Most prominent among those scholars was Abu Bakr al-Razi (865-925 CE) who believed in the supreme importance of reason. He argued that the mind had an innate capacity to distinguish between good and evil, and between what was useful and what was harmful. According to him, the mind did not need any guidance from outside it, and for this reason the presence of prophets was redundant and superfluous.

Al-Razi directed his most vehement attack against the holy books in general, including the Qur’an, because he saw them as illogical and self-contradictory. He also believed that all human beings were equal in their intellectual capacities as they were in all other things. It made no sense therefore that God should single out one individual from among them in order to reveal to him his divine wisdom and assign him the task of guiding other human beings. Furthermore, he found that prophets’ pronouncements and stories often contradicted those of other prophets. If their source was divine revelation as is claimed, their views would have been identical. The idea of a divinely-appointed mediator was therefore a myth.

Al-Razi understood the hold of religious belief on society, which he attributed to several factors. Firstly, systems of beliefs spread mainly through the human propensity for imitating and copying others. Secondly, religion‘s popularity rested on the close alliance between clerics and political rulers. The clerics often used this alliance to impose their own personal beliefs on people by force whenever the power of persuasion failed. Thirdly, the lavish and imposing character of the attire of religious men contributed to the high regard in which they were held by common people. Lastly, with the passage of time religious ideas became so familiar that they turned almost into deep-seated instincts that were no longer questioned.

In examining this chapter of Islamic history, regardless of the validity or otherwise of the views expressed, one cannot help feel amazed at the fact that the Islamic thinkers of the 10th century had the freedom to discuss and publish their “unorthodox” ideas, while the Islamic world now cannot, or will not, deal with any form of intellectual dissent. It might be reasonable to suggest then that the problem of Islam does not lie in inherited texts and traditions, but in interpretation. The Islamic heritage, like its Christian counterpart, is made up of a huge body of commentaries and interpretations that were produced in various periods of history to address problems specific to their age. We need to remember that the Christian scriptures have not changed since the middle ages. It was in the name of these very texts that innumerable so-called heretics were burnt at the stake.

Cracks in the Façade

While maintaining the image of religious superiority was easy when there was little contact between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world, advances in transportation and communication have increased this contact exponentially.  Here are some of the cracks in the façade of Islamic superiority:

Golden Age of Islam –  During the first five hundred years of Islam, the Islamic world made remarkable accomplishments in science, medicine, and architecture, due in part to their affluence as a result of “booty” and their conquest of highly educated populations.  These accomplishments later stimulated the European Renaissance.  But in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries, the contribution of the Islamic countries in these fields has been meager.  Out of the 797 Nobel Prizes awarded to individuals for accomplishments in science and other fields since 1901, Muslims can boast only 8, or one percent from a population that comprises 20% of the world’s population.  A recent United Nations Human Development report found that the countries in the Middle East only surpass Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of education and other human development measures.

Islamic Institutions – The Caliphate, which represented the unbroken chain of religious and political authority originating with the Prophet Mohammed, was abolished in 1924 by the secular leader of what remained of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.   The two most holy sites in Islam – Medina and Mecca – were forcibly taken from the descendants of the Qaraysh tribe – the Hashimites — by the House of Saud which has no pedigree in terms of ties to the Qaraysh.  The vast revenue derived from the pilgrimages of Muslims from around the world only nourish the already-overflowing coffers of the House of Saud.

Challenges to Religious Authority – There are so many organizations claiming to speak for Muslims that there is a virtual cacophony of opposing views.  In spite of the vast dawah (missionary) resources of the Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia, millions of followers are also claimed by other religious authorities, namely the Ayatollahs in Iran, the religious authorities at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, and an expanding number of Reformists hailing from such extreme points as the Sudan and the United States.   Much of the Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism that occurs today actually reflects bloody conflicts between the different religious factions.

Cognitive Dissonance

Psychologists have defined cognitive dissonance as the mental breakdown that occurs when someone’s mental concept of reality doesn’t match the actual situation on the ground.  The mind struggles to realign the mental concept with the actuality – often by creating excuses for the mismatch. Sometimes these “excuses” drive the person to engage in destructive behavior.  Here are some examples from the Islamic world:

Salafi Movement – The dramatic resurgence in Islamic fundamentalism, including the Salafi movement, is, in reality, a response to Islam’s decline. Influential Muslim scholars like Sayyid Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb have argued that the cause of Islam’s decline has been the decadence of rulers and the corruption of the religion by Western influences.  The solution, therefore, is to go back to the pure Islam practiced by the venerable ancestors of the first century of Islam.   This view promotes strict separation of Islam from the ignorant pagans and rejection of all Western cultural advancements (unless useful for Islam).

Terrorism – While there has always been a violent side to Islam, terrorism didn’t become a signature tactic until around 1970.   The multiple defeats of the Arab countries at the hands of Israel were in direct conflict with the concept that the entire Middle East was a sacred waqf (endowment) exclusively for Muslims and consecrated until Judgment Day.  Lacking the military might to defeat Israel, terrorism became the tactic of choice.  Wherever terrorism is used by Muslims, they must overlook the precedent set by Mohammed in the hudna (truce) of Hubayabiya deemed necessary because the Muslims had no prospect of victory over the Qaraysh.   Terrorism has accomplished nothing for Muslims, although it is difficult for them to recognize even this aspect of reality.

Distinctive Clothing/Appearance – One of the ways that movements reinforce their strength and unity is through distinctive clothing and appearance.  This is particularly apparent in the U.S. where gangs often have their own clothes, handshakes, and other symbols.  Public schools have been successful in reducing gang violence by banning such distinctive clothing and appearance. While Muslim veils, beards, kufi skullcaps have been around for a long time, their use to enhance group identity did not become de rigueur until the Civil War in Lebanon in  the 1970’s when the mullah Mussa Sadr urged women to wear distinctive headscarves to ward off sexual harassment and rape by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who controlled southern Lebanon at the time.  In 1982 a law was passed in the Iranian Republic making scarves mandatory because “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane.”  Muslim men must wear beards, and barbers are often threatened if they shave beards off.  Of course, there is nothing in the Quran or Hadith requiring headscarves or beards, but they are effective in boosting the cohesiveness of the Muslim “gang” and disdain for all others.

Ad Hominem Debates – When Muslims engage in a defense if their religion, their principal weapon is ad hominem attacks on their opponents.  They will call non-Muslims “Islamophobes” or “racists” or some other disparaging description.  This is because the arguments put forth by non-Muslims and ex-Muslims about the problems with Islam often cannot be countered with facts and data.  Numerous examples of this tactic can be found on such websites as www.islam-watch.org and www.jihadwatch.org.

Moderate Muslims – Rather than defend the offensive elements of an irrational doctrine, rather than escape from the clutches of Islam (which in many cases could be a fatal choice), an increasing number of Muslims just claim that they are “moderates.”  These are people who want to “have their cake and eat it.”  They want to remain Muslim but at the same time try to distance themselves from some of its more draconian doctrines.  They say, for example, that those who advocate or carry out jihad have hijacked the true Islamic faith. This position, of course, is an act of apostasy according to Shariah Law (See The Reliance of the Traveler, paragraph o8.7(7)).

Faith Matters is launching its paper that offers a brief insight into the Secular reforms of the Ottoman Empire, in order to analyse and debunk claims by extreme groups like Al Qaeda of it being an Islamic Caliphate, strictly governed by Shariah Law. The Ottoman Empire is often presented, by such groups as a model political system upon which to re-build a global Caliphate. Osama bin Laden marked the decline of the Ottoman Empire as the fall of Islam – that the Islamic world “has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years” and that “the righteous Khilafah will return with the permission of Allah”. Through the implementation of an Islamic legal and political system, extreme groups who mis-use the Islamic faith call for the rejection of liberal values and the current systems in place, which do not fundamentally clash with Islam.

The short paper authored by Ishtiaq Hussain who has long studied such ideologies, offers a new challenge to these claims, arguing that the Ottoman Empire bares little resemblance to the model proposed by such groups.  In focusing on the period known as the Tanzimat (1839-1876), Hussain shows that the Ottomans were in fact attempting to secularise their laws and state institutions rather than implementing religious laws into State laws.

These are some of the key findings in the report which show that:

• Homosexuality was decriminalised
• Ottoman society in general moved away from punishments such as stoning
• The death penalty for Apostasy was not implemented

Islamists often bypass these facts and use a warped interpretation of history in order to weave their own narrative into mainstream debate; using their own projected picture of a perfect Ottoman society living under a deeply rigid interpretation of Shariah Law in order to argue for the building of a modern day Islamic Caliphate. Those who spin this historical account help to prop up a narrative used as an ideological basis for extremism. The attacks of 9/11 were even marked by Bin Laden as “a great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous caliphate”.  Until now, their account has been met with little intellectual resistance.

This important paper is the first of its kind to expose and dismantle the Islamist historical account of the Ottoman Empire. Alongside the Government’s new Prevent Strategy focusing on extremism in schools, online and at universities,  Hussain creates a vehicle upon which to tackle extremists who adopt this historical narrative in order to justify their intolerant and right-wing ideology.

By debunking one of the fundamental layers of Islamist narrative, this paper provides an opportunity for debate and discussion within the public sphere. It also supports those civil society organisations and policy makers who defend liberal democratic values that underpin communities in Britain and also provides another tool for Muslims to counter the small yet vocal groups who espouse such a warped interpretation of the Ottoman Empire and the Khilafah. We also hope that it counters those who lump all Muslim communities together and who undermine the history of majority Muslim countries as places where pluralism was alive and thriving.

The report is now available to download from Faith Matters website.

But this record has been almost completely obliterated in recent years by the competing narratives of the Far Right and of hardline Islamists. Both blocs, for their own ideological reasons, seem to assert that one cannot be both a loyal Briton and a good Muslim at the same time.

In Ties that Bind former Islamist Shiraz Maher recaptures this lost history of Muslim service to the Crown. Maher shows that this collective past constitutes the basis of a new shared future – which can endure in no less testing circumstances. It also forms the basis for enhanced recruitment of Muslims to the armed forces, without political preconditions attached.

Download here.

It’s been four decades since President Richard M. Nixon sent Henry A. Kissinger to Beijing to re-establish contact with China, an ancient civilization with which the United States, at that point, had had no high-level diplomatic contact for more than two decades. Since then the cold war has ended; the Soviet Union (a threat to both China and the United States and a spur to Sino-American cooperation) has come unwound; and economic reform in China has transformed a poverty-ridden, poorly educated nation into a great power that is playing an increasingly pivotal role in the globalized world.

But a review of the same book by Kevin Rafferty in the Japan Times goes into specific details which Kissinger has chosen to exclude from his recollections of his murky past which included fostering relations with China and Pakistan which led to the murder of millions in Bangladesh and Cambodia. These recollections, now fading into the distant memory of right-wing US historians, include the repercussions of Kissinger’s derision of India, his support for the brutal anti-democratic repression by Pakistan of its then Eastern wing, Bangladesh. Rafferty serves up a useful condensed history of the crimes of Henry Kissinger’s tactics of realpolitik during that period.

He who laughs last...

This month marks 40 years since Kissinger feigned sickness in Pakistan and made a secret flight to China to pave the way for President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the country the following year. For me, Kissinger’s biggest failure is what he omits.

By the fawning way he used Pakistan as his launchpad, Kissinger’s diplomacy was also helping to perpetrate one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, the slaughter of about 1.5 million people and the flight of 10 million refugees whose only crime was to express their wish for democracy through the ballot box and peaceful protests.

Yet, there is no mention in the book, not a sentence of regret, not a word of apology, not even a passing note that the bloody birth of Bangladesh was brought about because Kissinger, reaching out to China, simultaneously encouraged the Pakistan military to butcher the people of East Pakistan, as it then was. It is their tragic 40th anniversary, too.

