Prophet Muhammad's Everlasting Promise of peace and security to Christians - St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai

حضرت محمدﷺ کا عیسائیوں کے ساتھ عہد [اردو]

النبي محمد وعد الآخرة للمسيحيين

وَأَوْفُوا بِالْعَهْدِ إِنَّ الْعَهْدَ كَانَ مَسْئُولً

Keep your promises; you will be called to account for every promise which you have made! (Quran; 17:34)

PROPHET MUHAMMAD'S PROMISE TO CHRISTIANS   Muslims and Christians together constitute over fifty percent of the world and if they lived in peace, we will be half way to world peace. One small step that we can take towards fostering Muslim-Christian harmony is to tell and retell positive stories and abstain from mutual demonization. In this article I propose to remind both Muslims and Christians about a promise that Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) made to Christians. The knowledge of this promise can have enormous impact on Muslim conduct towards Christians. Muslims generally respect the precedent of their Prophet and try to practice it in their lives. In 628 AD, a delegation from St. Catherine’s Monastery came to Prophet Muhammed and requested his protection. He responded by granting them a charter of rights, which I reproduce below in its entirety. St. Catherine’s Monastery is located at the foot of Mt. Sinai and is the world’s oldest monastery. It possess a huge collection of Christian manuscripts, second only to the Vatican, and is a world heritage site. It also boasts the oldest collection of Christian icons. It is a treasure house of Christian history that has remained safe for 1400 years under Muslim protection. The Promise to St. Catherine:"This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them. Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them. No compulsion is to be on them. Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries. No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims' houses. Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God's covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate. No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight. The Muslims are to fight for them. If a female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray. Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants. No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world)."   The first and the final sentence of the charter are critical. They make the promise eternal and universal. Muhammed asserts that Muslims are with Christians near and far straight away rejecting any future attempts to limit the promise to St. Catherine alone. By ordering Muslims to obey it until the Day of Judgment the charter again undermines any future attempts to revoke the privileges. These rights are inalienable. Muhammed declared Christians, all of them, as his allies and he equated ill treatment of Christians with violating God’s covenant. A remarkable aspect of the charter is that it imposes no conditions on Christians for enjoying its privileges. It is enough that they are Christians. They are not required to alter their beliefs, they do not have to make any payments and they do not have any obligations. This is a charter of rights without any duties! The document is not a modern human rights treaty but even thought it was penned in 628 A.D. it clearly protects the right to property, freedom of religion, freedom of work, and security of the person. I know most readers, must be thinking so what? Well the answer is simple. Those who seek to foster discord among Muslims and Christians focus on issues that divide and emphasize areas of conflict. But when resources such as Muhammad’s promise to Christians is invoked and highlighted it builds bridges. It inspires Muslims to rise above communal intolerance and engenders good will in Christians who might be nursing fear of Islam or Muslims. When I look at Islamic sources, I find in them unprecedented examples of religious tolerance and inclusiveness. They make me want to become a better person. I think the capacity to seek good and do good inheres in all of us. When we subdue this predisposition towards the good, we deny our fundamental humanity. In this holiday season, I hope all of us can find time to look for something positive and worthy of appreciation in the values, cultures and histories of other peoples. References See for example Life and Teachings of Muhammed by Amir Ali, p. 176. click to read it. Links: The original charter does not survive, but several copies are now extant in the library of St Catherine, some of which are witnessed by the judges of Islam in order to lend some force to its semblance of authenticity. The traditional explanation which accounts for the loss of the original claims that during the Conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman sultan Selim I in 1517, the original document was seized from the monastery by Ottoman soldiers and taken to Selim's palace at Constantinople.[2][1] A copy was then made to compensate for its loss at the monastery.[1] On the other hand, it is also possible that the charter was simply renewed under the new rulers, as other documents in the archive suggest.[3] Traditions about the tolerance shown towards the monastery were reported in governmental documents issued in Cairo and during the period of Ottoman rule (1517-1798), the Pasha of Egypt annually reaffirmed its protections.[1] In 1630, Gabriel Sionita published the first edition of the Arabic text, with Latin translation, under the title Testamentum et pactiones inter Mohammedem et Christianae fidei cultores. The origins of the document has been the subject of a number of different traditions, best known through the accounts of European travellers who visited the monastery.[1] These authors include the French knight Greffin Affagart (d. c. 1557), the French traveller Jean de Thévenot (d. 1667) and the English prelate Richard Peacocke,[1] who included an English translation of the text. Since the 19th century, several aspects of the Achtiname, notably the list of witnesses, have been questioned by scholars.[4] There are similarities to other documents granted to other religious communities in the Near East. One example is Muhammad's letter to the Christians of Najrān, which first came to light in 878 in a monastery in Iraq and whose text is preserved in the Chronicle of Séert.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achtiname_of_Muhammad The contents of letter are however generally in line with the special privileges granted by Islam to Christians as  People of the Book.  نص العهد: "هذا كتاب كتبه محمد بن عبدالله إلى كافة الناس أجمعين بشيراً ونذيراً ومؤتمناً على وديعة الله في خلقه لئلا يكون للناس على الله حجة بعد الرسل وكان الله عزيزاً حكيماً كتبه لأهل ملته ولجميع من ينتحل دين النصرانية من مشارق الأرض ومغاربها قريبها وبعيدها فصيحها وعجميها معروفها ومجهولها كتاباً جعله لهم عهداً. لا يغير أسقف من أسقفيته ولا راهب من رهبانيته ولا حبيس من صومعته ولا سايح من سياحته ولا يهدم بيت من بيوت كنائسهم وبيعهم ولا يدخل شيء من بناء كنائسهم في بناء مسجد ولا في منازل المسلمين فمن فعل شيء من ذلك فقد نكث عهد الله وخالف رسوله ولا يحمل على الرهبان والأساقفة ولا من يتعبد جزيةً ولا غرامة وأنا أحفظ ذمتهم أين ما كانوا من بر أو بحر في المشرق والمغرب والشمال والجنوب وهم في ذمتي وميثاقي وأماني من كل مكروه فمن نكث العهد الذي فيه وخالفه إلى غيره وتعدى ما أمره كان لعهد الله ناكثاً ولميثاقه ناقضاً وبدينه مستهزئاً وللّعنة مستوجباً سلطاناً كان أو غيره من المسلمين المؤمنين." تعتبر الجملتان الأولى والأخيرة في هذا العهد حاسمتان، فهما تجعلان الوعد أبدياً وعالمياً. يؤكد النبي محمد (ص) أن المسلمين يقفون مع المسيحيين من قريب وبعيد، ويرفضون فوراً أية محاولات مستقبلية للحد من وعد دير القديسة كاثرين وحده. من خلال أمر المسلمين باحترام الوعد حتى يوم القيامة، يُفشل الصك مرة أخرى أية محاولات مستقبلية لإلغاء الامتيازات. هناك ثلاثة حقوق لا يمكن التنازل عنها. أعلن النبي محمد (ص) أن المسيحيين جميعهم حلفاء له حيث ساوى بين معاملة المسيحيين السيئة مع انتهاك عهد الله تعالى. ومن النواحي المثيرة للاهتمام والإعجاب في الصك أنه لا يفرض أية شروط على المسيحيين للتمتع بميزاته. يكفي إنهم مسيحيون، ولا يُطلب منهم تغيير إيمانهم ومعتقداتهم ولا أن يدفعوا جزية ولا تكون عليهم أية التزامات. هذا صك حقوق دون أية التزامات. ليست الوثيقة معاهدة عصرية في حقوق الإنسان، ولكنها، ورغم أنها صيغت عام 628 بعد الميلاد فإنها تحمي بوضوح حقوق الملكية والحرية الدينية وحرية العمل والأمن الشخصي. أعرف أن معظم القراء سوف يقولون "وماذا بعد؟". حسناً، الجواب بسيط: يركز هؤلاء الذين يبغون رعاية الفتنة بين المسلمين والمسيحيين على قضايا تتسبب بالفرقة والنزاع. ولكن عندما تطرح موارد مثل وعد النبي محمد (ص) إلى المسيحيين ويتم إبرازها فإنها تبني الجسور. وهي تلهم المسلمين أن يرتفعوا فوق عدم التسامح الطائفي وتولد حسن النية لدى المسيحيين الذين قد يكونوا يتعاملون مع الخوف من الإسلام والمسلمين. عندما أنظر إلى المصادر الإسلامية أجد بها أمثلة لا سابق لها من التسامح الديني والشمولية. تجعلني أرغب بأن أصبح إنساناً أفضل. أعتقد أن القدرة على السعي لما هو صالح وصنعه متأصلان فينا جميعاً. عندما نكبت هذا التوجه نحو الصلاح فإننا ننكر إنسانيتنا الأساسية. آمل في أعقاب فترة الأعياد أن نجد جميعاً الوقت للبحث عن أمر إيجابي يستحق التقدير في قيم وتاريخ وثقافة الشعوب الأخرى. St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, Egypt                                          A Picture of Prophet Muhammad's Letter to St. Catherine's Monastery Dr. Muqtedar Khan | 08.22.2010 This article was published in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette [03.25.2007], Daily News Egypt [03.09.2007], AltMuslim [03.03.2007],  Pakistan Link,  Middle East Window, Turkish Daily News [04.10.2007 ], OpEd news [03.19.2007],Ikhwanweb [02.11.07],  and many other places.. Article also available in:   English   |  Indonesia   |  عربي   |  اردو   |  Français Courtesy Common Ground News Service http://www.ijtihad.org/Prophet%20Muhammed's%20Promise.htm Return to Ijtihad http://www.ijtihad.org/Prophet%20Muhammed's%20Promise.htm Minorities in Islamic State: The hand book highlights the rights of minorites... Read more: Protection of Minorities, a Religious Obligation of Muslims: http://islam4humanite.blogspot.com/2015/03/non-muslims-in-islamic-society.html حضرت محمدﷺ کا عیسائیوں کے ساتھ عہد [اردو] ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~  ~ Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Peace  A Project of  Peace Forum Network Peace Forum Network Mags Books, Articles, Blogs, Magazines,  Videos, Social Media Overall 2 Million visits/hits Follow @Peace_Forum

