. 2:23

This language clearly splits the world into two, the world of the righteous and the world of the infidel. The terms commonly used to describe this duality are dar al’Islam and dar al’harb. Dar al’Islam, following from above, means the ‘abode of safety, perfection, salvation, wellbeing and peace’. It is often translated simply as the ‘abode of peace’. Dar al’harb is the opposite. It means ‘abode of war’. It is everything that Dar al’Islam is not. It is danger, chaos, punishment, disease and conflict.

This dichotomy clearly argues that Islam is superior and the unbelievers are therefore inferior. It allows Muslims to look down on non-Muslims with derision and contempt. This has found modern expression in many a Friday night sermon. Evidence of this line of reasoning can be found in the writings of the influential radical Sayyid Qutb who said:

Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One only has to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative postures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts and mass media!

To Qutb the world had fallen into a state of jahiliyya, or ignorance of the word of Allah. The main source of this ignorance is the West which is seen in wholly negative terms. He argued that it was the duty of Muslims to wage a jihad to rid the world of jahiliyya.

There is an argument that jihad should only be declared in order to defend Muslims from attack. However, much depends on the definition of attack and defence. Qutb argued that the notion of defence should be expanded.

If we insist in calling Islamic jihad a defensive movement, then we must change the meaning of the word ‘defence’ to mean the defence of man against all those forces that limit his freedom. These forces may take the form of beliefs and concepts, as well as political systems, based on economic, racial and class distinctions. (From Tomorrow’s Islam)

To Qutb the beliefs and practices of dar al’Harb were a threat to dar al’Islam, they were responsible for corrupting Muslims. The freedom he speaks of is a specific freedom, it is the freedom to choose Islam. It is based on the idea that the freedom to choose is limited by the lies of the infidels, when the lies are exposed people will naturally convert to the one, true religion, Islam. Therefore Islam is fully justified in defending itself from aggressive and corrosive ideas by waging jihad.

Another influential thinker is Sayyid Mawdudi, a scholar of Deobandism and founder of the Pakistan party Jemaat e-Islamiya (party of Islam). He puts it this way:

Islam wants the whole earth and does not content itself with only a part thereof. It wants and requires the entire inhabited world. It does not want this in order that one nation dominates the earth and monopolizes its sources of wealth, after having taken them away from one or more other nations. No, Islam wants and requires the earth in order that the human race altogether can enjoy the concept and practical program of human happiness, by means of which God has honoured Islam and put it above the other religions and laws. In order to realize this lofty desire, Islam wants to employ all forces and means that can be employed for bringing about a universal all-embracing revolution. It will spare no efforts for the achievement of this supreme objective. This far-reaching struggle that continuously exhausts all forces and this employment of all possible means are called jihad.

The exemplars: Mohammed and his Companions

One of the enormous difficulties apologists have in trying to depict Islam as a religion of peace is the fact that the new religion was born in violence and that its prophet actually fought and killed.

The Koran is divided into two periods, the revelations in Mecca and the revelations in exile, in Medina. The Meccan revelations are often more peaceful and tolerant. The Medinite revelations indicate a shift towards belligerence. Qutb explains it this way:

For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership, he called people to God through preaching, without fighting or Jizyah, and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate, and later permission was given to fight. Then he was commanded to fight those who fought him, and to restrain himself from those who did not make war with him. Later he was commanded to fight the polytheists until God’s religion was fully established.

There is a common argument that the later passages ‘abrogate’ (naskh) the earlier passages. That is, when trying to interpret apparently contradictory passages the later passages inform the earlier passages. Unfortunately the later passages are the most violent and the law of abrogation demands the peaceful passages be tempered by the belligerent passages, not the other way around. Many radical Muslims believe that the final command of Mohammed, to ‘fully’ establish Islam, has yet to be achieved.

Many apologists will however, argue that Mohammed only ever used violence in order to defend his people. This argument is based on the evidence that Mohammed made a treaty with the tribes of Medina which they later betrayed, thus he was fully justified in waging a war. And according to the traditional tribal rules of Arabia this makes perfect sense. Except that it only tells one side of the story. It ignores the fact that the tribes might have had very good reasons to break the treaty.

Mohammed had been disowned by his own tribe. He was given refuge in Medina and he made a pact with the tribes of the region, three of whom were Jewish. However Mohammed continued to claim that he was a prophet of God in the line of Abraham and that his teachings superseded the previous teachings of Judaism. This was something the rabbis of Medina could not accept and it is clear that the teachings of Mohammed became increasingly problematic. Of course, from Mohammed’s view the Jewish tribes were simply rejecting the word of God. In any case the Jewish tribes decided to rid themselves of Mohammed, who they now regarded as a false prophet, so they formed an alliance with his own tribe, the Bani Quraysh. This new alliance negated the previous treaty and so Mohammed declared war on the tribes of Medina.

The rest is well recorded history. There are a number of Islamic accounts of the various assassinations, campaigns and battles. However, there is one in particular that is often glossed over. This is the massacre of the Bani Qurayzah, one of the Jewish tribes. Most accounts agree that Mohammed’s men dug a long trench, then lined up all the males of fighting age (around 700) and then systematically beheaded them. The women and children were then handed to the victors as slaves. Now this was rather normal behaviour at the time, but it certainly challenges the idea that Mohammed was a man of peace and compassion.

Mohammed’s army went on to conquer Mecca and the defeated infidels were given a simple choice, convert or die. The atmosphere of the final revelations are the most violent. These are sometimes called the ’sword verses’.

Fight and slay the unbelievers wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war. 9:5

Make war on them: God will chastise them at your hands and humble them. He will grant you victory over them and heal the spirit of the faithful. 9:14

Here we return to the translation of Islam as ’surrender’

If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, they shall become your brothers in the Faith. 9:11

And it was not confined to unbelievers but also to Jews and Christians, the People of the Book (Ahl al-Qitab):

Fight those among the People of the Book who do not believe in God and the Last Days, do not forbid what God and His Prophet have forbidden, and do not profess the true religion until they pay the poll tax (jizya) out of hand and feel themselves subdued 9:29

After the death of Mohammed there was a period of uncertainty because he had not left a clear successor. Eventually it was agreed that authority would pass to one of his deputies (Caliph). During this period of uncertainty a number of tribes returned to the old ways. The first Caliph Abu Bakr attacked them and forced them to recant, this has been called the ‘War of the Apostates’.

