Thoughts on the Eid Day

It's Eid Day at the end of the month-long fasting and my heart is sore. I think of the Muslims all over the world and I find little comfort.

I think of the Shia-Sunni divide profusely bleeding the ummah every moment. I shudder at the thought that some groups on both sides in Pakistan or elsewhere might not hesitate to shed each others' blood even on this day of joy and festivity. I think of those rulers in the heartland of Islam, Arabia, who would rather cooperate with Israel than endure the thought of Iran surviving and thriving. I cannot forget how this Shia-Sunni divide has been exploited by Islam's common enemies for centuries and has facilitated their conquest and domination of the Muslims, and continues to do so today. On this Eid Day I sit down alone and lament the blindness and the perversion of our hearts that this Shia-Sunni divide has caused.

I think of the plight of the Muslim lands - Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Mindanao, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen, ravaged by internal strife and humiliated by foreign occupation and domination, the killing fields that these places have become. Killing in the Muslim lands has become an easy sport. I think of the fear, insecurity, misery, humiliation and helplessness of so many of my brothers and sisters, too many to count. I think of the long dark night in their lives with no sign of an approaching morning.

I think of the beleaguered Muslim masses around the world. The Muslim societies in Muslim lands are no longer a unified whole; they are torn up into conflicting segments in which the masses always lose. The ruling elite in these lands have a tenuous connection with Islam and stand as a class apart only to serve themselves. Their insensitivity and heartlessness to those they rule over is mind-numbing. Likewise, Muslims living outside the Muslim world have a precarious existence and are under constant threat. At every step they need to prove themselves as sufficiently human, sufficiently American or European or whatever; they are regarded with suspicion, ridicule and even outright hostility.

I think of my brothers and sisters in so many places of the world in staggering poverty and suffering one natural calamity after another. I see my millions of flood-affected brothers and sisters in Pakistan, mostly poor, pitifully neglected by successive governments and by the rich and powerful in their communities who exploit them but refuse to stand by them in their distress. Where are Muslims who are humble in power and generous in wealth, as Islam teaches? I think of the waste and ostentation that go on all year round, culminating in Ramadan and on the Eid Day, even when neighbours are suffering unspeakably.

I think of the breed of politicians in the Muslim lands who ferociously compete with each other to lead the Muslims. Barring a few exceptions here and there, they range from insane to clownish. They display their talent best in groveling at the feet of their foreign masters while creating division and strife at home. They beg without shame from their foreign masters only to fatten themselves and their cronies. They utterly lack any sense of self-respect and are incapable of behaving in a dignified manner. In their own base interest they mortgage the fate of the millions of their fellow Muslims. They lead only to destroy. I think of the way Muslim rulers in the oil rich states squander their wealth in useless and wasteful projects. I grieve at the inhuman treatment millions of desperate expatriate Muslim workers receive at the hands of many Muslim governments.


I think of the government offices that will open soon after the Eid vacation. I will not speak of the incompetence and corruption in these places. I only shudder to think of the indignity and humiliation an ordinary Muslim is meted out by the people sitting in chairs in these places. An encounter with them is enough to take away one's joy of living.

I miss the loss of community, its integrity and cohesion that Allah (Subhanahu wa ta'ala) and His noble Messenger (Sallallahu alayhi wassallam) repeatedly enjoin on Muslims. Muslims oppress other Muslims without hesitation, inflict pain on each other, make each other's burdens heavier with no feeling of shame or remorse. Muslims go hungry in the midst of plenty and waste, get sick without succor, cry bitterly and in vain for redress and justice. I find Muslims today living side by side without even being aware of each others' existence. We pray together in the masjid, but have no real communion with one another.

I think of the Muslim people split up and caged into national entities, even so much so that at Hajj they are deprived of any opportunity to come close to each other because they are consigned to enclaves by nationality. I smell the air in which the concept of the ummah has been given a foul odor and has become dangerous to breathe in. It has become a crime to think of oneself as an integral part of a unified body of Muslims, universal and timeless.

I miss the ulema who are supposed to be the heirs of our noble Prophet Muhammad (saws) in all the aspects of his life and life's work. I long to see a body of the ulema who understand Islam, live by it, understand their own people and their tradition and know the contemporary world for what it is. I long to see them breaking out of their isolation in their own regional confines and forming a close bond with the ulema in all parts of the Muslim world, sit together and discuss issues and concerns that need to be addressed unitedly and firmly. I long to see them, and them alone, lead the Muslims. Muslim masses are hungry for leadership that does not come. There are many individuals and groups active in Islamic work, but there are not many who present Islam in its entirety, faithfully and truly. It is as if we are engaged in creating an Islam of our own inclinations, as if we are not comfortable with Islam as it is.

