NGOs out, polio in
The dear dear Taliban – so wise, so reasonable, so helpful.
In a recent broadcast on his illegal FM radio station, Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah said, “All NGOs should leave Swat because they are creating problems for peace.” Fazlullah has also described all Pakistanis working for NGOs as “enemies of the country”. “They come and tell us how to make latrines in mosques and homes. I’m sure we can do it ourselves. There is no need for foreigners to tell us this,” Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said.
He went on to explain in more depth:
Muslim Khan told IRIN, a news network run by the United Nations, that “NGO is another name for vulgarity and obscenity. They don’t want us to remain Muslims and want to take away the veil from our women.” Khan claimed NGOs hire women who work alongside men in the fields and in offices. “That is totally un-Islamic and unacceptable,” he said.
Sound fella. He’s a medical expert, too.
Taliban militants in the former tourist destination of Swat Valley have obstructed officials from vaccinating over 300,000 children…Extremist clerics have used mosque loudspeakers and illegal radio stations to spread the idea that the vaccinations cause infertility and are part of a US-sponsored anti-Muslim plot…“It’s a US tool to cut the population of the Muslims. It is against Islam that you take a medicine before the disease”, said Muslim Khan, Swat’s Taliban spokesman, speaking by telephone.
You see? He knows how to make latrines, he knows it is unacceptable to let women work alongside men, he knows vaccinations are against Islam. Soon under the wise and benevolent rule of the Taliban, Swat will be full of illiterate shrouded women, contaminated water supplies, crippled children, and corpses. Ain’t regression grand?
A truism: Pakistan will go down the drain unless liberal and progressive Muslim forces there can prevail over those who would push it into a dark age. That means getting its supine government to take back the concessions and show a bit of strength.
Still worth reading in this context:
Islam and Freedom of Thought By Akbar Ahmed and Lawrence Rosen
http://www.islamfortoday.com/akbar04.htm
Akbar Ahmed was formerly Pakistani Ambassador in London.
“What was once an occasional event — silencing scholars — increasingly has become a way of life in most Muslim countries. From South Asia to North Africa, an entire generation of Muslim intellectuals is at this moment [2001]under threat: Many have already been killed, silenced, or forced into exile.”
@Ian
Thanks for link.
When I read essays like that, I get this nagging feeling and an urge to ask him personnally:
“Why do you continue to be an apologetic for such a religion?”
It is almost incomprehensible to me that intellectuals can subscribe to a thought system which core element is: “submission” (to god’s will).
I see his claim that god’s will really is to pursue truth (wherever it leads us), but in the real world the “submission” part is all too often a carte blance for those wanting to usurp “power”
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Lady Mary Wortley Montague reported that the Turks practiced immunization some decades before it was practiced in the West.
The Taliban might like to take notice of what she – oh.
Greg: Not all Muslims are suicide bombing fanatics. Suggest you have a look at the link http://www.islamfortoday.com/akbar04.htm to see what I mean. IMHO we who are western liberals should do whatever we can to support those within Islam who want to take it in a more liberal direction. Otherwise, one as good as throws them to the fanatics.
Cassanders: finding one’s way out of an authoritarian religion that (probably) still holds one’s family, friends and country in its grasp cannot be easy. With respect, ask yourself how easy it would be to abandon your own worldview for something you have been told all your life is wrong and the road to perdition and ruin. The important question is the direction in which a person is moving rather than whether they have arrived at some destination already.
I found that link quite encouraging, though it has been a while since the site was updated.
I join with Cassanders in thanking Ian for the link. However, I have a question, arising from the article. Several times the equation of Islam and the search for knowledge is made, and reference to earlier Muslim scholars it provided in support of this. At one point it is even said that:
But the prophet Muhammad was a tribal warlord until his death. It’s really hard think of him saying such a thing, and, if he did, it’s hard to think that he meant by the word ‘scholar’ anything besides someone making a close study of the revelation of Allah in the Qu’ran. My knowledge of the history of the Muslim enlightenment is fairly sketchy, but am I wrong in thinking that Islamic scholarship was fairly limited both in time and space, and almost always overburdened by the need to guard against impiety?
Jinnah, for example, was a completely secularised Muslim at the time Pakistan was founded. He grew up in British India, and even aped the manners of an upper class Englishman. He can scarcely be taken as “an idigenous democratic model [that] is available to Muslim society.”
I am not nearly so encouraged by this article as Ian is. It does not seem to me to be a realistic assessment, either of Islam’s commitment to knowledge, or of Jinnah as a contemporary model of a Muslim commitment to democratic polity. Is my conclusion completely off the wall?
One problem with that article is that it’s completely uncritical of Jinnah’s project – you know, the one that cut India in two and unleashed the communal slaughters of 1947, and the one that established a Muslim state as distinct from a secular (albeit majority-Hindu) state in India.
And the claim that “Islam places enormous emphasis on knowledge” is…a tad starry-eyed, to put it no more strongly than that. Just for a start, the principle of submission is in radical tension with an emphasis on “knowledge” – unless “knowledge” means revelation or similar.
Eric, OB: Yes, quite. The article simply struck me as a step in the right direction for Islam, though I do not expect those inside it to find a way out of the maze in a hurry. Google ‘liberal Islam’ and see what I mean.