This early period was marked by a number of expansionary wars and internal civil wars. It was also marked by the assassination of two of the Caliphs, Uthman and Ali. This last civil war (Kharijites) created the schism between the Sunni and the Shia. So it can be seen that the birth of Islam was actually quite violent.

It is also interesting to note that much is made of the claim that Islam only engages in defensive war. Yet neither the Byzantine or Sasanian empires had declared war on Islam, rather the Muslims declared war on them. There is a tradition that says:

Abu Hurayra would say after these amsar (cities founded by Muslims) were conquered during the time of Umar, Uthman and afterwards, “Conquer whatever you wish, because by the One who holds the soul of Aby Hurayra in His hands, you have never conquered nor will you ever conquer any city until the Day of Resurrection without Allah having already given its keys into the hands of Mohammed previously”. (From Jihad: From Qu’ran to bin Laden )

What this means is that the success of the Muslim wars of expansion were considered to be preordained. And so the idea of the purely defensive war was quickly overturned and a tradition created to justify offensive war. Within a short time Islam had taken over the former Christian Byzantine empire and converted it’s most holiest church into a Mosque. The Muslim empire then went on to expand into Europe, Russia and Asia, to see the rise and fall of several ruling elites and periods of sectarian violence.

Perhaps the final word should go to the jurist al-Shaybani:

Allah gave the Prophet four swords (for fighting the infidels): the first against the polytheists, which Mohammed himself fought with; the second against apostates, which Caliph Abu Bakr fought with; the third against the People of the Book, which Caliph Umar fought with; and the fourth against dissenters, which Caliph Ali fought with.

Dhimmi and murtadd

One of the claims of apologists is that Islam is a tolerant religion. In many ways, in comparison to some other cultures of the time, it was somewhat more tolerant. However, it was a highly qualified tolerance. There is a famous ayat that says “there shall be no compulsion in religion.” There are also a number of ayat that claim that the People of the Book, that is, fellow Abrahamites and monotheists, should be free to practice their beliefs. Again such tolerance is a qualified tolerance.

However, all such acts of tolerance are denied to unbelievers, those who do not accept the god of Abraham. This caused some problems as Islam expanded and encountered Zoroastrian, Hindu and Buddhist communities. Scholars adapted the term People of the Book to include any religion that claimed to be based on revealed scripture. In the case of Zoroastrianism this was the Zend Avesta and in the case of Hinduism the Vedas. These two faiths were also called the People of the Flame. However Buddhism has never really been accepted as a legitimate faith. There have been some scholars who have developed a rather convoluted argument to accept Buddhism, but the majority opinion is that Buddhists are infidels. The principle stumbling blocks are that Buddhists worship a man, which is idolatry and that they are declared atheists (for an example of anti-Buddhist propaganda see this http://www.islamandbuddhism.com - now offline)

Yet, regardless of their special status, the People of the Book were still discriminated against. To begin with the Caliph Umar expelled all non-Muslims from Arabia. He also developed a code of behaviour detailed in the Pact of Umar, this relegated the People of the Book to second-class status who had to abide a set of humiliating rules. They were considered to be ‘protected people’ or dhimmi. Some of the restrictions placed on dhimmis were:

• To pay a special tax (the jizya)
• Not allowed to build new places of worship
       (but Muslims were allowed to destroy any place of worship they wished)
• Not allowed to recite prayers aloud, least Muslims hear them.
• Not allowed to publicly display their religious literature.
• Not allowed to publicly display religious symbols
• Had to always walk to the left of Muslims
• Had to stand and give a Muslim their seat
• Wear special clothes
• Remove their shoes whilst walking near a Mosque
• Never hit a Muslim (though a Muslim could hit them)
• Never build their houses higher than a Muslim house
• Not ride a horse
• Not bear arms
• Could not testify against a Muslim

If these Dhimmi laws were broken the offender was regarded as no longer a protected person and they reverted to the status of infidel, which meant they lost all legal rights, could have their property confiscated and might be summarily killed.

These laws were in effect in varying degrees of severity in every Muslim controlled area. They were even enforced in the supposedly tolerant society of Moorish Spain which still applied the jizya tax - and as far as Moghul controlled India. Some lenient rulers neglected to enforce them only to have the rulers who followed them reinstitute them. Many of these restrictions are a part of sharia law and some are enforced even today. In Aceh, Indonesia, there are restrictions placed on the construction of churches under sharia law.

Many apologists have argued that Islam did not use force to convert people to Islam. This is a distortion. To begin with infidels must convert or die, atheism or polytheism is not tolerated at all. The People of the Book are able to continue to practice their faith provided they adhere to the dhimmi laws. These laws were often so restrictive that many ordinary Jews and Christians converted simply to make their lives easier. It was only the most devout who resisted. However, in some instances particular communities, such as Egyptian Copts, were set aside for particular discrimination. The dhimmi laws could be applied harshly and even the smallest infringement could have the offender declared an infidel and their property seized. Unscrupulous Muslims could manipulate the dhimmi laws to destroy economic rivals amongst Jews and Christians. It is also fair to say that other Muslim communities were rather more lenient and provided they kept quiet some Jewish and Christian communities were able to thrive. However, it all depended on the whim of the ruling elites who could interpret the dhimmi laws as they saw fit.

Once you had converted to Islam you were forbidden to convert to another religion. Conversion, murtadd, or apostasy, is forbidden under sharia and the punishment is death. In Islam there are two types of apostasy, murtadd fitri, where someone born a Muslim converts and murtadd milli, where a convert to Islam reconverts. The rules defining apostasy can be strict. According to some jurists even to enter a church, synagogue or temple is an act of apostasy, as is questioning any aspect of Islam. It is this latter offence that allows hardliners to declare other Muslims to be apostates for daring to disagree with their interpretation. And given that the penalty for apostasy under sharia is death it is permissible to kill apostates. This excuse has been used to argue that the Muslim victims of terrorist attacks were engaged in un-Muslim activities and were therefore apostates.

So if Islam is the religion of peace and if there should be “no compulsion in religion” why is it permissible to kill atheists and polytheists, kill dhimmi as infidels if they break the dhimmi laws and kill apostates? It takes a considerable amount of rhetorical contortion to argue that Islam is a tolerant religion when these rules apply.

What do Islamists want?

According to orthodox Muslims Islam is the perfect system. They are idealists who believe they have a utopian solution. The answer to the world’s problems is Islam.

