Muslim Countries Must Rethink United Nations

The United Nations, after the United States had spurned the League of Nations, was forged mainly out of President Roosevelt's idea of "Four Policemen" - the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China - to police the postwar world. Later, on Churchill's suggestion France was brought in as "Fifth Policeman". The Big Five made up the Security Council with the right to veto on all issues that come before it. The power to veto was considered essential for there could be no "peace" in the postwar world if the Big Five did not agree. The acquisition of veto power by the organization's five most powerful member states, for all practical purposes, reduced the 184 non-veto members into a mere polyglot body of impotence, called General Assembly.

The United Nations Security Council, a totally undemocratic body, is composed of a privileged group of five countries with colonial and imperial past. Czarist Russia was known as the "prison house of nations" as it brutally and autocratically ruled over many peoples, including Georgians, Azerbaijanis and Turkic peoples. Imperialist China, through invasion and occupation, brought Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria and Taiwan under its jurisdiction. France and Great Britain exploited and ruled over many colonies all over the world. U.S. may not have occupied colonies in the manner of France and Britain, but it rules the world, like empires of the past, with its most extensive system of military bases.

Stalin's declaration shortly after the war, that "no peaceful international order is possible" between the communists and the capitalist-imperial world, and Churchill's famous "iron curtain" speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri set off the cold war. For the next four decades exchange of nasty barbs and fiery words between the diplomats of east and West characterized the world forum. The U.N., during the East versus West conflict, was powerless to bend any of the two superpowers or their client states to its will. Soviet invasion of Hungary and Afghanistan; American invasion of Vietnam, and recently Iraq; India's (an erstwhile Soviet client state) seizure of Portuguese enclave of Goa, Israel's (an American client state) flagrant violation of every U.N. resolution, are just a few blaring example of the United Nations' inability to contain the members of the Veto Club or their client states.

The Security Council effectively serves the five economically and militarily powerful nations to dictate and perpetuate the dominance over the less powerful countries, fomenting serious global crises. The power of veto did much, as intended, to ensure that general memberships would never unpleasantly surprise the "Big Brothers" by a show of unity and tenacity that would bind them to the lofty principles of the U.N. charter.

With the fall of the Berlin wall, the most conspicuous of all symbols of the cold war, in November 1989, comes the end of the East-West conflict. The death of the cold war resurrected the age old West's animosity towards Arabs and Muslims. Islam replaced communism as the principal adversary of Western liberal democracy. The hostility that was, to some degree, calmed by the presence of the big bear of communism resuscitated into a screeching storm of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim invective. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the unipolarization of the world, a new crusade against Islam and the "Islamic peril" is being wagged on all fronts: news media, academia, State Department, NSC, and the U.N. Security Council. The repressive measures of boycott, sanctions, and embargo, are reserved exclusively for Muslim Nations. The United States and the Great Britain employ the U.N. to impose their ideas on the rest of the world. They found it convenient to declare nations that have not caved in to their pressures "totalitarian" or "rogue states."

After the bitter experience of the Vietnam War United states came to realize that a unilateral international action is increasingly likely to be condemned abroad and unpopular at home. A military operation under the U.N. flag, rather than the Stars and Stripes, would internationally legitimize the action. Thus, U.N. has been reduced to a law enforcement agency of the U.S. State Department. It has won U.N. not the respect, but the contempt. It lost its credibility and became irrelevant, particularly in the Muslim world.

In a just and civilized community, crimes of like nature elicit like punishment regardless of the perpetrator. United Nations, under the tutelage of Western power, is free of any such moral restraint. If we look at United Nations' retributive actions we would find an invariable pattern of categorical prejudice against Muslim countries.

In 1988, an American airliner was sabotaged over Lockerbie Scotland; blame went to Libya. Gadhafi's refusal to hand over the two alleged suspects in the bombing, on the terms dictated by a country whose only justification is its power, brought the U.N. wrath. A few years later, on some other trumped up charge, American warplanes bombed Gadhafi's residence killing his infant daughter. Compare the U.N. treatment of Lockerbie incident with the American downing of an Iranian airliner in the same year, during the tension in the Persian Gulf, killing more than 300 passengers. U.N. slapped Libya with sanctions, and adopted a complete silence on American downing of Iranian civilian airliner. The silence speaks volume about U.N. dealing fairly and equally with all concerned.

