Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Thaksin's spectacular Rise & Fall

Thaksin's spectacular Rise & Fall
By Nirmal Ghosh

The Straits Times
Publication Date: 24-09-2006


Former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra built a US$2 billion fortune and rose to power by appealing directly to the poor. During his rule, the Thai economy shook off the 1997 financial crisis and boomed. So how did the billionaire politician end up without a job in last Tuesday's bloodless coup?

In an ironic twist to the downfall last week of the most powerful prime minister Thailand has ever seen, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra's very strength might have been his biggest weakness.

The 57-year-old billionaire businessman from Chiang Mai had built his political power base on the backs of poor farmers from the country's north-east.

His businessman's horse sense went down well there.

He once told The Sunday Times: "Better to lend money to the poor who will pay it back than give it to rich businessmen who will run away with it.

"If I walk into a bank in a suit, they will give me a loan without question. Try walking into a bank dressed like a villager and see what they say.''

He founded the Thai Rak Thai (TRT) - Thais Love Thais - in 1998 on a populist platform which promised to spread wealth to rural Thailand.

Three years later, it rode a wave of disillusionment with corruption and directionless government to victory in the 2001 election.

Thaksin, weathering accusations that he was concealing his own vast assets, approached politics and governance like he would run a business.

The TRT had sent consultants to the countryside to find out what the people needed and fashioned policies that delivered. Among them were cheap universal health care and microcredit schemes.

Last year, his party captured an even larger majority. The regions he had cultivated with his populist policies - the north and north-east - alone delivered 259 seats out of the 375 the TRT ended up controlling in the 500-seat Lower House.

The opposition was rendered toothless. TRT ideologues boasted that Thailand was heading for a two-party system, and the party could stay in power for 20 years.

Confident of his rural clout, Thaksin sneered at critics in public, often using his Saturday morning radio talk to the country to berate respected Bangkok intellectuals and economists.

But therein lies the rub that may have sent his stock crashing and, on last Tuesday (Sept 19), severed his hold on the premiership.

Analysts agree that Thaksin's monopoly on both economic and political power reduced the space of the Bangkok elite: old-money patricians, old-generation bureaucrats and influential intellectuals.

He had also alienated the Privy Council by simply ignoring them, a TRT insider told The Sunday Times last week.

Critics said that Thaksin had co-opted dozens of senators so the moderating influence of the Senate was neutralised. He ignored the National Human Rights Commission and let the National Counter Corruption Commission fall into disuse.

Furthermore, Thaksin co-opted almost all the electronic media, using it to dominate communication channels. He was perceived as autocratic and arrogant.

In essence, he had displaced generations-old power networks with new networks of his own. He placed loyalist police and army officers in key positions. An army that was finally professionalising had again become politicised - and in the end overthrew him in the country's first coup since 1992.

Yet if Thaksin's end was spectacular, his beginnings were anything but.

Although his father was a politician and his uncle a Member of Parliament who at one time served as a deputy minister, the young Thaksin was only a moderately successful businessman.

He joined the police force more as a stepping stone to greater things than as an end in itself.

That Thaksin was bright was never in doubt; he had finished at the top of his class in Thailand's police academy, and in 1979 earned a doctorate in criminal justice from Sam Houston State University in Texas.

Already well-connected, he married Pojamarn Damapong, daughter of Thailand's powerful Deputy Police Chief Samoer Damapong, with whom he has three children.

She would prove to be a key ingredient in Mr Thaksin's success story - something he often acknowledged in public with obvious pride.

Thaksin's first step into the big league was a mobile phone concession in 1990. His Shin Corp then built a telecommunications satellite.

As his net worth grew, riding the boom that lasted from 1986 to 1997, so did his political stock. He escaped the crash of 1997 relatively unscathed, but as he was already in government at the time, many believe he was tipped off about the devaluation of the baht and managed to hedge against it.

Thaksin served in two coalition governments before deciding that to be in politics on his own terms, he needed his own party.

Ideologues such as former journalist Pansak Vinyaratn, who wanted to fashion a 'new Thailand', joined him in creating the TRT.

At first, that was exactly what Thaksin seemed to be doing.

By July 2003, in his first term as prime minister, Thaksin stood before a huge Thai flag on national television and declared 'independence'' from the International Monetary Fund.

That month, a year ahead of time, Thailand paid off the last US$1.6 billion (S$2.5 billion) instalment of the US$12 billion loan it had taken to help survive the 1997 economic crisis.

Fuelled by spending and investment, the economy had recovered in earnest by 2003. In 2004, gross domestic product (GDP) growth was more than 6 per cent and exports grew 22 per cent. Last year, GDP growth slowed to 4.5 per cent and exports to 15 per cent - but the economy remained inherently robust.

A 2003 'war on drugs' in which more than 2,000 people billed as drug traffickers were killed, however, cast a pall over his administration. Several innocent people were killed by police, ostensibly by accident.

When a United Nations human rights rapporteur remarked on the death toll, the nationalist Thaksin famously snapped: "The UN is not my father."

In the south, he dismantled a joint military-police-civilian administrative structure, even though local residents reckoned it was working well. In 2004, the dormant Islamist separatist insurgency re-emerged.

Well over 1,300 people have been killed in the region along the Malaysian border since January 2004 in shootings and bomb attacks that security agencies have been unable to curb.

Thaksin appeared to condone a hardline response, which spawned a deep backlash and thoroughly alienated Muslims.

Then his family sold its controlling stake in Shin Corp to Temasek Holdings in January for 73 billion baht (S$3 billion). The family legally avoided paying tax on the income, and the lustre of his accomplishments lost more of their shine.

Detractors accused him of being unethical, saying he had made money from Thais and given nothing back.

The often flamboyant Thaksin's personal wealth alone was estimated by Forbes magazine this year at US$2.2 billion.

The Privy Council, whose power had grown over the years, embodied the old elite which became increasingly uncomfortable with Thaksin's growing fortune, style and power.

Earlier this year, in several speeches, Privy Council president Prem Tinsulanonda, 86, reminded Thais that their leaders should have high moral standards.

