EDITS | Wednesday, November 18, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Islam transcends loyalty to nation
Sunanda K Datta-Ray
It’s not quite a fatwa but Iran’s Supreme Leader has spoken through his representative in London. Ayatollah Abdolhossein Moezi, director of the Islamic Centre of England, has called on Muslim immigrants to be “better Muslims” and not to join the West’s armed forces. It is un-Islamic, he says, for them to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The wonder is that the directive was so long in coming. It needed the tragedy of Maj Nidal Malik Hassan, the American-born military psychiatrist son of Palestinian refugees, who ran amok and killed 13 people, to remind Ayatollah Khamenei of the conflict of loyalties that Muslims in the West face. A contributory factor may have been reports from The Hague, where Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader indicted on 11 charges including genocide, has succeeded in bullying the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia into postponing his trial. But not before the court heard transcripts of his telephone conversations warning of “a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die”.
Karadzic’s troops besieged and captured the United Nations safe haven of Srebrenica. Nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were tortured, machine-gunned and bulldozed into mass graves while their womenfolk were abused, raped and forced to defile the Quran. The Bosnian leader himself was quoted in court as saying, “They will disappear from the face of the earth.”
Those revelations, coinciding with Maj Hassan’s murderous spree, may have convinced the Ayatollah of the need for Muslims in the West to take a stand. But the dilemma is not confined to the diaspora. The Governments of Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia ostensibly support the US and Nato in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, significantly, they dare not send troops to wage the so-called war on terror. It also bears noting that the ruling regimes in some of these countries have also been targeted by jihadis. Pakistan is sui generis for it is as much at war with itself as it is under attack. Lines are blurred because religious extremism is also a feature of the continuing internal struggle for political power.
But there is no denying the peculiar predicament of Muslims in the West who live with what they see as their faith’s historical adversary. The anger that drove Karadzic harks back to six centuries of Ottoman rule over south-eastern Europe. The ‘Crusader’ tag for Westerners (used by Al Qaeda and the Taliban) recalls another ancient enmity. British Muslims in the small town of Luton publicly jeered at a regiment holding a ceremonial parade after returning from Iraq. The mayhem in London was the handiwork of British-Pakistani boys born and bred in Yorkshire who played cricket and spoke with a broad Yorkshire accent. That did not stop them from blowing themselves up while killing a large number of innocent folk.
The US police claim to have foiled a terror plot by six foreign-born men to blow up Fort Dix in New Jersey. The FBI accuses Najibullah Zazi, an airport van driver, of planning bomb attacks using hydrogen peroxide. In another case, Hosam (Sam) Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian-American, tried to bomb a Dallas skyscraper. The recent shooting of five British officers in Helmand province by an Afghan National Police officer, referred to only as ‘Gulbuddin’, recalled Aden’s British-trained police ambushing and killing seven British soldiers.
Western opinion-makers have been busy since the Fort Hood massacre upholding the “loyalty” of Muslims in the West. Condemning Maj Hasan’s shootings as a “heinous incident”, the Muslim Public Affairs Council of the US intoned piously, “We share the sentiment of our President”. President Barack Obama had just expressed horror. The Council sees no conflict between being American and Muslim and, indeed, there is no reason why French, British and American Muslims should not be as loyal as anyone else to their adoptive countries. But secular loyalty is separate from religious commitment. The myth of the ‘moderate’ Muslim, on which Western policy is predicated, continues to ignore this crucial divide despite a wealth of evidence.
The US has something to learn in this respect from Chinese-majority Singapore whose Muslims (14 per cent of the population) share the religious, ethnic and linguistic — but not political — identity of Malaysians next door. So close are the two countries that a Singaporean plane is in Malaysian air space almost immediately after takeover. Relations between the two countries have always been delicate.
Malay Singaporeans were initially exempt from military service which was compulsory for all other communities. When some protested that this was a form of discrimination, they were admitted to the armed forces but generally not into sensitive services that might expose them to temptation. The analogy one heard was that no Malay Singaporean soldier should be placed in a position where the call of religion might tempt him to drive a tank across the Causeway to Malaysia or fly his aircraft there.
Singapore also offers a much earlier warning of religious passion transcending military discipline. A little-noticed World War I memorial in the heart of the city-state recalls the mutiny by British Indian troops when they were ordered to embark for West Asia to fight Turkey and the Caliphate. The mutineers were captured and executed: They were all Muslims.
Maj Hassan may also have had two non-religious motivations. As a trained psychiatrist who treated repatriated American soldiers, he became familiar with the trauma of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Secondly, his cousin, Mr Nader Hassan, confirms the “harassment from his military colleagues” he suffered because of his “Middle-Eastern ethnicity”. In other words, they taunted him for his race and religion. That must have seemed the height of Western Christian injustice to someone who had been born and bred in the US and insisted on defying parental opposition to join the American Army because he had to do something for his country. He took to wearing salwar, kameez and a cap when off duty, regularly attending the mosque and distributing copies of the Quran.
Executing Maj Hassan will not solve the larger problem. Others may not explode as violently, but his outburst is indicative of the conflicting pulls to which Muslims are subject when they are forced to subordinate religious and cultural affiliations to secular considerations. They, too, see Karadzic as the face of the Christian West.
-- sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
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