On 2 August 1990, the United Nations Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq in response to its invasion of Kuwait. The U.N. trade embargo prohibited the import or export of goods or capital into or from Iraq. As a result of the U.N. imposed sanctions, according to former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, about 10,000 Iraqis died each month. In a letter to U.N. Mr. Clark stated, "The history of this violent century does not reveal a more deadly, cruel, inhumane and degrading torture of the whole population of an entire nation inflicted by foreign power for so long a period of time. That a deed is done in the name of the United Nations Security Council demonstrates its cowardly surrender to the will of the United States..." The U.N. Children's Fund estimated that 4,500 Iraqi children perished every month - one every ten minutes - as a direct result of American led U.N. sanctions.

In May 1995, then U.S. representative in the U.N., Madeleine Albright, cheerfully vetoed a Security Council resolution that called on Israel to reverse its decision to expropriate land in East Jerusalem. Ms. Albright is reported saying: "by injecting Council into this issue, this resolution would merely compound the problem." Contrast Ms. Albright's above statement with what she said when asked about the mass killing of the Iraqi children as a result of the Security Council's resolution, she unabashedly said that 500,000 dead Iraqi children were "worth it to enforce the resolutions."

Iraq's illegal occupation of Kuwait was not any more criminal than the Indian oppression of Kashmir or Israel's occupation of Palestine, Syrian territory or Southern Lebanon. If Iraq's occupation of Kuwait called for the U.N. Sanctions then, in all fairness, India and Israel should have also been subjected to the same punishment for they were guilty of the same crime. With the U.S. backing in the U.N. Security Council, Israel never faced the U.N. embargo for provocating the international will and making mockery of the Security Council resolutions. Using its veto power, the United States has stymied every effort to restrain Israeli violence and violation of international laws.

Today, the Security Council, by imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program, once again, proved that it's not a neutral and an objective body, but a highly politicized and blatantly discriminatory forum where members of the veto club protect themselves and their client states against the U.N. retribution, or block actions for political gains. United Nations in its discriminatory double standard singled out Iran for its nuclear program while completely ignoring any sanction against Israel for its stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The United States and Great Britain will never allow the Israeli nuclear program to U.N. scrutiny; Israel will never face the U.N.'s reprisal for violating more than 60 Security Council resolutions, thanks to the U.S. veto.

Security Council's bulldoggish manner in implementing resolutions against Muslim countries, and at the same time completely ignoring the other equally valid resolutions against Israel and India, shows its fixed state of mind - consistent discrimination against one set of people - Muslims.

Muslim countries must rethink the United Nations.

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Gaza factories remain paralysed despite Israel pledge to ease blockade

After three years of deadlock, Palestinian businesses are hoping for a better future. But some fear that the new Israeli trade rules could actually mean a fresh squeeze. Donald Macintyre reports from Gaza City. The chilled Tropika that Salama al-Kishawi proudly serves guests in his office tastes, unusually for a processed juice, of real oranges – especially refreshing on a 35C midsummer day in Gaza. But the flagship product of the Gaza Juice Factory has a significance that goes way beyond its taste.

The factory employs 65 workers and is one of very few industries to function despite the siege of Gaza imposed by Israel after Hamas seized full control of the territory three years ago this month.

How long it continues to function may well depend on just how the deal easing the Israeli blockade announced last Sunday works in practice. The future of Tropika has become a litmus test for Gaza's real economy.


In diplomatic terms, the deal negotiated between Israel and international envoy Tony Blair was a breakthrough. Israel is still refusing – apart from internationally supervised exceptions – to allow in anything, including cement badly needed for rebuilding bombed out homes, which it deems Hamas could use for military purposes.

But the announcement signified a real change of policy: in theory at least, all other goods will, for the first time in three years, be allowed to enter.

But nearly a week after the announcement, the people of Gaza, while content about the prospect of an increase in consumer goods from Israel, are demanding that the much more fundamental promise in the agreement, to allow the expansion of "economic activity", will also be honoured.

"If consumer items are allowed to come through the crossings, but at the same time we don't allow materials and the means of production to enter, that will have a negative effect," said Amr Hamad, Gaza director of the Palestinian Federation of Industries.

The Gaza Juice Factory, which is in the eastern suburb of Shajaia, in full view of the Israeli border, is a perfect illustration of the problem. Its neatly tended gardens and the bustle of forklift trucks loading the newly bundled bottles on to vans for shipment to local supermarkets testify that this is –unusually for Gaza – a going concern.

Their are tracks left by the Israeli tanks that smashed through the green metal perimeter fence during the military offensive of 2008-9, and the remains of what company boss Ayed abu Ramadan thinks must have been an Apache missile have been hung on the front wall as a memento to everything the factory has been through.

Its history is inextricably woven with that of the territory's turbulent and blood-splashed politics over the last 15 years.

