http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/editorial/world-under-holy-siege-879 EDITORIALWorld under holy siege
By Iqbal Jafar Wednesday, 08 Jul, 2009 | 01:20 AM PST | IN the early part of the last century it was a generally accepted view that religion would gradually become more of a private matter and less of a factor in the public domain of human relations. A rationalist-secularist-idealist worldview was expected to lead to an age of humanism that seemed to be the destiny of humankind. That worldview persisted despite the tragic aberrations of the mindless savagery of bolshevism, Nazism, fascism and the two world wars, remarkable as much for their destructiveness as for the absence of a justifiable cause or purpose of the military aggressions that launched them. That phase of history ended with the end of the Second World War, and it seemed for a while that reason and idealism would prevail in the future discourse within and between nations. That did not happen. With the perspective of hindsight we now know that at that very moment there were powerful undercurrents that would sweep away all such notions as so much flotsam in the turbulent waters of the world ahead. It all began in the late 1940s with three fateful divisions of the land and the people on the basis of religion or ideology. It happened in quick succession. The first to materialise was the ideological division between the ‘godless creed of communism’, and Christian Europe. The division of Europe was formally inaugurated by Winston Churchill in March 1946 in his speech at Fulton, Missouri by these words: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Soon enough, however, that division became a global ideological divide between the religious and non-religious antagonists of the ensuing Cold War. The second was the division of India, on the basis of religion, in 1947; and the third was the division of Palestine, again on the basis of religion, in 1948. Before the world could realise what on earth was happening, religion had kicked the door open for global politics to make its unheralded entry. It was but inevitable, therefore, that religion should assume an important role in the global political arena. While conflicts in Kashmir and Palestine kept smouldering at low intensity, the East-West conflict drew all the attention and resources as the compulsions of the Cold War unfolded with growing intensity. Moblising the religious right all over the world against the ‘godless creed’ was one of the weapons in the arsenal of the West, and it set about forging that weapon as early as the 1950s. The strategy evolved by the West for ideological defence had three main elements: the religious right was to be encouraged; the political right, including a rightist military dictatorship, was to be supported; and the notions of secular democracy, considered to be fertile ground for communist ideas, were to be discouraged. This strategy was not confined to the Muslim world alone, but was pursued all over the Third World. This strategy is also reflected in some of the writings at that time as the debate within the western establishment about the containment of the Soviet bloc continued throughout the 1950s. The thinking at that time was summed up in an essay Communism and Islam by Bernard Lewis. He argued that “communism is not and cannot be a religion, while Islam, for the great mass of believers, still is; and that is the core of the Islamic resistance to communist ideas”. He went on to say that “if the people of Islam are forced to make a straight choice, to abandon their own traditions in favour of either communism or parliamentarianism, then we are at a great disadvantage”. This clearly was advice to encourage Islamic orthodoxy and discourage democracy in the Muslim world. In violent episodes, apart from full-scale wars, inspired by this strategy, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, democratic governments toppled and military dictators propped up in Asia, Africa, South America and, at least in one case (Greece), in western Europe itself. The religious right was not only supported, its rivals, the secular liberals, were physically depleted if not altogether eliminated. There is, thus, no mystery about the resurgence of religiosity and the retreat of liberals all over the Third World. It did not just happen but was a desired outcome of a strategy enthusiastically planned and ruthlessly implemented. So ruthlessly, indeed, that even Pandit Nehru, the icon of secular democracy in the Third World, was planned to be assassinated in 1955, according to William Blum in Killing Hope. Unluckily for the Hindu militants the plan was not implemented or could not be implemented. As if in obedience to the law of unintended consequences, the West, especially the US, could not remain unaffected by the religious frenzy that it had helped unleash in the rest of the world. Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edger Hoover, for example, got so infected by the ideological frenzy orchestrated by their government that they launched a campaign of their own to rid the US of the liberals (‘commies’) through sustained persecution, almost succeeding in making America a police state. What the US government, politicians, media and some members of the academia did in the 1950s and 1960s became a prelude to the surge and empowerment of the Christian right as a political power to reckon with in the 1970s and later. It made firebrand televangelists like Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, the mirror images of Osama bin Ladaen and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, possible. During those four decades of the Cold War , the religious orthodoxy and militancy became so firmly rooted in the minds of millions of people (Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Jewish) that the fuel for fanaticism did not dry up even after the demise of the ‘evil empire’. To make things worse, a backup for religious militancy also existed in the form of India-Pakistan and Arab-Israeli conflict where the West was an ally of Israel. Thus emerged a new foe: Islam. The new foe was duly and formally identified by Margret Thatcher herself in her article that she wrote for The Guardian. The title of the article said all that she wanted to say: ‘Islamism is the new bolshevism’. No surprise then that the battle between ‘good and evil’ continues to rage unabated, and the world remains under a siege by the holy warriors. Finally, a puzzle for the newcomers: the holy warriors on both sides of the divide happen to be recognisable as the cold warriors of yesteryears. t...@isb.comsats.net.pk --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to greenyouth@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to greenyouth+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