What does it mean to be a Muslim in America today?

Your existence is always interrogated, investigated and questioned. There are amazing questions about the West apparently being at war with Islam, or Islam being at war with the West — often, no one really knows what Islam or the West is. Some 1,400 years of tradition and civilisation is scapegoated inelegantly as this one collective hive mentality concept of a sour, dour people who apparently hate life and hate everything and hate themselves.

In this interview, Al Jazeera America’s Wajahat Ali explains how Islamophobia is manufactured in the US — from its funding sources to its partners in the media and governance. For ordinary American Muslims, however, life goes on beyond the narrow prism of Islam and the West being at war with each other
Being a Muslim in America is exhausting, as a result of this type of marginalised status that some American Muslims or Muslim communities have inhabited in the post-9/11 world. We’re living in volatile, uncertain times where the fringe have become the mainstream, and fear-mongering and scapegoating are easy fuel for mileage when it comes to political and media careers. However, it’s nothing new — Muslims right now occupy a very pivotal role in a remake of “Tag, you’re the bogeyman!” played by LGBT, Mexican immigrants, African-Americans, Japanese immigrants, Jews, Irish-Catholics and so forth.

In 2011, you were the lead author of an investigative report, Fear, Incorporated, mandated by the Center for American Progress. Tell us what the report was about.

In August 2011, the Center for American Progress published Fear Incorporated: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, the result of a six-month investigation. What it does is that for the first time, it traces the money and connects the dots to a small, interconnected group of individuals, funders, think tanks, grassroots organisations, media channels and politicians who in the post-9/11 climate manufactured anti-Muslim talking points, capitalising, figuratively and literally, on the fear and misconceptions that people have.

We broke down the network to five major groups. First and foremost, it’s the funding — we traced $43 million from seven major funders over a period of 10 years, which went to the second group that I call the Islamophobia nerve centre: the think tanks, the scholars and the quote-on-quote “policy experts”. Predominantly, they’re the individuals who help create many of these memes through policy reports. And then those reports get hand-delivered to grassroots organisations, i.e. the third group.

For example, Act for America is one of the predominant grassroots anti-Muslim networks, co-founded by Brigitte Gabriel, who had said in 2007 that Arabs and Muslims have no soul, and has also said a practicing Muslim cannot be a loyal American and so forth.

The fourth group, then, is the media megaphone: how these memes are popularised through online magazines, radio and TV talks, predominantly Fox News. These individuals write books, give each other praise and blurbs in the books, invite each other on their radio shows, and write op-eds. They’re very savvy with social media. They end up as “terrorism experts” or “Sharia experts” without any experience or legitimacy.

We live in a globalised world, and we have extremism feeding extremism across the Atlantic. The number one recruitment tool and propaganda of ISIS and al-Qaeda is that the West is at war with Islam. The number one propaganda tool of the anti-Muslim bigots is: Islam is at war with the West. By virtue of exposing it, I’m in the thick of it, but I try to have a sense of humour about it, because you can either cry about it or you laugh, and laughter is a bit more cathartic.
Finally, the fifth group. Quite literally, quotes directly from these reports end up in the mouths of major political players. In the 2012 Republican primaries, essentially every single Republican presidential candidate ran with the anti-Sharia meme.

Especially now with the rise of ISIS, many of these players have reared their ugly head again. The good news is, you can trace it back just to a few people. It’s very interconnected, very incestuous, very well-organised.

It coincided with this tragedy in Norway that happened in August 2011. Anders Breivik, a self-described conservative Christian wanted to punish Europe for being too lenient on multiculturalism. He left behind a 1,500-page manifesto before he went and killed 77 people. In this manifesto, he cites every single person that I mentioned from the Islamophobia network. All of his talking points, his worldview about Muslims, is shared by members of both the US and European Islam­ophobia industry.