Thaksin was accused of disrespecting the King - an unpardonable act in Thailand.

The objections of the elite combined with resentment among intellectuals and the middle class.

"It is Thai Politics 101: You cannot have a prime minister who is too powerful," one political analyst remarked late last year as the movement against Thaksin began gathering pace.

Thousands under the banner of the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD), led by disgruntled former supporters such as maverick publisher Sondhi Limthongkul and ascetic Major-General Chamlong Srimuang, took to the streets demanding that he resign.

The demonstrations succeeded in shaking Thaksin so much that he took to touring his up-country strongholds. There, even bigger crowds shouted their unwavering support for him: 'Thaksin, soo! Soo!', or 'Thaksin, fight! Fight!'.

'It was when he was up country that Thaksin felt most comfortable and could talk more freely about making a new Thailand,' recalled one TRT member who asked not to be named.

Well aware that violence would make the government look bad and could trigger a coup d'etat, Thaksin ordered police and the military to exercise restraint during demonstrations in Bangkok.

But fears of bloodshed grew as the high-stakes power struggle deepened. Society became divided in a manner not seen before, Thai analysts said.

Trying to short-circuit opposition in Bangkok - and the wild card of the army - Thaksin dissolved Parliament in February and called a snap election, hoping to renew his mandate. But Thailand's three largest opposition parties crippled the election with a boycott.

The impasse dragged on until last month when King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who has ruled for 60 years and is hugely influential, told the country's top judges to sort out the mess.

The courts swiftly annulled the April2 poll and said a new one should be held. In a dramatic decision last month, they found three election commissioners guilty of favouring the TRT - and jailed them.

The stakes mounted.

Alleged assassination plots and conspiracy theories gained ground. Military intervention was openly discussed as a means to break the impasse.

Thaksin appeared uncompromising - and so did the deep-seated movement to oust him.

Last month, a powerful bomb was found near Thaksin's house in a car driven by a junior army officer. Police called in senior army officers for questioning.

Chulalongkorn University academic Thitinan Pongsudhirak warned of a growing army-police showdown.

"The police are going to come out at the wrong end," he said.

His words proved prophetic. As Thaksin and his entourage were enjoying breakfast in New York last Tuesday morning, royalist army chief Sonthi Boonyarataglin seized his chance.

Outflanking the Premier's loyalist generals, he unleashed tanks and armoured Humvees into Bangkok in a swift and surgical operation.

Not a single shot was fired.

Last Friday, at a ceremony, King Bhumibol endorsed General Sonthi as the head of the new Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy.

Seated on the King's right was General Prem. His presence cemented the widely held belief that the powerful former premier had backed the coup.

Thais largely welcomed the coup because it defused the political stand-off - though many admit military intervention is undemocratic.

Thaksin has taken refuge in London with his eldest daughter, who is studying in England. His wife is in Bangkok with their son and other daughter. Tanks still surround his old office at Government House.

But the man whose personal motto is 'Better to die than to live like a loser' cannot be written off, say analysts who have studied his track record.

He still has a potential long-term power base in the north and north-east. And even as his party is in tatters and he, his family and several Cabinet colleagues are being investigated for corruption, one TRT member said: "He is not past tense yet."

Thaksin's spectacular Rise & Fall

Thaksin's spectacular Rise & Fall
By Nirmal Ghosh

The Straits Times
Publication Date: 24-09-2006


Former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra built a US$2 billion fortune and rose to power by appealing directly to the poor. During his rule, the Thai economy shook off the 1997 financial crisis and boomed. So how did the billionaire politician end up without a job in last Tuesday's bloodless coup?

In an ironic twist to the downfall last week of the most powerful prime minister Thailand has ever seen, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra's very strength might have been his biggest weakness.

The 57-year-old billionaire businessman from Chiang Mai had built his political power base on the backs of poor farmers from the country's north-east.

His businessman's horse sense went down well there.

He once told The Sunday Times: "Better to lend money to the poor who will pay it back than give it to rich businessmen who will run away with it.

"If I walk into a bank in a suit, they will give me a loan without question. Try walking into a bank dressed like a villager and see what they say.''

He founded the Thai Rak Thai (TRT) - Thais Love Thais - in 1998 on a populist platform which promised to spread wealth to rural Thailand.

Three years later, it rode a wave of disillusionment with corruption and directionless government to victory in the 2001 election.

Thaksin, weathering accusations that he was concealing his own vast assets, approached politics and governance like he would run a business.

The TRT had sent consultants to the countryside to find out what the people needed and fashioned policies that delivered. Among them were cheap universal health care and microcredit schemes.

Last year, his party captured an even larger majority. The regions he had cultivated with his populist policies - the north and north-east - alone delivered 259 seats out of the 375 the TRT ended up controlling in the 500-seat Lower House.

The opposition was rendered toothless. TRT ideologues boasted that Thailand was heading for a two-party system, and the party could stay in power for 20 years.

Confident of his rural clout, Thaksin sneered at critics in public, often using his Saturday morning radio talk to the country to berate respected Bangkok intellectuals and economists.

But therein lies the rub that may have sent his stock crashing and, on last Tuesday (Sept 19), severed his hold on the premiership.

Analysts agree that Thaksin's monopoly on both economic and political power reduced the space of the Bangkok elite: old-money patricians, old-generation bureaucrats and influential intellectuals.

He had also alienated the Privy Council by simply ignoring them, a TRT insider told The Sunday Times last week.

Critics said that Thaksin had co-opted dozens of senators so the moderating influence of the Senate was neutralised. He ignored the National Human Rights Commission and let the National Counter Corruption Commission fall into disuse.

Furthermore, Thaksin co-opted almost all the electronic media, using it to dominate communication channels. He was perceived as autocratic and arrogant.

In essence, he had displaced generations-old power networks with new networks of his own. He placed loyalist police and army officers in key positions. An army that was finally professionalising had again become politicised - and in the end overthrew him in the country's first coup since 1992.

Yet if Thaksin's end was spectacular, his beginnings were anything but.

