http://familyofheart.com/09/presentation_TF.htm
In October last year, a vigourous debate broke out on the Internet
between conflicting viewpoints on the Taliban as espoused by two
prominent Pakistanis, both claiming roots in the Left. One of them
was Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistan's leading peace activist who
taught at the MIT and currently teaches Nuclear Physics at
Islamabad University who unequivocally slammed the Taliban as a
menace, which he said, "would transport us into the darkest of
dark ages."
The other point of view was that of Tariq Ali who told an audience
in Toronto and later CBC television that the Taliban were not a
terrorist organization, but rather an "indigenous Pushtoon
national movement," thus blessing the fanatic jihadis with a
respectable label that drew the anger and ire of many Pushtoon
nationalists in Canada.
It was in this context that Dr. Khalid Sohail raised an important
question: Was there a possibility of liberal and secular Muslims
with leftist leanings, who hold such opposing views, to work
together.
Since both Pervez Hoodbhoy and Tariq Ali claim their political
thought in the ideology of Left, secularism, small L liberalism
and anti-imperialism, it is worth analysing why they hold such
differing views on Islamist jihadi groups as Taliban, Hamas and
Hezbollah
The question being asked at this seminar is, Can secular Muslims
belonging to these two camps work together, and, how should we,
who call ourselves free from the grip of Islamic fundamentalism,
or the doctrine of Islamism, face the twin challenges of
Fundamentalism and Imperialism.
Allow me to make a very interesting observation. Most leftist or
secular Muslims who live inside Muslim majority countries have no
problem making this choice.
Whether they live in Iran, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Turkey, or
Egypt, they want to have nothing to do with the Islamists. In
both Afghanistan and Iraq, the communist parties have spoken
vocally against al-Qaeda and are part of the post-invasion
parliaments.
In Pakistan, the centre-left trashed the Islamists across the
country, while the secular Pushtoon nationalists, the ANP defeated
the Islamists in what we were told was their heartland--the
province of Pukhtoonkhwa that until recently was known as the NWFP.
Elsewhere, less than two weeks ago, in Bangladesh, the
Jamat-e-Islami managed to win just two seats in a parliament of
300 members. Among the stalwarts of the secular Left who
triumphed over the right-wing Islamist coalition were two
socialists of the 1960s, Rashid Khan Menon and Motia Chowdhury.
Inside Iran, the Left has not yet and will never forget the
massacres by the Mullahs that killed tens of thousands of secular,
liberal and leftist Muslims. Not one secular or liberal Iranian
Muslim has anything but contempt for the theocracy, no matter how
much Ahmedinejad postures as a revolutionary anti-imperialist
However, Muslims who migrated here, and those who claim the label
of the Left, are more like to tow the Islamist line, participate
in rallies organized by Muslim Brotherhood and they dare not say a
word critical of either Bin Laden or any of the dozens of Islamist
jihadi groups working to undermine the very western societies they
live in.
This chasm is epitomized by the Pervez Hoodbhoy-Tariq Ali divide.
While Hoodbhoy lives in Pakistan and slams the Taliban as
medieval murderers, Tariq Ali who has taken up British citizenship
extols the virtues of the Iranian regime and accords the
respectable label of 'Pushtoon nationalism' on the Taliban.
To better understand Prof Pervez Hoodbhoy's position, allow me to
quote him. As the Taliban were threatening to attack Pakistani
cities and had taken over the district of Swat, he wrote:
"A Taliban victory would transport us into the darkest of
dark ages. These fanatics dream of transforming the country
into a religious state where they will be the law. They stone
women to death, cut off limbs, kill doctors for administering
polio shots, force girl-children into burqa, threaten
beard-shaving barbers with death, blow up girls schools at a
current average of two per week, forbid music, punish musicians,
destroy 2000-year statues. Even flying kites is a
life-threatening sin."
Then addressing those who have been misled to believe that the
Taliban are some sort of latter day Sandanistas or the Viet Cong,
he wrote:
"The Taliban agenda has no place for social justice and
economic development. There is silence from Taliban leaders
about poverty, and the need to create jobs for the unemployed,
building homes, providing education, land reform, or doing away
with feudalism and tribalism… If the militants of Pakistan ever
win it is clear what our future will be like. Education, bad as
it is today, would at best be replaced by the mind-numbing
indoctrination of the madrassas whose gift to society would be
an army of suicide bombers. In a society policed by
vice-and-virtue squads, music, art, drama, and cultural
expressions would disappear. Pakistan would re-tribalize and
resemble a cross between FATA (Pakistan's Taliban dominated
tribal areas] and Saudi Arabia (minus the oil). "
Hoodbhoy is not alone. My colleague here today, Dr. Amjad Ayub of
the Labour Party of Pakistan, many years ago interviewed MOHAMMED
ISSA, president of the leftwing Afghan Watan Party for the weekly,
Jedojehud. This what the Afghan leftist politician Mohammed Issa
told Dr. Ayub:
"In the name of Islam, the Taliban practice brutality. There
is no future for Afghanistan under the Taliban. For 20 years
Afghanistan has been the centre of revolution and
counter-revolution. Now the political consciousness among the
people has been raised and they have begun to resist the
terrorist methods of the fanatic …. The Taliban are the
merchants of death."
