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Download this: Protecting civilians from terror

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, On The Road on Nov 12, 2007

Readers of this blog are a bloody demanding lot. If you’re not asking for new translations, you want more podcasts and the video of my latest speech. How’s a girl supposed to meet her deadlines, dammit?

But you know I love you (including the cruelest of my critics, for love drives you crazy) and I’m happy to oblige whenever I can.

Voila, the video of my presentation at a compelling conference entitled “Overcoming Extremism: Protecting Civilians from Terrorist Violence.” Its sponsor, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in DC, invited me to shed light on community responses to religious extremism.

Watch the video and you’ll also see a spirited exchange between me and Dr. Hany El-Banna, head of the international humanitarian group Islamic Relief. He’s a moderate Muslim whereas I’m a reform-minded one. And that makes a world of difference.

Which is also why I engage in a feisty volley of views with a Syrian scholar. He embraces the message of renewing ijtihad, Islam’s tradition of critical thinking. But he says that there’s already an Islamic “consensus” about important issues.

I tell him that until many more Muslims get over the fear of expressing themselves, any “consensus” is illusory because it’s determined by the privileged few who feel safe enough to speak. Call it the consensus of the confident.

The scholar shakes his head. I’m not surprised. He’s of the elite that naturally wants to protect its vice-grip on voice. Sadly, mullahs aren’t the only ones that reform-minded Muslims need to challenge.

Other conference highlights captured on video:

* Aryeh Neier, Executive Director of the Open Society Institute, addresses the failure of moral leadership on the part of civilians and not just political leaders, especially in the midst of genocide.

* Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, brilliantly explains why Americans have to keep human rights at the forefront of their agenda. It’s not just for their own integrity. It’s also because other countries take U.S. indifference as a license to absolve themselves of power abuses.

She tells the story of her recent meeting with Russian premier Vladmir Putin. When she questions his misuse of authority, Mr. Putin says only two words: Guantanamo Bay. The “export value” of a dirty conscience, she concludes, is devastating. That’s a slammin’ point.

On the lighter side, I met a young Sudanese blogger at the conference. Here’s his entry about our encounter. No, he’s not an agent of the Mossad.  I’ve double-checked with my Israeli masters.

Remember Iran

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Nov 09, 2007

With Pakistan all over the news, it’s easy to forget that human rights continue being trampled in Iran, too.

Two years after a military general named Zia ul Haq staged a coup and grabbed power in Pakistan, the Iranian revolution happened. That also turned out to be something of a coup: the Ayatollah’s promises of democracy never materialized. Quite the opposite.

Today, the daily dignity of the Iranian people is being sacrificed at Allah’s altar — an abuse of Islam as much as of people. While the mass imprisonment of democrats in Pakistan dominates human rights discourse this week, Iran’s persistent execution of children should be an equally high priority.

I’m proud to say that my country of Canada hasn’t forgotten, even though the United Nations would like it to. What do I mean? Glad you asked.  Read this.

How Bush should respond to Mush

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Nov 07, 2007

Why won’t the White House do something useful in response to Pervez Musharraf’s assault on Pakistan’s secularists? What I keep hearing is that George W. Bush desperately needs to conserve his allies in the war against terror.

Bollocks. Here are three reasons that this argument reeks of hypocrisy:

First, Musharraf’s cruel crackdown on human rights activists, journalists and people who take the rule of law seriously is a war of terror. Bush needs to name it. T-e-r-r-o-r-i-s-m: the deliberate targeting of innocents to inflict intimidation on an entire population.

Second, conserving allies requires you to identify who your allies actually are. In the fight for democracy, your friends are those who support an independent judiciary, women’s equality, minority rights and transparency. Read: the very Pakistanis being brutalized by Musharraf now.

Finally, conserving allies has rarely been on the to-do list of the Bush administration. Remember those riots over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons? Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East orchestrated much of the violence. Their target (when it wasn’t nuns and aid workers) was Denmark — a free country that has dispatched troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Now there’s a U.S. ally worth preserving.