To set out the facts, in December 1970 the Bengalis of East Pakistan, separated by 1,600 km of Indian territory from West Pakistan, where the military lived and ruled, voted overwhelmingly in the freest and fairest elections Pakistan had seen for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League, which stood on a platform of greater autonomy — not independence — from West Pakistan.

The Awami League won 160 of the 162 seats from East Pakistan, giving it an overall majority in the 300-member constituent assembly for Pakistan.

For the next three months there was deadlock as President General Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the People’s Party, which had majorities in two of the four provinces of West Pakistan, played obstructionist games about the terms on which the assembly would meet to arrange a new civilian constitution.

The deadlock was broken when Yahya sent troops to arrest Mujib and his key lieutenants and let the army loose on East Pakistan. Tanks were sent to deal with Dhaka University students, who had been active in protests against the military regime. The army set fire to apartments and then mowed down their fleeing occupants. The military reign of terror spread far and wide beyond the cities. The World Bank said whole villages had just ceased to exist.

By all eyewitness accounts the soldiers conducted mass murder and rape. Estimates of the dead range up to 3 million. About 200,000 women were raped and almost 10 million Bengalis fled to refugee camps in India.

One gruesome picture showed a bloated crow hopping on piles of corpses, its glittering eye contrasting with the bulging sightless eyes of the dead.

The rest of the world condemned the atrocities and sent aid for the refugees. Nixon and Kissinger said nothing but kept supplying aid, including military aid, to West Pakistan and encouraged other countries to divert military hardware to Pakistan when public opinion and Congress tried to block U.S. military deliveries. Kissinger sent a message to Yahya praising his “delicacy and tact” in Operation Searchlight, as the Pakistan Army called the crackdown. In July 1971, Kissinger objected to the idea that the Pakistan army should get out of civilian administration in East Pakistan to help the relief efforts, claiming, “Why is it our business how they govern themselves?”

Archer Blood, the U.S. consul-general in East Pakistan, and his entire staff were so appalled at the callous attitude of their own government that, in April, Blood sent the rightly famous eponymous cable of dissent: “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities … Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy … But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state…”

For his courage, Blood was called a “pansy” by Kissinger, silenced, recalled early and transferred.

Kissinger continued to support Yahya and the Pakistan military through thick and thin, beyond the need for Pakistan’s good offices in opening the door to China. As war between Pakistan and India, strained by the costs of housing and feeding the refugees, loomed toward the end of 1971, Kissinger was urging China not to be “a silent spectator” at the impending dismemberment of its ally Pakistan.

All of this must bring a smile to the face of Sarmila Bose, whose endeavours to whitewash Pakistani atrocities in Bangladesh in 1971 comes with the support and endorsement of right-wing institutions in the US who work hard to keep Henry Kissinger out of the way of accountability and justice. The comical irony of all this is that Pakistani Islamists and their fellow travellers are instrumental to US policies of realpolitik expansionism at the cost of millions of Muslim lives.

The Bangladesh liberation war – the nine-month struggle in 1971 whereby East Pakistan broke away and became an independent nation – remains relatively unknown in the west. I am a social anthropologist who has undertaken a decade-long research on the memories of wartime rape from the Bangladesh war. I came into contact with contemporary post-nationalist readings which address the role of Bengali Muslims in the killing of Bihari/non-Bengali collaborators and communities. Yet none of these Bangladeshi works are referenced in Bose’s book, which she claims to be the “first critical, neutral” study.

Bose’s book is methodologically inconsistent and appears to be informed by a disdain for Bangladeshis and their movement for political freedom. Her portrayal of East Pakistanis/Bangladeshis as either capable of showing “bestial” violence or being cowards calls into question her neutrality.

According to her book, Bangladeshis are prone to melodrama and self-pity, with a blind hate and vindictiveness towards the West Pakistani army – not so surprising, given that the violence was perpetrated by the army. To her, Pakistani army personnel are gentle, quiet, kind, honest, “fine men” with a good humour and “with no ethnic bias against the Bengalis”. Accepting her account, Jack contends that “it would be more accurate to accuse the Pakistani army of political killing”, while the killing of non-Bengali collaborators and communities by Bengali Muslim civilians counts as genocide.

The numbers killed and raped during the Bangladesh war, as noted by Jack, remains a contentious issue. There is no doubt that the figures bandied about – 3 million or 300,000 – are difficult to prove or disprove. In an earlier article, Bose mistrusts Bangladeshi scholars and calls for research to be “conducted by a credible team of international scholars in a systematic and verifiable manner”. Yet, in instances in the book where foreign press reports provide documentation of the killings and rapes by the Pakistani army, Bose states: “Foreign press reports are not uniformly reliable sources.”

Historian Prof Willem van Schendel of the University of Amsterdam, in criticising Bose’s book, suggested: “Debunking is an important, indeed necessary, historical genre in all war historiographies but … it is only helpful and effective if it adheres to the highest professional and ethical standards.” So in asking others that we pay attention, Jack should also find out about the living and dead who are unreckoned as a result of Bose’s inconsistent documentation of Bangladesh’s horrific losses.

A new book, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, by Timur Kuran, a Duke University economic historian, attempts to answer these questions and says that it is partly because of a series of taking the wrong forks in the road and partly because Islam is a victim of its own inbuilt egalitarianism. The New York Times has a review.

In answering the question, almost all post-modernist academics in today’s universities will invariably put the blame on colonialism. But this, as Kuran maintains, would be incorrect:

Many Arabs have an alternative theory about the reason for the region’s backwardness: Western colonialism. But that seems equally specious and has the sequencing wrong. “For all its discontents, the Middle East’s colonial period brought fundamental transformation, not stagnation; rising literacy and education, not spreading ignorance; and enrichment at unprecedented rates, not immiserization,” writes Timur Kuran,

So how does Professor Timur Kuran’s attempt to answer this question in his new book?

Professor Kuran’s book offers the best explanation yet for why the Middle East has lagged. After poring over ancient business records, Professor Kuran persuasively argues that what held the Middle East back wasn’t Islam as such, or colonialism, but rather various secondary Islamic legal practices that are no longer relevant today.

It’s a sophisticated argument that a column can’t do justice to, but for example, one impediment was inheritance law. Western systems most commonly passed all property intact to the eldest son, thus preserving large estates. In contrast, Islamic law stipulated a much fairer division of assets (including some to daughters), but this meant that large estates fragmented. One upshot was that private capital accumulation faltered and couldn’t support major investments to usher in an industrial revolution.

Professor Kuran also focuses on the Islamic partnership, which tended to be the vehicle for businesses. Islamic partnerships dissolved whenever any member died, and so they tended to include only a few partners — making it difficult to compete with European industrial and financial corporations backed by hundreds of shareholders.

The emergence of banks in Europe led long-term British interest rates to drop by two-thirds leading up to the Industrial Revolution. No such drop occurred in the Arab world until the colonial period.

These traditional impediments are no longer a problem in the 21st century. Muslim countries now have banks, corporations, and stock and bond markets, and inheritance law now isn’t an obstacle to capital accumulation. So if Professor Kuran’s diagnosis is correct, that should bode well for the region — and Turkey’s boom in recent years underscores the potential for a renaissance.

Yet one challenge is psychological. Many Arabs blame outsiders for their backwardness, and cope by rejecting modernity and the outside world. It’s a disgrace that an area that once produced outstanding science and culture (giving us words like algebra) now is an educational underachiever, especially for girls.

The crisis in the Arab world provides a chance for a new start. I hope we’ll have some tough, honest conversations on all sides about what went wrong — as a starting point for a new and more hopeful trajectory.

From Avicenna to Umar Khayyam, from the quatrains of Rumi and Hafez to the mysticism of Suhrawardi, from the works of a thousand known and unknown scholars, Persians dominated the days of Islamic glory writing, teaching, interpreting and comparing religions, thought, logic and science to pass on to future generations that would study the works they wrote and collected and translate these findings to formulate what would become the foundation of a European Renaissance. Like Greek was the language of scholarship in ancient Rome and Christian Byzantium, Farsi would become the language of learning and poetry in the world of Islam. The Ummayad invasions of the 7th century were a harsh beginning to the history of Iran under Arab Islamic domination. The once powerful Persian empire was militarily defeated by the united Arabian desert tribes seeking plunder and wealth from what was perceived as an age old tyrannical kingdom who’s rulers were the embodiment and reincarnation of the likes of both Pharoah and Nimrud. That God would give the victorious Muslims such a prize as the conquest of Persia did seem as a miracle. Recalling the stories of old, the Arab armies saw themselves as the heirs of the once great Alexander, conquering the evil kings of the East and delivering the masses from their terrible rule. Even the mighty Roman empire could not conquer Persia. But now, united under the banner of Islam, the once divided and bickering desert tribes brought the greatest empire in the east to it’s knees.

Conquest, as we have seen throughout history is a double, give and take phenomenon. A nation is conquered by another, and the victor hoists his flag and banners over the conquered and proclaims his mastery over their bodies and souls, their lives and destiny. However, what is said and ordered is usually never accomplished in total, because the human spirit is such that it will find a way to survive even in the most harshest of environments. A conquest can have beneficial aspects as well as negative ones, bringing in new ideas or allowing new freedoms that were forgotten by the administration of the vanquished nation, thereby allowing a blending of ideas, tradition and culture. From this blend, from these symbiotic relationships and from the will of a people to survive and thrive in the face of tyranny, a new and enriched culture develops. This is how civilization has advanced since the first ancient settlements on the Nile, the Euphrates and the Ganges came into existence. One tribe dominates another when trade becomes impossible or illogical, and the peoples involved wish either to coexist or are forced to coexist, and thus feel the need to prolong something their former identity. The desire to conquer also is stimulated by what the prize may have or be an heir to. You have something I want, and after your gold and women are mine, as your new ruler I wish to learn what it is you possess that made you seem so tempting in my eyes in the first place. What was it that caused me to finance armies and set forth risking life and limb to become your master? Beyond the material desire, beyond the gold, the wine, the beautiful women who would become concubines and ranks of slaves, there is the desire for knowledge, both scientific and metaphysical. It is this heritage of knowledge that conquerors seek and learn to emulate, whether they are conscious of this desire to emulate or not.

Ancient Persia is the land of Zoroaster a great prophet and teacher of a monotheistic tradition that explained the world and creation in dualistic forms. Zoroaster taught that Ahura Mazda was all light, goodness and order, asha, while Ahriman, the lord of darkness, manifested himself in druj, disorder and chaos. The human being is that battle ground between these opposing forces, and the use of reason and intellect, coupled with faith and ethical behavior helped humankind defeat the forces of evil. Followers of Zoroaster were mistakenly called ‘fireworshippers’, as the holy flame that was lit amid the center of their worship represented the light of asha and the eternal victory of Ahura Mazda over the forces of the dark. Like the Quran, the Torah, the Gospels and the Baghavad Gita, the book known as the Zend Avesta teaches humans to be compassionate, kind, tolerant and dutiful to their fellow human beings, and to develop a strong sense of faith and a deep personal spirituality.

Called Cyrus ‘the Great’ by historians for his legacy of human rights and tolerant rule of equality over his subjects, invaded the Near East and is credited with introducing to the monotheistic Hebrews many Zoroastrian concepts, such as the levels of heaven and hell, the hierarchy of angels, and the accounts of the last days, when good and bad will do a final showdown that will result in a victory of light over dark, which became the victory of God over Satan. The Biblical books of Ezekiel and Isaiah, Revelations and the battle of Armageddon, as well as some of the the well known ‘short surahs’ of the Quran are all very Persian in character and style.