How can we change the mindset of mainstream America? How can we overcome Islamophobia?

Number one: most Americans say they don’t know a Muslim. One of the root causes of anti-Muslim bigotry, based on the research, is ignorance. Not malice. Ignorance. I think that’s the key.

Unfortunately, what [most Americans] do know about Muslims is negative, and that comes from media representation. This type of sensationalism [and] stereotypes have predominated our mindsets not only with foreign policy but also with Western mainstream depictions of Muslims that go back a thousand years to the Crusades. It’s been this alien horde; brutal, barbaric, backward. Or it’s this cornucopia of fetishes — magic carpets and hookahs, and shishas and harems.

It always coincides with our foreign policy. In the 1970s, the big villain was Iran. The Iranian revolution. Khomeini. “Death to America.” In the ’80s, we had Qaddafi in Libya, and then you had Palestine and Israel, and then Iraq and Iran.

For American-Muslims, the key thing is to tell their story or else their story will be told to them by others — that is what is happening. It’s also imperative to extend your hand across the aisle in goodwill and know that there will be neighbours and partners. Other faiths and ethnic groups will grab your hand in solidarity. Tell and educate and inform diverse communities that Islamophobia is fundamentally anti-American.

I think you have to also have elected officials — we have two of them — and more and more people engaged at the local, state and federal levels. You also have to bridge the trust deficit between minority communities and law enforcement. You have to emerge as the best version of yourself, relying on the best aspects of your Muslim and American values.

Anders Breivik, a self-described conservative Christian wanted to punish Europe for being too lenient on multiculturalism. He left behind a 1,500-page manifesto before he went and killed 77 people. In this manifesto, he cites every single person that I mentioned from the Islamophobia network. All of his talking points, his worldview about Muslims, is shared by members of both the US and European Islamophobia industry.
It will take a nation of many diverse communities to rise up and be the best version of themselves to drown out the anti-Muslim bigots, and push them back where they belong, in the fringe. You need attorneys and lawyers who galvanise around a watershed legal case. You need smart laws, smart bills.

You are the co-host of The Stream on Al Jazeera [America]. Do you know of, or do you know personally, any other Muslim anchors on American television?

My buddy Hasan Minhaj from the Bay Area just became a correspondent for The Daily Show [with Jon Stewart]. He grew up in the Bay Area, a few years younger than me. Actually, Hasan and Trevor Noah, the guy who just got tabbed to be host, got hired on the same day. Malika Bilal is a Muslim African-American from Chicago who is the co-host of Al Jazeera English’s The Stream. Ali Velshi is a Muslim on Al Jazeera America. Aasif Mandvi is another Daily Show correspondent. Dean Obeidallah, a Palestinian-American of both Muslim and Christian descent, has a radio talk show. So there are a few, you know; there’s not many of us, but I think we’re getting there.

You also had a play out in 2009, The Domestic Crusaders. When did you start writing it and what drove you to write the play?

I started the play in 2001 as a senior at UC Berkeley on the demand of my short story writing class professor, Ishmael Reed, who took me out of the short story writing class three weeks after 9/11 and said, ‘I think you should write a play. Things are going to get bad for American-Muslims — I’m African-American, I’ve seen media depictions. One way to always fight back is through storytelling; art. I’ve never heard the Pakistani story; I’ve never heard the Muslim story. Have you read American family dramas like Long Day’s Journey into Night or Death of a Salesman?’

I said, Yes.

He goes, ‘All right, write me something like that but the Pakistani-Muslim version — I’ll see you in two months, give me 20 pages.’

Growing up in the Bay Area, I was storytelling without realising. It’s these passions that we have as children that we take for granted, that sometimes do make the building blocks for our future careers.

I wrote [the play] at a time in my life when everything was falling apart, and I needed to create something purely for myself. This was 2003, when George W. Bush was elected president; there was the war in Iraq. Many of the same anti-Muslim memes we have now were present.

To cut a long story short, I willed it to life, and the play got five weeks at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York. It got the New York Times, it got MSNBC, it got Al Jazeera, NBC, Wall Street Journal, local, national, international press, standing ovations. It was published by McSweeney’s.

Everyone laughed at me when I first started. At the time, ie in 2003, especially when the Muslim community was feeling particularly besieged, one doctor uncle was like, ‘Beta, why don’t you do something useful?’

Faith isn’t enough sometimes. You have to create something tangible, and nothing succeeds like success. The success of the play and my gradual ascension has had a very profound impact on the younger generation. When I did the play in New York, a lot of kids would come up to me. They’d say, ‘Listen, I brought my dad here because I don’t want to be a doctor, and I just wanted to show him a guy just like me could do it.’

That same uncle who mocked me in 2003, in 2009 said, ‘I’ve been in this country for 40 years. My kids have succeeded and gone to good colleges. I turn on the TV, and despite making the American Dream and being successful, they still see me as a terrorist or a taxicab driver. I wish I would’ve not made my sons into engineers — I should’ve made my sons into writers and journalists like you. So keep doing what you’re doing.’

That’s how you help shift the mindset even within our minority communities. That’s been a very rewarding, positive benefit from this long, lonely uphill journey.

That’s wonderful, thank you. Can you talk about a personal experience with Islamophobia?

My personal experience with Islamophobia has been taking on the Islamophobes. I attended the Countering Violent Extremism Summit held at the White House in February. Just by attending the summit, I got this hit piece on me, which regurgitated many of the inflammatory and slanderous accusations about Muslims that were written against me as a result of writing Fear, Inc.

It proves exactly what the anti-Muslim machine is about. It’s this pathological fear of American-Muslims who can gain some prominence in America’s political, cultural or social space and threaten their narratives. So I was apparently anti-Semitic — who knows why. I became ‘anti-American’. I got called an incubator of radicalisation. It’s very comical. When I first announced that I was co-host of Al Jazeera America, some of the reaction on social media was hysterical and inflammatory.

Right now, we’re living in some unique times, because the local becomes the national becomes the international with the press of a thumb on a smartphone. We live in a globalised world, and we have extremism feeding extremism across the Atlantic. The number one recruitment tool and propaganda of ISIS and al-Qaeda is that the West is at war with Islam. The number one propaganda tool of the anti-Muslim bigots is: Islam is at war with the West. By virtue of exposing it, I’m in the thick of it, but I try to have a sense of humour about it, because you can either cry about it or you laugh, and laughter is a bit more cathartic.

What does the future hold for Muslim-Americans?

The future of American-Muslims is tied to the future of America. The way America will treat its downtrodden, the way it will treat its marginalised communities, will be the great test for the present and future of America. Will we rise to our greatest values, will we achieve the American Dream in this evolving of a rough draft of the multicultural experiment that is America? That’s up to us and our actions. American-Muslims [are a] part and parcel of this experiment, of this burden and this test.

We have to acknowledge the fact that American-Muslims are tremendously privileged, and have it far better than other groups in the past — we are above-average income, very educated. As a community, we have a lot going for us. If we rely on the best of our values, both spiritual values and cultural values, I think we as a community will truly emerge.