But how did the State Department respond under Bush’s direction? Since I still believe in civilian courts, you be the judge:

“These cartoons are indeed offensive to the beliefs of Muslims. We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices.” - Justin Higgins, February 3, 2006.

My verdict? The Bush administration preferred to validate the choreographed outrage of some Muslims living under manipulative dictators than to conserve a key friend — Denmark — whose own Muslims, in the main, refused to get riled up about the cartoons. The dissing of Denmark wasn’t just reckless. It was feckless.

No, my sweet gulab jamans, I don’t buy the excuse that America needs Musharraf to the point of tip-toeing around tyranny. What America needs is integrity to retain any shred of cred in the battle for human dignity.

Benazir Bhutto sums up the challenge in her New York Times commentary. She’s finding her voice. When will Washington?

Amid crisis, Pakistan has promise

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Nov 04, 2007

Pakistan’s founder with India’s liberator
(Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Developing news: President Pervez Musharraf has suspended Pakistan’s constitution and fired the chief justice of the Supreme Court. This, he insists, will show radical Islamists who’s boss.

This, I insist, is more than a betrayal of Musharraf’s self-described moderation as a Muslim. It’s a betrayal of Pakistan’s potential for pluralism. Let me explain.

Days ago, I shared tea with Akbar Ahmed, the world-renowned Pakistani anthropologist, author, filmmaker, diplomat and proponent of tolerant Islam.

Prof. Ahmed entertained me with stories of a time when Pakistan’s democratic politicians stuck it to the feudal fanatics by engaging them rather than declaring emergency law. Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was once heckled by a religious fundamentalist. “You drink alcohol!” shouted the critic.

“Yes,” retorted Bhutto, “but I don’t drink the blood of the people!”

His defiant and witty response captured the spirit of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder. In 1947, Jinnah exuded high hopes for his people:

“You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques, or to any other place of worship in the State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed. That has nothing to do with the business of the state. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens of one state… You will find that in due course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense… but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”

Jinnah meant every word of his unconventional vision because he, himself, lived as a maverick. He adored his non-Muslim wife. And, as Akbar Ahmed emphasized to me, Jinnah’s sister often appeared with her bro on the campaign trail. Her visibility attested to Islam’s embrace of women as partners of men.

I must confess that as a pluralist, I’m no fan of the fact that many Muslims demanded a state separate from India. But when they got it, at least it came with the premise — and promise — of individual freedom.

Which brings me back to Musharraf. In a now-famous speech, he described contemporary Muslims as “the poorest, the most illiterate, the most backward, the most unhealthy, the most unenlightened, the most deprived, and the weakest of all the human race.” Since 9/11, he’s trumpeted himself as the standard-bearer of an open-minded, broad-hearted Islam.

Today, Musharraf is just another strongman foisting a media blackout on the masses while feigning to communicate with them through a stilted TV address which — did I already mention? — is blacked out anyway.

Pakistan can do better. It has done better. At this historic moment, the nation’s challenge is to be informed by its founder’s philosophy while resolutely looking to the future.

The exact same can be said of Islam. And, for that matter, of America. Which is why the stakes are so high here. If Pakistanis can live up to their promise, there’s no excuse for the rest of us.

Intervening in Afghanistan

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, On The Road on Nov 02, 2007

The debate is raging in various NATO countries - especially Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada - about how much longer to leave Western troops in Afghanistan. I’m sure I’ll be asked (or challenged) about the issue tonight, when I appear at a major bookstore in Canada’s capital, Ottawa.

Let me do my many critics a favour by tipping my hand. In a nutshell, here’s why I support humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan:

* Many Afghanis say they need NATO troops. Shall I pretend that the locals suffer from “false consciousness”? That they don’t know their lives the way that I, as a public intellectual, do? Doesn’t such haughtiness only replicate the neo-imperialist approach in which a distant elite lords it over the people on the ground?