The Earthquake
In the name of God, the beneficial, the merciful.
When the Earth is shaken up with the final shaking.
And the Earth brings forth her burdens.
And Man asks “what aileth her”
On that day she shall reveal her tidings
Because your Lord has inspired her
On that day men shall issue forth in sundry bodies that they may be shown their works.
So he who has done an atoms’ weight of good shall see it
And he who has done an atoms’ weight of evil shall see it

In surah Qariah The Calamity, we read another example of Persian religious scripture style when we read such verses that tell of “men being scattered upon the Earth” and “mountains becoming as carded wool”. Elsewhere “the heavens are rolled up as scrolls” or we learn that Man will see that if he willfully commits evil in the Earth “his abode for eternity is the everlasting fire”. Such language, like that found in the story of the Apocalypse, is clearly the influence of Persian Zoroastrian spiritual literature. Seven levels of Heaven, with all it’s rewards and delights are countered by seven in Hell, with the torments and trials all described in gory detail, tended by different groups of angels and demons accordingly who guard the mighty celestial gates. Indeed, the ancient religion of Zoroaster lives on in Judaism, Christianity and Islam in a thousand and one ways. The legacy and influence of Zoroastrianism on the Abrahamic faiths can be found in Cyril Glasse’s excellent study ‘The Once and Future Religion’.

It was the Arab invasion of Persia that was the death knell of Zoroastrianism. Many fled to India, where they are known to this day as Parsees. Some managed to escape to Anatolia  and then on to the Balkans, where dualism found fertile ground in the neo-pagan Christianity of a southeastern Europe that was politically and religiously split between the dogmatic hegemony of the church of Rome and that of a unitarian creed-minded Byzantine Constantinople. The Bogomils [lovers of God] came about, and their dualist ideas of the Earth being the contaminated work of the evil Satanel, redeemable only through the process of death, spread to France, where the Albigensians and Cathars became so popular that they threatened the very power of the Catholic Church. A crusade was preached against them to wipe out what became a heresy that almost tore Europe apart long before Luther did. Ironically in the Balkans, like in Persia, the oppressed Bogomils surrendered not to Christianity but to Islam, which came in with the arrival of the Ottoman Turks.

Iranian thought and spirituality therefore plays an important role in ancient and medieval history and religion. Slowly, as the Arab conquerors settled down to reap the rewards of their conquests, the people of Iran under pressure to convert to Islam became Muslim. While the Zoroastrian religion as it was previously identified faded, the teachings and thought of that once and future religion now found in Islam’s simplicity, tolerance and acknowledgement of all previous faiths a place in the Sun. Rather than being transformed by a simple faith from the desert, the Persian mind embellished Islamic thought with a color and a feel that was essentially Persian in character. The Islamic ‘Golden Age’ was replete with Persian scholars who interpreted the Quran and spiritual knowledge with a variety that astounds scholars and historians even to this day. The inquisitive minds of Persian scholars contributed to the establishment over 130 schools of thought within Islam in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine and physics were nearly all the domain of the Persian scholars  who were to be found in universities as far afield as Balkh in modern Afghanistan and Cordoba in Spain.

Al Farabi, studying the ancient texts of Pythagoras, wrote a treatise on music and the effects of music on the mind and the soul. The Sufis taught that music was a way to reach union with God, encouraged poetry and preached a tolerance and pantheism that embraced all mankind. Their ‘religion’ was an Islam that included within it’s tenets the basics of the former Zoroastrian ideal of a personal, intimate relationship with God, coupled with eastern Christian mystical devotion, and became influential in the Islamic world and has contributed a great many poets and thinkers, without whom Islam would seem boring and void of character. Like the pointed and spiraling domes that top mosques and Taj Mahal-like palaces in the east, like the slender minarets or the lilting and dainty tea carafes and aftabs, as in the flowing and elegant ‘arabesque’ script that we have come to know as lovers of calligraphy, as in the romantic miniature paintings of Bihzad and Sultan Muhammad or the melancholy Timurid and erotic Moghul paintings of Akbar’s era, the silver serving trays and decorated plates that hold sumptuous dishes such as stuffed cabbages or eggplant, delicately grilled meats served atop elaborate rice dishes redolent with fruits and nuts, all these are contributions of Persian cultural genius. The poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi remains among the most commonly read collections of poetry verse in the world to this very day. Iran was Islam’s outer garment, it’s suit and tie, as well as it’s socks and undershirt and has been an elegant, beautiful and important garment for centuries.

Shi’ism as a faith developed over time, originally based on what has been perceived as an injustice committed by a Sunni dominated community. Unlike the Sunni world, which by the 14th century was falling into a dogmatic literalism, Iran was united as Shi’ism became the state religion under one Shah Ismail, who is famous for ordering the creation of the classic work of art known as the Shah Nameh or Book of Kings for his son.The Shi’a in Iran maintained a hierarchy of learned scholars that continued for a time the tradition of debate and critical thinking that was the hallmark of such later Shahs such as Abbas the Great. During his reign “Isfahan was half the world”, and Iran maintained itself independently as an empire under the Safavids. As in the years before, Iranian Islam was characterized by a sense of open mindedness, scholarly pursuit, and a somewhat less dogmatic approach to religion than what characterized many other Muslim domains.The Shahs saw to it that religion and state each had their place, and that religion knew it’s place too. Indeed, one well meaning and overly respectful 18th century English ambassador was astonished to find that he was asked to leave the presence of one angry and insulted Shah whom he had refused to join in partaking of a flask of sweet wine. So much for the edicts of mullahs and the cultural correctness of non-Muslim ambassadors, but the clergy wasn’t about to issue fatwas condemning a Persian Shah’s drinking habits. Wine, women and song were highly prized in Safavid Persia. As Islamic civilization sank into the abyss, Iran was able to maintain it’s head above water a bit longer, though time wears all civilizations down. Perhaps their dependence on a monarchy rather than implementing a modern democracy, as some will say was a forced dependence, a result of western ambitions and influence, held Iran back from being the great modern nation it could have been. Indeed, many Iranians saw the American supported Shah Reza Pahlavi as an enemy of the people when the popular Mossadegh, who wished to nationalize the oil companies, was brought down in favor of the Shah during the years of the cold war. Such anger at foreign intervention caused the Iranians to oust that Shah in 1979, in an attempt to set up their own government. However, the inability of the different groups, which sprang from the educated intellectuals of Teheran university, left a power vacuum that was filled by what neither many Iranians nor westerners could ever have imagined. One who called himself an Ayatollah named Khomeini arrived via a 747 jet and proclaimed that Iranians throw out the ‘great satan’, the USA. Gathering the lesser educated mullahs of the countryside who represented the poor and disenfranchised farmers and small town laborers of Iran, Khomeini with the help of his supporters turned Iran overnight into an Islamic republic.

What most Iranians and foreigners were never expecting was the severity of this Islamic revolution. Unlike the Iranian tradition of the past, the new ulema and majlis were not the Avicennas and Khayyams of the present day. The open debates about faith that characterized Shi’a Islam of the past were now confined to a rigid and literal conference by uneducated mullahs who served as both religious leaders and national cheer leaders. Their inexperience in both has brought about a most shameful and depressing era in Iranian history. The war against Iraq pitted unarmed young Iranian boys against the machine guns and artillery of Saddam Hussein. They were mowed down in their thousands, charging armed only with broom handles and a red bandana around their heads that signified their willingness to die for God and Ali, the prophet Muhammad’s son in law who is the central figure of Shi’a faith and thought. All opposition that seems to threaten the leadership is dealt with harshly, whether that opposition comes in the form of intellectuals, journalists, news commentators, students who demand reforms, laborers, or opposing Islamic scholars who stand against the harshness of the mullahs. Whenever a demonstration against the government is organized, the dreaded Basij shoot a few marchers from the rooftops to discourage the protests that the free world sees all too well. Women are stoned, people flogged, minorities oppressed and public hangings all too common. In short, what Iran once was is definitely no more.

The beauty and dignity of the Shi’a faith, based on the life of a noble man such as Ali ibn Abu Talib and his son Hussein, a faith that places so much stress on righteousness, justice and good government, has been altered in a way that can barely be believed. The promise of redemption found in the Shi’a literature of the last days, with the coming of the Mahdi and Jesus, and a promise of redemption to all good people of all faiths, a holdover belief and a piece of literature from Zoroastrianism, has been molded into a promise of Armageddon that is all too real and frightening. The theme of the mullah-dominated religion of Iran is doomsday, and they must arm themselves for the coming of that day and the final battle between good and evil. This battle, a theme for thousands of years in Iranian religion and literature was never meant to be enacted literally, but rather as a moral and spiritual guide, fulfilled by the forces of nature and the universe of alternate dimensions.The literal mullahs have created a religion of martyrdom based on a dogma of us versus them. This is not the way of light, but clearly the work of darkness. They claim to stand for the noble Ali, but instead have become the Yazids, Muawiyas and Ummayads themselves. The oppressors have been transformed into the oppressed and vice versa, as the words of the Nahjul Balagha, the collected sermons and teachings of the noble Hazrat Ali, are interpreted for the benefit of the majlis and the Teheran regime, their spirit of justice and equality transmuted into a method of tyranny, Hitler like in their use of rhetoric and propaganda. Sufis, free thinkers, pluralists and pantheists, liberal mullahs and spiritual dervishes who see God’s face in everything and everyone, once a featured example of open minded Iranian society and religion, are jailed, tortured and put to death. It is clear that while around the world Islam seems to have sunk into the abyss, it seemingly has sunk extra low in the case of Iran. The tomb of Hafez and the ruins of Isfahan and Persepolis stand as gravestones and a testament to what was once a vibrant and thriving human culture that emphasized the mind and the heart, the intellect and the soul, and above all, human dignity.

Based on the verses of the Zend Avesta, in the Persian epic the Shah Nameh, the Book of Kings, there is a warning. Beware of the lord of darkness, Ahriman, who takes on many forms to deceive mankind. When the intellect is aware and educated, Ahriman is defeated and hides himself. Never content with defeat by the light of the intellect, Ahriman takes the form of a priest, a man of God if you will, claiming to follow the way of Ahura Mazda. Thus, mankind believes him, and follows thinking the holy man to be a good and just soul. But with trickery he leads all to the very pit of darkness. If this story ever had relevance in today’s world, it does with the situation in modern Iran. There, the lord of darkness has indeed led people astray, making evil seem as goodness, exchanging ahsa for druj. He holds the people in a slavery of the mind and the soul, and oppresses in the name of God. The people fight bravely, risking their lives by marching and protesting, making themselves targets for the dreaded basij who do the evil work of the concealed, mullah-manifested Ahriman.

There was, in Muhammad’s time, a companion known as Salman. He was Persian by birth, and Muhammad admired him for his intelligence and his sharp cleverness. The town of Medina was surrounded by thousands of pagan Meccan warriors who came to do away with Muhammad’s revolution once and for all. Weary of war and fighting, thinking how to dissuade these pagans from fighting and come to a truce that he had put forth, Muhammad turned to Salman. The man came up with an idea that was revolutionary in Arabia. He suggested that the Medinans construct a trench around the city. The pagans, accustomed to fighting from horseback, could not make their cavalry charges with a trench in front of them that surrounded the city. Disgusted, they left and went home. This became known as the ‘battle of the trench’. Soon, a much needed treaty eventually followed, and Muhammad was able to demonstrate his faith and teaching in a peaceful manner that turned the hearts of many in Mecca to the way of Islam and peace. The ‘battle of the trench’ resulted in the victory of monotheism over paganism in Arabia, as Muhammad entered Mecca and proclaimed that “truth has come and falsehood has vanished”.  There is a hadith, among many, that Muhammad supposedly once said

“If my religion were ever to falter and go along the wrong path, leave it to a person of Persian birth to set it aright”

It is clear that the people of Iran were and are held in high esteem in the past and in the present day. We should not forget these brave and intelligent  people in their time of need and oppression. We must support them in their fight against an evil oppressor, so they can support us with their wisdom and their light. Perhaps they will show us once again the correct way to travel the spiritual path after all.

