March 2010′s B-side enters new territory in its coverage of a religious edict in the form of a fatwa The missing persons of Pakistan are in the spotlight whilst the final article evaluates the Obama policy for Pakistan. March 2010′s B-side contents include:
- My Fatwa Against the Terrorists Creed by DR TAHIR UL QADRI
- Into the Terrifying World of Pakistan’s Disappeared by ROBERT FISK
- Victory for Obama from an Unlikely Quarter-Pakistan by FAREED ZAKARIA
Religious edicts in the form of a fatwa, do not make news too often. A fatwa issued by Dr Tahir ul Qadri has made headline news and rightly so.
My Fatwa Against the Terrorists Creed by Dr Tahir ul Qadri
I have been compelled to issue a fatwa – a comprehensive theological refutation of Islamist terrorism – because of what has been happening in Pakistan over the past year. Terrorists are bombing mosques during Friday prayers, they are burning schools, killing women. They are digging bodies out of graves, cutting off their heads and hanging the bodies from trees.
My 600-page fatwa is based on all four schools of jurisprudence: Hanafi, Shafii, Hanbali and Maliki, and the Shia school of Jafari. I have consulted hundreds of classical Islamic texts, the scholars, fiqh and the Hadith. The main theme is this: any act of terrorism such as suicide bombing cannot be justified in any way. There are no conditions, no pretexts or exemptions. It is condemned by the Quran and the Sunna.
Killing Muslims and non-Muslims through terrorist activities and using violent aggression to impose their mistaken and misplaced ideology is a fundamental rejection of faith. Such acts make the people carrying out the attacks unbelievers, or kufr.
Some scholars have said to me that we know suicide bombing is forbidden but to say that this is an act of an unbeliever is going far. I am not saying anyone who kills is an unbeliever. I say one who is committing acts of terrorism on the basis that it is sanctioned and lawful by Islam is an unbeliever.
The Quran says those who kill in mosques, burn people, blow them up, they will suffer the torments of hellfire. This is one aspect.
A second aspect I have examined is the justification that Muslim rulers in Arab countries or non-Muslims are not enforcing Islamic law so there is an obligation to fight against them. This is absolutely wrong. In no context is any organisation allowed to take up arms on their own and say we are defending Muslim land or we are avenging the aggression of non-Muslim powers. This is a matter for a state and its government.
The holy Prophet Mohammed told his companions that bad rulers would come and the people would curse them and the rulers would curse their people. The companions asked should they not fight them with swords if this time comes? And the holy Prophet said that no, they were not allowed as far as they were Muslims.
As for adopting the defence that the attacks are against foreign aggression, this is the privilege and responsibility of the state to stand up and to fight according to international law. If groups and individuals start taking revenge it will create global anarchy and there will be no rule of law, there will be just killing of mankind.
There is a prophecy of the Prophet Mohammed. He mentioned that the Kharijites would emerge continuously in Islamic history. The Kharijites believed that whoever did not agree with their philosophy was an unbeliever and should be killed. They wanted to resolve everything through the sword and through power. They rose up in the time of the rightly guided Caliphs, Usman and Ali, and fought against them.
This hadith, which appears in dozens of books, says the holy Prophet Mohammed said they would emerge again and again in different centuries until the final time of the anti-Christ. They would arrive more than 20 times. They would keep changing names and appear for the last time as part of the anti-Christ’s army. They would slaughter people.
Al Qa’eda is an old evil with a new name. They are the Kharijites with a new name. They are misguided today like the Khawarij youth were misguided at that time. They were brainwashed although they were religious people who prayed and fasted.
Those who have already decided to become suicide bombers are totally brainwashed. I exclude them from this discussion because they are blind. I am trying to reach the majority who have not reached that stage but have extremist tendencies and are proceeding in that direction.
There are thousands of extremists running websites and applying misguided ideas. The radicals who have no access to classical authorities are misguided and give the wrong concept of jihad. This religious ruling is particularly important for Britain and the western world, where the majority of Muslims are of south Asian origin.
We have seen examples of extremist groups targeting vulnerable young people from these communities to carry out their acts of violence – from training them as suicide bombers to brainwashing students across British universities. I am sure that the hundreds of authorities I have quoted will allow them to rethink, to see that whatever they were taught was wrong.
The fatwa has appeared in Urdu, and English and Arabic translations have been started. It will be translated into many other languages and distributed through the internet accompanied by videos, summaries and talks. We will do whatever is possible to reach the youth with the Almighty Allah’s help and grace.