Although his father was a politician and his uncle a Member of Parliament who at one time served as a deputy minister, the young Thaksin was only a moderately successful businessman.

He joined the police force more as a stepping stone to greater things than as an end in itself.

That Thaksin was bright was never in doubt; he had finished at the top of his class in Thailand's police academy, and in 1979 earned a doctorate in criminal justice from Sam Houston State University in Texas.

Already well-connected, he married Pojamarn Damapong, daughter of Thailand's powerful Deputy Police Chief Samoer Damapong, with whom he has three children.

She would prove to be a key ingredient in Mr Thaksin's success story - something he often acknowledged in public with obvious pride.

Thaksin's first step into the big league was a mobile phone concession in 1990. His Shin Corp then built a telecommunications satellite.

As his net worth grew, riding the boom that lasted from 1986 to 1997, so did his political stock. He escaped the crash of 1997 relatively unscathed, but as he was already in government at the time, many believe he was tipped off about the devaluation of the baht and managed to hedge against it.

Thaksin served in two coalition governments before deciding that to be in politics on his own terms, he needed his own party.

Ideologues such as former journalist Pansak Vinyaratn, who wanted to fashion a 'new Thailand', joined him in creating the TRT.

At first, that was exactly what Thaksin seemed to be doing.

By July 2003, in his first term as prime minister, Thaksin stood before a huge Thai flag on national television and declared 'independence'' from the International Monetary Fund.

That month, a year ahead of time, Thailand paid off the last US$1.6 billion (S$2.5 billion) instalment of the US$12 billion loan it had taken to help survive the 1997 economic crisis.

Fuelled by spending and investment, the economy had recovered in earnest by 2003. In 2004, gross domestic product (GDP) growth was more than 6 per cent and exports grew 22 per cent. Last year, GDP growth slowed to 4.5 per cent and exports to 15 per cent - but the economy remained inherently robust.

A 2003 'war on drugs' in which more than 2,000 people billed as drug traffickers were killed, however, cast a pall over his administration. Several innocent people were killed by police, ostensibly by accident.

When a United Nations human rights rapporteur remarked on the death toll, the nationalist Thaksin famously snapped: "The UN is not my father."

In the south, he dismantled a joint military-police-civilian administrative structure, even though local residents reckoned it was working well. In 2004, the dormant Islamist separatist insurgency re-emerged.

Well over 1,300 people have been killed in the region along the Malaysian border since January 2004 in shootings and bomb attacks that security agencies have been unable to curb.

Thaksin appeared to condone a hardline response, which spawned a deep backlash and thoroughly alienated Muslims.

Then his family sold its controlling stake in Shin Corp to Temasek Holdings in January for 73 billion baht (S$3 billion). The family legally avoided paying tax on the income, and the lustre of his accomplishments lost more of their shine.

Detractors accused him of being unethical, saying he had made money from Thais and given nothing back.

The often flamboyant Thaksin's personal wealth alone was estimated by Forbes magazine this year at US$2.2 billion.

The Privy Council, whose power had grown over the years, embodied the old elite which became increasingly uncomfortable with Thaksin's growing fortune, style and power.

Earlier this year, in several speeches, Privy Council president Prem Tinsulanonda, 86, reminded Thais that their leaders should have high moral standards.

Thaksin was accused of disrespecting the King - an unpardonable act in Thailand.

The objections of the elite combined with resentment among intellectuals and the middle class.

"It is Thai Politics 101: You cannot have a prime minister who is too powerful," one political analyst remarked late last year as the movement against Thaksin began gathering pace.

Thousands under the banner of the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD), led by disgruntled former supporters such as maverick publisher Sondhi Limthongkul and ascetic Major-General Chamlong Srimuang, took to the streets demanding that he resign.

The demonstrations succeeded in shaking Thaksin so much that he took to touring his up-country strongholds. There, even bigger crowds shouted their unwavering support for him: 'Thaksin, soo! Soo!', or 'Thaksin, fight! Fight!'.

'It was when he was up country that Thaksin felt most comfortable and could talk more freely about making a new Thailand,' recalled one TRT member who asked not to be named.

Well aware that violence would make the government look bad and could trigger a coup d'etat, Thaksin ordered police and the military to exercise restraint during demonstrations in Bangkok.

But fears of bloodshed grew as the high-stakes power struggle deepened. Society became divided in a manner not seen before, Thai analysts said.

Trying to short-circuit opposition in Bangkok - and the wild card of the army - Thaksin dissolved Parliament in February and called a snap election, hoping to renew his mandate. But Thailand's three largest opposition parties crippled the election with a boycott.

The impasse dragged on until last month when King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who has ruled for 60 years and is hugely influential, told the country's top judges to sort out the mess.

The courts swiftly annulled the April2 poll and said a new one should be held. In a dramatic decision last month, they found three election commissioners guilty of favouring the TRT - and jailed them.

The stakes mounted.

Alleged assassination plots and conspiracy theories gained ground. Military intervention was openly discussed as a means to break the impasse.

Thaksin appeared uncompromising - and so did the deep-seated movement to oust him.

Last month, a powerful bomb was found near Thaksin's house in a car driven by a junior army officer. Police called in senior army officers for questioning.

Chulalongkorn University academic Thitinan Pongsudhirak warned of a growing army-police showdown.

"The police are going to come out at the wrong end," he said.

His words proved prophetic. As Thaksin and his entourage were enjoying breakfast in New York last Tuesday morning, royalist army chief Sonthi Boonyarataglin seized his chance.

Outflanking the Premier's loyalist generals, he unleashed tanks and armoured Humvees into Bangkok in a swift and surgical operation.

Not a single shot was fired.

Last Friday, at a ceremony, King Bhumibol endorsed General Sonthi as the head of the new Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy.

Seated on the King's right was General Prem. His presence cemented the widely held belief that the powerful former premier had backed the coup.

Thais largely welcomed the coup because it defused the political stand-off - though many admit military intervention is undemocratic.

Thaksin has taken refuge in London with his eldest daughter, who is studying in England. His wife is in Bangkok with their son and other daughter. Tanks still surround his old office at Government House.