Bizarre as it may sound, but many of Pakistan's westernized
bourgeoisie, are today infatuated by the Islamists, romanticizing
them in the same way a yuppie drives a BMW while wearing a Che
T-shirt. These cappuccino communists claim the Taliban are
fighting imperialism and that despite their own soft corner for
whisky and fine wine, they are now Muslim nationalists willing to
fight the West, even as they queue up at the US embassy for a visa
to take their proletariat children for a summer vacation visit to
Disneyland.
Imperialism
But what exactly is imperialism? Is imperialism only restricted to
the adventures of Europe and the US or could we dare use the term,
"Arab Imperialism" or "Turkish imperialism"? And if not, then why
was the great Indian Muslim philosopher and poet, Allama Iqbal,
not taken to task when he coined the term Arab imperialism?
Before I go further, let me dwell on the term "imperialism" which
first came into common usage in England in the 1890s. The term
evolved to describe the contest between rival European states to
secure colonies and spheres of influence in Africa and Asia, a
contest that dominated international politics from the mid-1880s
to 1914, and caused this period to be named the "age of
imperialism" by my favourite author, the British Marxist historian
Eric Hobsbawn.
But for those of us who spent our youth sitting sat the feet of
aging Marxists, the one text that defined our understand of
imperialism was the book by Vladimir Lenin, titled, Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism
This was a classic Marxist theoretical treatise on the
relationship between capitalism and imperialism in which Lenin
identifies the merging of banks and industrial cartels as giving
rise to finance capital. According to Lenin, in the last stage of
capitalism, in order to generate greater profits than the home
market can offer, capital is exported.
LENIN did not claim that there was no imperialism before the late
19th century. As he explicitly noted, "Colonial policy and
imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and
even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a
colonial policy and practised imperialism." In a similar vein,
the era we Muslims glowingly describe as the "Fatoohaat-e-Islami"
needs to be seen as Arab Imperialism while the 600 year old rule
of the Ottoman Turks was too a colonial empire that rivalled that
of the British and the French, but again has escaped the label of
imperialism.
In calling imperialism a stage of capitalism, Lenin was saying it
was fundamentally an economic phenomenon. He said, "If it were
necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism,
we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of
capitalism."
In essence, what Lenin and the early Bolsheviks and the Commintern
said was that a fight against imperialism was not possible without
challenging capitalism itself.
Thus when Japan attacked the US, its anti-American stance could
not be and was never understood to driven by an anti-imperialist
doctrine. Similarly, when Hitler's Panzer divisions fought
advancing American and British troops in Western Europe, only a
fool would have placed Nazi Germany into the camp of
anti-imperialism.
Today, just because the Taliban or Hezbollah or Iran attack
Americans or blow up their embassies and fly planes into the New
York Towers, does not mean their anti-Americanism translates into
anti-imperialism.
While my friend Tariq Ali tries to position today's Iranian regime
as anti-imperialist, it is a country that practices unbridled
capitalism, where even the country's sea ports have been
privatized and where trade unionists continue to be imprisoned for
the mere fault of organizing labour.
Anti-imperialism
So then we have to answer the question, What exactly is
anti-imperialism? What better a place to turn for answer to this
question than to look at it from the perspective of the great
American, the writer Mark Twain.
In 1898, when the United States annexed the Philippines as part
of its war with Spain, a number of American liberals, upset at
their govt, set up the American Anti-Imperialist League which
continued to function until it was dissolved in 1921. A leader
and founding member of the League was Mark Twain, who defended
its views in the following manner:
"I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate
the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer,
not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and
duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own
domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an
anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its
talons on any other land."
The reason I bring up the name of Mark Twain is for a reason.
Here was an icon of America willing to stand up to his own
government, demanding justice for the other. This is
significantly different from those who demand justice for
themselves and look the other way when their own countries of
origin of communities indulge in an imperialism that occupies
the other. Britain, France, Portugal and The Netherlands
occupied vast regions of Africa and Asia at the time, but Mark
Twain set his focus on his own USA long before he targeted the
UK or the other European powers.
Let me give you an example. Let me ask you to reflect on the
tragedy of the Arab-Israeli conflict. While there are many
Israeli Mark Twains that stand up to their own government, there
is barely any voice among the Arab world that has spoken out
against the occupation by Arab countries of Kurdistan, Western
Sahara and dare I say, Darfur.
And while we Pakistanis rile endlessly about what we say is
Indian occupation of Kashmir, our own occupation of Baluchistan
in 1948 and the 60-year military operation of the region barely
creates a ripple.