For Egyptians, the history of the Iranian Revolution should serve as a warning. In 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini hid his true intentions—namely the creation of a despotic rule of the clerics—behind the mantle of democracy. More than once he promised that not a single cleric would hold a position of power in the future government. But once in power, he created the current clerical despotism. And when, in June 2009, three million people took to the streets of Tehran to protest decades of oppression, they were brutally suppressed.

With this history in mind, Egyptian democrats must not be fooled by the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. If and when Mubarak falls, they simply cannot allow the most radical and brutal forces to win in the ensuing chaos. If these forces are allowed to claim power using the rhetoric of democracy, Egyptians will find themselves decades from now needing another uprising, which is precisely the current situation of the Iranian people.

The propaganda machine for the clerical regime in Tehran has been gloating about the similarities between the events of Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran and developments in Egypt now. It shamelessly claims that today’s uprising in Egypt is but an aftershock of the revolution in Iran. The Egyptian people must prove them wrong.

And not just for the sake of Egypt. For over a century, Egypt, like Iran, has been a bellwether state for the entire region. The arrival of freedom to Egypt would therefore put the Iranian mullahs on the defensive. Far from a repeat of 1979, the Egyptian uprising might begin to seem like a close cousin of 2009—a true democratic revolt. This would give confidence to democrats across the Middle East. It would suggest that the tectonic plates in the region really are shifting away from despotism and dogma, toward democracy and reason. Inshallah!

Read it all.

The reason the story has only emerged recently is because Albania was cocooned for 50 years by a xenophobic dictatorship that permitted its citizens no contact with the outside world.

Remona Aly, campaigns director of the Exploring Islam Foundation, which is helping promote Gershman’s book, said: “We want to show how Islam promotes diversity and co-existence and has no tolerance of anti-Semitism. The message of this project is more vital now than ever before.

“Tensions in the Middle East need to be separated from the common shared theological heritage and values of the two faiths, and history of peace and solidarity between Islam and Judaism. Denying the Holocaust undermines the principles of Islam and through this campaign we hope to voice our solidarity with the aims and objectives of Holocaust Memorial Day.”

Gershman’s book documents the stories of many Muslim Albanians who looked after Jews.

Albanians gave them clothes and Muslim names, and rather than hiding them in the attic treated them as part of the family.

One of the Albanians photographed by Gershman, Rifat Hoxha, said: “I was born after the war. My father only told me of his rescue of a Jewish family shortly before he died, when I was 17.

“In 1944, under the German occupation, my parents sheltered the family of Nesim Hallagyem, his wife Sara and their son Aron.

“They were refugees from Bulgaria who stayed with my parents for six months.

“There were times of great danger when Germans went from house to house seeking Jews.

“Towards the end of the occupation my father escorted Nesim and his family to the port city of Durres, where they embarked as refugees hopeful of gaining access to Palestine.

“Just before leaving, Nesim entrusted to my father three beautifully bound books in Hebrew to keep for him until he could retrieve them.

“After the war my father did receive a letter from Nesim saying he and his family were safely in Palestine.

“This was during the Communist period in Albania when any correspondence from abroad was considered a crime subject to arrest.

“My father was prohibited from answering the letter and that was the last time there was any communication.”

Saleem Kidwai, secretary of the Muslim Council of Wales, said: “This is a very important piece of history that shows how people will selflessly help others out of pure humanity.”

Danielle Morashti, joint president of the Jewish Society at Cardiff University, said: “Until contacted by the Muslim Council of Wales, I had no idea this happened. “It deserves to be much better known.”

Contrast the extraordinary heroicism of those Albanian Muslims seventy years ago with this macabre and poor-spirited carping of MPACUK, the pro-jihadist MPAC, whose founder Asghar Bukhari famously offered to fundraise for David Irving.

It is not the Muslims who have made this event political, nor would we stop from attending it if we felt it was not being used a propaganda weapon to harm human beings that have committed no crime themselves. Zionist Jews themselves should hold their heads in shame for doing so and this has been documented and written about by numerous authors, none so worthy as the brave and great Jewish professor, Finklestein.

We, the Muslims, will attend any event about the Holocaust as long as the Palestinians are included in that event, as the equal and living victims of that crime, who are today in their millions paying the price for a crime they did not commit, by many of the people who are now holding expensive and swanky events with fine speeches claiming, ‘never again’

These, the same Muslims who, having plied their moral superiority on plight of the Palestinians by equating it to the cause of Hamas, cannot bring themselves to consider instances of other genocides of Muslims. Ones that are less convenient to the idea of religious supremacism, that have taken place in the Muslim world at the hands Muslims. This is what happens when you have feasted on a diet of Norman Finklestein and David Irving and little else.

This article, by one Syed Soharward, is a complete encapsulation of the modern Muslim definition genocide. He writes:

Muslims do not need to make anybody guilty of conscious. We just need to communicate with our Christian friends in their language and terminology. I am sure they will understand but Muslims have to take the first step. We want to make sure that the people must recognize and believe in the other Holocausts and genocide as well as the World War II Holocaust. Let’s review few Holocausts and Genocide of Muslims around the world.

He then goes on to list his genocides of choice: Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia and Kossovo, Muslim States in Russian Federation, Muslims in China.

No mention and erased from memory are the three numerically largest genocides of the 20th century, and no prizes for guessing why these have been forgotten by Muslims today.

Armenia

Bangladesh

Darfur

Jabir (Allah be pleased with him) reported: There came a slave and pledg- ed allegiance to Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) on migration; he (the Holy Prophet) did not know that he was a slave. Then there came his master and demanded him back, whereupon Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: Sell him to me. And he bought him for two black slaves, and he did not afterwards take allegiance from anyone until he had asked him whether he was a slave (or a free man).
Sahih Muslim Book 10 Number 3901

With the recent release of a new batch of Nixon tapes, once again we got to see the amoral side of how Nixon and Kissinger practiced statecraft. I happened to mention in polite conversation– with a GOP apparatchik who once campaigned for Nixon– the dark side of Nixon’s foreign policy. Specifically that even the crown jewel of his foreign policy, the opening to China, came at the cost of turning a blind eye to one of the most horrific genocides of the 20th Century, in Bangladesh. Of course my GOP friend accused me of exaggeration and revisionism, so for those ignorant or skeptical about this claim, let’s open the vault.

However one myth should be put to rest. Many Nixon detractors like to suggest that the only reason Nixon went to China in 1972 was for cynical political reasons. But in fact, Nixon as a private citizen had written in 1967 an essay “Asia After Viet Nam,” which explored a possible thawing of Sino-American relations. So whatever faults the man had, which were many, an opening to China was a legitimate intellectual turnabout for a man who once accused Democrats of near treason for suggesting the same thing a decade previously.

Richard Nixon was able to pull off his opening to China by way of Pakistan– in particular by dealing with that country’s ruler General Yahyn Khan. Both Nixon and Kissinger hated the Indian leader, Indira Gandhi and India in general. Kissinger once infamously referred to Gandhi as “the bitch” and the Indian people as “bastards.” Nixon, not to be outbid in any sort of ethnic bashing, called the Indians, “slippery, treacherous people.” So the administration clearly was going to lean toward India’s primary antagonist, Pakistan, in foreign relations. Nixon and General Khan first met on October 25, 1970. Nixon broached the subject of using Khan as a go-between with the Chinese. Kissinger’s previous attempts to open backdoor channels with China by way of Romanian contacts and his friend, Jeane Sainteny, had failed, so Khan’s agreement was music to Nixon’s ears.



At what price were Nixon and Kissinger willing to go to keep General Khan as their silent emissary? On July 19, 1971, Kissinger briefed the President and members of the White House staff on the upcoming trip to China. Kissinger laughed toward the end and said: “The cloak and dagger exercise in Pakistan arranging the trip was fascinating. Yaha hasn’t had so much fun since the last Hindu massacre.”

In fact General Khan had unleashed Operation Searchlight, a genocidal plan which the general and his army had been planning for months, to end once and for all their “troubles” with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). One year before, the Awami League, which represented East Pakistan, won a majority of seats in the National Assembly, giving them a chance to end the domination of West Pakistan over East Pakistan affairs. This was something that General Khan refused to tolerate and thus planned to end the influence of East Pakistan once and for all by murdering the intellectual, cultural and political elite. Khan told his supporters, “Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.”

The Pakistan military got their buckets of blood for their general. Although estimates of the number killed have varied widely, Time magazine reported: “Most counts of the genocide arrive between 1 million and 3 million people killed.” Nearly 10 million refugees crossed into India. Hindus were singled out– which makes Kissinger’s “joke” especially shocking. Conservative estimates are that nearly 200,000 women were raped.

American counsel general to East Pakistan Archer Blood and others in the State Department were appalled with what was going on in Pakistan: wholesale murder, rape and ethnic cleansing while the United States was silent. This prompted Blood to send the famous Blood telegram through the dissent channel to the State Department:

Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pakistan dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy,(…) But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

Blood had no idea who he was pleading with. Nixon and Kissinger were not about to be swayed by ethics and morality. Several weeks after receiving the Blood telegram, Nixon wrote on a memo from Kissinger that in no way was the USA to “squeeze” General Khan or Pakistan over their genocide. Blood would soon be transferred out of his position to prevent him from being a further thorn in General Khan’s blood-soaked paw.

One month after Operation Searchlight had begun, Kissinger sent a note to General Khan thanking him for his “delicacy and tact.” Kissinger historian Walter Isaacson describes Kissinger’s note as an “odd description” for a ruler in the midst of murdering millions.

Meanwhile India was in a state of emergency as millions of refugees came across their border from East Pakistan fleeing almost certain death from the Pakistan military. Humanitarian groups began to raise money to aid East Pakistan. Nixon and Kissinger were furious that they may have to slobber (Nixon’s words) over Gandhi to keep India from attacking West Pakistan. When Nixon learned that former Beatle George Harrison was teaming up with Indian singer Ravi Shankar to have a “Concert for Bangladesh,” he asked Kissinger: “So who is the Beetle giving the money to- is it the goddamn Indians?………We have to keep India away.”

Despite Nixon’s “slobbering” over Gandhi at the White House at a state visit, she would have no more of General Khan’s bloodbath and launched the Indian army into East Pakistan. Quickly the Indian army defeated Pakistan, and General Khan raised the white flag only after 10 days. India restored the democratically-elected leadership of East Pakistan. However, while the brief India-Pakistan war was underway, Nixon and Kissinger continue to supply Pakistan military aid (and lied to Congress about it), cut off economic aid to India and accused India of being the troublemaker in the region, not Pakistan. Nixon even sent the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to try and scare India, and tried to get the USSR and China to persuade India to back off.

The American ambassador to India, Kenneth Keating, was equally shocked at the callous statecraft Nixon and Kissinger were playing in appeasing General Khan at all costs. When Ambassador Keating pleaded with Nixon that India was the real ally and something needed to be done to stop the bloodletting, Nixon told Kissinger:

“I don’t want him (Ambassador Keating) to come in with that kind of jackass thing with me….Keating, like every ambassador who goes over there, goes over there and gets sucked in.”

Kissinger responded:

“Those sons-of-bitches, who never have lifted a finger for us, why should we get involved in the morass of East Pakistan.”

Of course the morass that Kissinger was speaking of was one that their Pakistani ally had got into in the first place. There would have been no war with Pakistan if it had not been for Operation Searchlight and millions of refugees coming across the Indian border. Amazing how two men who were supposed to be gurus of statecraft were unable to even acknowledge to themselves the consequences of General Khan’s reckless murder spree.

So let’s do a body count. The cost of having General Khan as their secret emissary to China was 1.5 million dead East Pakistanis, 10 million refugees and a war between India and Pakistan that took the lives of 14,000 Indians and 15,000 Pakistanis.

On February 21, 1972, Air Force One landed in China and Nixon and Kissinger would get the foreign policy coup that they had been working on since 1970. But those photo ops with Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai came a terrible cost. The United States sacrificed its moral authority as it sided with a ruthless dictator who murdered hundreds of thousands and tried to undermine the largest democracy in Asia.