The tern ‘Islamist’ has been used to mean anyone who supports Islam as a political solution. There are many Islamist groups and they fall into two broad categories; nationalist groups and internationalists. Nationalist groups are primarily concerned with overthrowing their own government and replacing it with a government based on Islamic principles and sharia law.

The internationalist groups would prefer to see all Muslim countries united under the traditional system of the Caliphate and the Caliphate to enforce Islamic principles and of course, sharia law. The most extreme internationalists want to restore the Islamic empire including Spain, the Balkans and India, and then to continue to expand Islam.

There are too many of these groups to name, save to mention that the ideology of Islamism has reached every Muslim community. There are five major sources of the Islamist ideology.

1. Wahhabism (also called Salafi). Founded in 1745 by Mohammed Ibn Wahhab. This is the state doctrine of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, it is highly influential in the Arab states. The Saudis have funded an extensive program of expansion and have funded the construction of Mosques and Islamic schools throughout the world through a network of charitable organisations (in my own city of Melbourne a prominent Islamic school, the King Khalid College, received funding from Saudi Arabia). The Wahhabi doctrine is strict and condemns Sufism and moderate interpretations as apostasy. A proportion of this charitable money has gone to fund Salafi jihadist groups, some of it to bin Laden and al Qaeda.
2. Deobandism. Founded in the Indian city of Deoband in 1866 as a rejection of Sufism and syncretism, its aim was to overthrow the British and restore Muslim rule. It is highly influential in Pakistan where they control around 65% of the Mosques and madari (religious schools). The Taliban were the students of Deobandi madari. Salafi money has gone to support the madari and the war in Afghanistan saw a coalition of Salafi and Deobandi jihadi.
3. Muslim Brotherhood (Ikwhan). Founded in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna. Sayyid Qutb was influenced by the Ikwhan. The Deobandi scholar Mawdudi was an important influence on the Ikwhan and Osama bin Laden is regarded as a follower of Qutb.
4. The Shia under the influence of the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini. The Iranian revolution inspired both Shia and Sunni fundamentalists with the hope that Islamic states could be created elsewhere.
5. A loose coalition of fundamentalist Sufi and minority sects. The Naqshbandiya in Central Asia have formed a loose coalition with Salafi and Deobandi jihadis (see link), particularly in the war in Chechnya. Fundamentalist jihadi Sufis are influential in North Africa, particularly Sudan.

All of these groups provide a ready pool of mujahideen who are prepared to travel in order to fight the global jihad. The Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiya is a Salafi group that was funded with Saudi money and supported by members of bin Laden’s al Qaeda group. The bombings in Madrid were committed by Moroccan mujahideen operating in support of the mujahideen under Zaqarwi in Iraq. The London suicide bombers had links with Deobandi radicals in Pakistan, and so forth.

‘But this is NOT the real Islam!’

When confronted with the above moderate Muslims will often reply by arguing that these groups do not represent the real Islam. This is a nonsense. There is no such thing as a real Islam. Rather, there are multiple Islams. In fact the situation is quite absurd. There is no central authority in Islam and rival groups compete with each other to attract followers. As I write this a council of American Muslim scholars has issued a fatwa condemning terrorism. Yet, at the same time a council of orthodox scholars in Indonesia has issued a fatwa condemning moderates. Fatwa at twenty paces!

Authority for interpretation and judgement is usually given to the ulemma, a council of recognised imams or mullahs. However their judgements are only binding on their community. Each sect and each country can have its own ulemma. This means that there can be a range of judgements made, some of them contradictory, with rival ulemma in the same country issuing fatwa against each other .

It is also possible for charismatic teachers to arise and to create their own following. There is actually no formal process by which teachers and clerics can be officially recognised. Some modern sects were created by a single charismatic figure.

The fact is that there are many rival interpretations of Islam. These rival interpretations are in a state of civil war. The Islamists believe that moderates are apostates who have betrayed Islam and have been corrupted by the Western doctrines of democracy, capitalism and also, socialism. A great many bombings and assassinations have actually been directed at moderate Muslims and those governments that have adopted non-Muslim political principles. The West has become a target because they are seen to support the moderates.

The cry that this is not the ‘real’ Islam is actually completely and dramatically irrelevant. What matters is that sufficient numbers of Muslims continue to choose to follow the radical fundamentalist interpretation.

Nor is it a question of the radicals being a minority, for even if they are a minority they are an influential minority. In fact they are actually a majority in some countries (the majority of any population are usually not involved in politics anyway and tend to passively follow political groups who promise a better future). They are able to punch above their weight because they have financial and ideological support from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Perhaps the question that should be asked of moderates is this, if the radicals are a minority and if they do not represent the ‘real’ Islam how is it they have been able to carry on a global jihad on several fronts, jihads that include civil wars, secessionist movements, revolutions, assassinations and global terrorism? The list of countries that have been affected by this global jihad is quite long. As I write this incidents have occurred in England, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Kashmir and Bangladesh. The simple fact is that there is broader private support for the Islamists objectives than is ever admitted to publicly and a number are sitting on the fence, waiting to see which way things turn out.

A final note on Iraq

Iraq has now descended into a civil war. This is sadly something I warned about in a previous article. The Iraq war has allowed radical Islamist mujahideen to set up operations. One of the aims of Islamism is to overthrow secular and corrupt governments in the Middle East. Saddam, as a Ba’athist was always a target. The US-led war has simply done the job for them. They are now waging an insurgent war with the primary goal of taking control of Iraq. Of course they want to defeat the US, but that is only the first step. They will not stop if the US withdraws. If they can control Iraq they can control substantial oil revenue and then have a geographical and financial base from which to wage jihad on the other countries in the region. The final goal is to set up a regional Caliphate.

Conclusion

Islam was never a religion of peace. It is a religion based on a warrior code. The evidence is clear, it was made evident in the actions of Mohammed and his Companions. Islam means ’surrender’. It is entirely legitimate to interpret the tradition of Islam as a state of perpetual jihad with the final aim being the defeat of unbelief and the surrender of all to the word of Allah as revealed by His Prophet, Mohammed. It is only when that surrender has been completed that the world will abide in a state of perfection and peace. Many jihadi see themselves as simply following the example set by Mohammed.