* Yes, the mission in Afghanistan is marked as much by combat as by peacekeeping. But isn’t that what a soldier should expect? For the public to go limp when some of our uniformed women and men die (as 72 Canadians already have in Afghanistan) is to live a faithless fiction — and one that the Taliban loves to exploit. Religious fanatics rely on the international community’s rudderlessness. The less we stand for something, the faster we’ll fall for anything.

Soldiers, by and large, are proud to take a stand. Individuals sign up to the army knowing that they might be deployed to dangerous places and come home in coffins. Who exactly is the public fooling by denying this possibility?

* You can be anti-war and pro-intervention at the same time. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Ambassador Swanee Hunt, a noted feminist who teaches at Harvard and co-authored This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace. Read what Ambassador Hunt says in Newsweek’s special issue on “Women and Leadership”:

“When I studied World War II, I always wondered about the policymakers sitting behind their big mahogany desks as Hitler overran Europe.

Then, during the Bosnian war, I was the U.S. ambassador in Vienna. Suddenly, I was behind a big mahogany desk of my own, hearing horrifying reports from embassy personnel who were interviewing the refugees pouring into Austria.

The responsibility was awesome. I couldn’t sleep at night. I wondered if I should resign my position to protest the fact [that] my country was not intervening.

I decided I could do more by working inside than I could by leaving, but it was a terrible, terrible moral dilemma for me. I used every bit of connection I had to try to convince the president to intervene. And when Clinton finally intervened, the war was over very quickly. Meanwhile, 200,000 people died needlessly.”

Now, I realize my critics will pounce on Ambassador Hunt’s words, “the war was over very quickly.” That, they’ll proclaim, is the difference between Afghanistan and the Balkans.

But, in fact, strife in the Balkans is not over. Ambassador Hunt was referring to the genocide, not the reconstruction effort afterwards. Given the reality that peace and stability haven’t yet arrived in Bosnia or its environs, should intervention have been avoided? Is the 200,000 Balkan body count a fair price for sparing Western soldiers the opportunity to do their jobs?

If so, let’s come clean and simply declare Western lives more worthy of protection than the lives of women, children and minorities elsewhere. We owe ourselves — and the world — a modicum of honesty.

Sucking up to the Saudi king

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 30, 2007

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah is in the UK for a state visit. Just when you think the Bush White House has mastered how to kiss the ring of the king, British officialdom manages to out-do Washington — not only in ceremony but also in hypocrisy.

After piously declaring human rights to be “universal”, and after warning despots from Zimbabwe to Burma that they won’t be embraced by 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has issued a slick (dare I say oily) message to Abdullah: Welcome, chap!

A pity, really.

Let me explain why diplomacy is duplicity in this case. Saudi Arabia does not represent Islamic fundamentalism , as the fundamentals of my religion are supposed to emphasize God’s mercy. Rather, the Saudi Kingdom epitomizes foundamentalism. By this I mean an ideological fixation with the founding moment moment of Islam — the 7th century.

Saudi teachings conflate personal faith with tribal culture, imposing on women a stifling style of dress and behavior, codifying the inferiority of minorities (including Muslim minorities), enforcing uncritical allegiance to the higher-ups, equating debate with division and, ultimately, reducing the unity of believers to uniformity of belief.

All of these are signs of a tribal time-warp. They’ve been exported to much of the Muslim world through a pact that Saudi Arabia’s father struck with clerics for the sake of their support. Lubricated by oil wealth, the deal is that the Saudi state will spread a spartan islam — foundamentalism — that strips the faith of its intellectual vibrancy and God-given free will.

In this way, hundreds of millions of Muslims have become culturally occupied by the norms of Arabia. To treat the Saudi regime to a diplomatic jamboree is to reinforce this malicous — and dangerous — confusion between desert culture and pluralistic Islam.