Not to give in to helplessness, not to give in to anger, not to give in to the Islamophobes, not to feed the bigotry and not to let it define us. Rather, we define ourselves, become the protagonists of our own narratives, and have our stories be by us for everyone. That’s the key.

This interview has been condensed and edited.
Interview: ‘Being Muslim in America is exhausting’
by Shay Lari-Hosain, dawn.com
July 12

Wajahat Ali
Wajahat Ali is the co-host and digital producer of Al Jazeera America’s news program The Stream. He is the author of The Domestic Crusaders, an off-Broadway play published by McSweeney’s that explores the post-9/11 Muslim-American experience. Ali frequently contributes to the Washington Post, the Guardian, Salon, Slate, the Wall Street Journal Blog, the Huffington Post and CNN.com.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 12th, 2015

What Should We Do if the Islamic State Wins?

It’s time to ponder a troubling possibility: What should we do if the Islamic State wins? By “wins,” I don’t mean it spreads like wildfire throughout the Muslim world, eventually establishing a caliphate from Baghdad to Rabat and beyond. That’s what its leaders say they are going to do, but revolutionary ambitions are not reality and that possibility is particularly far-fetched. Rather, an Islamic State victory would mean that the group retained power in the areas it now controls and successfully defied outside efforts to “degrade and destroy” it. So the question is: What do we do if the Islamic State becomes a real state and demonstrates real staying power?

That possibility is looking more likely these days, given Baghdad’s inability to mount a successful counteroffensive. If MIT’s Barry Posen is correct (and he usually is), the Iraqi Army no longer exists as a meaningful fighting force. Not only does this reveal the bankruptcy of the U.S. effort to train Iraqi forces (and the collective failure of all the commanders who led this effort and kept offering upbeat assessments of progress), but it also means that only a large-scale foreign intervention is likely to roll back and ultimately eliminate the Islamic State. This will not happen unless a coalition of Arab states agrees to commit thousands of their own troops to the battle, because the United States will not and should not do the fighting for states whose stake in the outcome exceeds its own.

Don’t get me wrong — I’d be as pleased as anyone if the Islamic State were decisively defeated and its violent message utterly discredited. But one needs to plan not just for what one would like to see happen, but also for the very real possibility that we can’t actually achieve what we want — or at least not at a cost that we consider acceptable.

So what do we do if the Islamic State succeeds in holding on to its territory and becoming a real state? Posen says that the United States (as well as others) should deal with the Islamic State the same way it has dealt with other revolutionary state-building movements: with a policy of containment. I agree.

Despite its bloodthirsty and gruesome tactics, the Islamic State is not, in fact, a powerful global actor. Its message attracts recruits among marginalized youth in other countries, but attracting perhaps 25,000 ill-trained followers from a global population of more than 7 billion is not that significant. It may even be a net gain if these people leave their countries of origin and then get to experience the harsh realities of jihadi rule. Some of them will realize that the Islamic State is brutal and unjust and a recipe for disaster; the rest will be isolated and contained in one spot instead of stirring up trouble at home.

More importantly, the relative handful of foreigners flocking to fight under the Islamic State’s banner are only a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims, and the fanatical jihadi message shows little sign of winning significant support in this large and diverse population.

I’m not being naive. Islamic State fellow travelers will no doubt conduct terrorist acts and cause other forms of trouble in various places. But that is a far cry from the Islamic State’s being able to spread willy-nilly across the Islamic world. The group clearly has the potential to cause trouble outside the stretch of desert that it currently controls, but it hasn’t yet demonstrated a significant capacity to expand beyond the alienated Sunni populations of western Iraq and eastern Syria.

Moreover, the Islamic State’s territory has few resources and little industrial power. Its military forces, though capably led, are not those of a great power (or even a regional power). The Islamic State faces strong resistance whenever it tries to move outside Sunni areas (e.g., into Kurdistan or Shiite-dominated Baghdad), where it cannot exploit local resentment against Baghdad or Damascus.

The Islamic State faces another important obstacle: It no longer enjoys the advantage of surprise. It emerged unexpectedly from the chaos of post-invasion Iraq and the Syrian civil war, and it featured the unlikely marriage of an extremist strand of Islam and some prominent former Baathist officials who knew how to run a police state. The combination has been surprisingly effective, just as the Iraqi Army has been (unsurprisingly) corrupt and unreliable. But the Islamic State’s potential to cause trouble is now clear, and Arab states, from the Persian Gulf to Egypt and beyond, will now go to considerable lengths to make sure the Islamic State model does not take root in their own societies. (Libya is another matter, after the foolhardy Western intervention there, but the emergence of an Islamic State clone there is also a containable problem.)

Now take an imaginative leap. Assume the Islamic State is contained but not overthrown and that it eventually creates durable governing institutions. As befits a group built in part on the former Baathist thugocracy, it is already creating the administrative structures of statehood: levying taxes, monitoring its borders, building armed forces, co-opting local groups, etc. Some of its neighbors are tacitly acknowledging this reality by turning a blind eye to the smuggling that keeps the Islamic State in business. Should this continue, how long will it be before other countries begin to recognize the “Islamic State” as a legitimate government?

The Western powers refused to recognize the Soviet Union for some years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and the United States did not do so until 1933. Similarly, the United States did not establish full diplomatic relations with the government of the world’s most populous country — the People’s Republic of China — until 1979, a full 30 years after the PRC was founded. Given these (and other) precedents, can we be certain that the Islamic State might not one day become a legitimate member of the international community, with a seat at the United Nations?

Perhaps, you’ll say, the Islamic State’s barbaric behavior — enslaving women, torturing civilians, beheading hostages — will forever exclude it from the community of civilized nations. Isn’t it more likely that its leaders will end up in the dock at the International Criminal Court than addressing the U.N. General Assembly? It would be nice to think so, but history suggests a more cynical lesson.

Those oh-so-posh and civilized Brits we enjoy watching on Downton Abbey? Their ancestors created the United Kingdom through violent and brutal acts of coercion and conquest (as any knowledgeable Welshman or Scot could tell you). Those heroic Americans who expanded the “Empire of Liberty” across North America? They massacred, raped, and starved Native Americans to get there — and collected plenty of scalps along the way. The Bolsheviks and Maoists who created the USSR and People’s Republic of China? They didn’t consolidate power via gentle persuasion, and neither did the Wahhabis under Ibn Saud or the Zionists who founded Israel. As the now-deceased Charles Tilly made abundantly clear in his landmark Coercion, Capital, and European States, state-building has been a brutal enterprise for centuries, and the movements that built new states in the past did many things that we would now condemn as utterly barbaric. (And let’s not pretend that today’s “advanced” societies are uniformly genteel or moral either. An innocent blown up by an ill-aimed drone strike is just as much a victim as someone brutally beheaded by the Islamic State.)

The norms of “acceptable” state conduct have changed dramatically over the past century, which is why we rightly regard the Islamic State’s behavior as especially abhorrent today. Pointing out that other state-builders acted badly in the past neither excuses nor justifies what the jihadis are doing today in Iraq and Syria. But this long history does remind us that movements that were once beyond the pale sometimes end up accepted and legitimized, if they manage to hang onto power long enough.

