http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\11\14\story_14-11-2008_pg3_1
EDITORIAL: Is this the age of intolerance? There has been some criticism of President Asif Ali Zardari's expensive visit to the United States to attend a UN "inter-faith dialogue" with 17 other heads of state, including the president of Israel. This was expected after he took a planeload of party leaders to Saudi Arabia earlier on a visit that was meant to get money for a country fast moving towards insolvency. However, the current visit must be looked through a different prism, though in the realm of perceptions it is a bit difficult to ask the people to understand subtleties. The current dialogue in which the Muslim side is headed informally by the Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz is diplomatically significant. Saudi Arabia is a special friend of Pakistan which cannot be snubbed by a gesture of "non-involvement", especially at a time when Islamabad needs Riyadh even more. Nor is the dialogue meant for the world clergy because the deliberations impinge on the conduct of states rather than on the deadlocked minutiae of faith wherein, unfortunately, lies most of the mischief. King Abdullah has initiated the discussion with the remark that "justice and tolerance are the key Islamic values". In his view, and rightly, religions should not be used as "instruments to cause misery". The King went on: "Terrorism and criminality are the enemies of every religion and every civilisation". He described the crisis today as "absence of the principle of tolerance". Although the UN Secretary-General Mr Ban Ki-Moon balanced the scale by making reference to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in his statement, the truth is that intolerance is not only an inter-faith problem but, in the case of Muslims, an intra-faith scourge too. The conference includes "open access" Western states that boast secular values that prevent them from judging their citizens on the basis if religion. Their presence is justified because they have Muslim populations that face Islamophobia by their own social scientists. The Muslim states represented in the conference suffer from the scourge of Muslim intolerance of other Muslims. We wonder if discussing the basics of faith will be any use between two disparate groups of states. The war of religions is ancient and has a gory jurisprudence. Any going back to the origins tends to revive "memories" that may go beyond what is recorded in history. Clerical inter-faith discussions have made shipwreck in the past because of a "revivalist" recapture of "pure" faith in Muslim societies and its export to the western states through expatriate workers. Religion in the West as the "other" is too greatly "reinterpreted" over time to even understand the new intensity of Islam. King Abdullah's reference to "justice" could be taken as the Islamic world's reference to the unjust international order in which the Muslims feel they suffer at the hands of the West. This point is important because it links with most research in social sciences that belies that religion causes conflict per se. There is a context here too and religion comes in handy in the process of "othering". In this context, "intolerance" can also refer to the draconian anti-terror laws that the Western states have brought in against their expatriate Muslims. But there is internal damage caused by this external confrontation. The biggest crises unfolding today are taking place inside Islam. The war in Iraq is not only "American aggression" but also a very bloody confrontation between the two great sects, the Shia and the Sunni. In the neighbourhood, the Lebanese Muslims may be satisfied with the way they have taken on Israel with the help of Iran, but their internecine politics clearly foreshadows a much bigger war with no quarters given. The truth is that the entire Middle East and the Gulf are in the grip of a new wave of sectarian intolerance backed by their patron states. In Sudan, the ethnic majority is killing a minority in what the world is now describing as genocide and the non-Muslim world cannot persuade the Muslims of Sudan to stop killing and raping their fellow-Muslims. In Somalia, a dozen Muslim tribes have fought among themselves and reduced the state to a wasteland from where agents of terror are targeting the world civilisation. The civil war in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule has left behind scars that will take a long time going away. The ethnic divide there is filled with blood from massacres that the world simply cannot understand. And now, after spilling into Pakistan, this rage has brought the state close to disintegration. The Muslim is increasingly alienated from his state. This alienation is spearheaded by those who claim to uphold and interpret Islam. There are two sources of this negation of the Muslim state: the concept of jihad as war delinked from the authority of the state; and the concept of right and wrong under sharia outside the ambit of the sovereignty of the modern state. Therefore much can be achieved if the inter-faith dialogue focuses not only on the inter-faith causes of conflict but also on the internal plight of the Islamic world under growing intolerance, extremism and violence. *