An imposing plaque reminds visitors that it was opened by Yasser Arafat just two days after his triumphant return to Gaza from exile in Tunis in July 1994. The factory became a success, exporting to Egypt, the US, Europe, and Israel itself for more than a decade.

In 2006, however, the exports ground to a halt. Hamas had won the elections, the land crossings were mostly closed. By then Gaza's famous citrus groves had been almost destroyed by the Israeli military during its frequent incursions since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000.

"Here in Gaza we have always had the best oranges in the world," said Mr Kishawi. "Now most of it has gone."

Yet the 87p bottles of Tropika on the shelves of Gaza stores today are a testament to the company's remarkable adaptability. Its managers diversified into Tropika, but also strawberry and tomato juice, along with ketchup, jam, and a popular range of candied fruits.

From being a 100 per cent exporter, the company now caters 100 per cent for the home market. And although it would have greatly preferred to buy its raw materials much more cheaply from Israel, it was obliged by the closure to bring in bottles, packaging, flavouring and colouring additives through the tunnels from Egypt, paying what Mr Ramadan delicately calls the high "subway tolls" demanded by the tunnelers to pay their own costs – including levies to the Hamas de facto government.

Scarcity of fruit was the first problem. "Last year I needed 9,000 tonnes of citrus to meet demand," said Mr Kishawi, "but I was only able to find 1,000 tonnes."

Oranges from Israel were half of what they cost in Gaza but only eating – as opposed to juicing – oranges were allowed in by the Israeli authorities.

To underline the Alice in Wonderland economics of Gaza it was also possible to import from Egypt, through the tunnels, identical concentrate to that which it used to export to Egypt. "In June 2007 I was selling concentrate at $1,350 (£900) a ton but now it costs me $4,000 a ton to bring in," explained Mr Kishawi. "Where is the competition in that?"

As if this wasn't enough, eighteen months later the factory suffered devastating damage from Israeli ground and air assaults during the 2008-9 offensive, which hit hundreds of industrial sites. The damage prompted Amr Hamad of the Federation of Industries to remark: "What [Israel] were not able to reach by the blockade, they have reached with their bulldozers."

The main tube in the juice factory's key evaporator, wrecked by a missile, was quickly repaired, but the huge, 2,000-tonne capacity freezer, along with its contents, was destroyed. Then, toward the end of last year, the firm hit another obstacle. It thought it had done a deal with Israeli suppliers to supply 500 tonnes of badly-needed grapefruit.

"But then, when they realised that it was going to a juice factory and not the supermarkets, they stopped the grapefruits coming in," said Mr Kishawi.

Two weeks ago, in the wake of the international outcry that followed the crisis over the pro-Palestinian flotillas, came the first stage of the easing of the embargo and, perversely, with it a fresh threat to Tropika. The company was happy to hear the blockade was being eased – anticipating that it would now be able to import from Israel much cheaper raw materials.

Instead, it found that it was facing new competition. For the first time in three years, Israel has permitted the entry of processed fruit juice
– at the competitive price of five shekels (86p) a bottle. In a final irony (though its bosses are not sure how long this will last), the company, which is effectively owned by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and has a board of directors appointed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, is now depending on a lifeline from the Hamas de facto government. It has issued a protectionist warning to traders not to order processed juice from Israel.

The company has already preemptively reduced Tropika's own price, from six to five shekels a bottle, and would have no problem competing with the Israeli product if it was also to import the much cheaper raw materials available in Israel. "If we have a truly open market we can compete with anybody, including Israel," says Mr Kishawi.

Underlining the present imbalance, however, the company's chief buyer, Haitham Kannan, says: "Israel can produce a bottle of juice for around 25 cents – which is what the plastic bottle alone costs us."

As his boss, Mr Ramadan, puts it: "This is like tying someone's hands up and telling him to get into the boxing ring. After everything we have been through – closure, war, shortages, it would be crazy if we lost the business now."

Yet the Gaza Juice Factory is still – for now – operating. More typical is the fate of the Aziz Jeans factory on the edge of the Jabalya, eerily silent now, four years after it was alive with the din of 100 employees stitching teenage fashion jeans for the Aziz family's appreciative Israeli business partner.

Able neither to import the fabric or, even more importantly, export the finished jeans, the firm, like many hundreds of others, came to an abrupt halt almost immediately the blockade began.

Its highly skilled workforce dispersed – "a lot", according to Aziz Aziz, on to the Hamas payroll. The last time The Independent was here, Mr Aziz had generated a modest income by assembling electric plugs – but the competition of ready-made plugs smuggled though the tunnels made this a hopeless task.