Moderate Islam realises that this goal is impossible. However, what the moderates have not yet fully realised is that it is up to them to defeat the radicals. This cannot be done until the power centres of fundamentalism are isolated and choked of support. This is not something that infidels can hope to achieve. What it calls for is a jihad of another kind, a complete reformation of Islam that reinterprets Islam in light of modern history. A reformation that demands the overthrow of sharia law and the discrediting of supremacist and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam.

There are encouraging signs that after the London bombings moderate Muslims are beginning to wake up from their state of denial. This must be carried forward to the heartlands of orthodoxy.

The West can assist this process by isolating Saudi Arabia and demanding that the Saud’s end their support of the Wahhabi doctrine. Iraq was never the problem, it was always Saudi Arabia. This will then have the effect of cutting off important sources of funding to other jihadist groups. It will then be up to the moderates in each community to name and shame the radicals.

Radical Islamism is doomed to failure, but it will sadly be a bloody fight that will take decades to complete. It may take a violent revolution in both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that may initially favour the extremists but will cause a final backlash. In many ways Islamism is the last rallying cry of a defeated cause. Islam reached it’s limit. It met infidels from east, west, north and south who refused to surrender and who fought back. Over time it began to lose territory, Spain, India, Greece, the Balkans. In many ways the defeat of the Ottoman empire in WW1 was the final defeat. Since then Islam has been struggling to find its way in a new world, a world not of all-embracing Islamic Caliphates but of independent nation-states, a world that can survive quite happily without it. This is not just a struggle against the Western enlightenment and modernity, but also a struggle against Asian values, a struggle against all that is not Islam. And perhaps this is the final humiliation – that Allah seems to have disserted Islam and the infidels are ascendant. The current violence is a futile protest against the inevitable, a protest against that those who would dare challenge Islam’s natural pre-eminence by those who believe it is they who should rule the world.

And what should we do? We should articulate a fair, free and fearless critique of Islam. We must identify those progressive Muslim voices that are calling for a reformation. And we should continue to refuse to ’surrender’.

A note on transliteration: There are no set rules on how to spell Arabic words so any reader will inevitably come across a wide variety of spellings. Qutb is sometimes spelt Kutb and Koran as Qur’an, and so forth. I have kept the spellings as originally used in quotes but have otherwise used the spellings I am used to.

Ray Harris, August, 2005

IslamIslamismislam myths

Continued from: koenraad elst: negationism in india - 3
I believe every Indian has the responsibility to learn of their past, pleasant or otherwise.
I am quoting from Mr Elst’s book, so that everyone has the opportunity to read.
Excerpts from Koenraad Elst’s book :
Negationism in India - Concealing the record of Islam

NEGATIONISM RAMPANT: THE MARXISTS

The Aligarh school has been emulated on a large scale. Soon its torch was taken over by Marxist historians, who were building a reputation for unscrupled history-rewriting in accordance with the party-line.

In this context, one should know that there is a strange alliance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League’s plan to partition India and create an Islamic state. After independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementation of the constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language, and to force India into the Soviet-Arab front against Israel. Ever since, this collaboration has continued to their mutual advantage as exemplified by their common front to defend the Babri Masjid, that symbol of Islamic fanaticism. Under Nehru’s rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the educational and research institutes and policies.

Moreover, they had an enormous mental impact on the Congress apparatus: even those who formally rejected the Soviet system, thought completely in Marxist categories. They accepted, for instance, that religious conflicts can be reduced to economic and class contradictions. They also adopted Marxist terminology, so that they always refer to conscious Hindus as the communal forces or elements (Marxism dehumanizes people to impersonal pawns, or forces, in the hands of god History). The Marxist historians had the field all to themselves, and they set to work to decommunalize Indian history-writing, i.e. to erase the importance of Islam as a factor of conflict.

In Communalism and the Writing of indian History, Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, professors at Jawaharlal Nehry University (JNU, the Mecca of secularism and negationism) in Delhi, write that the interpretation of medieval wars as religious conflicts is in fact a back- projection of contemporary religious conflict artificially created for political purposes. In Bipan Chandra’s famous formula, communalism is not a dinosaur, it is a strictly modern phenomenon. They explicitly deny that before the modern period there existed such a thing as Hindu identity or Muslim identity. Conflicts could not have been between Hindus and Muslims, only between rulers or classes who incidentally also belonged to one religious community or the other. They point to the conflicts within the communities and to alliances across community boundaries.

It is of course a fact that some Hindus collaborated with the Muslim rulers, but that also counted for the British colonial rulers, who are for that no less considered as foreign oppressors. For that matter, in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw the Nazis employed Jewish guards, in their search for absconding Jews they employed Jewish informers, and in their policy of deportation they even sought the co-operation of the Zionist movement: none of this can disprove Nazi- Jewish enmity. It is also a fact that the Muslim rulers sometimes made war among each other, but that was equally true for Portuguese, French and British colonizers, who fought some wars on Indian territory: they were just as much part of a single colonial movement with a common colonial ideology, and all the brands of colonialism were equally the enemies of the indian freedom movement. Even in the history of the Crusades, that paradigm of religious war, we hear a lot of battles between one Christian-Muslim coalition and another: these do not falsify the over-all characterization of the Crusades as a war between Christians and Muslims (triggered by the destruction of Christian churches by Muslims).

After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and Muslims as such were non-existent before the modern period, the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood non-existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy theory: the separate communal identity of Hindus and Muslims is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They carried on a divide and rule policy, and therefore they incited the communal separateness. As the example par excellence, prof. R.S. Sharma mentions the 19th -century 8-volume work by Elliott and Dowson, The History of India as Told by its own Historians. This work does indeed paint a very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans with merciless cruelty. But this picture was not a concoction by the British historians: as the title of their work says, they had it all from indigenous historiographers, most of them Muslims.

Yet, the negationist belief that the British newly created the Hindu-Muslim divide has become an article of faith with everyone in India who calls himself a secularist. It became a central part of the negationist argument in the debate over the Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid issue. Time and again, the negationist historians (including Bipan Chandra, K.N. Panikkar, S. Gopal, Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia, Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma, Gyanendra Pandey, Sushil Srivastava, Asghar Ali Engineer, as well as the Islamic politician Syed Shahabuddin) have asserted that the tradition according to which the Babri mosque forcibly replaced a Hindu temple, is nothing but a myth purposely created in the 19th century. To explain the popularity of the myth even among local Muslim writers in the 19th century, most of them say it was a deliberate British concoction, spread in the interest of the divide and rule- policy. They affirm this conspiracy scenario without anyhow citing, from the copious archives which the British administration in India has left behind, any kind of positive indication for their convenient hypothesis - let alone the rigorous proof on which a serious historian would base his assertions, especially in such controversial questions.