Already it is happening. We have been contacted by the Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s office and they want a copy to translate into Persian and Pashto. And so it will go.
There have been many other fatwas that condemn suicide bombings and there have been verbal resolutions against it. They were very brief, maybe one or two pages signed by hundreds of scholars and they did not contain many references. These brief declarations were not able to answer the questions or address all the concerns. I thought there was a need to address every major concern, every major and minor aspect which has already been planted in people’s minds.
In Pakistan, some religious scholars have condemned the military action in the Swat valley and North-West Frontier Province, or they have said they already have condemned suicide bombings and acts of terrorism. Some have felt they have fulfilled their duty. But by simply condemning the Pakistani military action or staying silent they are creating doubt in the minds of the common people and youth.
While Muslims resist and fight terrorism and are not ready to accept its remotest possible link with Islam, there are some who are also seen supporting it. Instead of opposing and condemning it openly they confuse the issue.
After this fatwa more scholars will become courageous and stand up.
A few are scared. A friend of mine who recently condemned suicide bombing in Pakistan was assassinated.
This grand fatwa, when it is in the hands of everybody, will give people courage, clarity and motivation.
Published in The National
WASIM VIEW- Suicide bombing is a Satanic curse that haunts Pakistan and the wider Muslim world daily. It is an act of rebellion against ALLAH and a crime against humanity and is haraam or forbidden in Islam. Thus the detailed fatwa against suicide bombing by Dr Tahir ul Qadri’s is most welcome and the need of the hour.
Qadri’s fatwa is coined by him to be a ‘grand fatwa’ and it is grand because it is ‘a comprehensive theological refutation of Islamist terrorism’. A comprehensive 600-page fatwa based on all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence found that ‘any act of terrorism such as suicide bombing cannot be justified in any way. There are no conditions, no pretexts or exemptions. It is condemned by the Quran and the Sunna’.
Qadri’s fatwa is a great service to Islam, because it reaffirms the Islamic viewpoint and tackles head-on the Muslim apologists for terrorism as well as those supporting Jihadi enterprises across the world. Qadri makes it crystal clear for all when he declares that ‘killing Muslims and non-Muslims through terrorist activities and using violent aggression to impose their mistaken and misplaced ideology is a fundamental rejection of faith. Such acts make the people carrying out the attacks unbelievers, or kufr. I say one who is committing acts of terrorism on the basis that it is sanctioned and lawful by Islam is an unbeliever’.
The modern day Muslim delight in undertaking jihad across borders is also tackled head-on especially the justification that Muslim rulers in Arab countries or non-Muslims are not enforcing Islamic law so there is an obligation to fight against them. Qadri rightly declares this ‘as absolutely wrong, in no context is any organisation allowed to take up arms on their own and say we are defending Muslim land or we are avenging the aggression of non-Muslim powers. This is a matter for a state and its government’.
Qadri too rules on acts of foreign aggression and states clearly that ‘this is the privilege and responsibility of the state to stand up and to fight according to international law. If groups and individuals start taking revenge it will create global anarchy and there will be no rule of law, there will be just killing of mankind’. Qadri’s labelling of Al-Qaeda as the infamous and doomed Kharijites is noted especially when he declares ‘Al Qa’eda as an old evil with a new name, they are misguided today like the Khawarij youth were misguided at that time. They were brainwashed although they were religious people who prayed and fasted’.
Qadri’s fatwa is comprehensive and a must read for all Muslims as it can serve to save the fools amongst us our midst especially those in Pakistan who apologise for the Taliban. The universal acclaim the fatwa has received is well deserved and I am encouraged to know that it is being translated in many languages. Dr Tahir ul Qadri has served humanity and Islam in authoring the grand fatwa against suicide bombing, terrorism and Al-Qaeda and I commend him for his efforts.
The second article is more of a report written by one of my favourite journalists, indeed he is an institution, Robert Fisk.
Into the Terrifying World of Pakistan’s Disappeared by Robert Fisk
If you want to know how brutally Pakistan treats its people, you should meet Amina Janjua. An intelligent painter and interior designer, she sits on the vast sofa of her living room in Rawalpindi – a room that somehow accentuates her loneliness – scarf wound tightly round her head, serving tea and biscuits like the middle-class woman she is. And although neither a soldier nor a policeman has ever laid a hand on her, she is a victim of her country’s cruel oppression. Because, five years ago, her husband Masood became one of Pakistan’s “disappeared”.
