Asian Tribune - October 15, 2017
Book Review:
Islam & Muslims in the 21st Century by Abdus Sattar Ghazali (2017)
By Habib Siddiqui
In 1978 Professor Edward Said’s book –‘Orientalism’ – was published. It was a groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East by the (late) Columbia University professor.
Nearly four decades after its first publication, the book remains a modern classic. In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Professor Said traced the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident.
In August 2003, nearly 23 months after 9/11, writing for theb> Al Ahram (weekly online), Professor Said wrote, “I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn't.” He was referring to his seminal work, Orientalism.
The trillion-dollar question that we must ask today is: has the situation improved since 1978 or even 2003? The answer is provided by veteran journalist Abdus Sattar Ghazali in his book - Islam & Muslims in the 21st Century. He shows that our world is more divided politically and ideologically today than ever before despite the fact that we are more connected virtually via electronic alternative media.
American forces are still in Afghanistan, some 16 years after the country was invaded and occupied. Iraq is in a gargantuan mess since American invasion and subsequent occupation, defying world opinion including the UN, in 2003 with millions of displaced folks everywhere. Thanks to the neo-imperial manipulation, the country may eventually get divided along ethnic lines with Kurds getting their own state in the north, creating further tension in the region, esp. with Turkey which has a sizable amount of Kurds in the east. Syria is under civil war where its majority Sunnis have been bearing the brunt of Assad’s mass murdering campaigns. Millions of Sunnis have been forced to seek refuge in nearby countries, including western Europe. A new nemesis – Daesh (or ISIS), replacing Al Qa’eda – falsely claiming to be Islamic and religious – has appeared in the bloody scene to further complicate the scenario and resurrect old Orientalism with the fabric of Islamophobia. Like the RAND-robots in the USA, the ISIS-robots are doing their best to terrorize everyone, redefining the clash of civilizations – ‘us’ against ‘them’. Not accidentally, the vast majority of the victims have been Muslims.
The extremist, ultra-nationalist and fascist forces are on the rise in many parts of our world (including the USA) and are even running governments in places like Austria, Poland, India, Myanmar, the Philippines, Hungary, Bulgaria and (arguably) the USA.
America has a new president in Donald J. Trump who purportedly wants to make America great again whatever greatness means to him. Many experts see him as a fascist-in-making. He has proven himself to be arrogant, confrontational, vulgar, rude, egotistic, self-contradictory and tweeter-crazy – just to name a fraction of his long list of depraved attributes that includes lying. He is also hostile to the Blacks, Hispanics and esp. Muslims. He wants to ban Muslims from immigrating into or taking refuge in the USA. Recently, he has decertified the Iran nuclear deal – a stupid proposition that is making every world leader nervous. Although he has replaced or removed some white supremacists from his inner circle of the White House advisers (e.g., Bannon and Gorka), Trump remains a very temperamental world leader and, as such, is the most dangerous person on earth who can do the greatest harm to humanity.
Sitting in the citadel of worldly power, surrounded by empire-dreaming neoconservatives, the temptation to be a neo-Pharaoh in our age is often too great to rewrite history by ignoring the mere fact that history cannot be white-washed or swept clean like a blackboard so that "we" in the Christian Occident might engrave our own future in ‘them’ - the non-Christian Orient - and impose our own forms of life and culture, including polity, for these ‘lesser people’ to follow.
During the Bush Jr. era of ‘global war on terror’, esp. after 9/11, we heard the high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and innumerable peoples with their myriad sediments of history, which include countless histories – good and bad, great and ugly – and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, don’t matter and can simply be swept aside or ignored like rubbish, or tossed around like a pile of playing cards or peanuts in a jar. Haughty and irrational though it may seem, the sad fact is, as Ghazali shows in his book, there is no shortage of such ‘civilizational’ plans and attempts since the dawn of this new century.
Libya’s Gaddafi has been lynched and replaced turning the once stable, desert oasis, people’s republic into a failed and fractured state of two competing governments each vying for legitimacy. Egypt’s former dictator Mubarak had a better luck, albeit replaced through a popular revolution that brought a civilian government – the first in Egyptian modern history – that was soon to be violently replaced – courtesy of the corrupt Saudis, Emiratis and their western patrons. While murderous Mubarak’s death sentence was commuted to prison time to be ultimately released free, the popularly elected President Mohammad Morsi and thousands of leaders and members of the Ikhwan-al-Muslimin are rotting in the prisons awaiting execution, with many already being excuted, in Sisi’s Egypt – the new Pharaoh.
The Arab Spring – the popular Arab uprising that was supposed to better the life of hundreds of millions of ordinary Arabs - was torpedoed by world powers and their client states in the Gulf that wanted to maintain the status quo, or more correctly, let the Arabs kill each other to further weakening them. Yemen and Syria are in a mess with hundreds of thousands killed and millions of people displaced from their bombed and burned out homes, towns and cities. Seemingly, the life of an ordinary Muslim has become so cheap that no one really cares about it any longer.
And seemingly, there is no end in sight. Every new day is proving to be a worse day than the day before. Even Muslims living far away from the Middle East in places like Myanmar, the Philippines, China and India are not safe from repressive, ultra-nationalist – or more correctly, fascist - governments who are exploiting the terror card to kill and/or evict Muslims from their ancestral homes.
In India, under the name of protection of the cow, Hindu vigilantes and Hindutvadi fascists are lynching Muslims even on the suspicion of herding, transporting, storing and eating beef. Taj Mahal, one of the finest examples of Islamic architecture that is visited by hundreds of thousands of international tourists each year generating hundreds of millions for the Indian treasury, was recently removed from an official booklet on the State of Uttar Pradesh’s tourist destinations. This comes on the heels of the State’s Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, declaring that the Taj Mahal does not “reflect Indian culture.” The monument’s Muslim-ness or Islamic character is unacceptable to the Hindu fascists of the BJP. Adityanath’s initiation into the broader Hindu Nationalist clique – which includes the militant Sangh Parivar/Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and umbrella Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) – began with an act of iconoclasm. He was also an activist behind the Ram Temple that saw the demolition of the historic Babri mosque (a 16th century house of worship built by the Mughal dynasty’s founder, Muhammad Babar) in Ayodhya.
If these be the new face of secular India under the rule of Hindutvadi fascists what can Muslims expect in Suu Kyi’s Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) in which they face extinction as part of a very sinister national project to wipe out Muslim identity! Denied of any right, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Muslim minorities, esp. the Rohingya, there are victims of a ‘slow-burning’ genocide that has seen in the last few weeks alone the forced exodus of more than 530,000 of this ‘most persecuted’ people to Bangladesh, let alone the wholesale destruction of all their worldly possessions. Their males, including children have been killed, women raped and properties looted before their homes, schools, shops, business centers, madrasas and mosques are burned down.
The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott
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