Am I the one being too dogmatic here? If so, allow me to challenge my own position (which no self-respect dogmatist would ever do). The British government should, indeed, receive the Saudi king — but only if Prime Minister Brown is taking tips from London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, who frequently hosts Muslim imperialists. We wouldn’t want a repeat of the inhospitality that Iran’s president recently received in New York. Britain, thank Allah, is far more progressive than America.

And we progressives are the last great hope for defending the human rights owed to colonizers of color. In that spirit, I shall keep a stiff upper lip.

Hanson and hope

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, On The Road on Oct 28, 2007

 

Irshad, Isaac and Taylor Hanson, and Michelle Douglas

Last week, I blogged about speaking to a stadium full of students, all pumped by their potential to become champions for human rights. Dubbed “Me to We Day,” the event had the unmistakable feel of a rock concert, complete with, well, rockers.

At the after-party, the Tulsa-based band, Hanson, sent an emissary to me and my best friend, Michelle. “They want to meet you,” the emissary breathlessly whispered, chasing us down with a look of concern about why we’re bolting early. (Hey, I’d flown overnight to make the event; sleep dep had set in with attitude.)

Figuring it’ll be a five-minute hello and how y’all doin’, I happily stuck around. Twenty minutes later, the Hanson brothers were still engaging me and Michelle about social justice. Isaac almost foamed at the mouth. A flick of spittle hit my face. I embraced it, a sign that these guys are passionate agents of change.

Note to cynics: If Tulsa can give hope to Toronto, isn’t that a reason to salivate?

Since the event, hope has came in equal measure from students and teachers who attended Me to We. Here’s a sample of their emails to this site:

• No one ever said that “going against the grain” would be easy but you have truly motivated my students to get involved and speak out for those without a voice. - Michelle, 7th grade teacher

• Please continue to challenge common beliefs… It is time for religious reform. Most of the major religions are too archaic in their thinking. - Adam, 14-year-old student

A 14-year-old who knows the word “archaic” and uses it in a sentence: Yet another reason for hope.

If you want to watch the presentation I made, it’s streamed on MTV’s Me to We site. Look for “Me to We: On Demand,” then move your cursor over “19 segments.” A menu will pop up. Scroll down and you’ll find my video in three consecutive segments.

I walked away from the entire experience affirming that real education is about indie thinking. Hanson, an indie band that ditched the constraints of a corporate label, sealed my sentiment. To the entrepreneurs of the school, studio and stage, I submit a final thought: Rock on.

Don’t kill the anti-genocide resolution

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 25, 2007

 

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Democrats in Congress recently sponsored a strong condemnation of the Armenian genocide by Turkey. Their resolution passed every stage of scrutiny leading up to a vote.

But now the vote looks like it won’t happen. Put simply, the Democrats are ‘fraidy cats. Why should they grab a backbone on this one? Read my latest commentary in The New Republic Online.

Re-printed by the International Women’s Perspective Portal.

Also translated and printed in Germany’s Der Tagesspeigel.

Beyond Bhutto and Musharraf

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Q & A on Oct 23, 2007

Just received from a woman in Pakistan: “My country [is in] upheaval. We need [an] Islam of reason. Me and my friends are circulating your Urdu translation book under the ground. Pray for us please.” - Asma

Sis, I’ll do more than pray. I’ll direct you to the video section of this website. That’s where you’ll find a young journalist, Imran Siddiqui, interviewing me for Pakistani TV.

It’s not my voice I want you to hear. It’s Imran’s. He’s spiritual, thoughtful and passionate for change. He proves that you and your friends aren’t alone.

Imran pushed hard to get this interview on the air. When it was finally broadcast in Pakistan, here’s what he wrote to me: “Surprisingly, I had a good response. People called with praise.”

To be honest, I don’t think the response surprised Imran in the least. He anticipated that Pakistanis would appreciate my views. That’s why he fought to make this interview happen. The real surprise came to his colleagues, who expected a public backlash.