It is a scandal and a disgrace and, of course, a crime against humanity. Ask not where Masood Janjua has gone – Amina does ask, of course, all the way up to the President – for he has entered that dark world wherein dwell up to 8,000 of Pakistan’s missing citizens, men, for the most part, seized from their homes or from the streets by cops and soldiers on the orders of spies and intelligence agents and Americans since 11 September, 2001. In Lahore alone, there are 120 “torture houses” just for the missing of the Punjab. Their shrieks of pain from the basements could be heard by residents – who complained only that the buildings might provoke bomb attacks. In Pakistan today, preservation counts for more than compassion.
Masood Janjua was 44 when he was “disappeared” on 30 July 2005. He ran an IT college and a travel agency, the father of two boys – Mohamed and Ali, and a girl, Aisha. He just never came home. Nobody saw what happened. Amina, who was 40 at the time, glows when she speaks of him. “We were so extremely close, so happy, our world was so heavenly – we were always visiting friends, having parties at home. He was so caring and kind to our children, so affectionate. That he should be taken from me! I think it was a very big mistake that they did. But when they do it – like this – they never say they were wrong.”
“They”. Everyone I talk to here talks about “they”. Many refuse to talk in case it provokes “them” to undertake a quick execution. “They” is the Inter-Services Intelligence. “They” is military intelligence. “They” are the Americans, some of them present – according to the few “disappeared” who have been released – during torture sessions. The Defence of Human Rights Pakistan (DHRP), the movement which Amina founded with 25 other bereft families, has gathered evidence of English-speaking interrogators who calmly ask victims questions during their torment. Ironically, Amina lives in a military district of Rawalpindi, beside an old British barracks, where US soldiers are observed in Pakistani uniforms – sometimes female American soldiers dressed, so she says, in the uniforms of Pakistani military paramedics.
Even more ironic was the first word she had of her husband after he disappeared. “When I went to the Supreme Court to demand his return, witnesses came forward to say they saw Masood inside an army barracks here in Rawalpindi, very close to his family. Just think – it was within walking distance from our home! He was inside a cell at 111 Brigade barracks. It was so sad for me – it was as if they were being cynical, to keep him so close to his family.”
Amina Janjua found that one of the court witnesses lived in Peshawar and she travelled to the North West Frontier Province to speak to him five months after her husband disappeared. “He had been in the army facility in Rawalpindi. The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and only when they were taken to the lavatory did they come close to other prisoners. They were forced to wear big hoods – hoods that went right down and covered their shoulders – and the detainees would get no chance to talk to another human being. This man said my husband was there – he even heard the guard call him ‘Janjua’.”
There is evidence that Pakistan’s “disappeared” are moved around, between barracks and interrogation centres and underground torture facilities in different towns and cities. There are also terrible rumours – fostered, some say, by the security authorities – that the army has thrown detainees from helicopters, that the cops dispose of bodies at night by dumping them in swamps or in open countryside so that decay and animal mutilation will cover the marks of torture before the bodies are found. But Amina Janjua believes most of them are alive. You might say she has to believe that.
“After 9/11, everyone was worried. People were ruthlessly disappeared after the New York attacks. No one knew why their loved ones were taken. The first few months were like hell for me. Then I regained my consciousness and said I could not accept all this. I said I would fight. I said I would get my husband back.” Brave words. Brave lady.
So she turned to the only brave institution still fighting in Pakistan: the lawyers and the judges and the courts. So far, the Supreme Court in Islamabad and the Lahore High Court have squeezed around 200 detainees out of the maw of the country’s security apparatus – those, that is, who were still in Pakistan. Many are known to have been freighted off to the tender mercies of the Americans at Bagram in Afghanistan, where Arab detainees have long ago testified to being beaten and sodomised with broom sticks. There have been prisoner murders, too, in Bagram, the jail that President Barack Obama refuses to close.
“At the beginning, I went to the International Red Cross about Masood,” Amina Janjua says. “I saw them over several months. There was no progress. My father-in-law went to many people, he even went to President Musharraf – he trained in the military with Musharraf and they knew each other very well – and Musharraf said, ‘I will do something for you’– but he never did. After that, when we called the President’s house, they would start avoiding us. We wrote to all the Pakistan intelligence agencies. All said my husband could not be found.”