They have kept on taking this stand even after five documents by local Muslims outside the British sphere in the 19th century, two documents by Muslim officials from the early 18th century, and two documents by European travellers from the 18th and 17th century, as well as the extant revenue records, all confirming the temple destruction scenario, were brought to the public’s notice in 1990. In their pamphlets and books, the negationists simply kept on ignoring most or all of this evidence, defiantly disregarding historical fact as well as academic deontology.

Concerning the Ayodhya debate, it is worth recalling that the negationists have also resorted to another tactic so familiar to our European negationists, and to all defenders of untenable positions: personal attacks on their opponents, in order to pull the public’s attention away from the available evidence. In December 1990, the leading JNU historians and several allied scholars, followed by the herd of secularist penpushers in the Indian press, have tried to raise suspicions against the professinal honesty of Prof. B.B. Lal and Dr. S.P. Gupta, the archaeologists who have unearthed evidence for the existence of a Hindu temple at the Babri Masjid site. Rebuttals by these two and a number of other archaelogists hae received coverage in the secularist press.

In February 1991, Irfan Habib give his infamous speech to the Aligarh Muslim University historians, in which he made personal attacks on the scholars who took part in the government-sponsored debate on Ayodhya in defence of the Hindu claim, and on Prof. B.B. Lal. In this case, the weekly Sunday did publish a lengthy reply by the deputy superintending archaeologist of the Archaeological Survey of India, A.K. Sinha. The contents of this reply are very relevant, but it is a bit technical (i.e. not adapted to the medium of a weekly for the general public) and written in clumsy English, which gives a poor over-all impression.

Actually, I speculate that the Sunday-editor may well have selected it for publication precisely because of these flaws. The practice is well-known in the treatment of letters to the editor: those defending the wrong viewpoint only get published if they are somewhat funny or otherwise harmless. I cannot be sure about this particular case, but it is a general fact that from their power positions, the negationists use every means at their disposal to create a negative image for the Hindu opponents of Islamic imperialism, including the selective highlighting of the most clumsy and least convincing formulations of the Hindu viewpoint.

In his Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, the Islamic apologist Ali Asghar Engineer has also selected a few incomplete and less convincing statements of the Hindu position, in order to create a semblance of willingness to hear the Hindu viewpoint while at the same time denying the Hindu side any publicity for its strongest arguments. He has kept the most decisive pieces of evidence entirely out of the readers’ view, but has covered this deliberate distortion of the picture behind a semblance of even - handedness. In Anatomy of a Confrontation, the JNU historians do not even mention the powerful argumentation by Prof. A.R. Khan, while Prof. Harsh Narain and Mr. A.K. Chatterjee’s presentation authentic testimonies (in Indian Express, republished by Voice of India in Hindu Temples, What happened to Them and in History vs. Casuistry) are only mentioned but not detailed and discussed, let alone refuted; but clumsy RSS pamphlets and improvised statements by BJP orators are quoted and analyzed at length.

The concluding paragraph of A.K.Sinha’s rebuttal to Irfan Habib’s speech points out the contradiction between the earlier work of even Marxist historians about ancient India (in which they treat the epics as sources of history, not mere fable) and their recent Babri-politicized stand: “Today, even taking the name of Mahabharata and Ramayana is considered as anti-national and communal by the communist leaders, Babri Masjid Action Committee historians and the pseudo-secularists. What do they propose to do with all that has been published so far in [this] context by the Marxists themselves, notably D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar, K.M. Shrimali, D.N. Jha and others? I have been thinking about the behavious of our Marxist friends and historians, their unprovoked slander campaign against many colleagues, hurling abuses and convicting anyone and everyone even before the charges could be framed and proved. Their latest target is [so] sobre and highly respected a person as prof. B.B. Lal, who has all his life (now he is nearing 70) never involved himself in petty politics or in the groupism [which is] so favourite a sport among the so- called Marxist intellectuals of this country. But then [slander] is a well-practised art among the Marxists.”

Another trick which a student of Holocaust negationism will readily recognize in the pro-Babri campaign of the Indian negationists, is that truly daring form of amnipulation: selectively quoting an authority to make him say the opposite of his own considered opinion. When the JNU historians started slandering Prof. B.B. Lal as a turncoat hired by the VHP, this was a panic reaction after their earlier tactic had been exposed (though only in Indian Express, but the negationist front will not tolerate even one hole in the cordon of information control). Until then, they had been using B.B. Lal’s fame to suport their own position that the Babri Masjid had not replaced a temple.

In their pamphlet The Political Abuse of History, the JNU historians had quoted from a brief summary, published by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1980, of Prof. B.B. Lal’s report on his excavations in Ayodhya and other Ramayana sites. They knew this report perfectly well, for they had gleefully quoted its finding that the excavations just near the Babri Masjid had not yielded any remains pre- dating the 9th century BC. But then they had gone on to state that there was no archeological indication for a pre- Masjid temple on that controversial site at all, even when the same report had cursorily mentioned the remains of a building dated to the 11th century AD. Later on, they have quoted the same summary as saying that the later period was devoid of any interest, suggesting that nothing of any importance dating from the medieval period had been found.

In fact, this remark only proves that the ASI summarizer saw no reason to give (or saw reasons not to give) details about the uninteresting but nonetheless existing medieval findings. But in autumn 1990, some of these details have been made public and they turned out to be of decisive importance in the Ram Janmabhoomi debate. Prof.K.N. Panikkar (in Anatomy of a Confrontation) suggests that, if these relevant details were not recently thought up to suit the theories of the RSS, they must have been deliberately concealed at that time (late seventies) by the ASI summarizer. The latter possibility means that negationists are active in the ASI publishing section, editing archaeological reports to suit the negationist campaign. The implied allegation is so serious that K.N. Panikkar expects the reader to assume the other alternative, viz. an RSS concoction. But he may well have hit the nail on its head with his suggestion that negationists in the ASI are doing exactly the same thing that they are doing in all Indian institutions and media: misusing their positions to distort information.