As I wrote back to Imran, “So many people operate from fear, with blinkers that narrow their potential to dream and do. But not you. You have higher expectations of yourself and Muslims, which is also why I suggested in our interview that people like you have more faith in Muslims than our leaders do.”

Having faith means challenging our own people, because only those who believe we can do better will care enough to take us in that direction — whatever the price to be paid along the way.

This is a moment of clarity for Pakistan. Pray. Then push.

The new culture wars

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 21, 2007

Today’s Sunday Times quotes me, among others, to analyze the “new culture wars” — the moral confusion that arises when multiculturalism calcifies into a dogmatic religion.

Example: How can Queers for Palestine ignore the fact that to be openly gay in the Palestinian territories is to to invite serious homophobic hostility? I’d support any movement of “Queers for Liberation,” since the title would suggest liberation from Islamist colonizers as much as from Israeli occupiers. But that’s not the logic of Queers for Palestine.

Moreover, how can feminists stay quiet about the abuse of women under most forms of Sharia law? If feminists view patriarchy as global, then differences in culture shouldn’t compel us to hit the mental mute button whenever Muslim men start speaking.

That’s the moral confusion of the new culture wars.

Happily, however, reason still has a fighting chance. The silence of Western feminists is being challenged — by Western feminists themselves.

This month, Sheila Jackson-Lee, a Democrat in the US House of Representatives, introduced legislation to condemn honor killings and other forms of cultural terrorism against women. Better still, publicly supporting her is none other than the National Organization for Women (NOW), the American feminist lobby.

Why is that news? Because right-wing media regularly criticize NOW for dismissing the plight of Muslim women. Well, mainstream US feminists have “officially” spoken — yet I don’t recall seeing any of them on television lately.

Where are the conservative talk show hosts NOW?

Frankly, they should be clamoring to book the president of NOW, Kim Gandy. Here are key quotes from her statement in support of Rep. Jackson-Lee’s brave measure, known as House Resolution 32:

• The United States must call strongly for the protection of the millions of women who will become victims of stoning, stabbing, maiming, forced suicide, beheadings, acid throwing and many other cruel punishments with the false justification of “family honor.”
• H. Res. 32 begins an essential process to engage other nations in a dialogue about the treatment of women within their borders [highlighting mine].

• The world’s leaders must stand up for women who have no voice. NOW has made a commitment to help in the global effort to rid of this oppression against women.

With straight talk like this, you’d think Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tammy Bruce, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others would be scrambling to have Kim Gandy on their programs. Why haven’t their producers phoned? Or have they — only to find that NOW is hiding? I don’t know the answer.

What I do know is this: NOW needs to reveal that a few years ago it tried to organize a press conference about defending Muslim women from the excesses of Islamist power. That press conference never happened because, ironically, the American media’s obsession with national security made “other” Islamic issues irrelevant.

But women’s rights abroad aren’t divorced from security at home. September 11 taught us that the entire world is our backyard. The Taliban began by attacking Afghani women and, with our indifference, went on to help Bin Laden’s minions execute their assaults on 3,000-plus workers in New York City.

The lesson: What happens to some of us thousands of miles away can wind up affecting each of us.

If you believe, as I do, that every creature on God’s green Earth is entitled to a basic set of dignities, then human rights are universal. And that suggests it’s everybody’s business to protect human rights, even when we’re told that different cultures do things in different ways.

Let me draw an ultra-important distinction: Although human beings are born equal, cultures are not. Cultures aren’t born at all; they’re constructed. Human-made. More often, man-made. Which means there’s nothing sacred about them.

In turn, that means there’s nothing blasphemous about reforming the most malignant aspects of cultures, including crimes committed under the custom of honor.

To the feminists of NOW, I, as a Muslim woman, say simply: You go, girls!

And to the orthodox multiculturalists who insist that “white women” have no right to pronounce on the lives of Muslim women, deal with this: Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee is an African-American from Texas. She knows racists.

I dare you to declare her one.

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