Too much innocent blood has been spilled in the name of Islam. It is time the madness came to an end, writes Aijaz Zaka Syed.
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
21-27 January 2010
Terrorism, they say, is the weapon of the weak. But in our case it has become the weapon against the weak. The use of suicide is not something invented by Muslims. It's perhaps as old as homicide. Japan's harakiri comes to mind. But perhaps no people have suffered from it, and because of it, as much as Muslims have in recent years.
So what drives a suicide bomber? And what kind of cause, however noble, makes you kill innocent people peacefully going about their day-to-day business — people who haven't harmed anyone and pose no threat to anyone? And how can these faceless men, whatever their motives, ever think they would be forgiven, let alone rewarded, in the next life for their despicable acts against the defenceless?
Is this what Islam really preaches and stands for? If not — as we all know it doesn't — why aren't our religious scholars, leaders and wise men raising a storm and doing more to stop these mad men bent on tarnishing the image of a noble faith and its billion plus followers?
I have struggled with these questions every time innocent people are killed in a terror attack or suicide bombing. And these questions have been troubling me again since the mind-numbing attacks on a Muharram procession in Karachi and a volleyball match in Pakistan's north last week.
The unparalleled scale of the attack on the Ashura procession in Karachi — Pakistan's financial/commercial capital and political nerve centre — has shaken a country that has long been used to daily mayhem of this kind. Nearly 50 people were killed and 500 injured in the Karachi attack. But more than the loss of lives, it is the devastation wreaked on the country's biggest city that day that will haunt Pakistan for a long time to come.
Thousands of businesses, shops and commercial establishments were destroyed in no time, incurring losses worth billions of dollars. And the attack on the heavily attended volleyball match in the troubled Northwest killed 75 villagers, and left scores maimed.
None of those watching the match or attending the Muharram procession had anything to do with the Western wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan or Iraq. They had no sympathy or affiliation whatsoever with the United States and the West. Then why have they been targeted? More importantly, what have the planners and perpetrators of these devastating attacks against unsuspecting bystanders achieved?
But whoever said there is any higher purpose or noble objective behind all this madness? There's no method in the madness. This is an all-consuming monster that does not distinguish between friends and foes. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound, more Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed in macabre attacks carried out in the name of Islam.
As regular readers would know, this humble hack has been doing his bit — for what it's worth — to question, critique and confront the big powers have been playing in the Middle East and Arab/Muslim world for centuries, and has gone to great lengths to point out repeatedly why US and Western policies are to blame for much of the mess you see in the Muslim world today, from Palestine to Pakistan.
I have also religiously underscored the fact that groups like Al-Qaeda have been birthed and fuelled by Western double standards and unjust, callous policies in the Muslim world. And that even in the face of increasing threats from extremist groups and evidence of a clear link between cause and effect, the West has tenaciously refused to address, review and change its fundamental policies in the greater Middle East region. But that's another story altogether.
Western actions cannot be an excuse for the kind of extremist violence that is being visited on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Why are innocent people — almost all of them Muslims — being made to pay for Western policies and sins? And how does it help the "cause" of these so-called defenders of Islam when they target innocent Muslims, and non-Muslims for that matter? This death cult is the ultimate injustice and calumny against a faith that celebrates peace, reason, moderation and justice in all spheres. Why, Islam literally means peace!
So what kind of Islam do these lunatics think they believe in when they send young, impressionable 13-year-olds who haven't even experienced what life is to die? The Karachi attack and the terror strike on the volleyball match are only the most recent instances of crimes committed in the name of a great faith. Pakistan's recent history, and that of the Middle East, is replete with such vile and craven crimes against humanity.
Tens of thousands of innocent Muslims — and non-Muslims — have died in this mindless violence targeting bazaars, mosques, schools, hospitals... you name it. True, the self-styled "coalition of the willing" has visited a great deal of horror on Iraq and Afghanistan. But we are not any less injured by nihilists who kill and murder with impunity in our name.
Let's face it: Some of the worst crimes against Muslims have been committed in the name of Islam by people who claim to be our defenders and champions. In fact, they are worse than the West because they pretend to be our friends and allies before they hunt us from within.
If the invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan are not our friends, the folks who live in our midst to kill us from within like a cancer are not our friends either. This is the reality Muslims have to confront, and confront it now, before it's too late. And this is the message we have to send across Muslim lands and around the world.