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The Origins of a Holy Book

Modern research into Islam's origin and early years has been hampered by the paucity and inaccessibility of ancient texts, and the reluctance of Muslim governments in places like Yemen to allow wide access to them.

Later this spring, a team of scholars at Germany's Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences will complete the first phase of what will ultimately be an unprecedented, two-decade effort to throw light on the origins of the Koran.

The project, called the Corpus Coranicum, will be something that scholars of the Koran have long yearned for: a central repository of imagery, information, and analysis about the Muslim holy book. Modern research into Islam's origin and early years has been hampered by the paucity and inaccessibility of ancient texts, and the reluctance of Muslim governments in places like Yemen to allow wide access to them.

But, drawing on some of the earliest Korans in existence - codices found in Istanbul, Cairo, Paris, and Morocco - the Corpus Coranicum will allow users to study for themselves images of thousands of pages of early Korans, texts that differ in small but potentially telling ways from the modern standard version. The project will also link passages in the text to analogous ones in the New Testament and Hebrew Bible, and offer an exhaustive critical

commentary on the Koran's language, structure, themes, and roots. The project's creators are calling it the world's first "critical edition" of the Koran, a resource that gathers historical evidence and scholarly literature into one searchable, cross-referenced whole.

Critical editions - usually books rather than websites - are a commonplace in academia. University bookstores do a brisk business in critical editions of the world's best-known literary works, from "The Iliad" to "Hamlet" to "Das Kapital.Ó" As labor-saving devices for scholars and teaching aids for students, they can be invaluable. Presenting a novel or manifesto or play in its historical context helps readers to see the ways it was shaped by contemporaneous events and local attitudes, how it was built from the distinctive cultural building blocks at hand. Embedding a work in critical commentary - and critical editions often include essays that are sharply at odds with each other - gives readers a sense of the richness of possible readings of the text.

But the form takes on a special significance with holy books, where millions of people order their lives in accordance to what they see as divine language. Standard versions like the King James Bible or the regularized Cairo Koran (the version, first printed in 1924, that most Muslims have today) help to unite the faithful in one common reading of their holy book. A critical edition, on the other hand, by its nature, highlights the contingency of a text's creation and gives readers the tools to interpret it for themselves.

Among Koranic scholars, there's a great deal of excitement about the Corpus Coranicum, which will help them make better sense of a text that - despite the fact that millions regularly recite from it and live their lives according to its precepts - remains something of a historical and theological puzzle

"I think it is a big deal," says Jane McAuliffe, the editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an and the president of Bryn Mawr College, "it's a wonderful opportunity to do something that the field of Koranic studies has wanted to do for a long time."

At the same time, the impending publication of the Corpus has set off a small stir outside the scholarly world. Islam has a long and lively tradition of theological debate, but in recent years revisionist scholars in the Muslim world have been threatened, branded heretics, and even attacked for their work. Already, the creators of the Corpus Coranicum, in response to press coverage in Germany, have felt the need to publicly insist on al-Jazeera and in visits to Muslim countries that they have no intention of undermining the faith. In part what's to blame is the strict, austere form of Islam that is dominant in some parts of the world, but the friction also stems from the relationship all Muslims have to the Koran. To a mainstream Muslim, the Koran is not merely a divinely inspired text put together by disciples, as most modern Christians believe the Bible to be. It is the literal word of God, dictated directly to Mohammed. To question that is to insult the faith.

The fact that it will be born on the Web makes the Corpus Coranicum seem a quintessentially 21st-century project, but its roots actually extend back to the 1930s. Then, as now, Germany produced some of the world's leading Koranic scholars - proteges of the great 19th-century linguist, historian, and "Semiticist" Theodor Noldeke.

The archive that was to become the Corpus Coranicum was started by the German Arabist Gotthelf Bergstrasser, who traveled through Europe and the former Ottoman Empire photographing the old Korans he turned up. After Bergstrasser's death in a mountain climbing accident in the Alps, a colleague named Otto Pretzl took over, before he died in a plane crash while serving in World War II. That left the photo archive in the hands of a young scholar named Anton Spitaler.

Then, in a mystifying twist detailed in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article, Spitaler began to claim, falsely, that the photo archive had been destroyed in 1944 by an Allied bombing raid. Spitaler kept up this deception until the early 1990s, when he revealed to a former student of his named Angelika Neuwirth that he still had all 450 rolls of film. He offered to give them to her - she is today the head of the Corpus Coranicum project - and he died a decade later without explaining himself.