Chrisianity was set up from its very beginning to divide into a multitude of contending sects; Islam not nearly so much. Those familiar with Islam say that Mohammed forbade any additions or alterations to it, while Christ effectively gave his followers an open cheque, and permission to steer it wherever they chose, as in Matthew 16:18-19.
Islam may well turn out to be unreformable. That to my way of thinking would make it far more dangerous than otherwise. However Muslims in more modern secular countries like Turkey get to be like Catholics in Italy, paying lip service to the religion, but relatively slack in practice.
Ian, perhaps I’m just a pessimist, but I think Islam is probably much more dangerous than otherwise. And Turks may be slack in practice, but they’re beginning to pull up their socks!
The problem with religion is that there’s always that backward glance. Reforms may last for a time, but then someone is sure to come along who knows what the real message of the Bible or the Qu’ran really is. Christians are constantly rediscovering what is really necessary for salvation. Chart the progress of catholicism since Vatican II – steadily backwards towards the romantic past. And Islam, well, it was imperialist and theocratic from the start. It doesn’t have far to go to get to there from here.
Jinnah, by the way, was wrong, but he did it, not only because he felt that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu majority India, but because Gandhi, whether he intended to or not, put Hinduism right at the centre of the struggle for independence. That made compromise impossible. Gandhi-ji is over-rated, I think. He was a racist in South Africa, and he was, despite everything, a Hindu nationalist in India. And his idea of ‘cottage industry’, still paraded on the Indian flag, was a joke. Like Islamists today, Gandhi was deeply anti-Western. If there is an India and a Pakistan today, a lot of the responsibility is his.
Whatever Mohammed forbade or permitted, Islam is of course subject to modification and reform because Muslims pick and choose which elements of their holy book(s) to emphasize – just like all religious believers do. For example, Sufi Muslims are much less likely to go in for fundamentalism and violence and much more likely to treat women as human beings. And, like many religious disagreements, this one has been the source of internecine violence: Sufi rejection of women-hating and other elements of fundamentalist extremism motivated the Talibani to bomb a Sufi holy site early in March, the mausoleum of Sufi poet Rehman Baba in Peshawar.
‘Cuz, you know, Sufi are clearly a horrendous splinter sect that must be stamped out, as evidenced by their willingness to treat half the human race like actual human beings (or at least much more so than other Muslim traditions).
“there’s always that backward glance.”
Yeah. In the US they’re called “Great Awakenings” and they’re numbered. The current one is number 3.
Eric, G: Points all taken of course. Except that one moderate Muslim (ie the sort the Taliban oppress and kill) driven into the arms of the extremists because there’s nowhere else for them to go is still one too many.
As a purely political strategy, one can oppose all religions and religionists with equal fervour; or one can discriminate and between the best and the worst and seek to drive wedges between them, however few and however small.
I am prepared to side with a moderate Muslim against a Muslim fanatic any day.
OB: Try this for a ‘Great Awakening’: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s117777.htm.
(I was told in my youth of a bunch of whackos who had built an amphitheatre in 1920 at Balmoral Beach on Sydney Harbour, in order to witness the Second Coming. They expected Christ to come walking through Sydney Heads, which are the two prominent peninsulas forming the harbour entrance. Or so the story went. Well there’s the real story behind it. Even more interesting.)
And where is it written that non-believers cannot do both? That is, maybe there is a place within the big secular tent for those who forthrightly point out the flaws inherent in faith as a way of [not] knowing AND for those who wish to be more circumspect and focus on strategic alliances with moderates among the faithful against the extremists (although not – if they are being genuinely strategic – letting moderates off the hook when they offer tacit and/or explicit support to fundies, which they often seem all-too-eager to do). Not that I’m accusing *you* of such “There’s only one right way to be a public atheist, and yours is WRONG WRONG WRONG!” rhetoric Ian – I’m actually thinking mostly of a certain “communications expert” who happens to suck at actually communicating…
For my part, I like Sufis. I find genuine mystics of all stripes to be mildly interesting and mostly harmless. Ah, but how can you tell a genuine mystic from a pseudo-mystic? The latter is the one trying to sell you something – literally or metaphorically.
G: Except when there is a brawl between the fanatics and the moderates, one can either say ‘a plague on both your houses’ or pick a side to support. This was the issue taken up by Nick Cohen in his critique of the antiwar (ie Iraq/Afghanistan) Left. Many of them were quite happy to support Islamic fascists against the Islamic centre, and of course the US, which was a big issue post 9/11.
An Islamic moderate who chooses alliance with fundamentalists can have it pointed out that (a) this is against their interest from their purely Muslim point of view or (b) that both Muslim worldviews, fanatic or moderate, are flawed anyway. I think it would be easier to split a moderate away from a fanatic than to split a moderate from Islam.
But I think you are saying that one can enjoy the company of mystics and learn things from them, but by observing some no-go areas.
The only Sufis I have known have been westerners: theosophical types whose world I entered briefly, but managed to avoid joining.
“Ah, but how can you tell a genuine mystic from a pseudo-mystic? The latter is the one trying to sell you something – literally or metaphorically.”
That’s the thing about that “communications expert” – he talks as if everyone were engaged in trying to sell someone something. It seems not to have occurred to him that not everyone is.