To be accepted into the community of nations, however, radical or revolutionary movements eventually have to abandon some (if not all) of their most ferocious practices. As Kenneth Waltz pointed out more than 30 years ago, eventually all radical states become “socialized into the system.” Over time, they learn that their grandiose ideological ambitions are not going to be realized and that uncompromising fidelity to their original revolutionary aims is costly, counterproductive, and maybe even threatening to their long-term survival. Within the movement, voices arise that call for compromise, or at least a more pragmatic approach to the outside world. Instead of “world revolution,” it becomes time to build “socialism in one country.” Instead of spreading the “Islamic Republic,” it becomes time to cut deals with both Great and Lesser Satans. The new state gradually adapts to prevailing international norms and practices, and it eventually moves from pariah to partner, especially when its interests start to coincide with those of other states. It may still be a troublesome presence in world politics, but it is no longer ostracized. If the Islamic State survives and consolidates, that is what I’d expect to happen to it as well.

But make no mistake: This process of “socialization” does not happen automatically. Radical states don’t learn that beastly behavior is costly unless other states join forces to impose the necessary penalties. If the Islamic State manages to cling to power, consolidate its position, and create a genuine de facto state in what was previously part of Iraq and Syria, then other states will need to work together to teach it the facts of life in the international system. And because the Islamic State is not in fact that powerful, preventing it from expanding or increasing its power and imposing costs for its abhorrent behavior should not be all that hard.

The chief task for American statecraft, therefore, should be to coordinate and back up an international campaign of containment in which local actors such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, and Iran — which have the most at stake — take the lead role. It also means helping others counter the Islamic State’s efforts to spread its message, convincing other states to do more to limit its sources of revenue, and patiently waiting for its excesses to undermine it from within.

What Should We Do if the Islamic State Wins?   by Stephen M. WaltStephen, foreignpolicy.com

The five pillars of Islamophobia

Vague categories like ‘extremist’ and ‘radicalisation’ are trawling Muslims in a very large ‘counter-terrorism’ net.

The status of Muslims in the west is under threat. The increased prevalence of anti Muslim hate crime is only one of the more visible consequences. In the UK, Muslim schoolchildren are suffering a ‘backlash’ of abuse, according to the teaching unions; Muslim women are the victims of more than half of Islamophobic attacks, says Tell MAMA.

Though violent crimes against Muslims are understandably a key issue for Muslims and the anti-racist movement, it would be a mistake to think that Islamophobia is just a problem of racism by a small minority on the streets, or those on the fringes of politics. In fact it is deeply embedded in our politics and society, and a more serious problem than many writers have recognised. Moreover, while most accounts of Islamophobia suggest that anti-Muslim racism is simply a matter of prejudice, which may have social consequences, it needs to be understood as more than a problem of racist ideas.

Obviously these are a key part of Islamophobia but to be effective such ideas need to be practically developed—to be actively produced, spread and institutionalised in new policies and practices. Anti-Muslim racism is sustained by what we call the ‘five pillars’ of Islamophobia.

Legitimate targets?

The first and most important is the institutions of the state—most notably the sprawling ‘counter-terrorism’ apparatus, the key nexus of institutions and practices which targets ‘extremists’ and those said to have been ‘radicalised’. The imprecision with which these concepts are defined and operationalised in official discourse, together with the routine practices of the police and intelligence services, means that many thousands of people, including non-Muslims, are regarded as a legitimate targets for suspicion, surveillance and intelligence-gathering.

Some academic authors see the state as progressive, or at least neutral, and capable of helping challenge anti-Muslim racism by creating spaces for Muslim cultural and civic engagement. But in our view the state is not neutral. Counter-terrorism policy disadvantages Muslims (and others) through exceptional legislation, pre-emptive incapacitation and intelligence and surveillance. And the counter-terrorism apparatus has spread from its traditional home in the police and intelligence services to occupy almost every branch of the state, from schools and universities to libraries.

A relatively new front in the war to drive Muslims from the public sphere is the NGO sector. The Charity Commission, headed by the neo-conservative Lord Shawcross, has presided over a significant increase in investigations of Muslim charities. The think tank Claystone reported that the Charity Commission had marked 55 British charities with new issue code ‘extremism and radicalisation’, without the organisations’ knowledge, and that Muslim charities were disproportionately affected.

Further right

The other four pillars of Islamophobia are social or political movements which bolster the state or push it further right—social movements ‘from above’, as the sociologists Laurence Cox and Gunvald Nilsen put it. By this they mean the ‘collective agency of dominant groups’.

The first is the most well known—the far right. Its traditional representatives in neo-fascist parties have all taken an anti-Muslim turn, but they have been joined in recent years by a plethora of new parties (such as the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People’s Party and UKIP in the UK), street movements such as the English Defence League, PEGIDA in Germany (and the UK, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden) and the ‘counter-jihad movement’, which operates in almost every EU country, as well as in the US.

The far right is not neatly bounded and there are all sorts of overlaps with other strands of the social movements from above, which are themselves interpenetrated. They include the neo-conservative movement, strongly active in the EU as well as in the US, its country of origin; the Zionist movement; and a number of left/liberal currents such the pro-war or ‘decent’ left. All three are transnational movements from above and have connections to groups further to the right, as well as to the more mainstream conservative movement and indeed right-wing, neo-liberal think tanks.

These social movements, though divided on some matters, do work together—in combination with the state—to produce, reproduce and enact anti-Muslim racism, in the process putting in place the policy frameworks and practical arrangements which ensure the subordination of ordinary Muslims.

Take the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society, a think tank which brings together key US and UK neo-conservatives, including William Kristol and Richard Perle. Among the key financial backers of the HJS has been the Conservative peer Stanley Kalms, the former treasurer of the Conservative Party and life president of DSG International (formerly Dixons). Kalms is a prominent member of Conservative Friends of Israel, though in 2009 he flirted with UKIP. He has supported the Henry Jackson Society and its predecessor the Centre for Social Cohesion through his Traditional Alternatives Foundation and the Stanley Kalms Foundation, and his links with more mainstream conservatism are illustrated by his financial backing for the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Centre for Social Justice.

Kalms appears to have quite ‘radical’ views on Muslims and Islam. According to Tony Lerman, the writer and ‘lapsed’ Zionist, Kalms was present at a meeting on 17 November 2006 where he said: ‘Most Muslims didn’t want to integrate ... Ultimately they would line up behind the fundamentalists.’ Social movements from above, including the far right and elements of the neo-conservative and Zionist movements, play an important active role in fostering anti-Muslim racism.

We will not turn back the tide of Islamophobia only by confronting the threat of UKIP in politics, or the EDL and other parts of the transnational ‘counter-jihad movement’ on the streets. We also need to focus our attention on elements of the (also transnational) neo-conservative and Zionist movements which provide information, ‘research’ and advocacy which can drag the state and politics to the right and sharpen Islamophobic polices, as we have seen in the UK with the revision of the ‘Prevent’ programme in 2010 (drawing on the material of the neo-conservative Centre for Social Cohesion) and in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015.