I do not know how many people, especially Muslims, paid attention to this year's hajj sermon. Addressing the white sea of three million pilgrims from around the world in Mecca, and by extension the larger Muslim world, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al-Sheikh used unusually strong language to draw attention to the issue that has become the bane of the Islamic world.
While Islamic scholars, including those leading prayers at the most sacred mosque on the planet, have been talking about the growing cult of the suicide bomber and warning against extremism, this is the first time anyone has condemned the menace with such force and in such unequivocal terms. Warning Muslims around the world against the extremists, the grand mufti termed the spectre of terror and suicide attacks as "the curse of Muslim lands". He singled out the extremism and the death cult of suicide attacks as the "most serious problem" facing the Muslim community today.
This is the message that has to be taken far and wide with the force and conviction with which it was delivered. This is a matter of life and death, literally. Religious scholars, politicians, intellectuals, the media and ordinary Muslims have to come together, deploying all resources and means at their disposal to free ourselves of this stigma distorting the real, pristine image of Islam before the world.
Too much innocent blood has been spilled and too many innocents have died in the name of our faith. It's time to say enough is enough! Please, not in our name! For God's sake, not in our name!
Aijaz Zaka Syed is opinion editor of Khaleej Times (Dubai, UAE).
Mark says:
The attack in Karachi, Pakistan on an ‘Ashura (Shi’ite holy day) procession was attributed to Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, two of the most extremist Sunni Salafi (fundamentalist) groups in Pakistan. Their attack on Shi'ites was part of the civil war that is going on in the Islamic world — between extremists and those whom they regard as apostates (non-extremists) and between Sunni extremists and those they regard as infidels (Shi'ites). I'm simplifying here, but I could write an article or a book (many have already done so) on these conflicts.
In any case, members of groups like Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi consider Shi'ites to be worse than Christians and even worse than Jews. In fact, some of their ideological rants claim that Shi'ites are either crypto-Jews or allied with Jews in the "World Jewish Conspiracy" to control the world and destroy Islam. The bottom line is that, unlike Aijaz Zaka Syed (who is originally from India), they do not consider Shi’ites to be Muslims and, therefore, they are prime targets.
With all due respect to Mr. Syed, I have to take issue with his assertion that “Islam literally means peace!” It is true that the root of Islam — S-L-M — is also the same root as the word SaLāM, which means peace in Arabic. However, the word Islām — as a word — literally means “submission or resignation or surrender to the will of God” and one who does so is a muSLiM.
The implication that Islām means peace comes from classical Islamic law, which divided the world into dār al-Islām (the house or abode of Islam) and dār al-harb (the house or abode of war). Dār al-Islām was the part of the world that was under Islamic rule or control. It was assumed as a matter of course by the theologians and jurists that, by definition, anyplace that came under Islamic rule or control would be an “abode of peace,” which is how the implication that Islam “literally means peace” developed. Even a cursory survey of Islamic history demonstrates that peace was more often the exception than the rule.
In classical Islamic law, dār al-harb was, by definition, in a state of ignorance and chaos that must be brought under Islamic control to bring peace. It justified the initial Arab conquests of the Byzantine and Persian empires which, in another context, were nothing more than imperial and colonialist conquests similar to those that had preceded them (see, e.g., the Greeks and Romans) and which succeeded them (see, e.g., the British and the French). It justified conquests of the Arab Muslim kingdoms in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa by the Turks (first the Seljuks and then the Ottomans). It justified the Mughal conquest of much of India. And it justified the wars between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar Empires.
Discussions about dār al-Islām and dār al-harb are an obsession of the Salafists and those who sympathize with some or many of their aims. But, as Mr. Syed implies, it is not of great concern to the majority of Muslims, who have less esoteric concerns and more basic priorities.
It should have been obvious when suicide bombers or “martyrdom operations” started in the early 1980s against Israeli, U.S., and then other Western targets (and which started out as a Shi’ite weapon before it was later adopted by Sunni Muslim extremists) that it would eventually — and inevitably — be turned against fellow Muslims. Of course, those “fellow Muslims” would be regarded as “heretics” or “apostates” or “collaborators” — so they weren’t really “fellow Muslims.” It’s a problem when theology is turned into ideology.