According to Islam, the Koran is a series of revelations Mohammed was given through the Angel Gabriel, starting in 610 AD and ending with Mohammed's death two decades later. Those revelations were recorded and compiled by Mohammed's followers. In the religion's early years, little need was seen for a standardized text - Mohammed and most of his followers were illiterate and as a result the Koran was meant to be recited rather than read (a tradition that remains central to Islam). Transmission was mainly oral, with written texts simply an aid. But within decades of Mohammed's death, conquests had ballooned the size of the Muslim empire and many of the original disciples were themselves aging and dying, and one of Mohammed's successors decreed a standard written version to unify the growing faith. In a pre-printing-press world, however, the process took time, and alternate versions continued to be written and read for decades, and perhaps centuries.

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Modernity And Morality

To be civilized you should have western habits and consumption patterns and also have to mimic western way of life. On the top of that list comes women's liberation. That is, if women in your culture are not 'liberated' by discarding the traditional garb or dress, you must be 'oppressing' your females, and you are uncivilized!

The values that I grew up with and learned as a child born in South Asia nearly half a century ago are quite different than the ones preached and practiced today in the West. In our zeal to be called civilized we have automatically assumed it to equate with modernity. Thus, in our political jargon when our western leaders talk about being civilized they mean how well we have adopted the modern western way of life. That means, to be civilized you should have not just an ordinary wired telephone but a wireless/cellular phone, TV, cars, computers and other amenities of the western modern life - running faucets, western habits and consumption patterns. Minus those modern amenities, you simply are not civilized. But that is not enough! You have to also mimic western way of life. On the top of that list comes women's liberation. That is, if women in your culture are not 'liberated' by discarding the traditional garb or dress, you must be 'oppressing' your females, and you are uncivilized! It is no accident that France and its president, born of a broken family and himself a playboy, Nicolas Sarkozy are now defining how the 'cultured' and 'civilized' French society ought to look like.

Sarkozy is married, if I am not mistaken his third time, to Carla Bruni, a singer who is more known for exhibiting her naked body than her voice. So, as you can guess: hijab and Muslim veil, worn by many traditional Muslim women, are unacceptable in that 'emancipated' country whose 'civilized' natives still have not learned the basic hygiene, let alone the true meaning of morality. If you care not to expose your kids to sex, you better switch off the TV after sunset. In such countries of sin and immorality, where sometimes you can't distinguish a real politician from a part-time pimp and a prostitute, and, (probably pertinently so,) run by racists and bigots, it is no wonder that immigrants with their conservative values and family-oriented culture and tradition are considered a direct threat to the very foundation of those states. It is that age-old cry and fury of the 'liberated' inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah: you must be like us in order to reside here; there is no place for the Prophet Lut (Lot) or his righteous kind!

Sarkozy is surrounded by guys like Bernard Kuchner who not too long ago is accused by hard-hitting investigative journalist Pierre Pean in "The World According to K." of a "possible conflict of interests" in working as a consultant in Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo while serving as government-appointed head of a public body supporting health services in Africa. In the Netherlands the far-right, anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders of the PVV has won major gains in local elections, with results indicating that he may dominate the political scene in the run-up to the general election in June. After winning the election, Wilders told cheering supporters at a rally in Almere, "We are going to conquer the entire country ... We are going to be the biggest party in the country. The leftist elite still believes in multiculturalism, coddling criminals, a European super-state and high taxes." Wilders likens the Qur'an to Hitler's Mein Kampf and wants Muslim immigrants deported.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's Christian Democrats remain the largest party in the Netherlands, but for how long? On March 18, 2010, the PVV gave up trying to form a governing coalition in Almere, where it won more seats than any other party. In a press release, the party said most of the other parties had refused to give ground to PVV demands on what it describes as "essential issues". The PVV's demands included a ban on headscarves for city council workers and in all institutions and clubs "which get even one cent of council money." The ban would not have applied to other religious items such as Christian crosses and Jewish skull caps. Is it anything but blatant discrimination and religious bigotry?

In the French-speaking Quebec province of Canada Premier Jean Charest this week proposed an anti-niqab bill. The proposed law is misguided and described by the Ottowa Citizen as a clumsy, politically-charged hammer. The newspaper says, "Of the 200,000 or so Muslims in Quebec, maybe a few dozen women wear a niqab, a veil that covers the entire face except for a slit for the eyes. To draft legislation singling out such a tiny minority suggests the law has more to do with pandering to fears about immigration -- specifically, the failure of some immigrants to integrate -- than solving any real, non-aesthetic problem posed by niqabs... The anti-niqab bill is clearly meant to be a political statement, and an ostentatious one at that, not unlike the infamous code of behaviour drafted by the Quebec town of Herouxville in 2007 that prohibited all sorts of practices, real or imagined, that are associated with immigrants. The joke was that Herouxville had virtually no immigrant population." The editor is absolutely right, but will the racist politicians in Quebec see the light, or follow their racist cousin in France? Never mind a westerner's preference for almost everything artificial and unnatural, cosmetics and perfumes to hide his/her natural imperfections and bad body odors, are the modern amenities the real measures of civilization?