One has to wonder why these inconvenient facts are never presented to Dr. Kissinger when he appears on TV before the groveling sycophants who interview him.

A synagogue in the St. Louis, Missouri, area is exhibiting photos and stories about Albanian Muslims who risked their lives to rescue Jews during World War II.

The exhibit is based on Norman Gershman’s book Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II, which we posted about last year.

In 2005 Marc Levin, a Jewish-American film maker released an interesting documentary about a rise in anti-Semitism after the 9/11 attacks. It consisted mainly of Levin engaging with a diverse range of people which included: white nationalists, black nationalists, Arab-Americans,   evangelicals, Kabbalist rabbis, holocaust survivors and even the founder of the website Jew Watch.

According to Levin he had been prompted to make the film after an encounter in a New York cab shortly after 9/11. His driver an Egyptian immigrant had claimed that Jews had been warned not to go to work on the day of the attacks. When probed further the driver had told Levin that “it’s all written in the book”.

‘The book’ he was referring to is commonly known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and despite being published over a hundred years ago it remains an international best seller. At the core of most editions are a series of twenty four recorded ‘protocols’ or ‘minutes’ allegedly produced by Jewish elders at the turn of the twentieth century.  They describe a grand plan designed by the Jewish people to achieve global dominance.

In this article I will be looking the emergence of The Protocols, proof of its forged nature and how it still influences certain ideological groups today.

The first abridged form of the protocols had been serialised by a Russian newspaper in August 1903, a year that had been particularly bad for parts of the Russian Jewry. Earlier that year a Russian-Christian boy had been found murdered. A local newspaper had alleged that not only had the boy been murdered by Jews, but that his blood had been used in the preparation of matzo- an unladen bread. What followed was the first Kishinev pogrom which the New York Times described:”as a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, “Kill the Jews,” was taken- up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep”. The murdered boy had in fact not been killed by Jews, but by a relative.

The text itself remained for a while obscure. However during the next two years it began to circulate more widely as problems in Russia began to grow. A wave of mass political and social unrest had resulted in the 1905 revolution, while in the same year Russia was defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War. Sergei Nilus would be the first to have the whole text published in his book ‘The Great within the Small: The Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth’. The text was used by monarchists and ultra-nationalists to scapegoat the Jewish people who they believed were at the root of Russia’s problems.

It would be more than a decade before the text spread to a wider arena. The 1917 revolution and its dismantling of the monarchy caused white Russians (anti-communists) to abandon their homeland and head west, taking the obscure text with them. From abroad it was used to discredit the Bolsheviks who were portrayed as overwhelmingly Jewish and who were accused of carrying out the plans described in the protocols.

In the United States the text was initially used as part of the First Red Scare. In 1919 it appeared in the Public Ledger in a pair of newspaper articles with all references to “Jews” replaced with references to Bolsheviks. Later the Protocols were also used by the industrialist Henry Ford who stated that ‘…they fit in with what is going on. They are 16 years old, and they have fitted the world situation up to this time.” He sponsored the printing of 500,000 copies of the Protocols as well as supporting other anti-Semitic publications.

Another sinister undertone of The Protocols was the artwork that appeared on the covers of various editions.  This included pictures of the Devil draped with the Star of David, a snake encircling the globe and other images commonly associated with magic and Satan worship.

A manuscript for the protocols had never been found and raised doubts about its authenticity.   In August 1921 Lucien Wolf traced back the history of the concepts found in the Protocols to the works of Goedsche and Jacques Crétineau-Joly. A more dramatic series of articles appeared   afterwards in The Times. Its Constantinople reporter, Philip Graves uncovered that text had been plagiarised from Maurice Joly’s ‘The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu’.

On September 4, 1921 the articles were reprinted by The New York Times. An entire book written by Herman Bernstein documenting The Protocols was published in the United States in the same year. In 1934, an anonymous editor expanded the book a commentary. This 1934 text is the most common edition found in the English-speaking world, as well as on the internet.

The Protocols became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution of the Jews and were made required reading for German students.  Hitler refers to the Protocols in Mein Kampf stating that there importance “is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.” At the height of World War II, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed: “The Zionist Protocols are as up-to-date today as they were the day they were first published.”

After the extent of the holocaust became clear most political figures in most parts of the world generally avoided claims that The Protocols represent a truth about a Jewish conspiracy. In the Middle East the opposite occurred. A Large number of Arab and Muslim regimes and leaders endorsed them as authentic. Many Arab governments even began funding new printings of the Protocols, and taught them in schools as historical fact.  According to a Freedom House 2006 report, in Saudi Arabia the:

“textbook for boys for Tenth Grade on Hadith and Islamic Culture contains a lesson on the “Zionist Movement.” …It asserts that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an authentic document and teaches students that it reveals what Jews really believe. It blames many of the world’s wars and discord on the Jews.”

Many Islamist organizations also accept them as fact. Article 32 of the Hamas Charter states:

“The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying”

Even some largely peaceful groups have promoted the same view.  In 1991 Mirza Tahir Ahmad (4^th global head of the Ahmadiyyah Muslim Community) in a sermon cited The Protocols to support his argument that the Jews were secretly controlling the world.  About the Protocols he states:

“This was a scheme of the top leaders of Israel, who believe in Zionism, as to how they shall dominate the world, what mode of action shall be adopted for this purpose, what will be the work principles and objectives, what means will be adopted etc”

In 2003, al-Usbu, an Egyptian weekly reported that the Alexandria Library was displaying the first Arabic translation of the Protocols next to a Torah scroll. The museum’s director Dr. Youssef Ziedan was quoted as saying:

“…it has become one of the sacred [texts] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law … more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it … It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah”

Aside from the Arab world The Protocols remain popular worldwide especially among far-right groups and other fringe groups which use it as evidence of a new world order. The book in recent times has become more widely available and can be found on many sites on the internet.

On two occasions in South Africa in 1934, and Switzerland in 1937, the Jewish community won important civil cases against the publishers of The Protocols.  Although the Swiss Appeal Court in the Berne trial overturned the decision, it was on a technicality, and the judges made clear their criticism of the evil nature of the forgery.

Despite being exposed as a forgery over 90 years ago the book continues – with the support of contemporary anti-Semitic literature – to strongly influence many people’s world view. In the words of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel who suffered firsthand the consequences of anti-Semitism in a concentration camp:

“If ever a piece of writing could produce mass hatred, it is this one. . . . This book is about lies and slander.”

By Raziq

This is a re-post of an article by Raziq first posted in January 2010

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Islamist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, Al-Muhajiroun and the Muslim Brotherhood claim that Muslims were ruled by a single political leadership which started from the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the 6th century and lasted until the last days of the Ottoman Empire in 1924. According to Islamists, this political leadership looked after the interests of all Muslims worldwide. The central aim of Islamist groups today is to recreate this leadership by uniting the 52 or so Muslim-majority countries in the world into a single state ruled by a single ruler (Caliph). They refer to this totalitarian system as the Khilafah (or the caliphate).

A basic study of Muslim history tells us that various Muslim empires existed in various parts of the world at the same time. In the 10th century, for example, there were three different Muslim empires in the world; the Umayyads in Spain, the Abbasids in Baghdad and the Fatimids in Egypt. Each of these Empires had their own Caliphs and they were independent of each other. Again in the 17th century, three different Muslim empires existed; the Ottomans in Central Asia, the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals in the Indian sub-continent. As well as these empires many parts of the Muslim world were not ruled by any of these empires at all, i.e. South East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of central Asia.

The Mughals considered themselves even more worthy Caliphs than the Ottomans because they were descendants of Tamerlane (Timur). In the 14th century Tamerlane had defeated the Ottoman army and imprisoned their Sultan Bayezid in a cage. He later had him tortured, beaten and starved to death. However Islamists groups have totally ignored the Mughal claim to the caliphate. Furthermore, many of these empires were often at war with one another, the Ottomans and Safavids fought many wars and eventually agreed on a border.

India was conquered by the first Mughal Emperor Babur in 1526 but the Mughal claim to the Caliphate began with the Emperor Akbar in 1556:

The Mughal Emperors, from the reign of Akbar onwards, called their domains ‘Dar ul Khilafat’ (the abode of caliphate). In Akbar’s reign gold coins were minted that bore the inscription ‘the great Sultan, the exalted khilafah’ (The Mughal Emperors, catalogue of Indian Gold Coins in the British Museum, by S. Lane-Poole, p.159).

In official correspondence with the Ottomans, the Mughals made clear their claim to be the true Caliphate:

In the reign of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan … his minister wrote a letter to a Turkish ambassador. In the letter he describes Shah Jahan as ‘his exalted majesty, who occupies the dignity of caliphate, the khaqan of the world, the shahinshah of the Sultans of the whole earth, the shadow of god’ (Dastur ul-Insha, Abdi Sari Effendi, National Bibliothek, Vienna, pg 161).

Most of the Mughal emperors saw themselves as Caliphs of India.  The Mughal Emperor Shah Alam 11 (1759-1806) is also called ‘Khalifah and Shadow of God’ by his biographer. (Shah Alam Nameh, p.16 – Calcutta, 1912)

So the Islamist assertion of there only being one caliphate which united all Muslims across the world under a single ruler is utterly false. It is a misrepresentation of history inspired by the Arab nationalist movements of the 1930s and 40s. The aim of constructing such a myth is to inspire confidence in their insane totalitarian project which attempts to apply medieval political paradigms to a modern globalised world. Let’s hope they don’t intend on replacing SUVs with diesel driven camels.

It was a minor revolution which swept this capital of the fertile Punjab province—a revolution engineered by fanatical mullahs against the Pakistan government. Five and a half years ago, when millions of frightened refugees were pouring into newly created Pakistan, the mullahs were the people’s leaders. They had a strong voice in the government. But when the country began establishing industries, hospitals, schools and banks, the mullahs protested that these innovations clashed with Islamic law. When Pakistani women shed their veils and emerged from purdah (complete seclusion in the home), the more fanatic mullahs were outraged. When the time came for Pakistan to draw up a constitution, the mullahs demanded that it be based on the Koran. (Result: Pakistan, a nation of 76 million, is still without a constitution.) The government of Prime Minister Kwaja Nazimuddin avoided an open clash with religious leaders, but paid less attention to their counsel.

The Hungry Mobs. Last month a religious group known as the Ahraris, influenced by fanatic mullahs, demanded that the government declare half a million members of the Ahmadiya sect to be non-Moslems. The Ahmadiyas are a close-knit and unpopular group, followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who at the turn of the century declared himself a Nabi, or prophet of Allah. There was politics in the mullahs’ demands, because Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, able, bearded Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan, is an Ahmadiya.* The Ahraris’ mullahs demanded his removal. When the government refused, the mullahs began stirring up trouble, particularly in Lahore, where there are many Ahmadiyas. Craftily they timed their protest to occur before the new season’s crops were harvested, when people were hungry.

Spellbinding mullahs whipped up crowds in Lahore’s many mosques, and in a few days wild processions were shouting anti-Ahmadiya slogans. When police clubbed and shot demonstrators, the bodies of the dead and wounded were dragged to the mosques, where the mullahs exhibited them. Within a week the Ahmadiyas had been forgotten: thousands of hungry Pakistanis had turned their wrath on the government. In the streets they cried “Hai Nazimuddin” (Woe on Nazimuddin).

The Counter Blow. When news of the Lahore uprising reached Prime Minister Nazimuddin in Karachi, he ordered 44-year-old Major General Mohammed Azam Khan, commander of the military cantonment outside Lahore, to move into the city and regain control. Ten thousand Pakistani troops put the city under martial law. Within six hours the revolution was over. The Red Cross counted 330 dead at first aid stations. Other dead, picked up and buried by relatives, probably raised the death toll to 1,000 or more.

