Labor of Love
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Canada
Globalization, a blessing
or curse, is the hottest debate of our times. It
is an issue that remains pending — the jury
on it would be out for a long, long time. The strident
mantra of the 21st century may be manna to the aggressively-enterprising
corporate cabal in the West; however, in the East,
it is mostly perceived as another deceptive version
of the 19th-century Western colonialism that looted
and plundered the rich-in-resources Asia, Africa
and Latin America, filling Western treasuries until
they overflowed.
In the Islamic world, spanning from Morocco to Indonesia,
comprising 57 sovereign states and one-fourth of
humanity, globalization is being increasingly associated
with the ‘War on Terror’, which in itself
is seen as a war against the Muslims, wherever they
may be.
The template to this Muslim mindset, irrespective
of whether it is right or wrong, is the global scenario
unfolding since the cataclysmic events of 9/11 and
all that has transpired in its wake. Muslim masses
have a point in arguing, with facts to back up their
hypotheses, that the Western leaders and ideologues
— men like George W. Bush, Tony Blair and
John Howard, among others — have cleverly
exploited the post-9/11 sense of hurt of their people
to unleash a vengeful war of attrition against Muslims.
The events in Afghanistan, Iraq and occupied Palestine
speak for themselves. George W. Bush’s so-called
‘War on Terror’ is assuming the tone
of a new crusade as he himself had initially christened
his onslaught on the heels of 9/11.
The only difference between the classical crusades
and their latest version is that contemporary Western
armies are being resourced by a combination of corporate
mafia and neo-con evangelists, whereas in the past
the brew was a mix of royalty and church. Another
innovation is the corporate-owned Western news media
whose services and expertise are being harnessed,
globally, in the dissemination of varnished and
‘kosher’ truths.
Prof Akbar S. Ahmed is one of the few voices pleading
for course-correction in a blind pursuit of agendas
set, largely, in ignorance and based on half-truths.
From his academic perch at the American University
in Washington, Akbar has been waging a one-man’s
resistance in the academic domain.
Akbar’s has been a rare voice of reason amongst
West-based Muslim scholars operating in largely
unhelpful and hostile surroundings. He has been
at it, patiently and diligently, since the day-after
9/11 because of his conviction that an open-ended
war, with obviously hostile intent and agenda, waged
by the West against Muslims, is the wrong tool,
given the hugely yawning religious, racial and cultural
divide between the West and the Islamic world.
But Akbar’s own modus operandi is not geared
towards finger pointing entirely at the West. His
plea for reason is focused equally in the direction
of the Islamic world. He holds both responsible
for operating in ignorance and not trying to understand
each other with the intent to narrow the gulf currently
dividing them. He’s also critical of the Muslim
mode of denial, which, to his mind, isn’t
doing a service to any Muslim or Islamic cause.
Akbar woke up early to the ineluctable need of bridge-building
amongst the followers of the leading Abrahamic faiths
of the world in the wake of 9/11. His book Islam
Under Siege (2003) was a passionate plea for reason
and sanity all around, especially to the beleaguered
Muslims of the West who, even after six years since
9/11, are still not being allowed to disappear from
a microscopic radar screen, with all their moves
minutely scrutinized and deduced.
But Islam Under Siege was largely the intellectual
product of an armchair analyst, no matter how clinically
researched and brilliantly argued. And that was
also before the American armies went rampaging into
Iraq to lay waste a country, which had nothing to
do with 9/11, and was in no way responsible for
the evil perpetrated in its guise.
Iraq veritably hit the Islamic world like a ton
of bricks, convincing even those otherwise inclined
to give all the benefit of the doubt to the West
that it was a war against the world of Islam, the
protestations to the contrary of its authors notwithstanding.
Sensing the new mood swing in the Muslim world,
Akbar discarded his own armchair to venture out
into the field to take the pulse of the throbbing
heartland of the vast arc of Islam and its Muslim
masses, and the intelligentsia felt the impact of
this latest Western onslaught against them. But
he did something unprecedented, too: he decided
to take along some of his young students, both male
and female, in lockstep with him to see and experience
the post-9/11 and post-Iraq invasion Muslim world,
first hand and draw their own conclusions.
Why did Akbar think of this maverick move? Because
he seems close to being convinced that the crop
of think-tank ideologues and brainy gurus hogging
the Washington beltway can no longer be relied upon
to be reasonable, or give up their pre-conceived
mindset of disbelief of everything Islamic. But
the younger generation of Americans isn’t
saddled with the kind of baggage dragging down their
forebears and stilling them into intellectual stupor.
It isn’t only an intellectual torpor; influential
voices in the pantheon of American intelligentsia
and journalism — like a rabidly Muslim-baiting
Charles Krauthammar of The Washington Post —
have also been belligerently propagating their concoctions
of hate against the Islamic world with unremitting
zeal. They are provocatively hawking their bellicosity
and telling Washington’s obliging ruling elite
that the time for talking is over; it’s now
the moment of action. These merchants of doom are
one reason for an exacerbating trust-deficit between
the West and the Muslims of the world.
So Akbar took his young acolytes along on a journey
of discovery, visiting in the process a swath of
Muslim countries, including Turkey, Syria, Jordan,
Qatar, India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.
One surprise to this scribe, however, is the glaring
omission of Iran. Why was one of the most important
Muslim states in the world left out of the itinerary
of Akbar’s team? Wouldn’t its inclusion
have given a greater balance to the study of contemporary
Islamic world, particularly because it’s the
epicenter of contemporary Shia revivalism as a political
force in the Middle East? Any study of the contemporary
Muslim world is incomplete without an empirical
study of Iran.
Akbar’s field study of the Islamic heartland
is pegged like a tripod, surveying the three most
defining models of Islamic thought and action: the
Sufi model of total devotion to Allah and peaceful
co-existence — Sulh-i-kul (peace-with-all)
— with His creations, epitomized by Ajmer,
renowned for the shrine of the great saint and mystic
Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti Ajmeri; the Aligarh paradigm
steeped in modernity and liberalism of Islam and
the Deoband template anointed by an orthodox and
atavistic interpretation of Islamic dogma and ritual.
Akbar’s painstaking and innovative research
clearly establishes the fact that partisans of all
three models are, by and large, inclined to co-exist
in peace and harmony with the West and cannot be
stigmatized — as is currently fashionable
in the West — for being hotbeds of radicalism.
All three, however, have this strong sense that
there’s little effort in the West to understand
Islam and its followers, which isn’t the way
to peace or bridge-building among universal faiths.
Akbar S. Ahmed’s Journey into Islam is, no
doubt, a labor of love. Akbar has made a sterling
contribution to the inescapable need for a rational,
cool and un-phlegmatic dialogue between the denizens
of the Islamic world and their Western detractors.
His is a voice of reason and rationality. However,
the question remains: is anyone listening? Is this
moderate voice going to be heard or will it be drowned
in the cacophony of jingoistic shibboleths baying
for the blood of Muslims? Take your own pick for
an answer.
For a punch line, however, it should be said that
if the intellectual transformation of Akbar’s
team of young and inquisitive researchers and observers
is any guide, then one could say with some confidence
that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