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Let's consider TV. It has both positive and negative sides. There is no doubt that it allows us to learn about our planet and galaxy. A peasant in Lalmonirhat in Bangladesh can now get a glimpse of life in Louisiana, USA - located on the other side of the globe without ever having to sail or fly there. But news, history, geography, health and science are not the only things shown on TV. Seldom do we realize that with TV, we have brought violence and sex into our family rooms, and not the kind of things family members can watch together in the same room! Just turn on any major channel in the USA between 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. You will see soap operas about dysfunctional families where everyone seems to be cheating - husband cheating his wife and vice-versa, let alone the unmarried guys and gals whose preoccupation seems all about sex. In places like Germany and France, it is much worse; you can hardly find a channel in the evening that is free of showing sexual stuffs. If this kind of lifestyle is what a western civilization has ended up producing who in the right mind would need this poison?

Unfortunately, a dominant culture is like a magnet that attracts others to mimic its ways. Many in the third world and developing countries are, therefore, learning those bad ways faster and unquestioning. Take a look at the beaches in South America where traditional bikinis worn by women are getting fast replaced by G-string bikinis. It is no surprise that we see many young boys in South Asia today with earrings, a practice that was not known or seen in the past. Many youngsters are now addicted to drugs -- another statement to show off their borrowed modernity and liberated soul. Many possess illegal arms. It is not difficult to find a strong correlation with a rise in sex-related crimes, violence and divorce in these societies today. Women in traditional homes are discarding natural herbs for synthetic cosmetics!

In this culture of modernity often times it is the large and small screen actors that become the role models to copy. The things that they wear become our fashion and style. We are not shocked any more to learn that most Hollywood actors live immoral lives; they are into drugs and sex. Divorce and sex scandal are rather common facets of life in the Hollywood. The hottest topic that dominated the media the last week was all about sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. It is obvious from the reports unearthed thus far that Pope Benedict has a long history, dating at least back to 1979, of condoning such sexual abuses within the Church. As a micro-manager all his life, he was on the top of all such affairs and cannot now evade accountability. He allowed the transfer of molester priests that preyed on children. There are also questions about Benedict's directive as a Vatican cardinal in 2001 that bishops worldwide were to keep pedophilia investigations secret under threat of ex-communication. Regrettably, the church leaders chose to protect the church instead of the children.

As a child growing up in Bangladesh, I remember the story of a rickshaw puller who stopped by a well to help a village girl to put her water pitcher on the head. Neither the doer of the kind act nor the beneficiary had to utter a single word; he knew the kind of help the girl needed. After he was able to place the water pitcher on the head of the girl, he left for his rickshaw while the girl left for her home. No "thank you" was even needed to be uttered by the girl. It was all that natural - giving and receiving. That is what real civilization is all about: where each member of the society does continuous small acts of charity without expecting reward or recognition. It is also free of hypocrisy or pretension.

Surely, a society and civilization that prides in its modernity where immorality, sex and abuse are engrained into its very core, and fascist inclinations are interwoven with its sinful and faulty character cannot be the role model or guiding light for anyone, much less for others with strong life-giving and -sustaining ethics, values and mores.

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Islam and the Gender Equity Movement

The mere proposal of an All-Africa Muslim Women formation nearly caused brouhaha at a conference I recently attended.

Some righteous males started pontificating about women wanting to dethrone them from their God-given seat of being the centre around which the life of a woman should revolve. They accused women of wanting to beat them in the marvelous game of smoking cigarettes, wearing trousers and sleeping around. If this was aimed at intimidation and muting and mutilating the women's voice, I must say, this is a strategy that seems to be working very well for the blessed man. The most enthusiastic and articulate woman activist started giving men assurances that they are by no means feminists. She stressed that they want to organize themselves precisely to preach to the women who are not dressed properly, that women can police the behavior of deviant women who wear trousers or don't put on scarves better than men can ever do. The males who defended such a forum did this on the basis of enabling women to impart religious education to children and other, with emphasis on the usual message we hear from the pulpit: Islam provides rights to women, but it is men who dispense these rights.