At week’s end, Moslem Prime Minister Nazimuddin cautiously blamed the Ahraris for the rioting. This was strong stuff in a nation founded on religion. When the Ahraris failed to protest. Nazimuddin boldly lashed out, accused them of having opposed the formation of Pakistan. The Ahraris stayed silent.

The only sound in Lahore was the banshee wail of the curfew siren and the tramp of hobnailed military boots on the darkened, empty streets.

Hat tip: The Pak Tea House

Pop music without fatwas

The old guard

Education for girls

Jobs for women (in skirts and cute head scarfs)

More jobs for women

University with some decadent gender mixing thrown in

Honest jobs in industries

Adequate fuel and electricity

Big hat tip: Tarek Fatah

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A QUARTER CENTURY AGO I met a man who calmly told me how he had organised the massacre of a family. He wasn’t confessing out of a sense of remorse; he was bragging about it, grinning as he spoke to me.

I was a young reporter on assignment in Dhaka, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with Bangladesh, which had emerged as an independent nation after a bloody war of liberation 15 years earlier, in 1971. The man I was interviewing lived in a well-appointed home. Soldiers protected his house, checking the bags and identification of all visitors. A week earlier he had been a presidential candidate, losing by a huge margin.

He wore a Pathani outfit that looked out of place in a country where civilian politicians wore white kurtas and black vests, and men on the streets went about in lungis. He had a thin moustache. He stared at me eagerly as we spoke, curious about the notes I was taking, trying to read what I was writing in my notepad. He sat straight on a sofa, his chest thrust forward, as if he was still in uniform. He looked like a man playing a high stakes game, assured that he would win, because he knew someone important who held all the cards.

His name was Farooq Rahman, and he had been an army major, and later, lieutenant-colonel. He had returned to Bangladesh recently, after several years in exile in Libya. Before dawn on 15 August 1975, he led the Bengal Lancers, the army’s tank unit under his command, to disarm the Rokkhi Bahini, a paramilitary force loyal to President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League party. When he left the Dhaka Cantonment, he had instructed other officers and soldiers to go to the upscale residential area of Dhanmondi, where Mujib, as he was popularly known, lived. Soon after 5:00 am, the officers had killed Mujib and most of his family.

I had been rehearsing how to ask Farooq about his role in the assassination. I had no idea how he would respond. After a few desultory questions about the country’s political situation, I tentatively began, “It has been widely reported in Bangladesh that you were somehow connected with the plot to remove Mujibur Rahman from power in 1975. Would you…”

“Of course, we killed him,” he interrupted me. “He had to go,” he said, before I could complete my hesitant, longwinded question.

FAROOQ RAHMAN BELIEVED he had saved the nation. The governments that followed Mujib reinforced that perception, rewarding him and the other assassins with respectability, political space, and plum diplomatic assignments. One of Mujib’s surviving daughters, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, who inherited his political mantle and who was to become the prime minister of Bangladesh, was marginalised for many years. She lived for a while in exile, and for some time, was detained. The political landscape after Mujib’s murder was unstable. Bangladesh has had 11 prime ministers and over a dozen heads of state in its 39-year history. Hasina was determined to redeem her father’s reputation and seek justice, and her quest has larger implications for Bangladesh’s citizenry. Hundreds of thousands—and by some estimates perhaps three million—people were killed during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971. Tens of thousands of Bangladeshis now wait for justice—to see those who harmed them and their loved ones brought to account. But the culture of impunity hasn’t disappeared. It took more than three decades for Sheikh Hasina to receive some measure of vindication.

SOMETIME IN THE AFTERNOON of 27 January this year, Mahfuz Anam received a call from an official, saying that the end was imminent. Anam was in the newsroom of Bangladesh’s leading English newspaper, The Daily Star, which he edits. He knew what the message meant: perhaps within hours, five men—Farooq, Lt-Col Sultan Shahriar Rashid Khan, Lt-Col Mohiuddin Ahmed, Maj Bazlul Huda, and army lancer AKM Mohiuddin— would be hanged by the neck until dead at the city’s central jail. Anam told his reporters to be prepared, and sent several reporters and photographers to cover the executions.

“We had hints that the end was near, particularly when the relatives of the five men were asked to come and meet them with hardly any notice,” Anam told me during a long telephone conversation a week after the executions. “The authorities had told the immediate families that there were no limits on the number of relatives who could come, and they were allowed to remain with them until well after visiting hours. We knew that the final hours had come.”

Once the families left, the five men were sent to their cells. They were told to take a bath and to offer their night prayers. Then the guards asked them if they wanted to eat anything special. A cleric came, offering to read from the Qu’ran. Around 10:30 pm, a reporter called Anam to say that the city’s civil surgeon, Mushfiqur Rahman, and district magistrate Zillur Rahman had arrived at the jail. Police vans arrived 50 minutes later, carrying five coffins. The anti-crime unit, known as the Rapid Action Battalion, took positions providing support to the regular police force to prevent demonstrations. Other leading officials came within minutes: the home secretary, the inspector general of prisons, and the police commissioner. Rashida Ahmad, news editor at the online news agency, bdnews24.com, recalls: “Many media houses practically decamped en masse to the jail to ‘experience a historic moment’ firsthand.” Anam told me, “By 11:35 pm, we knew it would happen that night. We held back our first edition. The second edition had the detailed story.”

Bazlul Huda was the first to be taken to the gallows. He was handcuffed, and a black hood covered his face. Eyewitnesses have said Huda struggled to free himself and screamed loudly, as guards led him to the brightly lit room. An official waved and dropped a red handkerchief on the ground, the signal for the executioner to proceed. It was just after midnight when Huda died. Muhiuddin Ahmed was next, followed by Farooq, Shahriar, and AKM Muhiuddin. It was all over soon after 1:00 am.

Earlier that day, the Supreme Court had rejected the final appeal of four of the five convicts. Shahriar was the only one not to seek presidential pardon. His daughter Shehnaz, who spent two hours with her father that evening, later told bdnews24.com, “My father was a freedom fighter; and a man who fights for the independence of his country never begs for his life.”

Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, was at her prime ministerial home that night. She was informed when the executions began, and she reportedly asked to be left alone, and later offered namaz-e-shukran (a prayer of gratitude). Many people, most of them supporters of the Awami League, had gathered outside her house that night, but she did not come out to meet anybody. A few days later, she told a party convention that it was a moment of joy for all of them, because due process had been served.

The mood was sober and subdued. Dhaka residents I spoke to told me the celebrations were only in certain localities. Ahmad, who was at her news desk until late at bdnews24. com, wrote to me, saying the mood was sombre, and many looked at it as a time for reflection, although that night and the following day there was muted rejoicing in some areas. Many could understand Hasina thanking God, and other politicians welcoming the closing of a dark chapter, but some felt it a bit much that parliament itself thanked God and adjourned for the day, she said.

The chapter is not yet closed. In early February, Awami League activists ransacked and set afire the home of the brother of Aziz Pasha, one of the self-confessed conspirators who had died in exile in Zimbabwe a few years ago. Six other conspirators remain at large, and the Government says it is determined to bring them back.

CALL IT JUSTICE, REVENGE, or closure. It has taken 34 years for this particular saga to reach its end. Khondaker Mushtaq Ahmed, who took over as Bangladesh’s president after Mujib’s assassination, had granted the officers immunity and praised the assassins. General Ziaur Rehman, who later became president, con- firmed the immunity. A series of articles in August 2005 were published simultaneously in The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the coup d’état that killed Mujib and much of his family. Lawrence Lifschultz, an American journalist who had been South Asia Correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review in the 1970s, revealed that one of his principal sources, alleging CIA links with the political leadership of the coup, was the US Ambassador to Bangladesh, Eugene Boster.

While Boster sought anonymity during his lifetime, Lifschultz disclosed after Boster’s death that the ambassador had in 1977 informed he and his colleague, the American writer, Kai Bird, that the US Embassy had contacts with the Khondaker group six months before the coup, and that the ambassador had himself ordered that all links with Khondaker and his entourage be severed. Boster claimed he learned later that behind his back the contacts continued with Khondaker’s associates until the actual day of the coup.

In their book, Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution (1979), Lifschultz and Bird document Khondaker’s prior links to a failed Kissinger initiative during the 1971 war. Khondaker’s colleagues in Bangladesh’s government-in-exile had discovered his covert contacts with Kissinger, and it ended with him being placed under house arrest in Calcutta. Four years later, Khondaker—who was in Mujib’s cabinet—became president after the military coup, and once in office, he granted immunity to the assassins.

Later governments gave some of the assassins high-ranking posts, even though these men had conspired to eliminate the country’s elected leader. Lt- Col Shariful Haq Dalim represented Bangladesh in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tripoli, and became high commissioner to Kenya, even though he had attempted another coup in 1980. Lt-Col Aziz Pasha served in Rome, Nairobi, and Harare, where he sought asylum when Hasina first came to power in 1996. She removed him; he stayed on in Harare, and died there. Maj Huda was briefly a member of parliament, and also served in Islamabad and Jeddah. Other conspirators served Bangladeshi missions in Bangkok, Lagos, Dakar, Ankara, Jakarta, Tokyo, Muscat, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Ottawa, and Manila.

The Oxford-trained lawyer, Kamal Hossain, who was Mujib’s law minister, and later foreign minister, told me, “The impunity with which Farooq operated was extraordinary. When he returned to Bangladesh, the government facilitated him and President [Hussain Muhammad] Ershad, who wanted some candidate to stand against him in the rigged elections. [Ershad] let Farooq stand to give himself credibility.”

It was clear that a trial of the assassins would only be possible if Mujib’s party, the Awami League, came to power. That happened in 1996, and Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, became prime minister. The cases began and the court found all 12 defendants guilty. But Hasina lost the 2001 elections, and the process stopped, resuming only after her victory in the elections of December 2008. The government now wants to bring the surviving officers back to Bangladesh: Noor Chowdhury is reportedly in the United States; Dalim is in Canada; Khandaker Abdul Rashid, Farooq’s brother-in-law, is in Pakistan; MA Rashed Chowdhury is in South Africa; Mosleuddin is in Thailand; and Abdul Mazed is in Kenya. Bringing all of them back may not be easy, because they will face executions. Canada and South Africa have abolished the death penalty, and Kenya put a stop to it recently, making it harder for those governments to extradite them.

How does a nation, whose independence was soaked with blood, which lost a popular leader of its freedom struggle in a brutal massacre, reconcile with that crime? What form of justice is fair? Does the death penalty heal those wounds?

Bangladesh thinks so. It is among the 58 countries (including India) that retain the death penalty, but it applies it only in rare cases, like murder. In 2008, five people were executed in Bangladesh. Many governments oppose the death penalty on principle, and the European Union appealed to the Bangladeshi government to commute the sentence of Mujib’s assassins. The human rights group Amnesty International also sought clemency, while agreeing that the men should face justice.

Bangladeshi human rights lawyers have found it hard to challenge the death penalty because it is not controversial in Bangladesh. There are also political exigencies. One human rights activist told me, “We are against [the] death penalty but the dilemma is that we are in a country where life imprisonment really means imprisonment guaranteed until your party is in power. The death penalty is almost seen as the only way to guarantee justice for such a grisly crime.” Grisly, it certainly was. This is what happened.

IN 1975, Dhanmondi hadn’t changed much from how it looked at Independence, with roads lined with two-storey houses dating back to the 1950s. Today, there are multi-storey buildings, English-medium schools, new universities, shopping malls and hookah bars
to lure younger crowds. Back in 1975, the area was quieter. In the evening, people strolled along the periphery of the large lake in the middle of the neighbourhood and at night you could hear the tinkle of the bells of the cycle rickshaws plying the roads.