But the man whose personal motto is 'Better to die than to live like a loser' cannot be written off, say analysts who have studied his track record.

He still has a potential long-term power base in the north and north-east. And even as his party is in tatters and he, his family and several Cabinet colleagues are being investigated for corruption, one TRT member said: "He is not past tense yet."

Sunday, September 17, 2006

India gripped by tale of Muslim girl who ran off to wed Hindu

India gripped by tale of Muslim girl who ran off to wed Hindu
By Martin Hickman and Shekhar Bhatia
Published: 16 September 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1603861.ece
Like an Indian version of Romeo and Juliet, the love-struck teenagers met across a divide and planned to marry secretly against the wishes of their parents.

Where the story of Subia Gaur and Ashwani Gupta differs from Shakespeare's play is that the wedding in India was attended by one thousand impromptu well-wishers and broadcast live on television news.

And it took place because of an invention that could scarcely have been imagined in 1597: the internet.

Ms Gaur, 18, met her husband-to-be through an internet chatroom two years ago while a schoolgirl in London. The pair spent hours e-mailing each other in a mixture of English and Hindi and friendship blossomed into romance.

They finally met face-to-face in April when Ms Gaur travelled to India to visit her grandparents in Mumbai. Mr Gupta, a trainee financial analyst, travelled 700 miles by train from Delhi to see her. But there was a problem: just as in the case of the Montagues and the Capulets, the families were divided, not by a feud but by religion.

When Ms Gaur's Muslim parents learned that she was conducting a secret affair with a Hindu, they put pressure on her to end the relationship. Instead they wanted her to marry a Muslim in an arranged marriage once she had finished her studies.

Undeterred, the A-level student secretly flew to Delhi, pursued the next day by her mother.

Amid talk of death threats and police protection, the young couple spent the next month in hiding before their wedding on Monday, which generated an outpouring of public support.

For Ms Gaur, the happiness of the occasion was tarnished by the realisation of what she had left behind in Plaistow, Newham. Explaining her flight from unglamorous east London to India's bustling capital, she said: "I knew they would never accept Ashwani so I decided to go to India. We thought if we got married they wouldn't be able to take me back. I haven't had any contact with my friends or my younger brother and sister. It's been very stressful..."

His family have accepted the young couple despite the religious differences and Ms Gaur says she will not become a Hindu.

In Newham, her father grieves for the daughter he has lost to another family 5,000 miles away, but scotches any talk of retribution.

Mr Gaur, a shop manager, said he had suffered a mild heart attack last week and was "suffering more than you can imagine". But he dismissed remarks from a police chief in Delhi that some of Ms Gaur's relatives had tried to take her away.

"She is part of my body, my first-born child, and it is madness to say that we could harm her in any way," Mr Gaur said. "I believe she has been brainwashed - she doesn't understand what she has done.

"She is a Muslim above all and she has married a Hindu and that is the most shocking thing about this, not that she has lied to us and married against our wishes. We knew nothing about this man until April, when he flew from his home to Bombay."

Mr Gaur claimed that his unwanted son-in-law had only married his daughter to obtain a British passport but would welcome them both to London if he converted to Islam.

Newspapers and television in India have devoted considerable space to the story, with some applauding the couple and others complaining the girl had upset her parents.

Ms Gaur said: "I knew the first time I met Ashwani in person that he was the one I was going to marry. Religion doesn't matter.

"I never wanted the attention that I've received. But if there is someone in my position, I hope my story gives them the courage to follow their heart."

Reply to The Sun Newspaper

Reply to The Sun Newspaper: The Zuriani Zonneveld Interview

MEDIA STATEMENT



Pak Lah has given a directive to the media to stop publicizing provocative and corresponding emotive opinions/responses surrounding religious issues, but unfortunately denigrating the practice of syariah around the world, deliberately highlighting in some cases validly pathetic circumstances continues to be given wide publicity by the English newspapers in the country. Recently, the Sun has continued to ascribe to itself to be the purveyor of such a trend and we make reference specifically to the highly misinformed and personally prejudiced interview by Zuriani 'Ani' Zonneveld, reported in the Sun as a 2-part interview on 24th August and 7th September recently.

While it is becoming tiresome (though we assure everyone that we are energized to defend Islam and the Ummah!) to have to respond to the opinions of one who has a manifestly superficial understanding of her (Ani) religion, we must categorically state that the publicity given to such damaging opinions cannot be left unanswered.

The caption heading of "Challenging Core Values" already takes a belligerent stance on the core values of Islam which no spirited Muslim will allow to go pass. If values are to be challenged, then all the values in the tenets of all religions need to be challenged as the so called adherents continue to wage "crusades" of modern times in a more barbaric and murderous fashion – all because they are intent on making others like them and therefore "if you are not with us, you are against us". It is indeed laughable then that Ani happily basks in the limelight of that "crusading environment" and is totally ignorant of the fact that she has become malleable in the hands of those who are anti her self professed religion.

For her to quote verses from the Holy Quran and her spurious interpretations egged on by the margins of her own group (Progressive Muslim Union of North America), smacks of conceit and delusion. This can only stem from a definite lack of understanding (far from being knowledge) and her void of personal identity. If only apart from "Singing About Faith", she would commence the journey of learning about faith can she then credibly take on the cudgels in defending what she believes is worth defending. Otherwise, it can be only a little more than embarking on a vendetta of sorts derived from a personal identity crisis and her own personal quagmire of cultural despair. What then the purpose of the interviewers in ending with the punch line "My husband is Dutch". Is there an intended insinuation?

It suffices to pick one or two of her many pontifications in her eagerness to show "others are wrong" illustrates a severe inadequacy of understanding of the evolution of Islamic thought. For example, "leading congregational prayers" is made an issue that should be examined within the context of rational thought that seeks clarification and searches for relevant meaning; and one cannot simply discard its evolution if one wants to do justice to the issue. Again, the exhortation of every person unto himself – "you unto yours and me unto mine" is asserted completely devoid of its contextual relevance. We urge Ani to go and learn before she opines further!