Many families have been given false hopes. “In some villages way out in the country,” Amina recalls, “families were told by the authorities that their sons were coming home. These were poor people but they were so happy, so delighted. They would hold a party and give out sweets and slaughter valuable animals to show their happiness. But then the sons didn’t come home. Can you imagine treating people like this?”
Amina Janjua’s fraudulent hope came in a phone call in 2006, a year after Masood’s disappearance. “We had our first breakthrough when the military secretary of the President called Masood’s father to say that his son was alive and that they had heard about him, though he had been ill – in a fever. That was our first sign of relief.
“Then he started avoiding us again. There was no message after that. Then we were told ‘No, he is not with us, but we are making every effort because the President has made this request to help you.’ I went on asking senior people in the army what had happened to my husband, and they – I put it like this – they started shivering. They would shudder. They could not disclose any information.”
Teaching herself law and fighting her own case, Amina Janjua returned to the Supreme Court. “When I did this, I started hearing of many other cases and things that are happening. And that’s when I realised. It’s not about ‘missing’ people – this is about abduction. I started organising files on these abducted people and eventually I had 788 families on my list and I started conducting research. And we got about 200 prisoners released. The courts ordered this. They were all still in Pakistan. Others, we know, had been taken to Bagram, three or four to Guantanamo Bay where at least we knew they were alive.”
But Amina’s research could prove terrifying. She discovered not only that abducted men were alive. They were also dead. “I suspected some of them had died,” she said. “I know of three prisoners who are dead. One was Mohamed Shafiq; he was a coach driver and they released his death certificate – it said he died of ‘some illness’. He was in his 40s. One of the prisoners, a businessman called Said Menon, died shortly after he was released.
“All of the 200 we got released had been tortured. Initially, it was very ruthless – they were not allowed to sleep; there were beatings and thrashings; they were hanged upside down. There was loud music. There were actual torture rooms where the things were done to them. The prisoners told us they didn’t think their torturers were human beings at all. The faces of the torturers, they said, were horrifying. It was no longer a real world for them. The torturers seemed so powerful, like monsters, so big.”
The questions they were asked were repetitive, according to Amina Janjua. Where are the guns? Where are the weapons? Where is Mullah Omar? Two prisoners described to Amina’s committee how they were made to wear orange jumpsuits, shaven till they were bald and taken for questioning to Islamabad. “They were interrogated by foreigners – they could see them. They were English-speaking. They didn’t know if they were Americans or British.”
The DHRP now holds public protests in all the cities of Pakistan where the prisoners have their homes – in Lahore, Sagoda, Quetta, Faisalabad, Karachi, Peshawar – but the families focus on Islamabad where they demonstrate their fury and their anguish outside the Supreme Court and the offices of President Asif Ali Zardari and the Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. The DHRP files show that there are 1,700 missing from Baluchistan alone. At least 4,000 appear to be in the hands of the Pakistani interior ministry, while 2,000 have been handed over to what the DHRP describes as “foreign agencies” – usually, the Americans. Perhaps 750 of the missing Pakistanis are believed to have been taken by the Americans – illegally, of course – to Bagram, the Policharki prison outside Kabul, or to Herat in western Afghanistan.
Published in The Independent
WASIM VIEW- Robert Fisk is an a colossus in the field of journalism and one of the most respected journalists in his field. Fisk is in Pakistan at present and he is very welcome as are his writings.
Fisk reports on the missing people of Pakistan and the story of Mohammed Janjua who disappeared during Musharraf’s rule and remain missing today. Fisk is right to declare this as the brutality of the Pakistani state and right again in declaring such evil as a crime against humanity.
The real news of the Fisk report is that it brings to focus the true cost of 9/11 which is felt in Pakistan to this day. Writing for a mainly Western audience, his readers will benefit from knowing how Pakistani citizens have had to pay for 9/11 in drones and in the disappearances of ordinary citizens. Thus the real cost of the 9/11 revenge war are laid bare in Fisk’s writings and it is this, ordinary Pakistanis have paid and continue to pay the highest price.
The final article is written by Fareed Zakaria who looks at the never-ending headache, Pakistan-US relations.
A Victory for Obama from an Unlikely Quarter-Pakistan by Fareed Zakaria
President Obama gets much credit for changing America’s image in the world—he was probably awarded the Nobel Prize for doing so. But if you asked even devoted fans to cite a specific foreign-policy achievement, they would probably hesitate. “It’s too soon for that,” they would say. But in fact, there is a place where Barack Obama’s foreign policy is working, and one that is crucial to U.S. national security—Pakistan.