At any rate, the details of the full report were given in articles by Dr. S.P. Gupta and by Prof. B.B. Lal himself (and independently by other archaeologists in talks and letters to Indian Express) in late 1990. The pillar-bases of an 11th century building, aligned to the Babri Masjid walls, were presented by Prof. B.B. Lal and Dr. S.P.Gupta in separate filmed interviews with the BBC. There could be no doubt about it anymore: Prof. B.B. Lal had arrived at a conclusion opposite to the one ascribed to him by a number of Marxist historians (not only from JNU).

That is why is early December 1990 several of the most vocal Marxist historians suddenly took to slander and accused Prof. B.B. Lal of having changed his opinion in order to suit the VHP’s political needs. Now that they could no longer use Prof. Lal’s reputation for their own ends, they decided to try and destroy it. In the case of Dr. S.P. Gupta, they have not taken back their ridiculous allegation that he had falsely claimed participation in the Ramayana sites excavations. But with a big name like B.B. Lal, an impeccable academic of world fame, they had to be careful, because slander against him might somehow backfire. That is why they have nor pressed the point, and why a number of Marxist historians and other participants in the Ayodhya debate have quitely reverted to the earlier tactic of selectively quoting from the ASI summary of Prof. B.B. Lal’s report, and acting as if the great archaeologist has supported and even proven their own position. As the press had given minimum coverage to B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta’s revelations, many people would not suspect the truth.

Another trick from the negationists’ book that has been very much in evidence during the Ayodhya debate, consists in focusing all attention on the pieces of evidence given by those who upheld the historical truth,, and trying to find fault with them as valid evidence. Thus, at the press conference (19 Dec. 1992) where Dr. S.P. Gupta and other historians presented photographs of an inscription found during the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which proved once more that a temple had stood on the site, and that it was specifically a birthplace temple for “Vishnu Hari who defeated Bali and the ten-headed king [Ravana]“, some journalists heckled the speakers with remarks that “because of the demolition, the inscription was not in situ and therefore not valid as evidence”, and similar feats of petty fault-finding.

A few days later, a group of 70 archaeologists and historians, mostly names who had not taken a prominent role in this debate so far, brought shame on themselves by pronouncing judgement on this piece of evidence without even seeing, let alone studying it. They demanded not that the government look into this new evidence, as would be proper for representatives of the scientific spirit, but that it trace down from which museum the planted evidence had been stolen and brought to Ayodhya. In doing history falsification, it is best to remain on the attack, and to put the bonafide historians on the defensive by accusing them first.

After dozens of pieces of evidence for the forcible replacement of temple with mosque scenario had been given, the Babri negationists had never come up with a single piece of counter- evidence (i.e. positive evidence for an alternative scenario); they could not do better than keep silent over the most striking evidence, and otherwise scream at the top of their voice that evidence A did not count, evidence B was not valid, evidence C was flawed, evidence D was fabricated. In 1992 alone, in the clearing operations near the Janmabhoomi site in June, during several visits of experts, and during the demolition on 6 December, more than 200 pieces of archaeological evidence for the pre-existent Vaishnava temple had been found, but these 70 scholars preferred to disregard all them. This time, the suggestion was that in the middle of the kar seva, the inscription had been planted there. You could just as well join the Holocaust negationists and say that the gas chambers found in 1945 had been a Hollywood mise-en-scene. Picking at a single testimony as if the whole case depends on it has been a favourite technique of the negationists to distract attention from the larger picture, to make people forget that even if this one piece of evidence were flawed, this would not invalidate the general conclusions built on a whole corpus of evidence.

A final point of similarity between the Marxist involvement in the Babri Masjid case and the techniques of Holocaust negationism is the fact that there was a Babri Masjid debate in the first place. Indeed, postulating doubt and the need for a debate is the first step of denial. The tradition that the Babri Masjid had forcibly replaced a temple was firmly established ad supported by sources otherwise accepted as authoritative; when it was challenged, this was not on the basis of newfound material which justified a re-examination of the historical position. The correct procedure would have been that the deniers of the established view come up with some positive evidence for their innovative position: until then, there was simply no reason for a debate. Instead, they started demanding that the other side give proof of what had been known all along, and forced a debate on something that was really a matter of consensus. Subsequently, instead of entering the ring, attacking or countering their opponents’ case with positive evidence of their own, the challengers set themselves up as judges of the other side’s argumentation. This is indeed reminiscent of the negationist Institute for Historical Review announcing a prize for whomever could prove that the Holocaust had taken place.

There is yet another trick from the negationist arsenal which has been tried in India: find a witness from the victims’ camp to testify to the aggressor’s innocence. Of course there are not witnesses around who lived through Aurangzeb’s terror, but there are many who lived through the horrors of Partition. It is nobody’s case that the killings wich Jinnah considered a fair price for his Muslim state, never took place. But the negationists have spent a lot of effort on proving the next best thing: that the guilt was spread evently among Hindus and Muslims.

The Communist novelist Bhishma Sahni has used the novel Tamas to point the Hindus as the villains in the Partition violence. The interesting thing is that Bhishma Sahni’s own family was among the Hindu refugees hounded out or Pakistan. His anti-Hindu bias, coming from a man who would have more reason for an anti-Muslim animus, is a gift from heaven for the Hindu-baiters. Marxist Professor Bipan Chandra parades a similar character in his paper: Communalism - the Way Out (published together with two lectures by KJhushwant Singh as: Many Faces of Communalism). One of his students had survived the terror of Partition in Rawalpindi, losing 7 family members. Bud he did not have any animus against the Muslims, for he said: “Very early I realized that my parents had not been killed by the Muslims, they had been kiled by communalism.” Coming from a victim of Muslim violence, this is excellent material for those who want to apportion equal blame to Hindus nd Muslims.

Of course, Bipan Chandra’s student was right. The cause of Partition and of its accompanying violence was not the Muslims, but communalism, i.e. the belief that people with a common religion form a separate social and political entity. This belief is not fostered by Hinduism, but it is central to Islam ever since Mohammed founded his first Islamic state in Medina. It is true that some Hindu groups (most conspicuously the Sikhs) have recently adopted some Islamic elements, including the communalist belief that a religious group forms a separate nation entitled to a separate state. But the source of this communalist poison in India is and remains Islam. Therefore, Bipan Chandra’s student has in fact said: “My family was not killed by the Muslims, but by Islam.”