There are many more instances of unbalanced criticisms she has made against Malaysia. Her haughty attitude of "Ya, go on, print this. I don't care..... Let him (PM) read it" typifies her de-culturalization and the arrogance of those steeped in the culture of "hang them when you find them.... Dead or Alive."

Finally, while she accuses those she disagrees with as being arrogant and self-righteous, she herself manifests those traits. And as she forthrightly puts it, "I don't claim to be a Muslim scholar. I just challenge them (ulama') to go learn, go study! Don't assume you know your faith."……She too, should look in the mirror and take that advice for herself that isn't it just possible that she needs to go learn and study her self-professed faith!

It is with trepidation and deep concern that we see the publicity given to these virulent denigration of the practice of syariah, i.e. the practices of the Muslim Ummah which has become a constant assault – overwhelmingly negative, hardly positive. We view this as a battle of "proxy" and would urge those in authority, including the editors to exercise a responsible circumspection in their duties rather than to take cheap pot shots motivated by whatever agendas. What is dismaying is that they continue in their destabilizing agenda while ostensibly giving lip service to the directive of Pak Lah; worse they exploit the affinity they have with the Prime Minister and his immediate family. Let us genuinely respect the Prime Minister and sincerely accept his wisdom with at least some basic honesty.

Yours sincerely,

Yusri Mohamad
Chairman of PEMBELA Meeting
and President
Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM)

The real link between 9/11 and Iraq

The real link between 9/11 and Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt


You've heard US President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney say it over and over in various ways: there was a connection between the events of September 11, 2001, and Iraq. Let's take this seriously and consider some of the links between the two.


Numbers and comparisons
At least 3,438 Iraqis died by violent means during July (roughly similar numbers died in June and August), significantly more than the 2,973 people who died in the attacks of September 11.
A total of 1,536 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone in August, according to revised figures from the Baghdad morgue. That's more than half the September 11 casualties in one city in one increasingly typical month. According to the Washington Post, this figure does not include suicide-bombing victims and others taken to the city's hospitals, nor does it include deaths in towns near the capital.

By the beginning of this month, 2,974 US military service members had died in Iraq and in the Bush administration's "global war on terror", more than died on September 11. (Twenty-two more American soldiers died in Iraq in the first nine days of September, and at least three in Afghanistan.)

Five years after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, according to Emily Gosden and David Randall of the British newspaper The Independent, the Bush administration's "global war on terror" has resulted in, at a minimum, 20 times the deaths of September 11; at a maximum, 60 times. It has "directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on Earth. If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths - of insurgents, the Iraqi military during the 2003 invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds - are included, the toll could reach as high as 180,000."

According to Australian journalist Paul McGeough, Iraqi officials (and others) estimate that that country's death toll since 2003 "stands at 50,000 or more - the proportional equivalent of about 570,000 Americans".

Last week, the US Senate agreed to appropriate another US$63 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose costs have been averaging $10 billion a month so far this year. This brings the (taxpayer) cost for Bush's wars so far to about $469 billion and climbing. That's the equivalent of 469 Ground Zero (as the site of the destroyed World Trade Center is called) memorials at full cost-overrun estimates, double that if the memorial comes in at the recently revised budget of $500 million. (Keep in mind that the estimated cost of these two wars doesn't include various perfectly real future payouts such as those for the care of veterans and could rise into the trillions.)

In 2003, with its invasion of Iraq over, the Bush administration had about 150,000 troops in Iraq. Just under three and a half years later, almost as long as it took to win World War II in the Pacific, and despite much media coverage about coming force "drawdowns", troop levels are actually rising - by 15,000 in the past month. They now stand at 145,000, just 5,000 short of the initial occupation figure. (Pre-invasion, top administration officials such as deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz took it for granted that US troop levels would be drawn down to the 30,000 range within three months of the taking of Baghdad.)

Reconstruction
While Americans are planning to remember the attack with four vast towers and a huge, extremely costly memorial sunk into Manhattan's Ground Zero, Baghdadis have been thinking a bit more practically. They are putting scarce funds into constructing two new branch morgues (with refrigeration units) in the capital for what's now most plentiful in their country: dead bodies. They plan to raise the city's morgue capacity to 250 bodies a day. If fully used, that would be about 7,500 bodies a month. Think of it as a hedge against ever more probable futures.

While the various New York memorial constructions can't get off (or into) the ground, because of disputes and cost-estimate overruns, what could be thought of as the real US memorial to Ground Zero is going up in the very heart of Baghdad. Unlike the prospective structures in Manhattan or seemingly just about any other construction project in Iraq, it's on schedule.

According to Paul McGeough, the $787 million "embassy", a 21-building, heavily fortified complex (independent of the capital's hopeless electricity or water systems), will pack significant bang for the bucks - its own built-in surface-to-air missile emplacements as well as Starbucks and Krispy Kreme outlets, a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, and a sports center. As in essence a "suburb of Washington", with a predicted modest staff of 3,500, it is a project that says, with all the hubris the Bush administration can muster: We're not leaving. Never.

Record-breaking months
Roadside bombs (or IEDs - improvised explosive devices), "the leading killer of US troops", rose to record numbers this summer - 1,200 in August, quadrupling the January 2004 figures according to the Washington Post - while bomb and attack tips from Iraqi citizens fell drastically. They plummeted from 5,900 in April to 3,700 in July. ("It will improve once it's not so darn lethal to go out on the street," was the optimistic observation of retired US Army General Montgomery C Meigs, director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.)

According to a recently released quarterly assessment the Pentagon is mandated to do for Congress, Iraqi casualties have soared by a record 51% in recent months, quadrupling in just two years.

From the same report, monthly attacks on US and allied Iraqi forces rose to about 800, doubling since early 2004. In Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency (where a "very pessimistic" secret US Marine Corps assessment indicates that "we haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically - and that's where wars are won and lost"), attacks averaged 30 a day.

A sideline record in the "war on terror": Afghanistan's already sizable opium crop is projected to increase by at least 50% this year and would then make up a startling 92% of the global supply. According to Antonio Maria Costa, the global executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, those supplies would exceed global consumption by 30% - so other records loom. (Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, the investigation into the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden is going nowhere. His trail has gone "stone cold ... US commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years.")