Finally — just so you don’t forget — my point in posting this article was to bring to my readers’ attention an example of a Muslim naysayer — and not an obscure one — to the violence that is going on in the Muslim world, and the growing realization — as exemplified by the Grand Mufti of Mecca's hajj sermon, that the djinn (genie) must be put back in the bottle before it destroys the Muslim world. There is a great danger when we generalize — that includes what I have written here.
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Report: Global Muslim population hits 1.57 billion
By Eric Gorski
Associated Press
October 8, 2009
The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practice Islam, according to a report Wednesday billed as the most comprehensive of its kind.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population whose size has long has been subject to guesswork, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.
The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan.
"This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report," said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.
Pew officials call the report the most thorough on the size and distribution of adherents of the world's second largest religion behind Christianity, which has an estimated 2.1 billion to 2.2 billion followers.
The arduous task of determining the Muslim populations in 232 countries and territories involved analyzing census reports, demographic studies and general population surveys, the report says. In cases where the data was a few years old, researchers projected 2009 numbers.
The report also sought to pinpoint the world's Sunni-Shiite breakdown, but difficulties arose because so few countries track sectarian affiliation, said Brian Grim, the project's senior researcher.
As a result, the Shiite numbers are not as precise; the report estimates that Shiites represent between 10 and 13 percent of the Muslim population, in line with or slightly lower than other studies. As much as 80 percent of the world's Shiite population lives in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.
The report provides further evidence that while the heart of Islam might beat in the Middle East, its greatest numbers lie in Asia: More than 60 percent of the world's Muslims live in Asia.
About 20 percent live in the Middle East and North Africa, 15 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2.4 percent are in Europe and 0.3 percent are in the Americas. While the Middle East and North Africa have fewer Muslims overall than Asia, the region easily claims the most Muslim-majority countries.
While those population trends are well established, the large numbers of Muslims who live as minorities in countries aren't as scrutinized. The report identified about 317 million Muslims — or one-fifth of the world's Muslim population — living in countries where Islam is not the majority religion.
About three-quarters of Muslims living as minorities are concentrated in five countries: India (161 million), Ethiopia (28 million), China (22 million), Russia (16 million) and Tanzania (13 million).
In several of these countries — from India to Nigeria and China to France — divisions featuring a volatile mix of religion, class and politics have contributed to tension and bloodshed among groups.
The immense size of majority-Hindu India is underscored by the fact that it boasts the third-largest Muslim population of any nation — yet Muslims account for just 13 percent of India's population.
"Most people think of the Muslim world being Muslims living mostly in Muslim-majority countries," Grim said. "But with India... that sort of turns that on its head a bit."
Among the report's other highlights:
A similar study on global Christianity is planned to begin next year.
Associated Press
October 8, 2009
The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practice Islam, according to a report Wednesday billed as the most comprehensive of its kind.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population whose size has long has been subject to guesswork, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.
The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan.
"This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report," said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.
Pew officials call the report the most thorough on the size and distribution of adherents of the world's second largest religion behind Christianity, which has an estimated 2.1 billion to 2.2 billion followers.
The arduous task of determining the Muslim populations in 232 countries and territories involved analyzing census reports, demographic studies and general population surveys, the report says. In cases where the data was a few years old, researchers projected 2009 numbers.
The report also sought to pinpoint the world's Sunni-Shiite breakdown, but difficulties arose because so few countries track sectarian affiliation, said Brian Grim, the project's senior researcher.
As a result, the Shiite numbers are not as precise; the report estimates that Shiites represent between 10 and 13 percent of the Muslim population, in line with or slightly lower than other studies. As much as 80 percent of the world's Shiite population lives in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.
The report provides further evidence that while the heart of Islam might beat in the Middle East, its greatest numbers lie in Asia: More than 60 percent of the world's Muslims live in Asia.
About 20 percent live in the Middle East and North Africa, 15 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2.4 percent are in Europe and 0.3 percent are in the Americas. While the Middle East and North Africa have fewer Muslims overall than Asia, the region easily claims the most Muslim-majority countries.
While those population trends are well established, the large numbers of Muslims who live as minorities in countries aren't as scrutinized. The report identified about 317 million Muslims — or one-fifth of the world's Muslim population — living in countries where Islam is not the majority religion.