There has been a spate of good news coming out of that complicated country, which has long promised to take action against Islamic militants but rarely done so. (The reason: Pakistan has used many of these same militants to destabilize its traditional foe, India, and to gain influence in Afghanistan.) Over the past few months, the Pakistani military has engaged in serious and successful operations in the militant havens of Swat, Malakand, South Waziristan, and Bajaur. Some of these areas are badlands where no Pakistani government has been able to establish its writ, so the achievement is all the more important. The Pakistanis have also ramped up their intelligence sharing with the U.S. This latter process led to the arrest a month ago of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy leader of the Afghan Taliban, among other Taliban figures.
Some caveats: most of the Taliban who have been captured are small fish, and the Pakistani military has a history of “catching and releasing” terrorists so that they can impress Americans but still maintain their ties with the militants. But there does seem to be a shift in Pakistani behavior. Why it’s taken place and how it might continue is a case study in the nature and limits of foreign-policy successes.
First, the Obama administration de-fined the problem correctly. Senior ad-ministration officials stopped referring to America’s efforts in Afghanistan and instead spoke constantly of “AfPak,” to emphasize the notion that success in Afghanistan depended on actions taken in Pakistan. This dismayed the Pakistanis but they got the message. They were on notice to show they were part of the solution, not the problem.
Second, the administration used both sticks and carrots. For his first state dinner, Obama pointedly invited Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—clearly not Pakistan’s first choice. Obama made clear that America would continue to pursue the special relationship forged with India under the Bush administration, including a far-reaching deal on nuclear cooperation. But at the same time, the White House insisted it wanted a deep, long-term, and positive relationship with Pakistan. Sens. John Kerry and Dick Lugar put together the largest nonmilitary package of U.S. assistance for the country ever. Aid to the Pakistani military is also growing rapidly.
Third, it put in time and effort. The administration has adopted what Central Command’s Gen. David Petraeus calls a “whole of government” approach to Pakistan. All elements of U.S. power and diplomacy have been deployed. Pakistan has received more than 25 visits by senior administration officials in the past year, all pushing the Pakistani military to deliver on commitments to fight the militants.
Finally, as always, luck and timing have played a key role. The militants in Pakistan, like those associated with Al Qaeda almost everywhere, went too far, brutally killing civilians, shutting down girls’ schools, and creating an atmosphere of medievalism. Pakistan’s public, which had tended to downplay the problem of terrorism, now saw it as “Pakistan’s war.” The Army, reading the street, felt it had to show results.
These results are still tentative. Pakistan’s military retains its obsession with India—how else to justify a vast budget in a small, poor nation? It has still not acted seriously against any of the major militant groups active against Afghanistan, India, or the United States. The Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani group, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and many smaller groups all operate with impunity within Pakistan. But the Pakistani military is doing more than it has before, and that counts as success in the world of foreign policy.
Such success will endure only if the Obama administration keeps at it. There are some who believe that Pakistan has changed its basic strategy and now understands that it should cut its ties to these groups altogether. Strangely this naive view is held by the U.S. military, whose top brass have spent so many hours with their counterparts in Islamabad that they’ve gone native. It’s up to Obama and his team to remind the generals that pressing Pakistan is a lot like running on a treadmill. If you stop, you move backward, and, most likely, you fall down.
Published in Newsweek
WASIM VIEW- Fareed Zakaria is an Indian-American foreign policy analyst who has struggled to contain his loyalties to both flags in the article above. The Indian view on Pakistan and her alleged terrorism against India comes through in each paragraph, implied politely amidst the big story of President Obama’s success in Pakistan which Zakaria deems to be deserving of a round of applause.
Zakaria bases his views on the recent successes against the Taliban and he is right to highlight improved Pakistan-US coordination in intelligence and military circles. However such successes are arbitary and come and go, as do the more regular bouts of mistrust in the world of Pakistan-US relations. For a respected foreign policy analyst like Zakaria to declare recent successes as the almost final word on Pakistan being a successful foreign policy experiment for Obama is plain and simple, an untruth.
Evidence against Zakaria’s hypothesis is plentiful with the much sexed-up Pakistan-US strategic dialogue of recent days ending with laughs and very little in substance. Zakaria should rather take note that the Obama Administration are failing in Pakistan with every drone attack that degrades Pakistan and increases the body count of innocents,. These are ordinary Pakistanis who have perished and will perish in the coming months of April and May and many moons thereafter, die only to feed the monster of revenge that is America, and this is success?