Dissent criminalised

Most importantly, we need to understand that it is the state itself and its machinery of surveillance and repression that is at the forefront of ensuring that Muslims are collectively pushed to the edge of public life with extremely serious short-, medium- and long term consequences for democratic politics. The intention seems clear: dissent, whether by Muslim organisations, social movements or trades unions, is criminalised to protect our rulers from pressure from below.

It is a sad commentary on the state of hysteria about Islam in the UK today that even documenting evidence on Islamophobia is seen as evidence of ‘extremism’ or ‘radicalisation’. Simply in writing this article we have potentially entered what the police have called the ‘pre-criminal space’, which is enough to warrant unwelcome attention from the intelligence and policing agencies—never mind those of conservative newspaper columnists.
"The five pillars of Islamophobia" by Tom Mills and David Miller, opendemocracy.net
This article is based on a paper delivered at the Understanding Conflict conference at the University of Bath, 8-11 June 2015.

Why Standing Against Anti-Islam Bigotry Matters

Over the past few months, conseratives
(and even some liberal) politicians and pundits have painted a fairly negative picture of people who argue that most Muslims are not, in fact, terrorists committing horrible atrocities. Unsettled by the murder of Charlie Hebdo journalists in France, for example, right-wing figureheads attacked President Obama for attempting to dispel negative stereotypes of Muslims at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) accusing him of being an “apologist for radical Islamic terrorists.” Meanwhile, various Fox News commentators have pushed back against attempts to disassociate the larger American Muslim population from the two ISIS-affiliated extremists who attempted to storm an anti-Islam conference in Texas, and even Bill O’Reilly took flak from fellow conservatives for calling a “Draw Muhammad” contest “stupid” because it was “insulting the entire Muslim world.”

Taken together, you’d be forgiven for thinking their overarching message roughly amounts to the following: going out of one’s way to defend American Muslims, if not necessarily bad in and of itself, is somehow inappropriate in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

But if a smattering of new surveys and studies are to be believed, this tendency to stick up for Muslim neighbors after a violent incident is not only important, it’s oddly normal — and it helps protect people from harm.

Take, for instance, an eyebrow raising new study from the Pew Research Center. The poll, which was conducted after the Charlie Hebdo shootings and released last week, showed that 76 percent of people in France now say they have a favorable view of local Muslims, compared to the 72 percent in 2014. At first glance, this rapid rise in support seems surprising, especially given that the country recently endured a brutal attack at the hands of extremists claiming to be affiliated with ISIS, a militant group that purports to be representative of Islam. Yet this outpouring of pro-Muslim sentiment occurred among members of every political persuasion in France, and the share of people who held a “very favorable” view of Muslims increased by almost ten points — rising from 14 to 25 percent in just a year. Even stranger, while this result may seem counterintuitive, the same thing happened in the United States after the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center: In 2001, favorable views of Muslim Americans rose from 45 percent in March of that year to 59 percent by November.

Photo by: Pew Research Center
So where does this unusual spike in pro-Muslim sentiment come from? Some sociologists are hesitant to speculate, but Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at Pew, hinted in a blog post and a subsequent interview that the change may emanate from efforts by politicians and the media to do precisely what many on the right-wing are currently railing against: calling out anti-Muslim bigotry.

“One of the potential reasons for this pattern is that in the days following the attacks [in France], you had widespread calls for national unity,” Wike told ThinkProgress. He drew direct parallels between the Charlie Hebdo killings and September 11 attacks, noting the similarities between the call to unity in France and America’s charge to overcome differences in the face of terror: “In 2001, [statements made by President George W. Bush] about how violent extremism does not represent Islam … that had an impact.”

Indeed, despite accusations from some that Obama is effectively coddling Muslims by defending their religion, former President George W. Bush was just as eager to dismiss perceptions that American citizens who worship Islam were somehow allied with terrorists, saying in 2001 “There are thousands of Muslims who proudly call themselves Americans, and they know what I know — that the Muslim faith is based upon peace and love and compassion.”

Although Wike stressed that the Pew data wasn’t detailed enough to make concrete conclusions on its own, he did note that other scholars have claimed that this kind of sympathetic media coverage can have a tangible impact on a population rattled by a terror attack. He cited a 2013 paper by Christopher Smith, a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University, who tracked this same phenomenon in the United States in 2001. In it, Smith puts various opinion polls alongside analysis of media coverage over time, arguing that the sudden uptick in support for Muslims was the result of politicians and the media working simultaneously to beat back negative stereotypes about Muslims.

Photo by: Pew Research Center

“Despite their fear, most Americans responded to [the September 11 attacks] not with prejudice, but rather with sympathy for innocent Muslims defamed by the actions of extremists and targeted by retaliatory hate crimes,” Smith’s paper reads. He hypothesizes that this was partly a result of a string of news coverage after the attack that was compassionate towards Islam, arguing, “This counterintuitive outcome apparently resulted from a bipartisan effort by government and media to avert discrimination by framing Islam in a positive way.”

Undoubtedly, one of the natural responses to terrorism in the West — or at least in France and America — appears to be an appeal to compassion, with politicians, faith leaders, and media moguls often working quickly to combat anti-Muslim bigotry. But while surges in solidarity are encouraging, Wike noted that they aren’t enough — in 2001 America or 2015 France — to erase all-too-common spikes in anti-Muslim violence that often rage in the wake of a terrorist attack. When militants murdered journalists at Charlie Hebdo and patrons at a Jewish deli in France earlier this year, for instance, there was a sudden rash of Islamophobic incidents in and around Paris, with mosques being damaged, shot at, and firebombed.

“In both [France and the United States], there is a minority of people with extremely negative views, and it’s possible that those people are more likely to turn to violence,” Wike said.

Worse, Wike pointed out that the increase in pro-Muslim views among Americans didn’t hold up over time, tapering off over the years as the War on Terror raged on. Smith’s paper also acknowledges this shift, but offers a specific reason as to why: according to Smith, it was largely the byproduct of conservative media outlets reframing their news stories in ways that demonized Islam.

“Media coverage of Muslim Americans in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 focused heavily on critiquing stereotypes and documenting violations of Muslims’ civil liberties,” Smith writes. “[But] opinion-makers relaxed this impulse after the immediate sense of threat subsided, especially in right-leaning media outlets. A gradual increase of animosity toward Islam during the period from 2002 to 2010 coincided with a growth of partisan difference in assessments of the faith.”