About three-quarters of Muslims living as minorities are concentrated in five countries: India (161 million), Ethiopia (28 million), China (22 million), Russia (16 million) and Tanzania (13 million).
In several of these countries — from India to Nigeria and China to France — divisions featuring a volatile mix of religion, class and politics have contributed to tension and bloodshed among groups.
The immense size of majority-Hindu India is underscored by the fact that it boasts the third-largest Muslim population of any nation — yet Muslims account for just 13 percent of India's population.
"Most people think of the Muslim world being Muslims living mostly in Muslim-majority countries," Grim said. "But with India... that sort of turns that on its head a bit."
Among the report's other highlights:
- Two-thirds of all Muslims live in 10 countries. Six are in Asia (Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey), three are in North Africa (Egypt, Algeria and Morocco) and one is in sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria).
- Indonesia, which has a tradition of a more tolerant Islam, has the world's largest Muslim population (203 million, or 13 percent of the world's total). Religious extremists have been involved in several high-profile bombings there in recent years.
- In China, the highest concentrations of Muslims were in western provinces. The country experienced its worst outbreak of ethnic violence in decades when rioting broke out this summer between minority Muslim Uighurs and majority Han Chinese.
- Europe is home to about 38 million Muslims, or about five percent of its population. Germany appears to have more than 4 million Muslims — almost as many as North and South America combined. In France, where tensions have run high over an influx of Muslim immigrant laborers, the overall numbers were lower but a larger percentage of the population is Muslim.
- Of roughly 4.6 million Muslims in the Americas, more than half live in the United States although they only make up 0.8 percent of the population there. About 700,000 people in Canada are Muslim, or about 2 percent of the total population.
A similar study on global Christianity is planned to begin next year.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
What Can We Learn About Mohamed Atta From His Work as a Student of Urban Planning?: Part I (and my comments)
Mark says:
This is the first in a series of articles by Daniel Brook on the connections between urban planning and architecture and the leader of the 9/11 attacks, Muhammad Atta, who did his master's thesis in urban planning at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany. There are several themes that should hopefully catch your notice in these articles (I will post the succeeding articles in the following days). For example, a number of terms (e.g., Oriental) are used but not always in the "expected" ways. The present is not always just a continuation of the past and many things that we assume always were may actually be relatively recent developments. And what we sometimes assume to be "Islamic" or "Arab" (a reflection of the view that the present is just a continuation of the past) is not necessarily "Islamic" or "Arab" but had their origins elsewhere.
Finally, you will no longer see this kind of reporting when the "mainstream media" goes belly up.
The Architect of 9/11
In Aleppo, Syria, Mohamed Atta thought he could build the ideal Islamic city.
By Daniel Brook
Slate.com
September 8, 2009
A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian [at] the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center." While the Middle East scholar had never met the lead hijacker, Ajami knew his type: the young Arab male living abroad, tantalized by yet alienated from Western modernity, who retreats into fundamentalist piety.
Eight years after 9/11, we still almost know Mohamed Atta. We can almost see him, a gaunt and spectral figure making his way through Hamburg's red-light district en route to his radical storefront Al-Quds Mosque. We still vividly recall his ominous visa photograph. But the man in that photograph remains a cipher, his eyes vacant. How did those eyes see the world?
We'll never know for sure, but part of the answer may lie in a document he left behind, one that has strangely gone largely unexamined: his master's thesis in urban planning. While the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian street toughs tapped for their brawn, Atta was chosen for his brains. Trained as an architect in his native Egypt, he went on to pursue a master's degree in city planning at the Hamburg University of Technology, in Germany.
In the climate after 9/11, when attempts to understand the terrorists were often seen as apologies for them, the thesis Atta wrote was not given close scrutiny. Newsweek, among other outlets, reported that the thesis lashed out at the imposition of modernist high-rise buildings on Arab cities, but only its chilling dedication — "My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, Lord of the worlds" — got wide coverage. When the British Prospect magazine sent a reporter to Hamburg a few months after Sept. 11, she dismissed out of hand the idea that Atta's academic work was worth considering. After securing an interview with Atta's thesis adviser, professor Dittmar Machule, the reporter concluded it was "ludicrous that Atta's ideas on how to preserve an old quarter of Aleppo are regarded as a window into his terrorist's mind." Machule bolstered this impression, telling the Associated Press that the thesis had "no anti-Americanism, no anti-Zionism, no anti-Christianity, just good thinking."