The Iraqi condition
Along with civil war, the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, the still-strengthening insurgency, and the security situation from hell, Iraqis are also experiencing soaring inflation, possibly reaching 70% this year (which would more than double last year's 32% rise), stagnant salaries (where they even exist), an "inert" banking system, gas and electricity prices up in a year by 270%, massive corruption ("An audit sponsored by the United Nations last week found hundreds of millions of dollars of Iraq's oil revenue had been wrongly tallied last year or had gone missing altogether").

Iraqis also face a lack of adequate electricity or potable water supplies, tenaciously high unemployment, ranging - depending upon the estimate - from 15-50/60% (the recent Pentagon report to Congress offers Iraqi government figures of 18% unemployment and 34% underemployment), acute shortages of gasoline, kerosene and cooking gas in the country with the planet's third-largest oil reserves, forcing the Iraqi government to devote $800 million in scarce funds to importing refined oil products from neighboring countries and making endless gasoline lines and overnight waits the essence of normal life ("Filling up now requires several days' pay, monastic patience or both").

If that weren't enough, Iraq has an oil industry, already ragged at the time of the invasion, that has since gone steadily downhill (its three main refineries are now functioning at half-capacity and processing only half the number of barrels of oil as before the invasion, while the biggest refinery in Baiji sometimes operates at as little as 7.5% of capacity), government gas subsidies severely cut (at the urging of the International Monetary Fund), malnutrition on the rise and, according to that Pentagon report to Congress, 25.9% of Iraqi children stunted in their growth.

In other words, economically speaking, Iraq has in essence been deconstructed.

Diving into Iraq
On December 9, 2001, Cheney began publicly arguing on the television program Meet the Press that there were Iraqi connections to the September 11 attacks. It was "pretty well confirmed", he told the program's host Tim Russert, that Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, had met the previous April in Prague with a "senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service". On September 8, 2002, he returned to the program and reaffirmed this supposed fact even more strongly. (Atta "did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center.")

All of this - and there was much more of it from Cheney, Bush and other top officials, always leaving Iraq and September 11, or Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, or Saddam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the same rhetorical neighborhood with the final linking usually left to the listener - was quite literally so much Bushwa.

These were claims debunked within the intelligence community and elsewhere before, during and after the invasion of Iraq. We learned only the other day from a belated partial report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq.

We learned as well that US intelligence people knew Saddam Hussein had actually tried to capture Zarqawi and that the claim that Zarqawi and he were somehow in cahoots was utterly repudiated last fall by the Central Intelligence Agency. None of this stopped the vice president or president - who as late as this August 21 insisted that Saddam "had relations with Zarqawi" - from continuing to make such implicit or explicit linkages even as they also backtracked from the claims.

As is often the case, under such lies and manipulations lurks a deeper truth. In this case, let's call it the truth of wish fulfillment. The link between September 11 and Iraq is unfortunately all too real. The Bush administration made it so in the heat of the post-attack shock.

Think of that link this way: immediately after September 11, 2001, the US president and vice president hijacked the United States, using the rhetorical equivalents of box-cutters and Mace; then, with most passengers on board and not quite enough of the spirit of United Flight 93 to spare, after a brief Afghan overflight, they crashed the plane-of-state directly into Iraq, causing the equivalent of a Hurricane Katrina that never ends and turning that country - from Basra in the south to the border of Kurdistan - into the global equivalent of Ground Zero.

Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of Victory Culture. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

The world in 2031: How September 11 could shape our future

The world in 2031: How September 11 could shape our future

Last week, the Harvard academic Niall Ferguson offered an optimistic prediction of how our world could look, 30 years after the September 11 attacks. But is the future really so rosy? Will our society and way of life survive the traumas of war, terrorism and climate change? Here, three leading historians look ahead - to a time we can only imagine
Published: 11 September 2006

The new Thirty Years' War by Paul Kennedy

It seems very hard and strange now, to look back more than 30 years to that shocking morning of September 11 2001, and to attempt to reflect on how the world has changed and not changed during those decades. In the catastrophe's immediate aftermath and, in fact, for many years afterwards, it was common to believe that the world's scene was totally different; that the landscape of national and international politics had been transformed by the sabotage and deliberate crashes of four aircraft on American soil.

That certainly was the drumbeat message of the Bush administration of the time and, if anyone can recall those days, for the subsequent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, the emergency military expeditions to defend the oilfields of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and the welter of terrorist attacks upon Europe, North America and Japan in the critical years 2008-2012. They all seemed to justify an apocalyptic view.

How curious, in retrospect, appears that broad post-September 11 conviction that we were on the verge of Armageddon or, to use a softer but still powerful phrase, that we had entered a new Thirty Years War, this time between universalistic liberal values and the fanatic, destructive counter-attack of fundamental Islamicists.

Yet our later knowledge of how the world unfolded in ways very different from those ultra-gloomy assumptions is not just a display of being wise after the event. After all, what were regarded as the major tendencies in global affairs before al-Qa'ida struck the Pentagon and the Twin Towers? Surely they the following: the United States was unquestionably the global No 1, albeit facing serious financial imbalances and militarily overstretch abroad; Asia, led above all by China and India, was rising both economically and militarily; Russia, under Putin's coldly calculated mix of domestic and external stratagems, was steadily recovering its place in world affairs; Europe was getting older and slower but was still a nice place in which to live; Africa was grappling, with mixed results, with more disasters than any other broad region of the Earth; and the Middle East, with exceptions, could not manage the 21st century.

Thirty years later, those major tendencies seem to have held their course, and were to be far less disrupted by the impacts of the September 11 attacks than some of us assumed at the time. Just look at the world around us, in this pleasant early-autumnal week of 2031. The United States still possesses the greatest overall combination of military, economic and technological strengths, but it has been considerably checked and sobered by the fiscal crises and military setbacks of the decade that followed the Bush administration's decision to fight in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so that it now sensibly pursues policies of cooperation - with the other powers, and with international agencies - and much more restraint abroad.