On 15 August 1975, before dawn, 700 soldiers with 105 millimetre weapons left their barracks and headed for the three homes where Mujib and his family lived. Everyone was still asleep at Mujib’s home, number 677 on road 32 in Dhanomondi. Mujib’s personal assistant, Mohitul Islam, was at his desk when Mujib called him, asking him to call the police immediately. Mujib had heard his brother-in-law Abdur Rab Serniabat’s house at 27 Minto Road was being attacked. Serniabat was a minister in Mujib’s government.

Mohitul—who lived to tell the tale—tried calling the police, but the phones weren’t working. When he called the telephone exchange, the person at the other end said nothing. Mujib snatched the phone and shouted into the mouthpiece.

The guards outside were hoisting the national flag when the soldiers arrived. The guards were stunned to find army officers rushing in through the gate, ordering them to drop their weapons and surrender. There were a few shots.

A frightened servant woke up Mujib’s son Kamal, who got dressed and came down when Maj Bazlul Huda entered the house with several soldiers. Even as Mohitul tried telling Huda that it was Kamal, there was a burst of gunfire; Kamal lay dead. Huda quickly went to the landing of the staircase when he heard Mujib’s voice.

“What do you want?” Mujib asked Huda, whom he recognised.

The soldiers pulled their triggers, spraying Mujib with dozens of bullets. Before his burial the following day in his birthplace, Tungipara, the imam noticed at least ten bullets still lodged inside Mujib’s body. When I visited the house in 1986, I saw dozens of bullet marks on the wall and staircase where he was killed. Mujib had collapsed on the stairs; his trademark pipe in his hands. He was dead by the time his body stopped tumbling down the stairs.

The killers then went inside the house, and one by one, killed everyone they could find: Mujib’s wife Fajilutunessa, Kamal’s wife Sultana, Mujib’s other son Jamal and his wife Rosy, and Mujib’s brother Naser, who was heard pleading, “I am not in politics.”

Then they saw Russell, Mujib’s ten-year-old son, who was crying, asking for his mother. He, too, was killed.

Around the same time, another group of soldiers had killed Mujib’s brother-in-law, Serniabat at his home, and a third group had murdered the family of Fazlul Haque Moni, Mujib’s nephew, an influential Awami League politician who lived on road 13/1, about two kilometres away from Mujib’s home. At that time, Mahfuz Anam was a young reporter at the Bangladesh Times. He lived across the Dhanmandi Lake, and had a clear view of Sheikh Moni’s house. “I saw what happened,” he recalled. “Early that morning I was awakened by the sound of firing. I got up. My room was on the side of the lake. I ventured out to the boundary wall. I saw troops enter Sheikh Moni’s house. I heard plenty of firing, followed by screaming. I heard shots—some random, some from sub-machine guns. I saw the troops leave the house. It was all over in four to six minutes. I could hear the people inside groaning; it continued for some time.”

The junior officers’ coup had proceeded exactly as planned. There had been no resistance from the moment Huda and his team had reached Mujib’s home. After taming the Rokkhi Bahini, Farooq arrived at Mujib’s gate, eager to know what had happened at Mujib’s home. Huda told him calmly, “All are finished.”

When we met a decade after those killings, I asked Farooq, one of the leading conspirators, “And the ten-year-old boy: did he have to be killed?”

“It was an act of mercy killing. Mujib was building a dynasty; we had to finish off all of them,” he told me with a degree of finality, his arm slicing ruthlessly in the air, as if he was chopping off the head of someone kneeling in front of him. There was no mercy in his eyes, no remorse, only a hint of pride.

They had tried killing the entire family, but they could not get Mujib’s two daughters, Hasina and Rehana, who were on a goodwill tour in Europe. Hasina was in Bonn, Germany, where her husband, MA Wazed Miah, a nuclear scientist, was a researcher at a laboratory (He died in May 2009). Kamal Hossain, Mujib’s cabinet minister, was on an official visit to Belgrade. Speaking a week after the executions of Mujib’s killers, he told me, “I first heard there had been a coup. Later, at the home of the Bangladesh Ambassador to Yugoslavia, we sat listening to French radio, and more information began coming out. We heard about Mujib’s death, then we heard about the other family members. My first thought was Hasina’s safety.” He met her in Bonn and decided to sever his relations with the new government. He handed in his official passport to the ambassador, and left for England, which had better links with Bangladesh, and where getting information would be easier. Hasina, too, decided there was no need for her to go back. She was granted asylum in India and lived in New Delhi with her husband until 1981. Hossain returned to Dhaka in 1980.

IN OCTOBER 1986, I visited Mujib’s house, the mute witness to the ghastly events of that dawn. As if to ensure that no one will forget the tragedy, Hasina, who showed me around, had made only minimal changes to the house, preserving the crime scene. The bare walls bore bullet marks. Shattered glass lay on the ground of what was once Mujib’s library. On the
staircase on which Mujib was shot, and on the wall which he tried to grip for support as he fell, darkened blood stains were still visible.

Mujib was 55 when he was killed. He had been in and out of Pakistani jails, and was widely regarded—and initially revered— as Bangladesh’s founding father. At the time of Partition, what is now known as Bangladesh formed the eastern wing of Pakistan. The two parts of Pakistan were divided by thousands of kilometres of Indian territory. Islam united the two, but culture, language and the idea of nationhood divided them. The eastern half was more populous, and should legitimately have commanded greater resources, but the generals and politicians in power in the western half disregarded eastern demands, responding to eastern claims with contempt, if not repression. Punjabis dominated the Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pathans in the west, and they had even less regard for their Bengali compatriots.

Things came to a head in 1970, when in nationwide elections, Awami League secured a majority. Mujib should have been invited to become Pakistan’s prime minister, but the generals and politicians in the west thought differently. Mujib’s negotiations with Gen Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s ruler, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party which had won a large number of seats in the west, continued interminably. Meanwhile, Yahya Khan sent Gen Tikka Khan to Dhaka. Many Bangladeshis remember planeloads of young men arriving on flights from the west. They were military men but not in uniform, and they did not carry weapons. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s navy was shipping weapons through ports like Chittagong, keeping Bengali officers in the dark, and secretly arming the men who had landed in Dhaka.

The crackdown began on 25 March 1971, as the Pakistani army brutally attempted to crush Bengali aspirations. Mujib was jailed in West Pakistan. In the east, hundreds of thousands were killed, and millions of refugees made their way to India. A civil war followed, and India aided the Mukti Bahini, as Bangladeshi freedom fighters were called. In early December, Pakistan attacked India on its western front; India retaliated, and its troops defeated Pakistan on both fronts within a fortnight. Indian troops entered Dhaka, and thousands of Pakistani troops surrendered. A few weeks later Mujib returned to the Tejgaon airport. A sea of humanity greeted the leader of the new nation, Bangladesh.

Three and a half years later, Farooq and his men annihilated most of Mujib’s family. “Even dogs didn’t bark when we killed Mujib,” Farooq told me.

THE SHEIKH MUJIBUR RAHMAN of 1975 was not the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of 1971. He squandered his unprecedented goodwill for two reasons. First, he could not meet the phenomenal expectations Bangladeshis had in his leadership. Lifschultz, who
was based in Dhaka in 1974, remembers the day when Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Zulifikar Ali Bhutto, visited Bangladesh for the first time since its independence from Pakistan. As Bhutto’s motorcade moved from the airport into central Dhaka, a section of the crowd lining the street shouted, “Bhutto Zindabad (Long Live Bhutto).”

Lifschultz thought this was rather bizarre. He told me there were conflicted feelings among some Bangladeshis who in 1974 were living through the first stages of a severe famine. Clearly, some believed their hopes had been belied, but to him, the cheering of Bhutto seemed particularly perverse, given the circumstances of Bangladesh’s emergence.

BANGLADESHI FRUSTRATION with Mujib was understandable. By mid-1974, Bangladesh was reeling from a widespread famine that experts believe was at least partly due to political incompetence. Citizens were also stunned by the ostentatious weddings of Mujib’s sons at a time of economic crisis. Food distribution had failed, and people were forced
to sell their farm animals to buy rice. Thousands of poor people left their villages looking for work in the cities. Irene Khan, who was until recently the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, was a schoolgirl in the early 1970s. She recalls hungry voices clamouring for food outside the gates of her family home every day.

With public criticism over the mass starvation growing, Mujib clamped down on dissent. He abolished political parties and created one national party called Bangladesh Krishak Shramik Awami League (BAKSAL); removed freethinking experts who did not agree with his policies; nationalised newspapers (closing most), and allowed only two each—in Bangla and in English. He stifled dissent within the party, suspended the constitution, and declared himself president. Now editor of The Daily Star, Anam calls those measures the greatest blunder Mujib made. “It is still a mystery what led him to do that. He had it all. There was nothing, nobody in the parliament opposed to his policies, except for a few voices. He was the tallest man in the country. Why did he do it? It was in total contrast to his political heritage. It was a dramatic transformation from a multiparty system to a one party state.”

The only time I met Farooq, in 1986, he expressed outrage at those changes, “How do you pass an amendment in Parliament which abolishes party membership in just 11 minutes? No discussions, nothing!” Bangladesh, in his opinion, was becoming a colony of India, and as a freedom fighter, he thought he had to stop that. “I tried to save the country,” he told me, his tone rising, “Mujib had changed the constitution so that the court could not do a thing. All power was with the president.”

None of Farooq’s explanations justified the terrible manner in which he and his family were killed, but the famine and his increasingly authoritarian rule partly explains why there was little outward expression of grief after his assassination. At the same time, it was not just Mujib’s killing, but the brutality of it, that many Bangladeshis felt justified the death penalty for the assassins.

Justice moves slowly in Bangladesh. According to a recent study, Bangladesh’s jails can hold only 27,000 prisoners, but there are some 70,000 inmates in jail, and some 47,000 are still awaiting trial, according to the inspector-general of prisons. One reason for the backlog is the shortage of judges. The other is that some defendants are too poor to afford legal help.

The trial of Mujib’s assassins falls under a different category. There was little political will to try the assassins. That changed when Hasina came to power. The five of- ficers were sentenced to death as early as 1998. They appealed, but higher courts upheld the sentence in April 2001 and November 2009 respectively. They sought a Supreme Court review, and later, four of the five applied for presidential pardon. While the government meticulously followed the constitutional procedures, many have noted the speed with which the final appeals were dealt with.

A four-member special bench of the Supreme Court’s appellate division met at 9:25 am and issued a verdict at 9:27 am, on 26 January 2010, rejecting the review petition. Senior civil servants of the law and home ministry met at noon, and discussed the issue for three hours. Farooq, who had resisted writing his mercy petition, did so that afternoon. Officials received and dispatched his petition within minutes, as they were all in one room with colleagues whose approval was needed. A report on bdnews24.com said that President Zillur Rahman rejected the petition at 7:30 pm (the hangings occurred soon after midnight).

The quick turnaround of the documents was remarkable. One lawyer told me, “What you saw wasn’t due process; it was process with undue speed.”

THERE IS A SENSE IN DHAKA NOW, that the executions have brought the tragedy to a close. Perhaps; but many other wounds continue to fester. On the day of Mujib’s killing in 1975, the officers had also arrested Tajuddin Ahmed, Nazrul Islam, Kamaruzzaman, and Mansur Ali—four leading Awami League politicians suspected of being pro-Mujib. On the
night of 3 November 1975, soldiers came to the jail, and asked for the four to be brought to one cell. The jail authorities tried to find out what was going on, when a call from the president asked them to cooperate. The soldiers then took out their weapons, and, without reading out any charges, without any trial or any authority, sprayed bullets on them, killing them instantly. Mosleuddin, involved with the 15 August killings, proudly claimed to have played a role in the jail killings. Khondaker gave the killers immunity. Some pro-Mujib of- ficers overthrew Khondaker two days later. A counter-coup followed, and the situation was stabilised weeks later when Gen Ziaur Rahman took over, ending the pretence of civilian rule. Tajuddin’s daughter, Simeen Hossain Rimi, has compiled her father’s writings and sought justice. The government has said it will pursue that case, too.