It is a different matter that Muslims are the most likely carriers of the Islamic disease called communalism, and that they had massively voted for the commnalist project of creating a separate Muslim state. The culprit was Islam, and concerning the positions of the Muslims in the light of the fanatical nature of Islam, I would quote Bipan Chandra’s own simile for understanding the difference between communalism and its adherents: when a patient suffers from a terrible disease, you don’t kill him, but cure him. The victims of Islamic indoctrination should not be the target of Hindu revenge, as they were in large numbers in 1947. Don’t kill the patient, kill the disease. Remove Islam from the Muslims’ minds through education and India’s communal problem will be as good as solved.

At this point we may take a second look at the Marxist position, mentioned above, that the Hindu community is a recent invention. The observations which I just made concerning the Islamic provenance of communalism might seem to confirm that there was no Hindu communal identity. However, the authentic sources from the medieval period are unanimous about the sharp realization of a separate communal identity as Muslims and as Hindus, overwhelmingly on the Muslim side, but also on the Hindu side. We know for instance that Shivaji, who turned the tide of the Muslim offensive in the late 17th centure, was a conscious partisan of an all-Hindu liberation war against Muslim rule (Hindu Pad Padashahi). The same counts for Rana Pratap and many other Hindu leaders, and there cannot be any doubt that the Vijayanagar empire was conscious of its role as the last fortress of Hindu civilization.

It is true that some Hindu kings attacked neighbouring Hindu states in the back when these were attacked by the Muslim invaders. They were at first not aware that these Islamic newcomers were a common enemy, motivated by hatred against all non-Muslims; but their lack of insight into the character of Islam in no way disproves their awareness of a common Hindu identity. The fact that they were acutely aware of their internal political rivalries, does not exclude that they were aware of a more fundamental common identity, which was not at stake in these internecine feuds, but which they defended together once they realized that it was the target of this new kind of ideologically motivated aggressor, Islam. Brothers are aware that they have a lot in common, and this is not disproven by the fact that, when left to themselves, they also quarrel with each other.

If at all some Hindus had at first only been conscious of their own caste or sect rather than of the Hindu commonwealth, the Muslim persecutions of all Hindus without distinction certainly made them aware of their common identity and interest. So, if the Marxists perforce want to deny the common culture and value system underlying the diversity of the Hindu commonwealth, then let them apply some of their own dialectics instead. “It is in their common struggle aginst the Islamic aggressors, that the disparate sections of the native Indian society have forged their common identity as Hindus”: I do not agree with this statement which posits a negative and reactive basis for a common Hindu identity, but it must be accepted if one labours under the assumption that there never had been a positive common identity before. It is unreasonable to expect the Indian Pagans to be lumped together as Hindus for centuries on end, to be uniformly made the target of one neverending aggression by Islam, to be subjected to the same humiliations and the same jizya tax, and yet not become conscious of a common interest. This common interest would then give rise to unifying cultural superstructure. That is how the sustained and uniform Islamic attack on all India Pagans would inevitably have given rise to at least a measure of common Hindu identity if this had not previously existed.

In his Communal History and Rama’s Ayodhya (1990), the Marxist Professor R.S. Sharma argues that the medieval Hindus did not see the Muslims as a distinct religious entity, but as an ethnic group, the Turks. His proof: the Gahadvala dynasty levied a tax called Turushkadanda, tax financing the war effort against the Turks. But this does not prove what Sharma thinks it proves.

The Muslims called the Pagans of India sometimes Kafirs, unbelievers, i.e. a religious designation; but often they called them Hindus inhabitants of Hindustan, i.e. an ethnic-geographical designation (from Hind, the Persian equivalent of Sindh). And they gave religious contents to this geographical term, which it has kept till today: so it is correct that the Hindus never defined themselves as Hindus, as this was the Persian and later the Muslim term for the Indian Pagans adhering to Sanatana Dharma. But that was only a terminological matter, the fundamental religious unity of the Sanatana Dharmis was just as much a fact. Similarly, the Hindus called these newcomers Turks, but this does not exclude recognition of their religious specificity. On the contrary, even Teimur the Terrible, who made it absolutely clear in his memoirs that he came to India to wage a religious war against the Pagans, and who freed the Muslim captives from a conquered city before putting the Hindu remainder to the sword, referred to his own forces as the Turks. Conversely, the Hindus describe as the typical Turkish behavious pattern that which is enjoined by Islam.

While it is true that the Hindus have been much too slow (till today) in studying the religious foundation of the barbaric behavious which they experienced at the hands of the Turushkas, at least they soon found out that for these invaders religion was the professed motive of their inhuman behavious. Prof. Sharma’s piece of evidence, the institution of a Turushkandana, does however prove very clearly that the Islamic threat was extraordinary: the normal armed forces and war credits were not sufficient to deal with this threat which was in a class by itself.

The original source material leaves us in no doubt that conflicts often erupted on purely religious grounds, even against the political and economical interests of the contending parties. The negationists’ tactic therefore consists in keeping this original testimony out of view. A good example is Prof. Gyanendra Pandey’s recent book, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. As the title clearly says, Pandey asserts that communalism (the Hindu-Muslim conflict) had been constructed by the British for colonial purposes anmd out of colonial prejuidices, was later interiorized by Indians looking for new, politically profitable forms of organization in modern colonial society. This is like saying that anti-Judaism is a construction of modern capitalists to divide the working class (the standard Marxist explanation for all kinds of racism), while concealing the copious medieval testimony of anti-Judaism on undeniably non-capitalist grounds. Prof. Pandey effectively denies a millenniumful of testimonies to Islamic persecution of the Indian (Hindu) Kafirs.

Another example is prof. K.N. Panikkar’s work on the Moplah rebellion,,, a pofgrom against the Hindus by the Malabar (Kerala) Muslims in the margin of the khilafat movement in 1921 (official death toll 2,339). Panikkar takes the orthodox Marxist position that this was not a communal but a class conflict, not between Hindus and Muslims but between workers who happened to be Muslims and landlords who happened to be Hindus. In reality the communal character of the massacre was so evident that even Mahatma Gandhi recognized it as terrible blow for his ideal of Hindu-Muslim unity. It is quite possible that the occasion was used to settle scores with landlords and money- lenders (that stereotype of anti-Hindu as well as of anti- Jewish sloganeering), but the mullahs exhorted their flock to attack all Hindus, and added in so many words that not only the landlords but all the Hindus were their enemies. The poison of Islamic fanaticism is such that it turns any kind of conflict into an attack on the non-Muslims.