Perhaps the subject — the architecture of a little-known Syrian city — sounded too esoteric to be relevant. But it always struck me as a missed opportunity to understand Atta — and, perhaps, to understand what led him to commit his hideous crime. So I went to Hamburg to see what I could learn about the thesis. I then retraced Atta's academic research across three continents, interviewing those who knew him as an urban-planning student and trying to see the places I visited through Atta's eyes — those of a keen architectural observer wearing ideological blinders.
I met with professor Machule at his office in Hamburg, where he keeps the only known copy of Atta's thesis under lock and key. While Machule acknowledges that publishing the document would be in the public interest, he worries Atta's father, a retired EgyptAir attorney who maintains his son's innocence, would sue if the document were published without family consent. But Machule was willing to walk through the thesis with me. I sat in the spot where Atta gave his thesis defense in 1999, and together we made our way through the German document section by section. Machule translated portions of it and responded to my questions. The thesis was also heavy on visuals — photographs, maps, and sketches of proposed redevelopments.
The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. The highways and high-rises are to be removed — in the meticulous color-coded maps, they are all slated for demolition. Traditional courtyard homes and market stalls are to be rebuilt.
For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. "The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected," Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to "engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind," which he sees as "out of place in Islamic society."
The subtitle of the thesis is Neighborhood Development in an Islamic-Oriental City, and the use of that anachronistic term — Islamic-Oriental city — is telling. The term denotes a concept rooted in 19th-century European Orientalism, according to which Islamic civilization and Western civilization are entirely distinct and opposite: The dynamic, rational West gallops toward the future while the backward East remains cut off from foreign influence, exclusively defined by Islam, and frozen in time. In his academic work, Atta takes the Orientalist conceit of two distinct civilizations, one superior, the other inferior, and simply flips the chauvinism from pro-Western to pro-Muslim.
Today, the "Islamic-Oriental city" is a teetering intellectual edifice that survives only on the right-wing fringes of academic Middle East studies, in the imagination of tourists seeking to experience the "authentic" Thousand and One Nights Arabia, and, as Atta's work makes clear, in the minds of Islamist radicals. Ironically, there could hardly be better evidence for the fallaciousness of the "Islamic-Oriental city" concept than the urban history of Aleppo and specifically of its Bab al-Nasr neighborhood, the old city quarter that Atta describes — and egregiously misinterprets — in his thesis.
Professor Machule told me he found Atta's reactionary plans for the neighborhood impractical but not objectionable. "He made a proposal for a design which seems to be from the 17th century," Machule said. "I would say this is not realistic, these are dreams. But why should young people not have dreams?" Atta's ideas about the role of women conflicted with Machule's sensibilities, but the professor said he saw the benefit of training a talented Egyptian who could bring Western urban planning techniques — if not Western architectural styles — back to the Arab world. When Atta refused to shake the hand of the lone woman on his thesis defense committee, Machule explained to her that he meant no offense by it, that this was simply his strict Muslim practice. Atta received high marks.
Degree in hand, Atta left Germany. A few months later, over a Ramadan feast in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden informed him that he would be a martyr. Atta did not choose the World Trade Center as a target; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mechanical engineer now commonly called "the architect of 9/11," did that, likely because his nephew Ramsi Youssef had tried and failed to level the buildings in 1993. But when Atta was told he would lead a mission to destroy America's tallest and most famous modernist high-rise complex — the apotheosis of the building type he dreamed of razing in Aleppo — he may have felt the hand of divine providence at work.
Daniel Brook is the author of The Trap: Selling Out To Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America and has written on architecture for Harper's and Metropolis, among other publications. He is at work on a book about the architecture of Westernization. Travel for this series was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
This is the first in a series of articles by Daniel Brook on the connections between urban planning and architecture and the leader of the 9/11 attacks, Muhammad Atta, who did his master's thesis in urban planning at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany. There are several themes that should hopefully catch your notice in these articles (I will post the succeeding articles in the following days). For example, a number of terms (e.g., Oriental) are used but not always in the "expected" ways. The present is not always just a continuation of the past and many things that we assume always were may actually be relatively recent developments. And what we sometimes assume to be "Islamic" or "Arab" (a reflection of the view that the present is just a continuation of the past) is not necessarily "Islamic" or "Arab" but had their origins elsewhere.