And then there are the war crimes.

When Hasina came to power in 2008, one of her electoral promises was to seek justice for the victims of the 1971 war. Without getting into the technical debate over whether what happened in Bangladesh in 1971 was a genocide— which is a legal term with a precise meaning in international law—there is enough evidence to prove that both war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed in Bangladesh. Many of those who committed those acts are still free: some live abroad, some in Pakistan and some in Bangladesh, living with the same impunity as some of Mujib’s killers did until recently. These individuals resisted an independent Bangladesh, and successive governments in Bangladesh haven’t pursued the matter. Some governments lacked the political capital and will, some had little moral authority, and some have even been complicit with some of the crimes.

That context has changed with Hasina’s recent victory. Irene Khan, who worked for many years at the UN High Commission for Refugees before leading Amnesty International, told me:

You can have debates about whether particular acts constitute war crimes or genocide. You can debate whether what happened was a war or an internal con- flict. But they were crimes against humanity. There was obviously culpability and collusion of some locals with the Pakistani army. For instance, in December 1971, before the formal handover to the Indian army, there was a whole list of intellectuals who were picked up and killed. These were not political cases; these were civilians. Those crimes have remained uninvestigated; it is extremely important that there is a commission of inquiry, if Bangladesh is to put a closure to this chapter of its history. Even if you will have only a limited number of prosecutions, you need a full record of what happened.

Pakistan’s own war inquiry commission report of 1974 mentions that tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and many women were raped. Bangladeshis find that report incomplete because it barely scratches the surface of what happened.

Justice for those crimes against humanity won’t be easy. At the time of the final handover of Pakistani prisoners of war, India and Bangladesh signed a tripartite treaty with Pakistan, which effectively granted immunity to Pakistani soldiers. While Bangladesh passed a law subsequently to try war criminals, that law only focused on Bangladeshi collaborators, leaving out the Pakistani army. “That issue has always been brushed under the carpet,” Irene Khan told me. “The real question is: can an international treaty sign away the rights to justice of victims? The treaty absolves the Pakistani army and political leaders.”

Realpolitik may have prevented going after Pakistanis, and domestic politics made targeting local collaborators complicated. Hasina’s rival was Khaleda Zia, Ziaur Rahman’s widow. She led the Bangladesh National Party, which has had an electoral alliance with Jamaat-i-Islami, a fundamentalist party. Some of the Jamaat’s leaders and many followers are accused of being collaborationists.

The Bangladeshi government had said it would commence trials in March. A tribunal was expected to be set up in Dhaka by 26 March, Bangladesh’s Independence Day, but nobody has been indicted yet, no prosecutors or investigators have been appointed, and only Bangladeshi ‘collaborators’ will be tried. Some observers fear that the process will be seen as an attack on Jamaat-i-Islami. If the initial indictees are only from the Jamaat, they will claim they are being victimised, and the credibility of the process will suffer. A fair process would also investigate the conduct of the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladeshi freedom fighters who are alleged to have committed atrocities against Urdu-speaking Biharis, many of whom supported Pakistan.

And all this, to what end? It is a people’s quest for justice; a society’s desire to break the imposed silence. It is to reassert the norms that govern a nation, to re-establish the foundations on which civilisation can rest.

Irene Khan is not sure if the recent executions will help turn the tide against the culture of impunity. “This is a systemic problem in Bangladesh,” she says. “There is impunity from the local policeman who beats up a suspected thief, to the security forces who tortured and killed suspected mutineers in interrogation cells.” She refers to the failed Bangladesh Rifles mutiny last year. Guards of Bangladesh Rifles objected to army officers commanding them, so they held officers hostage, killing many of them and ransacking the barracks, before surrendering. Hundreds of mutineers were tortured later, and over 60 died.

THE CULTURE OF IMPUNITY runs deep. Hasina may think of reaching closure for her personal grief. For millions of Bangladeshis, that remains an elusive goal. Projonmo 71 is a social movement, bringing together the children of those who died during the independence war. Staunchly Bengali in their nationalism, many of its members are secular.

Meghna Guhathakurta, an academic who taught international relations at Dhaka University and is now the director of Research Initiatives, a development think tank, is one of them.

She vividly remembers the midnight of 25 March 1971. Her father, Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, who was a professor of English at Dhaka University, was correcting examination papers. Schools and colleges were closed, as Bangladeshis had embarked on a non-cooperation movement. She feared her father would get arrested, and they had been warned.

An army convoy came to the campus. There were six apartments in the building. The soldiers began banging on the doors. An officer and two soldiers entered their ground floor apartment through the back garden. The officer asked in Urdu, “Where is the professor?” Her mother asked why they wanted to meet her husband. The officer said they had come to take him away.

“Where?” she asked. The officer did not reply.

Guhathakurta told me what followed in a calm voice:

My mother called my father. The officer asked my father if he was the professor. My father said yes. ‘We have come to take you,’ he said. Meanwhile, several other professors were being brought down. Some families tried to hold them, but we told them—‘let them go, otherwise they will shoot you.’ We turned around, and we heard the firing of guns. And we saw all of them lying in a pool of blood. Some were shouting for water. We rushed out to the front part of our compound. I saw my father lying on the ground. He was fully conscious. He told me they had asked him his name and his religion. He said he was a Hindu, and they gave orders to shoot him. My father was hit by bullets in his neck, his waist, and it left him paralysed. The soldiers had run away. We took my father to the house. We could not take him to the hospital because there was a curfew.

He remained in pain, and they could only take him to the hospital on 27 March, when the curfew was lifted. He died three days later.

I asked her about the executions of Mujib’s assassins. “I am against impunity, and I am very much happy justice has been met,” she said. “But I am not happy that we have the death penalty. Not every crime has been tried yet.”

She is a peace activist and has thought of forgiveness, but there is a moral dilemma around that idea. British writer Gillian Slovo, who was born in South Africa, had faced such a moral quandary in the years after apartheid was lifted. During apartheid, Slovo’s father, Joe, led the South African Communist Party, and he and her mother, Ruth, first lived in exile in Mozambique, from where they carried on their anti-apartheid activism. They were among the few whites to take on the South African regime (her mother had been detained without trial in 1963, and the couple fled South Africa after the African National Congress leadership was rounded up). Tragedy struck in Mozambique, when agents of apartheid sent her a letter bomb, which exploded, killing her.

Slovo ended up confronting the man responsible for sending that lethal parcel to her mother. She discovered a copy of her book, which she had autographed, had ended up with that man. I met Slovo in late 2008, soon after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and I asked her if it was possible to forgive. After all, South Africa had astounded the world with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which offered a non-violent way in which the oppressor and victim could resolve differences face to face. Slovo told me, “Lots of countries like truth commissions because they look at South Africa and think of the miracle. But I am not sure if it was entirely miraculous; it had its flaws, too. The commission was a compromise to stop people from fighting. People need to see if the two sides want to stop fighting first. It is impossible to otherwise start a process that goes so deep. There is a difference between individual and collective responses. South Africa’s experience reflected the thinking of an archbishop [Desmond Tutu], whose church believed in forgiveness.”

Guhathakurta had studied at a convent, and the Christian ideas of mercy were ingrained in her as a child. She was 15 when her father was murdered, and the impression of those school lessons was strong. She told me, “I remember the first thing I did was to say: I forgive those who killed my father. But in a multicultural system it doesn’t always work. Not all religions are about forgiveness. Revenge is permitted in many religions. Human beings have a primordial urge to take revenge.”

Many years later, Guhathakurta was interviewing victims of 1971 for a film. She was talking to those who escaped from killing fields, and families of people who were victims. That’s when it occurred to her: trauma never really ends. Her nightmares will always stay. She acknowledged her anger. She did not want revenge; she wanted justice. She said:

For me, justice would be when the Pakistani government realises what it did. But they have not even recognised the genocide. For me, justice means something like Berlin’s Holocaust Museum is constructed in Islamabad. I want to see signs where they say that such an event took place, and it was our fault, because we did it, and we are sorry. You can’t ask the daughter to forgive the murderer of her father. Revenge doesn’t make sense, either. Just because my father died doesn’t mean yours has to die. But recognition, that something took place, and the fact that it should not take place again— that’s justice. The Holocaust museum says it happened, therefore it can happen again.

Slovo had put it slightly differently: Real reconciliation only happens when the terrible is acknowledged, so that you can’t say it did not happen.

TOWARDS THE END of the Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie’s novel, Kartography, Maheen tells her niece Raheen, “Bangladesh made us see what we were capable of. No one should ever know what they are capable of. But worse, even worse, is to see it and then pretend you didn’t. The truths we conceal don’t disappear, Raheen, they appear in different forms.”

Bangladesh abounds with victims—each family has a horror story of its own, where a loved one has been hurt grievously, and the ones who have committed those atrocities have not faced justice, nor expressed remorse. It is impossible to heal everyone. But honest accounting of what happened would be a good start. Trying Mujib’s killers, seeking the extradition of those living abroad and solving the mystery of the jail killings are useful steps in making sense of their warped politics, where individuals bragging about killing defenceless people were being rewarded.

Removing the culture of impunity will be a small step towards justice—not necessarily through death penalties, but through remorse, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Until that happens, the question Projonmo 71 left inscribed on the plaque commemorating the martyred intellectuals at Rayer Bazaar in Dhaka will continue to resound across the wounded rivers and valleys, awaiting an answer: “Tomra ja bolechhiley, bolchhey ki ta Bangladesh?” (Is Bangladesh saying what you had wanted to say?)

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Fear mongering seems to have become a past time for some Muslims: the fear that the whole world is against Muslims and there are numerous forces out there wanting to undermine and destroy Islam. One of the chief instigators of this paranoid delusional mindset is an individual called Abdul Karim Hattin. This short biography of him appears on the Islamonline website:

Abdul Karim became a Muslim when he was 19 years old and now at 30, he has completed a degree in Media Studies at the University of Luton. He is the co-director and founder of Halaqah Media and Black Banner Media. He wrote the documentary From the Shadows…Exposing the New World Order.

Those who have listened to his recordings will know he is delusional in the extreme; there are great illogical leaps in his historical narrative and just about every war and revolution is linked to those evil people ‘the Freemasons’. In his recent ‘exposing the modernists’ lecture series he tries to explain how various UK based Muslim organisations, i.e. MPACUK, Quilliam, Radical Middle Way, MCB, Murabitun etc. are part of a grand western/Masonic conspiracy to dilute Islam. He speaks about an ‘Aryan Islam’ being promoted under the guise of Modernism. The evidence he presents is mainly from people he has spoken to and from his own analogical ‘deductions’.

One of the many problems with Abdul Karim Hattin’s theories is that they are not original, in fact they are re-hashed Nazi ideas with an Islamised vocabulary. He seems to take popular conspiracy theories and put his own warped twist on them. The other problem is that, after highlighting an issue, he fails to provide any solution. Just as his ‘shadows’ recording ended without presenting any solution at all, you are left wondering what solution there can be. He seems to be obsessed with courting controversy and making ridiculous claims, even upsetting the salafis (pdf) by making inaccurate historical claims in his ‘the arrival of Saudi Salafis’ lecture. If you have a spare half hour and want a real good chuckle just search him out on Youtube and read Salafi Manhaj’s ‘A Critique of Abdul-Karim Hattin and his Bizarre Lecture Series Entitled ‘Arrival of the Saudi Salafis’ exposing his conspiracy theory claptrap‘.

It makes one wonder what he is actually trying to achieve. By provoking fear of the mainstream he is implying that Muslim communities must isolate themselves from the mainstream – hardly the message young British Muslims need. And isn’t Islam about having hope? Even political Islamist movements offer the illusion of a future utopian state, he doesn’t even do that.

Verdict: Abdul Karim Hattin should stop reading nutcase conspiracy sites and seek medical help. If you do come into contact with him, avoid eye contact and back away slowly and safely.