My support for the idea was informed by an expectation that it will serve as a platform for women to challenge male-centric expressions of Islam, push for a fiqh that allows the voices and experiences of women to be articulated and to unapologetically confront the inequities and injustices that women face in society. I had thought that such a platform would raise issues such as women leadership and women scholarship in Islam, access to education, decent and adequate space for women in places of worship, women representation in Mosque committees and on the board of Muslim schools and other Islamic institutions. Thanks to the all-powerful protestation and rave of the male voice, this was shrinking into a place for women at a table laid out by men, with strict instructions not to forget that this is a men's world.

As the vigorous debate went on the voices of the women were getting muter and muter. This vindicated my observation that patriarchal, chauvinist and sexist men deliberately make generalizations and equate the feminist and gender equity movement with women smoking cigarette, drinking beer, tearing off their bras, discarding motherhood in order to intimidate and bully women away from the struggle against gender-based inequities and injustices. The same Muslim men who rile against the Islamophobic painting of Muslims with one brush find it so easy and comfortable to stereotype the feminist and gender equity movement as a lobby of immodest, anti-men, wild women. They deliberately ignore the diversity of the strands and perspectives within the feminist movement.

The reality of the matter is that as a political, cultural and/or economic movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women, and concerned with issues of gender difference, women rights and interests, feminism addresses a range of issues and causes most of which are compatible with the Islamic call towards justice for all. These issues and causes include campaigns for women's legal rights (rights of contract, property rights, voting rights); for women's right to bodily integrity and autonomy, and for reproductive rights (including access to contraception and quality prenatal care); for protection of women and girls from domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape; or workplace rights, including maternity leave and equal pay; against misogyny; and against other forms of gender-specific discrimination against women.

In addition to ignoring the validity and legitimacy of the many issues and causes addressed by the feminist and gender equity movement, those who bash women's rights and gender equity also deliberately or ignorantly don't recognize the diverse theories, philosophies and currents within this movement. In their zeal to portray feminists as all being frustrated, estranged, elite white and black women, the 'haters' lump liberal feminism, radical feminism, socialist feminism, environmentalist feminism, anarchist feminism, individual feminism, post colonial feminism and Black feminism or Womanism together. What seem to be lost to the gender equity bashers is that at its very birth Islam transformed the gender dynamics in society by recognizing the full personhood of women, placing a prohibition on female infanticide, recognizing inheritance, turning marriage into a social contract rather than a status, making dowry to be a nuptial gift to the women rather than a bridal-price paid to the father, and providing inheritance and property rights to women at the time such rights were unknown of.

The patriarchal and sexist brigade within the Muslim community thrives on political apathy, low culture of reading, decline in popular education and lack of access to material by classical and contemporary Muslim scholars who tackle these issues outside the framework of literalist and a-contextual fiqh. According to the catalogue of the list of books in our libraries and bookstores, and our curriculum in Muslim institutions, Qasim Amin's Women's Liberation (Tahrir al-Mar'a) (1899) was never written and the feminist undertones in the works of the first woman to undertake Quran exegesis - Aisha Abdal Rahman - aka Bint al Shati (Daughter of the Riverbank) - are just a figment in the imagination of modernist scholars.

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How many Madressa and Dar-ulooom graduates know that women's assertion of their right to be acknowledged, listened to and heard starts with the female companions of the prophet Mohammed (s) demanding to know from the prophet (s) why Allah does not address women directly in Quran - to which the Almighty responded by henceforth using the phrase 'believing men and believing women' when addressing the believers? And that this woman activism gender equity tradition continues in the medieval period and the eighteen century with Ibn Arabi arguing that women could achieve spiritual stations as equally high as men and Nana Asma'u - the daughter of the prominent and eminent reformer Uthman Don Fodio - pushing for literacy and education of Muslim women. How many Madressa teachers tell their students of the founding of the University of Al Karauine by Fatima al-Fihri in 859 CE? How many of our children know that 26 of the 160 Mosques built in the 12 and 13th century during the Ayyubid dynasty were funded by a women's charitable trust (Waqf) and that half of all the royal patrons for these institutions were women?

Needless to mention the obvious example and inspiration behind women's active participation and leadership in public political, economic, social and cultural affairs women were the mothers of the believers, Khadijah (RA), Aisha (renowned scholar of hadith and military leader), Fatima (RA) (the beloved daughter of the prophet).