China and India have indeed risen, not without enormous wrenches in their domestic social fabrics, and are now major, responsible actors on the world scene. Putin's clever Bismarckian policies of internal and external improvements paid off; here is the fourth big player on the world chessboard. Europe worries incessantly about itself but, actually, is just fine, a comfortable antidote to America's habit of self-improving and Asia's blinkered commitment to 15-year-plans. Africa endured hell for the first half of these past three decades - continued civil wars, genocides, failed states, environmental calamities - but resourceful peoples in Botswana, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Morocco, South Africa and elsewhere fought off those common foes and advanced, stronger than before, for the tests they endured.

The Middle East was different, but that was true before September 11, even if the subsequent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt between that date and the second decade of our 21st century intensified its convulsions. The annual Arab Development Reports composed by the UN Development Programme early in the 21st century had pointed to the many hindrances that would prevent this region from smoothly entering the comity of nations. Regional experts and CIA analysts warned that the area was unstable, unhinged, in so many ways.

Still, the convulsions of 2009-2012 came so thick and fast that, for all their failures, the policy-makers of those years can hardly be dismissed as buffoons; to be fair, they were humanly incapable of dealing with the almost-simultaneous collapse of the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, the worsening of the Iraqi civil war, the generational struggle for power in Iran, and, above all, the horrifying Iranian nuclear devastation of Tel Aviv as well as much of the city's surrounding suburbs.

The Israeli nuclear counter-strike killed 10 million Iranians, but the ancient Persian entity itself remained, eviscerated but not obliterated. The Great Powers were paralysed, for what exactly was one supposed to do following an Iranian-Israeli nuclear exchange? Frightened, they sought for compromises on all fronts, multiple UN-led peacekeeping missions, and then disentanglement and post-nuclear clean-up. Americans were aroused, but simultaneously scared at going back into that mire - and who exactly did you "nuke" just because Tel Aviv had disappeared?

Europeans were numbed. Putin kept his lips tightly closed. And why should the ever-more-prosperous Asia get involved in stupid religious and ideological wars far to the west? So Israel limped on, awfully damaged, still protected by the US, but facing an unclear future.

Thirty years after the September 11 attacks the Middle East remains unstable, even if moderate political groups are gaining ever more support from a newer generation of Arabs in the Gulf, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The most promising fact is that al-Qa'ida is a distant memory, like the anarchists of the 1870s and 1880s. They scared people for a long while, but ran themselves into the sand, especially with their foolish bombings in Shanghai and Beijing in the years 2010 to 2012 to protest at Chinese security measures against Muslims in the country's western provinces.

With an aroused China joining an already belligerent USA in the war against terror, with Putin agreeing and Europe and the rest of the world scuttling to destroy any home-grown terrorists, and with all possible al-Qa'ida financial supporters arrested by cooperative measures among banks (instigated by President Bush), they are now a busted flush. Indeed, the terror organisation is becoming a distant memory.

So, where are we, 30 years after the twin towers came down? Older, certainly; perhaps a bit wiser. It has not been a happy planet, especially in much of Africa and the Middle East. But, in truth, we are in 2031 a lot better off than most of the pundits of 2001 thought we might be. That itself is cause for some rejoicing. But not much.

Paul Kennedy is professor of history at Yale University. His latest book is 'The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government', Allen Lane, £25

Malays Would Rather Have Pleasure Than Pressure?

Malays Would Rather Have Pleasure Than Pressure?

Di mana boleh cari ramai Melayu
Pastinya di Kelantan dan Trengganu
Dan juga di pasar malam dan pasar minggu
Di Akademi Fantasia dan Pesta Lagu
Di Jom Heboh orang Melayu berpusu-pusu
Di Sungai Buloh dan sebelum ini di Pudu
Dan di jalan, lumba haram tak buka lampu
Dan di selekoh duit rasuah depa sapu
Di pusat serenti akibat ketagih dadah dan candu
Di malam kemerdekaan dan malam tahun baru
Terkinja-kinja best giler menari macam hantu
Apa hobi orang Melayu
Terkenal dengan budaya malas dan lesu
Berlepak buang masa tak jemu-jemu
Atau baca majalah Mastika cerita hantu
Tengok telenovela dari Filipina dan Peru
Sambil makan junk food kacang dan muruku
Mana tak gendut berpenyakit selalu
Kalau nak berlagak melayu nombor satu
Asal bergaya sanggup makan nasi dan toyu
Boleh tak jumpa mereka di kedai buku
Atau di perpustakaan dan majlis ilmu
Atau ambil kelas kemahiran di hujung minggu
Ada tapi kurang sangat ke situ
Kenapa Melayu jadi begitu
Nak salahkan sapa ibubapa atau guru
Pemimpin negara atau raja dulu-dulu
Ayat lazim di mulut ialah malas selalu
Nak harap kerajaan saja bantu
Terutama sekali kontraktor kelas satu
Tak habis-habis gaduh nak jatuh sapa dulu
Dan suka sangat dengan budaya mengampu
Sampai bila kita nak tunggu
Bangsa Melayu jadi bangsa termaju
Boleh, dengan beberapa syarat tertentu
Pertama dengan banyak menguasai ilmu
Kata nabi ikutlah al Quran dan sunnah ku
AlQuran yang diturunkan 1400 tahun dulu
tapi apakah yang kita tahu,cuma baca nak halau hantu

Kenyataan Akhbar PEMBELA

Kenyataan Akhbar Bersama oleh Persatuan Peguam Syarie
Malaysia dan Peguam Pembela Islam

Pada Mesyuarat Agung Luar Biasa Majlis Perundangan
yang diadakan pada 18 Ogos 2006 di Wisma MCA, Jalan
Ampang, Kuala Lumpur di mana beberapa beberapa peguam
hadir dan menyokong usul yang dicadangkan oleh YM Raja
Aziz Addruse untuk membentuk jawatankuasa bertindak
untuk mengkaji pindaan kepada Akta Guaman Professional
berkenaan perkara disiplin, satu pengumuman telah
dibacakan oleh Raja Aziz Addruse pada penutup
mesyuarat bagi pihak Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, ahli Majlis
Perundangan Malaysia.