Finally, you will no longer see this kind of reporting when the "mainstream media" goes belly up.
The Architect of 9/11
In Aleppo, Syria, Mohamed Atta thought he could build the ideal Islamic city.
By Daniel Brook
Slate.com
September 8, 2009
A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian [at] the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center." While the Middle East scholar had never met the lead hijacker, Ajami knew his type: the young Arab male living abroad, tantalized by yet alienated from Western modernity, who retreats into fundamentalist piety.
Eight years after 9/11, we still almost know Mohamed Atta. We can almost see him, a gaunt and spectral figure making his way through Hamburg's red-light district en route to his radical storefront Al-Quds Mosque. We still vividly recall his ominous visa photograph. But the man in that photograph remains a cipher, his eyes vacant. How did those eyes see the world?
We'll never know for sure, but part of the answer may lie in a document he left behind, one that has strangely gone largely unexamined: his master's thesis in urban planning. While the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian street toughs tapped for their brawn, Atta was chosen for his brains. Trained as an architect in his native Egypt, he went on to pursue a master's degree in city planning at the Hamburg University of Technology, in Germany.
In the climate after 9/11, when attempts to understand the terrorists were often seen as apologies for them, the thesis Atta wrote was not given close scrutiny. Newsweek, among other outlets, reported that the thesis lashed out at the imposition of modernist high-rise buildings on Arab cities, but only its chilling dedication — "My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, Lord of the worlds" — got wide coverage. When the British Prospect magazine sent a reporter to Hamburg a few months after Sept. 11, she dismissed out of hand the idea that Atta's academic work was worth considering. After securing an interview with Atta's thesis adviser, professor Dittmar Machule, the reporter concluded it was "ludicrous that Atta's ideas on how to preserve an old quarter of Aleppo are regarded as a window into his terrorist's mind." Machule bolstered this impression, telling the Associated Press that the thesis had "no anti-Americanism, no anti-Zionism, no anti-Christianity, just good thinking."
Perhaps the subject — the architecture of a little-known Syrian city — sounded too esoteric to be relevant. But it always struck me as a missed opportunity to understand Atta — and, perhaps, to understand what led him to commit his hideous crime. So I went to Hamburg to see what I could learn about the thesis. I then retraced Atta's academic research across three continents, interviewing those who knew him as an urban-planning student and trying to see the places I visited through Atta's eyes — those of a keen architectural observer wearing ideological blinders.
I met with professor Machule at his office in Hamburg, where he keeps the only known copy of Atta's thesis under lock and key. While Machule acknowledges that publishing the document would be in the public interest, he worries Atta's father, a retired EgyptAir attorney who maintains his son's innocence, would sue if the document were published without family consent. But Machule was willing to walk through the thesis with me. I sat in the spot where Atta gave his thesis defense in 1999, and together we made our way through the German document section by section. Machule translated portions of it and responded to my questions. The thesis was also heavy on visuals — photographs, maps, and sketches of proposed redevelopments.
The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. The highways and high-rises are to be removed — in the meticulous color-coded maps, they are all slated for demolition. Traditional courtyard homes and market stalls are to be rebuilt.
For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. "The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected," Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to "engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind," which he sees as "out of place in Islamic society."
The subtitle of the thesis is Neighborhood Development in an Islamic-Oriental City, and the use of that anachronistic term — Islamic-Oriental city — is telling. The term denotes a concept rooted in 19th-century European Orientalism, according to which Islamic civilization and Western civilization are entirely distinct and opposite: The dynamic, rational West gallops toward the future while the backward East remains cut off from foreign influence, exclusively defined by Islam, and frozen in time. In his academic work, Atta takes the Orientalist conceit of two distinct civilizations, one superior, the other inferior, and simply flips the chauvinism from pro-Western to pro-Muslim.
Today, the "Islamic-Oriental city" is a teetering intellectual edifice that survives only on the right-wing fringes of academic Middle East studies, in the imagination of tourists seeking to experience the "authentic" Thousand and One Nights Arabia, and, as Atta's work makes clear, in the minds of Islamist radicals. Ironically, there could hardly be better evidence for the fallaciousness of the "Islamic-Oriental city" concept than the urban history of Aleppo and specifically of its Bab al-Nasr neighborhood, the old city quarter that Atta describes — and egregiously misinterprets — in his thesis.