I remember what Allah (swt) has called the Muslims, the best ummah raised for mankind (Quran 3:110). Can we make any claim to being the best of anything? This Eid Day will pass and another day will begin, and thus another week, month and year. On this auspicious day we need to examine ourselves and ask what groundwork we have done for that noble role during the month of Ramadan that we have just bidden farewell to.

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A Mosque Maligned

Just to show you how naive I am: When I first heard about the plan to build a mosque and community center two blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks, I didn't envision any real opposition to it.

Sure, I can understand how some people traumatized by 9/11 - firefighters who survived it, or people whose loved ones didn't - might not like the idea. But I'd have thought that opinion leaders of all ideological stripes could reach consensus by applying a basic rule of thumb: Just ask, "What would Osama bin Laden want?" and then do the opposite.

Bin Laden would love to be able to say that in America you can build a church or synagogue anywhere you want, but not a mosque. That fits perfectly with his recruiting pitch - that America has declared war on Islam. And bin Laden would thrill to the claim that a mosque near ground zero dishonors the victims of 9/11, because the unspoken premise is that the attacks really were, as he claims, a valid expression of Islam.

Apparently I was wrong. Two New York politicians - Representative Peter King and Rick Lazio, a candidate for governor - are ginning up opposition to the project, as is the Weekly Standard.

Their strategy is to ask dark questions about the motivations behind the project (known as Park51 because of its address on Park Place). Those motivations reside in an imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, founder of the Cordoba Initiative and the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the project's co-sponsors. So far as I can tell, Rauf is a good person who genuinely wants to build a more peaceful world. (I met him briefly last year at a venue where we had both been asked to give talks about compassion - his from an Islamic perspective, mine from a secular perspective. Here's the talk he gave.)

But if you think Rauf's good intentions are going to keep him safe from the Weekly Standard, you underestimate that magazine's creative powers. Its latest issue features an article about Park51 chock full of angles that never would have occurred to me if some magazine had asked me to write an assessment of the project's ideological underpinnings. For example: Rauf's wife, who often speaks in support of the project and during one talk reflected proudly on her Islamic heritage, "failed to mention another feature of her background: She is the niece of Dr. Farooq Khan, formerly a leader of the Westbury Mosque on Long Island, which is a center for Islamic radicals and links on its Web site to the paramilitary Islamic Circle of North America (I.C.N.A.), the front on American soil for the Pakistani jihadist Jamaat e-Islami."


Got that? Rauf's wife has an uncle who used to be "a leader" of a mosque that now has a Web site that links to the Web site of an allegedly radical organization. (I'll get back to the claim that the Westbury Mosque is itself a "center for Islamic radicals.")

The odd thing is that the author of this piece, Stephen Schwartz, is a self-described neoconservative whose parents were, by his own account, communists. You'd think he might harbor doubts about how confidently we can infer people's ideologies from the ideologies of their older relatives. You'd also think he might disdain McCarthyite guilt-by-association tactics.

You'd be wrong. Schwartz's piece goes on and on, weaving webs of association so engrossing that you have to keep reminding yourself that they have nothing to do with Rauf. At one point Schwartz spends several paragraphs damning someone whose connection to Park51 seems to consist of having spoken favorably about it.

As for the views of Rauf himself: In Schwartz's universe, Rauf's expressions of opposition to terrorism are themselves grounds for suspicion. Rauf, says Schwartz, has "cloaked the Cordoba effort in the rhetoric of reconciliation, describing himself and his colleagues as 'the anti-terrorists.'"

Rauf has been the imam at a Manhattan mosque for a quarter of a century, so you'd think that, if he actually had radical views, there would be some evidence of that by now. Just to give you some idea of what solid evidence of radicalism looks like: Representative King, who shares the Weekly Standard's grave suspicions about Rauf, supported the Irish Republican Army back when it was killing lots of innocent civilians. He raised money for the I.R.A. and said it was "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland" and praised the "brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry" and in various other ways backed this terrorist group. If Rauf's past looked like King's past, there would indeed be cause for concern.

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Facebook and Muslim Outrage: Gleaning the Wrong Lesson, Again

There is no denial – and no shame – in the fact that most Muslims hold their Prophet in the highest regard. Despite the continued decrease in the number of faithful in increasingly secularized Western societies, Muslims are clinching even tighter to their faith.

"Any depictions of the prophet are considered blasphemous by Muslims," wrote Agencies, as reported readily by Aljazeera.net English. The above statement is meant to fully summarize the reason behind the outrage that arises in Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world whenever some provocative 'artist' decides to express his freedom of expression and 'expose' Muslims as anti-democratic.

Such a simplistic interpretation of such an intricate issue.