I suggest to you my friends that many Islamists who spew
Anti-Americanism, hate of all things Western and have nothing
to do with the struggle against imperialism. The hatred that the
Muslim Brotherhood cadres have against West must never be
mistaken as a call for social justice or equality. I suggest to
you that the forces of Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism are a
threat to civilization itself, because their agenda is against
progress itself; against the march of time; against the very
ideas that brought us the concept of secularism and democracy,
the end of slavery, end of gender apartheid and the notion of
countries based on race or religion.
Let me introduce you to one of the western world's great freedom
fighters, a Marxist who stood up to British colonialism and US
big capital. The name of this person is Cyril Lionel Robert
James better know as CLR James and who died in 1989. He was an
Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. He
was influential in the United Kingdom and the United States in
socialist parties and Marxist thought, as well as leading ideas
about the end of colonialism
In his book 'The Making of the Caribbean People', CLR James
wrote:
'I denounce European colonialism, But I respect the learning
and profound discoveries of Western civilization."
British Muslim writer Kenan Malik reflecting on the Islamist
attacks of 9/11 wrote a profound piece in which he invoked the
memory of CLR and compared it to the nihilism and fatalism of
the Islamists. He wrote that despite the fact that CLR James was
one of the great radicals of the twentieth century, an
anti-imperialist, a superb historian of black struggles, a
Marxist who remained one even when it was no longer fashionable
to be so, today, James' defence of 'Western civilization' would
probably be dismissed as Eurocentric, even racist.
Malik wrote:
"To be radical today is to display disenchantment with all
that is 'Western' — by which most mean modernism and the ideas
of the Enlightenment — in the name of 'diversity' and
'difference'. The modernist project of pursuing a rational,
scientific understanding of the natural and social world — a
project that James unashamedly championed — is now widely
regarded as a dangerous fantasy, even as oppressive.
CLR James, like most anti-imperialists in the past, recognized
that all progressive politics were rooted in the 'Western
tradition', and in particular in the ideas of reason, progress,
humanism, and universalism that emerged out of the
Enlightenment. The scientific method, democratic politics, the
concept of universal values — these are palpably better concepts
than those that existed previously, or those that exist now in
other political and cultural traditions.
Kenan Malik wrote, "Not because Europeans are a superior people,
but because out of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the
scientific revolution flowed superior ideas." He says, The
Western tradition is not Western in any essential sense, but
only through an accident of geography and history. Indeed,
Islamic learning provided an important resource for both the
Renaissance and the development of science. The ideas we call
'Western' are in fact universal, laying the basis for greater
human flourishing.
Let me quote from Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Algerian
nationalist, who said:
'All the elements of a solution to the great problems of
humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought.
But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission that
fell to them.'
For thinkers like Fanon and CLR James, the aim of
anti-imperialism was not to reject Western ideas but to reclaim
them for all of humanity. In conclusion, let me answer the
question posed by our hosts. Is it possible for secular Muslims
or Pakistanis to work together.
The answer is a qualified YES.
The Muslim Canadian Congress will work with any secular Muslim
and non-Muslim who is willing to commit to the separation of
religion and state, not just here in Canada, but across the
Muslim world too.
Yes, we are willing to work with all those who reject the notion
that the Supreme Leader of Iran must be of Arab ancestry alone
and that he is accountable to only to God, and not the
citizenry.
Yes, we are willing to work with all secular organizations that
reject the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood and the
Jamat-e-Islami that "Islam is the Answer" and "Quran is our
constitution".
Yes, we are willing to work with any secular or liberal Muslim
body that have the courage and steadfastness to oppose Sharia
law in Canada, not support it in the name of community
solidarity.
How any secular Muslim would follow these jihadis is beyond me.
Let me conclude by quoting two people with impeccable
credentials in their struggle for social justice. One from the
present and the other from a man who in the words of the
American author John Reed was the cause for "Ten Days that shook
the world".
First, here is Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy.
"Tragically for Pakistan, American hypocrisy has played into
the hands of Islamic militants. They have been vigourously
promoting the notion that this is a bipolar conflict of Islam,
which they claim to represent, versus imperialism. Many
Pakistanis, who desperately want someone to stand up to the
Americans, buy into this. This is a fatal mistake…Their goal is
to establish their writ over that of the Pakistani State. For
this, they have been attacking and killing people in Pakistan
through the 1990s, well before 9/11. Remember also that the
4000-plus victims of jihad in Pakistan over the last year have
been Muslims with no connection at all to America. In fact, the
Taliban are waging an armed struggle to remake society. They
will keep fighting this war even if America were to miraculously
evaporate into space."
And allow me to close by quoting Lenin as he addressed a
conference attended by communists from the Muslim world and
central Asia. Lenin warned the delegates to be wary of Islamists
who pose as anti-imperialists. He emphasized,
"the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, " which
he said and I quote, "strove to combine the liberation movements
against European and American imperialism with an attempt to
strengthen the positions of Khans, landowners, mullahs, etc."
Thank you ladies and gentlemen.