A gradual increase of animosity toward Islam during the period from 2002 to 2010 coincided with a growth of partisan difference in assessments of the faith.
Recent reporting corroborates Smith’s findings: 2010 — a full 9 years after the 9/11 attacks — saw a flurry of assaults on Muslim houses of worship, with far fewer politicians and media outlets coming to their defense than in 2001. Meanwhile, America continues to underreport efforts to combat anti-Muslim bigotry. Much was written on the anti-Islam protest in Arizona in May, for instance, when a group of bikers held their own “draw Muhammad” contest before driving down to a nearby mosque to protest while holding firearms, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper even took the organizer of the event to task for his views. But few outlets covered what the bikers saw when they arrived at the mosque: an equally large interfaith counter-protest, where dozens of demonstrators stared down the bikers while wielding signs that read “End hate speech.” Even less was said about the interfaith service of peace held at the mosque just a few days after the event.

Granted, it’s always difficult to draw a one-to-one correlation between anti-Islam media coverage and assaults on mosques — making specific connections between the media we consume and the actions we take is always a guessing game. But if Smith’s paper and Pew’s opinion polls are any indication, France stands to learn some powerful lessons from America’s historical struggles with anti-Muslim hatred: namely, speaking out against anti-Muslim bigotry matters, but it needs staying power to make the effect last.

“Education about Islam undoubtedly remains an important antidote to anti-Islamic prejudice, but education alone is unlikely to offset the effects of the highly politicized portrayals of Islam in the American news media,” Smith writes. “This suggests that media has tremendous power to shape public opinion and behavior, and opinion-makers need to take extra care in selecting framing. Prejudice against Muslims will undoubtedly remain commonplace so long as Islam remains a salient issue in American partisan politics, but careful framing can go a long way to mitigate those feelings.”

Why Standing Against Anti-Islam Bigotry Matters by Jack Jenkins, thinkprogress.org

Return to mainstream religious values: Jonathan Sacks

Jonathan Sacks: ‘I’m optimistic when I speak to young Muslims. They have incredible idealism’ by Peter Stanford, telegraph.co.uk

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - whose new book argues for a return to mainstream religious virtues - tells Peter Stanford how he thinks Isil can be beaten
Jonathan Sacks begins our conversation by issuing a stark warning. The former Chief Rabbi says that Isil and other current manifestations of extremist religion around the globe now pose the “greatest challenge facing us in the 21st century”.

It is a bleak, dark assessment from the man hailed by Prince Charles as “a light unto this nation”, now a member of the House of Lords, and a global campaigner for greater religious understanding between all the faiths. And Lord Sacks is using the term “us” in its broadest sense.

So he means not just his own community, or the countries of the Middle East, or even Western governments and armies. Unless both what he calls the “symptom” of Isil, and the factors that have caused its rise, are tackled and tackled effectively, he says, the murderous chaos seen from afar in Syria and Iraq will become an issue that impinges ever more on all our lives.

“Right now,” he urges, “Europe needs to join together to fight these extremists, not to talk of Jews and Christians, us and them. The challenge we all face is how to defend our hard-won freedoms and liberties. That is what’s at risk and why I am trying to widen the argument.”

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To that end, next week he is publishing Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, his first book since standing down in 2013 as Chief Rabbi after 22 years in office. It is no use, he says, hoping the problem will go away, or relying on our political leaders in the West to sort it out.

“Their maximum length of concentration is until the next election, so there is a culture gap with these religious extremists. They are in a time system where the minimum unit of currency is a decade, and they are comfortable looking at things in centuries. Right now, a long-term problem is meeting short attention spans in the West.”

Jihadi John: Western Islamists are radicalised because of the secularisation of society, says Lord Sacks

The 67-year-old father of three, and grandfather of seven, is speaking from Jerusalem, where is giving a lecture at Israel’s National Library and receiving a medal from former president Shimon Peres – as well as attending a family wedding. His work now sees him travelling between America, Israel and his base in Britain, with Elaine, his wife of 45 years.

Lord Sacks describes his meetings with young British Muslims the same age as those lured by internet and social media grooming to head off to fight alongside Isil in Iraq and Syria. Why, he has asked himself, do they do it? The conventional socio-economic explanations don’t work for him.

“These are not the reasons European jihadist are going there to fight. They are not living in poverty. They can go to university and enter the professions, but that isn’t enough for some. They are in search of identity, and in Europe we have gone down the road of abolishing identity.”

It is the secularisation of Western society, he argues, and the resulting moral vacuum, that leaves idealistic youngsters without anything in which to believe and susceptible to radical voices. “Young people like ideals but we are very short of ideals right now, and that means they can be drawn to causes that are also very dangerous.”

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•Young British Muslims should realise that extremists like Jihadi John are not honouring Islam

In the book, he coins the phrase “altruistic evil” to describe the appeal to such youngsters of Isil propaganda. It blends talk of high ideals and the sacred to justify what would otherwise be seen as murderous acts. “They are being offered an identity as part of the global nation of Islam which is presented in these social media outlets as being attacked and humiliated.”

The lack among these youngsters of a strong sense of British identity causes him to reflect on words he has often seen engraved on Jewish gravestones here. “They read ‘a proud Englishman and a proud Jew’. Do we understand any more what it means any more to be ‘a proud Englishman’? Many of the young people I meet don’t. There is no strong local identity, and so they seek it out where it is offered – on You Tube and social media.”

His argument is that a return to mainstream religion values is needed if we are to rediscover an identity that can counter the attraction of Isil for disillusioned young people. But can we have a British identity without religion?

“No,” he replies bluntly, “I don’t think you can. Religion gives us a real sense of the common good as members of a society rather than the self-centred ideas that are promoted elsewhere.”

And what of his own Jewish community? The rise of militant Islam has been accompanied by an upturn in reports of anti-Semitic incidents all across Europe, including, earlier this year, the murder of a synagogue guard in Copenhagen and the killing of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris in the wake of the assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Only this week, the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has been appointed to a European body charged with combatting rising anti-Semitism.

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Photo: Warren Allott/Telegraph)

“It’s valuable,” he says of the Blair appointment, though without any great enthusiasm, “and it has my full support, but I am trying to focus on a bigger phenomenon. The anti-Semitism we are seeing is a symptom of something else altogether. I intend to fight with all my passion those who want only to see this as anti-Semitism.”

Including members of the Jewish community who feel increasingly unsafe in Western Europe? A poll in the wake of the supermarket and Charlie Hebdo attacks found 40 per cent of French Jews had considered leaving the country.

“Some people definitely feel like this,” Lord Sacks concedes, “but I am fighting hard against that feeling. This is not about Jews. It is about all our freedoms, about the sanctity of life. If Jews are not safe in Europe, then no one is. If Jews leave Europe, then we have all lost our freedoms, lost our soul.”

His book is one front in that battle. It is the distillation of a concern that has been growing inside him since 2001. “I have been feeling since 9/11 that we are not addressing the theological dimension of all of this, wrestling with the religious issues. It is sometimes said that weapons win wars, but ideas win the peace.”

Yet Lord Sacks’ solution to the problem – a reinforcing of “good” religious ideas of respect, tolerance and love of neighbour, better education, plus a coming together of all the faiths with the secular authorities to fight extremism – surely overlooks one crucial factor. Many people, especially in the West, take as read that all religion itself begets violence, not just the extremist forms.

