Thursday, July 31, 2014

The Fiction Of Rationalism And Humanity / Mohammad Jalaluddin




Both Gaza and ISIS could be said to bring out the worst in us in different ways. It is not just men, women and children alone who are dying. But humanity itself. And not just there.

To begin with Muslims are terrorists for a large swathe of humanity outside of Islam, and for them it was almost of no importance as long as victims were Muslims only. 

There was a very macabre labyrinth of opiniona - from a ‘let Islam f****** itself into non existence’ to ‘good that they are not butchering from outside their faith.’ Islam is their favourite whipping boy anyway.

They’ll beat their breast out for the atrocities in Nigeria. They will just ‘enjoy’ an ISIS. And then they will gleefully endorse the ‘humanitarian’ Israel’s gender neutral devouring of civilians and children in Palestine. Palestinians are a double whammy after all – they have been standing up to “our natural allies,” plus they are Muslims.  

Naturally this freshly minted splinter opinionates, so to say, could be seen cheering the killings of women and children in Gaza from the hilltop of Sderot (Sderot, meaning boulevard :) is a western Negev city in the Southern District of Israel), drinking, snacking and posing for the camera.

And there will be wonderfully endowed young women who will strip to cheer the brave Israeli soldiers.

On their part, the Kurds kept playing fire flutes of their nationalism like obedient accompaniment on the sidelines. People in the amphitheatre loved that too. 

Meantime the media is frenetically switching from one horror to another, milking the conflicts no end. The ISIS ransacking of the Sunni mosques in the northern province of Ninevah, the ‘bride for jihad’ story that nobody bothered to repudiate or substantiate, everything was grist for the mill. They all helped boost  the TRP ratings. 

Whether the ISIS men demanded jihad brides or not, surely they didn’t mind violating women as pleased. And with that the hate index too shot up everywhere. Why not but if this is what happening over there?

The macabre ISIS stories, what with their Sunni angle, nurture the Shia scars and further demonize the idea of the caliphate. They also portray it all as a case of Islam vs the rest of civilization. Thus Islamophobia thrives, with not inconsiderable help from the media.

But then these are predictable. They are all behaving true to their character. But what beats me completely is the sand-dune fickleness, so often amounting to somersaulting, of the ummah people themselves. 

Iraqis in UK went into a denial mode, taking out a protest rally, insisting that it was not sectarian strife but a Muslims versus extremist imbroglio. 

The same folks had gone into mute mode when Boko Haram was committing everything ‘haram.’  

Closer home, the reaction of the Urdu press is even more appalling. Akhbar-e-Mashriq from Kolkata headlines ‘ Islami Shiddat Pasand Hamare Haqeequee Mohafiz ‘("Islamic extremists our real protectors")!! 

These are the same idiots who gathered to cry foul on the eve of war crime tribunal in Dhaka conferring sainthood on war criminals like Delwar Saidee. 
Delwar Hossain Sayeedi , also known as allamah, the Bangladeshi Muslim politician, convicted for war crimes during the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war. The International Crimes Tribunal found Sayeedi guilty in 8 of the 20 charges, including mass killing, rape, arson, looting and forcing minority Hindus to convert to Islam during 1971. On 28 February 2013, the tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging.

Our Islamists will also cry their hearts out over the victims in Muzaffarnagar and Kokhrajhar, but Iraqi victims are divine collateral, affordable damage for their divine ummah!

The butchered Iraqis for them are not human beings, but just non-Muslims. Yes, Shias, Ahmadies and so on. They even decorated these killers with sainthood for their out-of-turn show of semblance of human empathy in the case of our girls. And these very same imbeciles of the Islamist variety come out with drenched handkerchiefs for Gaza. 

In general Indian Urdu media is a bundle of confusion, with a pronounced tilt towards the ISIS. There is an interesting point of diversion between Pakistani and Indian Islamic views vis a vis the ISIS. While both agree that ISIS is a by-product of Maliki’s misrule and USA’s suffocating hegemony, their agreement ends there. 

Pakistanis seem to think that the ISIS and Islamic caliphate are just another handiwork of Uncle Sam and Israel to eliminate Islam. And they sound alarm in no uncertain terms about the calamity ISIS might bring to Islamic world. 

But no, India’s Jamaat e Islami Hind (JIH) thinks ISIS represents resurgence of Islam – they wouldn’t pause to consider whether it could not also be a product of a devious plot  by Uncle Sam to exterminate Islam itself, root and branch.

They shamelessly try to cover up the ISIS’s barbaric crimes of killing maiming
and raping,  citing the safe return of our girls. About the newly minted caliphate, Secretary of Jamiat-ul- Ulema Hind, Mufti Arshad Faruqi writes in their mouthpiece Dawat, “The fatwa issued by Yousuf al Qaradhawi is worth consideration. He has invalidated the method of establishment of Caliphate but not their Islamism.” 

The second sentence is just dyslexic if not simply contradictory. The psychology of such pathological contradiction draws its sustenance from a medieval sense of Ummah.  Some sane voices, like that of Hasan Suroor and New Age Islam, have of course been sharply critical of such views and have sounded alarm in strongest possible terms, on the fallout of  nurturing such a mindset among Indian Muslims particularly. But they are drowned out amid fanatical chest-thumping.

Ukraine is just background music to this endless tournament of bloodletting. Well, some even tried smelling a rat of jihad there too,  before retiring into blissful somnolence.

Less said about our own government the better. Their business is just taking credit for ‘safe’ evacuation of Indians from Iraq. Rightly. And stonewalling any dissenting voice against Israel. 

Why should they even say a word of empathy for Gazans when they have shown it doenst matter one bit – after all they have won a handsome victory despite having to face charges of butchery in Gujarat and elsewhere.

Orgasmic mirth of their foot-soldiers and quack intellectual troops in social media makes one cringe in the pit of the stomach.

Huntington must have been grinning in his grave, much to the chagrin of ‘economist of the conscience,’ Amartya Sen. The component of identity that Dr.Sen never agreed to be ‘the most dominant’ is de facto ‘the’ most dominant component of identity crisis in the current theatre of farce, in and out of the amphitheatres of dehumanization under process across geography, and that is the component that Huntington based his ‘the clash of civilization’ on. And there is a perceptible continuity of the clash with a reverse vectorial tide since the aftermath of WW1.

So there is Muslim rationalism, there is Christian rationalism. Where is rationalism by the way? 

There is Muslim humanity and there is Christian humanity too. And all others shades are background music for the ‘might is right’ theme. 
Humanity whither?  


1 comment:

  1. what you are trying to say? pros and cons will be there in all society....... and more over the palestine - israel war on gaza strip is not a new one. it was there even before King.David (730 BCE).,,,due to rise of media now, this issue is under torch light.... more over it is the Hamas who first started the war in 2007 and they are using human shield , that is the reason why people are also dying along with hamas. AND NOT EVERYONE IS INNOCENT.

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