Professor Machule told me he found Atta's reactionary plans for the neighborhood impractical but not objectionable. "He made a proposal for a design which seems to be from the 17th century," Machule said. "I would say this is not realistic, these are dreams. But why should young people not have dreams?" Atta's ideas about the role of women conflicted with Machule's sensibilities, but the professor said he saw the benefit of training a talented Egyptian who could bring Western urban planning techniques — if not Western architectural styles — back to the Arab world. When Atta refused to shake the hand of the lone woman on his thesis defense committee, Machule explained to her that he meant no offense by it, that this was simply his strict Muslim practice. Atta received high marks.
Degree in hand, Atta left Germany. A few months later, over a Ramadan feast in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden informed him that he would be a martyr. Atta did not choose the World Trade Center as a target; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mechanical engineer now commonly called "the architect of 9/11," did that, likely because his nephew Ramsi Youssef had tried and failed to level the buildings in 1993. But when Atta was told he would lead a mission to destroy America's tallest and most famous modernist high-rise complex — the apotheosis of the building type he dreamed of razing in Aleppo — he may have felt the hand of divine providence at work.
Daniel Brook is the author of The Trap: Selling Out To Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America and has written on architecture for Harper's and Metropolis, among other publications. He is at work on a book about the architecture of Westernization. Travel for this series was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
The Gazan Jilbab
By Diana Mukkaled
Asharq Alawsat (London)
August 28, 2009
The Hamas movement was enraged by the media and the Agence France Press [AFP] in particular, which published a report that was circulated concerning Hamas’ decision to impose the Hijab and Jilbab [traditional, long, loose-fitting robe] on female students in schools in the Gaza Strip. The report also spoke of the decision that only female staff would be allowed to work in girls’ schools.
The Hamas-affiliated Interior Ministry issued a lengthy statement that condemned the AFP report, describing it as “superficial and lacking the required media transparency and objectivity, as well as being selective.”
The lengthy statement did not refute or deny any of the basic information revealed in the AFP report by school principals, teachers, and female students, nor did Hamas deny that female students would be required to wear the Hijab and Jilbab, and would be subjected to punishment should they fail to comply with this. A number of statements and decisions were made following Hamas’ decision and these were verbally conveyed to school principals.
There is no doubt that the statement of clarification issued by Hamas in response to the media report and the disapproval of the decision it had already taken led to a fundamental dilemma within the movement. This is accompanied by its recent experiences and the numerous, serious mistakes that Hamas has made over the past few years.
Hamas failed to justify this step and was cautious about adopting it; it was happy just to hide behind repeating the same old phrases such as “the Palestinian nation is a conservative and a Muslim one” and that “wearing the Hijab for female students is a personal decision that stems from the family and is not imposed by force.” Therefore, the tolerance that Hamas claimed to have when it seized power in Gaza by force has disappeared on more than one occasion and the issue of Hijab in school will not be the last time this will happen.
This recent restriction that Hamas is imposing on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that further aggravates the crises is a new step taken by Hamas in an area where nothing has been achieved except more sanctions and continuous suffering for the Palestinians. Once again, Hamas is defending itself by casting accusations against the media and demanding that it focus on the Israeli sanctions and the sufferings caused by the occupation forces (which of course does deserve media coverage and attention), and asks the media to turn a blind eye to its own fatal errors and failures. This is the foundation of the Hamas experience in power. It is not enough that Hamas gives in to the media that is sympathetic towards it, i.e., those who are either refrained from talking about this particular issue or others who side with the movement to the extent that many have warned against such bias.
Once again, the media is the target of ill will, coercion and dismissal. How can it not be when it is held responsible for revealing such intentions and orientations? But on the other hand, how could Hamas believe that a decision such as imposing the Hijab on students would pass unnoticed and uncovered by the media? The Hamas authority is not meant to be ashamed of its decisions but it seems that we are facing an authority that is equivocal in its intentions and one that demands the media to conspire along with it.
Hamas is not supposed to be ashamed of such a decision, especially as it is supposedly in harmony with its constitution and its own doctrine. Its attempt at equivocation is evidence that its doctrine is flawed and Hamas cannot declare this publicly. The media can host such discussions without necessarily having to accept them.