And the prophet's (s) words of praise to the women of Medina: 'How splendid were the women of the ansaar; shame did not prevent them from becoming learned in the faith.' The prophet's (s) words clearly articulate that guarding one's chastity, spirituality and righteousness does not dictate invisibility in public affairs. This is a sufficient rebuttal of the myth that women scholarship, leadership and activism are equal to the loss of shame and decency. What about stressing in the rules of modesty the language and tone we use when talking to our employees and house-helpers most of whom are old enough to be our parents, irritating cat-calls, suggestive looks and gestures towards women in the streets or passes at our house-helpers? How many men who rap about modesty talk down to their wives and treat them like they are dolls?

How many of the men who rant about modesty use vulgar, derogatory and degrading language, are rude to people, and give shabby treatment to their aged parents and grandparents? How many of these men are equally enraged when they witness girl-children below the age of eighteen being handed over in arranged/forced marriages to adults, and how many speak out in outrage against honor-killings and the disowning of children by their parents for marrying outside the village, race, tribe, and sect. How often do we rebuke men for strolling around the beach with bare chests and walking the streets in Bermudas? It seems like for many of us males, modesty and chastity has little to do with God and the integrity of the individual but a lot to do with controlling women's body, voice and movement to ensure that our wives and our daughters remain our property.

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Islam's European Reformation?

The controversial Tariq Ramadan's latest book promotes a "Western" version of Islam. Is he the "Muslim Martin Luther"?

Late last month, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton lifted a six-year visa ban on the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan, an Oxford professor and Europe's premier voice of reformist Islam, had been prohibited by the Bush administration from entering the U.S. on the grounds that he had given money to the Palestinian militant group Hamas - a charge he vigorously denied. Ever since, Ramadan has polarized public opinion in both America and Europe: the left lauds him as a "Muslim Martin Luther," while the right demonizes him as an extremist in sheep's clothing. Despite the passionate debate, neither side has shown much interest in the substance of Ramadan's message - conveniently summarized in his concise new book, What I Believe (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Ramadan wrote What I Believe as "a work of clarification." In it, he emphasizes that his goal is to fashion a distinctively "Western" expression of Islam that does not require Muslims to choose between their national identities and their religious one. According to Ramadan, a person can be both fully Muslim and fully French, British, or German; these multiple identities shift and blend depending on the situation we face.

Ramadan's intellectual agenda reflects his own unconventional upbringing: his maternal grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical group that championed the establishment of an Islamic state in Egypt and which launched the modern era of Islamist politics. Ramadan's father, Said, was one of al-Banna's senior deputies, and after al-Banna's death, he went into exile with his family in Geneva. There, he committed his life to preserving and disseminating al-Banna's legacy. The first of Said Ramadan's children born in Europe was Tariq. Caught between the Islamist cauldron of Egypt and cosmopolitan Geneva, Tariq grew up parsing his multiple and seemingly competing identities. As he writes, "I am Swiss by nationality, Egyptian by memory, Muslim by religion, European by culture, [and] universalist by principle."

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U.S. Can't Afford Military Aid to Israel

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama pledged to "go through the budget line by line to eliminate programs that we can't afford and don't work." One week later, he sent his FY2011 budget request to Congress, which included a record-breaking $3 billion in military aid to Israel.

This requested increase in U.S. weapons to Israel -- part of a ten-year $30 billion agreement signed between the two countries in 2007 -- qualifies on both counts as a program that the United States can't afford and that doesn't work in establishing a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Data published recently by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation shows that U.S. military aid to Israel comes at a financial and moral price that this country cannot afford to pay. Its website reveals that this same $3 billion earmark for Israel could be used instead to provide more than 364,000 low-income households with affordable housing vouchers, or to retrain 498,000 workers for green jobs, or to provide early reading programs to 887,000 at-risk students, or to provide access to primary health care services for more than 24 million uninsured Americans.

If U.S. weapons were going to Israel for a good purpose, then perhaps a coherent guns versus butter debate would be appropriate. However, Israel repeatedly misuses U.S. weapons to commit grave human rights abuses against Palestinians who are forced to live under its illegal 42-year military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.

During the Bush Administration, Israel killed at least 3,107 innocent Palestinian civilians, according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. Israel also injured thousands more innocent Palestinians and destroyed billions of dollars of Palestinian civilian infrastructure including homes, schools, factories, government buildings, and even Palestine's only airport. The severity and scale of this killing and destruction were made possible by hi-tech U.S. weapons provided to Israel at taxpayer expense.

And during Obama's first year in office, Israel continued to misuse its stock of U.S. weapons to entrench its apartheid policies toward Palestinians by maintaining its illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip -- collectively punishing its 1.5 million Palestinian residents by severely restricting the flow of humanitarian relief -- and building illegal Israeli-only colonies on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

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