“Religion is not the sole cause of violence in the world,” he says, with just a hint of the weariness in his voice that comes with having to defend his corner so often. “In the 20th century, it has been nation states, issues of race and political ideology that have nothing to do with religion, that have caused two world wars, the Holocaust and the gulags. Those who argue that if you get rid of religion, you will get rid of violence, have short memories.

“But, equally, the idea that religion is pacific is negated by history. All the major faiths have their violent episodes and their difficult texts. We have to be honest and candid about that.”

Former peace envoy Tony Blair is to take on a new role combating anti-Semitism (Photo: PA)

So why does he believe Islam is apparently in such turmoil now? One suggestion is to link everything back to the “humiliation” – to use his own word – that young Muslims feel is being visited on their Palestinian co-believers by the Israelis.

His reply is firm and short. “I simply think that Israel has nothing to do with the crisis in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Somalia. It is a distraction to suggest otherwise. The situation between Israel and the Palestinians right now has no bearing on any of the major conflicts in the Middle East."

The causes of Islam’s troubles, he suggests, lie elsewhere. He sees a general “turning inwards” among Muslims – found in other faiths, too, he adds – “that emphasises difference not common ground, and that is anti-modern”. He is concerned, too, by its tendency to combine religious with political power: “I can’t think of a single instance in history when that has been a blessing.”

•Tony Blair's new role fighting anti-Semitism - a kick in the teeth for Palestinians?

•Tony Blair accused of trying to 'erase' his role in rise of Isil

His third culprit is what he calls “the destablising effect of the revolution in information technology. In the past, radical groups would be marginalised and largely unknown, but now they can instantly reach a global audience with their ideas.” Put these three factors together, he concludes, “and they represent a perfect storm”.

It sounds a gloomy assessment of heavy weather ahead. Lord Sacks, though, is unmistakably a man on a mission, and he is sure that there is plenty we can do, if we find the will. “I’m optimistic, in the sense that when I speak to young Muslims, they are hungry for rising to the challenge of religion bringing reconciliation not violence among people. They have incredible idealism.”

And, he adds, as a final thought, befitting of one whose voice is so familiar on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, “I happen to believe in divine providence. God sends problems and God sends solutions.”

Jonathan Sacks: ‘I’m optimistic when I speak to young Muslims. They have incredible idealism’ by Peter Stanford, telegraph.co.uk
Not In God’s Name by Jonathan Sacks

The faith factor by Muhammad Amir Rana

DOES religion play any role in your professional growth? This was a question put before successful women professionals and leaders from different fields at an international conference. It was a tricky question. One hardly assesses the role of religion in one’s professional life. The Muslim women leaders wearing hijab were no exception.

The answer was ‘no’. It came from a leading woman professional associated with Islamic banking. Religion had not created any hurdle in their paths or these women had not bothered much about it. It can be interpreted either way. But many acknowledged the value of religion in building morality and character. Others considered society, state and culture as the determining factors in the development of their moral behaviour.

Usually, we overlook the role played by religion in our daily lives. But it remains in our surroundings, shapes certain types of behaviour, and influences the socio-cultural and politico-economic patterns of society. Most of these women had struggled to break cultural and familial taboos to develop independent identities. Many had bitter feelings about how their families tended to use religion-based arguments to stop them from pursuing their ambitions.

Apart from the gender perspective, it has been observed that the influence of religion is increasing in Asian and African Muslim societies and their diasporas in the West. Religion is part of almost every discourse, including on policymaking and socialisation. Power elites are confused about how to deal with rapidly growing religious influences in their societies. Different states are trying to deal with the challenge by adopting reconciliatory and/or confrontational approaches.

In Pakistan, the power elite are scared to touch religious issues. Religiously inspired actors are fully exploiting this weakness.

In a wider perspective, weak or absent political institutions provide spaces to resistance forces. And in most parts of the Muslim world, these resistance forces are religious in orientation. This fact was largely ignored by the US and its Nato allies when they launched military and political interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria. The interventionists had alternative plans for these countries, but the resistance forces foiled most of them. Religious forces exploited the crises, which traditional secular and political elites had failed to resolve.

In Pakistan, the power elite are scared to touch religious issues.
Interestingly, now the interventionists think that they should factor religious sensitivities into their geopolitical adventures. The damage that has already been done by their interventions is huge. These have not only destroyed the socio-cultural fabric of societies where they have intervened, it has also accentuated the sectarian fault lines. Sectarian tensions provide an excuse to interventionists in their exit strategies as they blame local factors for sectarian divides.

At the same time, the ruling elites in these Muslim countries and their regional allies further provoke sectarian tendencies in their narrow strategic and political frameworks. This is a globalised world, and other Muslim societies cannot avoid the impact of such developments in the Arab world. These developments are triggering sectarian tensions in many Muslim countries, which were under rural-to-urban transition.

Religion helps in maintaining social cohesion, mainly in the lower and middle classes, during social and urbanisation transformations. Especially in societies where political and social institutions fail to provide connectivity in such transformations, religious institutions take over the process. At that time, sectarian influences damage the processes of social cohesion, and religion becomes more a dividing force than a uniting one.

Terrorist groups are also benefiting from these sectarian tensions. They are increasingly devising their strategies on a sectarian basis. The same is happening in the case of the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, which is gradually becoming a sectarian terrorist group.

The problem is complex and spread over international politics to local-level societal developments. The situation provokes a question: is religion ‘manageable’?

This question makes the situation more complicated and vague because it provides different, paradoxical alternatives. The stakeholders try to present solutions which suit their interests. Answers vary from counter-narratives, mainstreaming to creating safe spaces. The concept of safe spaces is about creating an environment for dialogue between the hardliners and moderates.

No one can deny the power of narratives, but who will challenge the existing troublesome ones, which also have roots in religious traditions? Decoding and developing narratives also require serious intellectual pursuit to challenge the faith-based connotations of these narratives.

There is a counter-argument which completely rejects the concept of managing religion. Proponents of this narrative believe in the extrication of religion from political and extremist influences. For that purpose, they advocate managing the religious actors rather than faith itself.

This creates space for direct intervention by the state, but in Pakistan’s case, the state is reluctant to deal with religiously-inspired actors. The reason is that state institutions do not know who the real religiously-motivated actors are in the country. Their narratives are based on their interaction and relationship with the leadership of religion-based political parties. These parties may not necessarily represent moderate voices in the religious discourse. A few such voices might be found in religion-based political parties, but they do not have a major impact on party policies.

On the other side, a segment of the religious elite has emerged in Pakistan which is apologetic about the actions of religious extremists and tries to justify them through externalising the problem and shifting the burden on other institutions. The so-called religious elite cannot respond to these challenges.

Managing religion or religious actors are both hard tasks. These challenges become even more complex when we see that a conducive environment for such initiatives is not available either on the international or the domestic level. The establishments and social and religious elites prioritise their interests rather than work for solutions. ‘No religion in our professional lives’ will not remain an option unless the challenge is faced by both state and society.

The faith factor
by Muhammad Amir Rana, dawn.com
The writer is a security analyst.