Diana Mukkaled is a prominent and well respected TV journalist in the Arab world, thanks to her phenomenal show "Bil Ayn Al Mojarada" (By The Naked Eye), a series of documentaries around controversial areas and topics which airs on Lebanon's leading local and satellite channel "Future Television."
Asharq Alawsat (London)
August 28, 2009
The Hamas movement was enraged by the media and the Agence France Press [AFP] in particular, which published a report that was circulated concerning Hamas’ decision to impose the Hijab and Jilbab [traditional, long, loose-fitting robe] on female students in schools in the Gaza Strip. The report also spoke of the decision that only female staff would be allowed to work in girls’ schools.
The Hamas-affiliated Interior Ministry issued a lengthy statement that condemned the AFP report, describing it as “superficial and lacking the required media transparency and objectivity, as well as being selective.”
The lengthy statement did not refute or deny any of the basic information revealed in the AFP report by school principals, teachers, and female students, nor did Hamas deny that female students would be required to wear the Hijab and Jilbab, and would be subjected to punishment should they fail to comply with this. A number of statements and decisions were made following Hamas’ decision and these were verbally conveyed to school principals.
There is no doubt that the statement of clarification issued by Hamas in response to the media report and the disapproval of the decision it had already taken led to a fundamental dilemma within the movement. This is accompanied by its recent experiences and the numerous, serious mistakes that Hamas has made over the past few years.
Hamas failed to justify this step and was cautious about adopting it; it was happy just to hide behind repeating the same old phrases such as “the Palestinian nation is a conservative and a Muslim one” and that “wearing the Hijab for female students is a personal decision that stems from the family and is not imposed by force.” Therefore, the tolerance that Hamas claimed to have when it seized power in Gaza by force has disappeared on more than one occasion and the issue of Hijab in school will not be the last time this will happen.
This recent restriction that Hamas is imposing on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that further aggravates the crises is a new step taken by Hamas in an area where nothing has been achieved except more sanctions and continuous suffering for the Palestinians. Once again, Hamas is defending itself by casting accusations against the media and demanding that it focus on the Israeli sanctions and the sufferings caused by the occupation forces (which of course does deserve media coverage and attention), and asks the media to turn a blind eye to its own fatal errors and failures. This is the foundation of the Hamas experience in power. It is not enough that Hamas gives in to the media that is sympathetic towards it, i.e., those who are either refrained from talking about this particular issue or others who side with the movement to the extent that many have warned against such bias.
Once again, the media is the target of ill will, coercion and dismissal. How can it not be when it is held responsible for revealing such intentions and orientations? But on the other hand, how could Hamas believe that a decision such as imposing the Hijab on students would pass unnoticed and uncovered by the media? The Hamas authority is not meant to be ashamed of its decisions but it seems that we are facing an authority that is equivocal in its intentions and one that demands the media to conspire along with it.
Hamas is not supposed to be ashamed of such a decision, especially as it is supposedly in harmony with its constitution and its own doctrine. Its attempt at equivocation is evidence that its doctrine is flawed and Hamas cannot declare this publicly. The media can host such discussions without necessarily having to accept them.
Diana Mukkaled is a prominent and well respected TV journalist in the Arab world, thanks to her phenomenal show "Bil Ayn Al Mojarada" (By The Naked Eye), a series of documentaries around controversial areas and topics which airs on Lebanon's leading local and satellite channel "Future Television."
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The Trouble With Islam
Sadly, mainstream Muslim teaching accepts and promotes violence.
By Tawfik Hamid
The Wall Street Journal
April 3, 2007
Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right.
But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.
These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name — Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.
It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.
The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace.
Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals — who unceasingly claim to support human rights — have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.
Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria — which happened in the last few decades — or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please.
The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods.
Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession.
Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies.
Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today.
Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand — but so far haven't — that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates."
All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.
Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us.
Dr. Hamid, a onetime member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West.
By Tawfik Hamid
The Wall Street Journal
April 3, 2007
Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right.
But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.
These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name — Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.
It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.
The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace.
Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals — who unceasingly claim to support human rights — have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.
Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria — which happened in the last few decades — or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please.
The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods.
Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession.
Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies.
Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today.
Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand — but so far haven't — that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates."
All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.
Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us.
Dr. Hamid, a onetime member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West.
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