There is no denial - and no shame - in the fact that most Muslims hold their Prophet in the highest regard. Despite the continued decrease in the number of faithful in increasingly secularized Western societies, Muslims are clinching even tighter to their faith. However, while the outrage over the latest transgression by some Facebook user and his "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" may appear as a straightforward news story - that of Western values vs Muslim narrow-mindedness - the true underpinnings of the outrage is suspiciously missing.

The na•ve depiction by Western media makes it easy for 'freedom of expression' enthusiasts to condemn Muslims for yet again failing the democracy test.

The latest Facebook episode is a remake of the same old story. Some ill-intended 'artist', under the guise of freedom of speech, takes on a confrontational mission, knowing fully the response such an act would generate, and perhaps the lives that would be lost. Muslim masses, predictably, respond through angry protests, burning flags, denouncing America, Israel, Zionism, Facebook, Youtube and so on. Strangely, the very governments that are considered US allies tend to be on the forefront of condemning the 'blasphemous' provocations. Muslim masses are thus exploited on all fronts - by the media, by anti-Muslims, by rightwing forces in the West, and their own governments.

This, in turn, gives more ammunition to the Islamaphobes who constantly try to fan the flames in order to validate their racist perception of Muslims. The likes of Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz, and other 'experts' invade our TV screens and take on the responsibility of lecturing the world on Islam. They use the same reductionist and racist language that they have utilized for years in the guise of academic jargon.

Why, though, are these 'academics' and 'intellectuals' eager to discredit Islam? And why are Muslims playing right into their hands?

It behooves us all to remember that some of those who champion freedom of expression are selective in their advocacy. Freedom of expression becomes important when the holiest symbols of Islam and its Prophet are paraded, ridiculed and stereotyped. However, these very advocates are enraged when the opinions being expressed are inconsistent with their own agenda, which is overtly militant and hegemonic, and refuses to take into consideration any honest opinion on Israel and its war crimes against Palestinians. One needs to repeat the way that the respected South African Judge Richard Goldstone, himself Jewish, was depicted for pointing out the horrendous crimes committed in Gaza during Israel's most recent war. More, these individuals seem completely oblivious when Muslims are denied the right to express their own values. When, for example, was the last time a rightwing fanatic stood up for a Muslim woman's right to cover her hair or face?

It must be stated, however, that discrediting Muslims and Islam is not a random strategy. It is very much in tandem with an overriding agenda that has occupied the thinking of many rightwing and Zionist ideologues for years, especially following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rising of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fervor in various Western countries. The aim is to dehumanize Muslims, to make them seem less civilized, and thus less worthy of equal human rights. In other words, Muslims cannot be treated using the same standards that apply to Westerners, because they have failed to subscribe to Western values. The angry protests in Pakistan are supposedly proof of this. This makes war easy and sanctions morally justifiable.

Why are Muslims playing right into this scenario? Actually, they are not, although it would seem otherwise. The fact is, many Muslims nations are caught between two layers of oppressions: that of outsiders - wars and occupation, interference in their countries' affairs, all forms of humiliation and exploitation - and internal pressures - corruption, oppression and denial of rights, including, yes, freedom of expression, speech, assembly and democracy itself. These rights are also denied by the very countries that are seen as 'pro-American.'

Under these external and internal pressures, Muslim societies embrace even tighter their everlasting Islamic symbols. Islam, for many Muslims, represents more than just a way of life and an answer to unworldly questions. It also provides a sense of hope, and it helps to maintain a level of solidarity and societal cohesion. The harder people's lives become, the more impoverished, oppressed and abused, the stronger their faith grows.

Considering all of this, insulting Islam, depicting the Prophet in degrading (or any other) ways, bashing Islamic symbols and values is equivalent to denying Muslim masses with their last and only chance at dignity and hope.

Those who are under the impression that Muslims are opposed to freedom of expression are only seeing a small part of the picture. Those versed in history understand that it was Muslim advancements in science, art and literature, and their most impressive translations of the great works of ancient civilizations that allowed Europe to bask in the sun of its renaissance.

Moreover, those who are sensible enough to see the big picture will understand that when a Pakistani woman chants "Death to Facebook" - as pitiful and confusing such phrase may sound - she is not actually referring to a social networking website. Far from it, especially since numerous Muslims have utilized Facebook to share their own ideas with the rest of the world. What the woman is chanting against is the manipulation of freedom of expression to further humiliate her people. She is standing in solidarity with European Muslim communities who are under a most intense attack on their civil rights and liberties. She is angry at the war in Afghanistan, the constant bombing of innocents in Pakistan, the occupation of Iraq, the rape of women and the parading of naked prisoners, the siege in Gaza. She is angry about the Western double standards regarding democracy, about her own oppression and her people's misfortunes. And so much more.

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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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