More Marxist wisdom we encounter in Romila Thapar’s theory (in her contribution to S. Gopal’s book on the Ayodhya affair, Anatomy of a Confrontation) that the current Hindu movement wants to unite all Hindus, not because the Hindus feel besieged by hostile forces, not because they have a memory of centuries of jihad, but because “a monolithic religion is more compatible with capitalism” (to borrow the formulation of a reviewer). She thinks that the political Hindu movement is merely a concoction by Hindu capitalists, or in her own words “part of the attempt to redefine Hinduism as an ideology for modernization by the middle class”, in which “modernization is seen as linked to the growth of capitalism”. She reads the mind behind the capitalist conspiracy to reform Hinduism thus: “Capitalism is often believed to thrive among Semitic religions such as Christianity and Islam. The argument would then run that if capitalism is to succeed in India, then Hinduism would also have to be moulded in a Semitic form”.

It is always interesting to see how Communists presuppose the superiority of Hinduism by denouncing Hindu militancy as the semiticization or islamization of Hinduism. But the point is that the political mobilization of Hindu society under the increasing pressure of hostile forces is explained away as merely a camouflage of economic forces. One smiles about such simplistic subjection of unwilling facts of Marxist dogma. Especially because such analyses were still being made in 1991, and are still being made today: in India it has not yet dawned on the dominant intelligentsia that Marxism has failed not only as a political and economical system, but also as a socialogical model of explanation. On the contrary, Indian Marxists even manage to make foreign correspondents for non - Marxist media swallow their analysis, e.g. after the Babri Masjid demolition, even the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Seitung explained Hindu fundamentalism in the same socio-economical terms, complete with urban traders who are looking for an identity etc.

Incidentally, Romila Thapar is right in observing that certain Hindu revivalists ae trying to “find parallels with the Semitic religions as if these parallels are necessary for the future of Hinduism” (though her attempt to force the Ram Janmabhoomi movement into this mould, with Rama being turned into a prophet and the Ramayana into the sole revealed Scripture etc., is completely unfounded and another pathetic case of trying to force unwilling facts into a pre- conceived scheme). She sounds like favouring a renewed emphasis on “the fact that the religious experience of Indian civilization and of religious sects which are bunched together under the label of Hindu are distinctively different from that of the Semitic”.

It is true that some Hindu revivalist movements have tried to redefine Hinduism in terms borrowed from monotheism, with rudiments of notions like an infallible Scripture (back to the Vedas: the Arya Samaj), iconoclastic monotheism (Arya Samaj, Akali neo-Sikhs), or a monolithic hierarchic organization (the RSS). But the reason for this development cannot with any stretch of the imagination be deduced from the exigencies of capitalism. An honest analysis of this tendency in Hinduism to imitate the Christian-Islamic model will demonstrate that a psychology of tactical imitation as a way of self-defence against these aggressive Semitic religions was at work. The tendency cannot possibly be reduced to the socio - economical categories dear to Marxism, but springs from the terror which Islam (not fedualism or capitalism, but Islam) had struck in the Hindu mind, and which was subsequently fortified with an intellectual dimension by the Christian missionary propaganda against primitive polytheism. Those Hindus who were waging the struggle for survival against the Islamic and Christian onslaught have come to resemble their enemies a bit, and have interiorized a lot of the aggressors’ contempt for typical Hindu things, such as idol- worship, doctrinal pluralism, social decentralization. It is for Hindu society to reflect on whether this imitation was the right course, and whether it has not been self- defeating in some respects.

At any rate, the very existence of this psychological need among some militant Hindus to imitate the prophetic - monotheistic religions is a symptom of an already old polarization between Hinduism and aggressive monotheism, especially Islam. Bipan Chandra’s chronology of communalism as a 20th century phenomenon cannot explain the communal polarization of which Sikhism and the Arya Samaj were manifestations. These can only be understood from the centuries oif active hostility between Islam and Hinduism. Shivaji was not a herald of capitalism, nor a product of British divide and rule policy, but a participant in an ongoing war between Hindu civilization and Islamic aggression.

Since the 1950s the history market is being flooded with publications conveying the negationist version to a greater or lesser extent. The public is fed negationist TV serials like The Sword of Tipu Sultan, an exercise in whitewashing the arch-fanatic last Muslim ruler. Most general readers and many serious students only get to know about Indian history through negationist glasses. In India, the negationists have managed what European negationists can only dream of: turn the tables on honest historians and marginalize them. People who have specialized in adapting history to the party-line, are lecturing others about the political abuse of history. By contrast, geunine historians who have refused to tamper with the record of Islam (like Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar, K.S. Lal) are held us as examples of communalist historywriting in textbooks which are required reading in all history departments in India.

But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other things, it stipulated that: “Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden.” Under Marxist pressure, negationism has become India’s official policy.

Now that Marxism is no longer the fashion of the day, it is very easy to expose the shameless dishonesty of many vocal Marxist intellectuals. It is time to go through the record and see what they have said about the “economic successes” of the Soviet Union, the enthusiasm of the Chinese people for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, about the Communist involvement in crimes like Katyn, and about the lies put out by the CIA-sponsored dissidents and camp survivors. Their Islam negationism is by far not their first systematic falsification of a chapter of history.

When the Marxists start lecturing Hindus about tolerance and the respect for Barbar’s mosque, it is easy to put them on the defensive by asking what happened to churches, mosques and temples when Mao took over. Communist regimes’ treatment of religion has been similar to Islam’s treatment of infidelity. Either religious people had the zimmi status, i.e. they were suffered to exist but at the cost of career prospects, benefit of social or material benefits, always under the watchful eye of police informers, and of course without the right to convert or to object to state atheism’s conversion efforts (according to the chinese Constitution, there is a right to practise religion and a right to practise and propagete atheism); or they were simply persecuted, their religious education forbidden (in the Soviet Union, many people have spent years in jail for transporting Bibles or teaching Hebrew), their places of worship demolished or expropriated for secular use. Communism and Islam are truly comrades in intolerance.

Certainly some statements can be dug up of Indian Communists defending the Cultural Revolution in which so many thousands of places of worship were destroyed and their personnel brutalized or killed. When the Khumar Rouge were in power, less that 1,000 of the 65,000 Buddhist monks managed to survive : what did the Indian Marxists (card- carrying and other) say then? The bigger part of the Marxists’ success was in their aggressiveness: as long as they remained on the offensive, everyone tried to live up to the norms they prescribed. Now it is time to put them to scrutiny.