Pengumuman tersebut ialah kesan fatwa agama yang telah
dikeluarkan terhadap nyawa
Malik Imtiaz Sarwar kerana peranannya dalam kes Lina
Joy.

Siasatan sedang dijalankan berkenaan fatwa berkenaan.
Siasatan kami mendapati fatwa berkenaan tidak pernah
pun dikeluarkan.

Kami mempersoalkan motif mereka yang telah
mengelirukan Raja Aziz Addruse untuk membuat
pengumuman berkenaan dan menggunakan Mesyuarat Agung
Luar biasa untuk memburukkan imej Mufti-Mufti dan
Institusi Majlis Fatwa .

Perbuatan seumpama ini hanya akan menaikkan lagi
ketegangan antara agama dan kami ingin menasihati
mereka yang terlibat agar lebih berhati-hati terhadap
tindakan mereka kerana ianya akan memberi kesan yang
buruk

Tarikh : 21 Ogos 2006


Zainur Zakaria Zainul Rijal Abu Bakar
Protem Chairman President
Peguam Pembela Islam (PPI) Persatuan Peguam Syarie

http://myislamnetwork.net/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=90

******************************************
JOINT PRESS STATEMENT BY

SHARIAH LAWYERS ASSOCIATION OF MALAYSIA
(PERSATUAN PEGUAM SYARIE MALAYSIA)
&
LAWYERS IN DEFENCE OF ISLAM
(PEGUAM PEMBELA ISLAM)

At the recent EGM of the Malaysian Bar held on the
18th of August 2006 at Wisma MCA, Jalan Ampang, Kuala
Lumpur where a record number of lawyers attended and
voted in support of a motion proposed by YM Raja Aziz
Addruse calling for an ad hoc committee to study the
amendments to the Legal Profession Act over
disciplinary matters, an announcement was read out by
Raja Aziz Addruse at the close of the meeting on
behalf of Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a member of the
Malaysian Bar.

The announcement was to the effect that a religious
fatwa had been issued on the life of Malik Imtiaz
Sarwar for his role in the Lina Joy case.

Investigations have been carried out with regard to
the said fatwa. Our investigations reveal that no such
fatwa was ever issued.

We question the motive of those who misled Raja Aziz
Addruse into making the statement and using the EGM to
tarnish the image of the Muftis and the Fatwa
institutions.

Conduct such as this has the tendency to heighten
religious tension and we would like to advise those
involved to be very careful of their actions as they
can give rise to serious consequences.

Date: 21st August 2006

Zainur Zakaria Zainul Rijal Abu Bakar
Protem Chairman President
Peguam Pembela Islam (PPI) Persatuan Peguam Syarie

http://myislamnetwork.net/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=90

Creeping Islamization in Malaysia

Creeping Islamization in Malaysia


Letter from Malaysia: Nation's secular vision vs. 'writing on the wall'

Thomas Fuller International Herald Tribune

Published: August 28, 2006


KUALA LUMPUR 'The idea of a secular state is dead in Malaysia," says Farish
Noor, a Malaysian scholar who specializes in politics and Islam. "An Islamic
society is already on the cards. The question is what kind of Islamic
society this will be."

It is hard to square this view with a drive through modern Kuala Lumpur, its
downtown bars and nightclubs not exactly the symbols of a budding theocracy.
Yet as Malaysia marks 49 years of independence from Britain on Thursday,
lurking behind a cosmopolitan facade is a tense and divisive battle over the
country's future.

Those who want to maintain the country's secular roots are fighting what
they call creeping Islamicization. Muslim women who at the time of
independence often wore silky, tight-fitting outfits today do not leave the
house without a head scarf, which is now also required for female police
officers of all religions during official functions.

Muslim prayers are piped into the loudspeakers of government offices in the
new administrative capital, Putrajaya. And Islamic police officers routinely
arrest unmarried couples for "close proximity."

"I see the writing on the wall," said Ivy Josiah, the director of the
Women's Aid Organization, a group that lobbies the government on women's
issues. "It's only a matter of time before Malaysia becomes another Taliban
state."

Malaysia, a multiracial country where just over half the population of 26
million is Muslim, is testing the limits of compatibility between
traditional Muslim beliefs and Western- style democracy.

In Europe, the threat of terrorism posed by disaffected Muslims has spurred
religious leaders and politicians to wonder whether there is a better way to
assimilate Muslim and Western traditions. The experience of Malaysia appears
to show that there is no easy solution, even after five decades of trying.

In recent years, a number of high- profile court cases have highlighted the
clash between Muslim and secular laws, but none so much as the lawsuit
brought by Lina Joy, a computer saleswoman, who is challenging the Malaysian
government over its refusal to officially acknowledge her conversion from
Islam to Christianity. After two lower courts ruled for the government, Joy
awaits a judgment from the country's highest court.

The case has aggravated already mistrustful relations between Muslim,
Christian and Hindu communities. It has led to death threats against one
prominent lawyer, large protest gatherings and a ban by the government on
any further public debate. At the heart of the case is the fundamental
question of which is supreme in Malaysia: Muslim law or the country's
secular Constitution.

Malaysia has a hybrid legal system that incorporates both Islamic and civil
laws for personal and family matters: Muslims are governed by religious laws
against drinking, eating during the daylight hours of Ramadan and having
close proximity between unmarried women and men. Marriages, divorces,
funerals, and inheritance are governed by Islamic laws.

For non-Muslims - Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs - civil laws
apply. But the hybrid system is now in crisis and the multiracial fabric
could fray.

Critics complain of Islamic influence in day-to-day governance. When the
government recently debated whether free needles should be distributed to
drug addicts, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said he would first check
with the Muslim authorities for guidance on whether this followed Islamic
principles.

"You are seeing worldwide a common thing happening," said Malik Imtiaz
Sarwar, a Muslim lawyer. "Muslims are defining themselves by their religion
instead of their country." Malik recently asked for police protection after
receiving death threats for his role in the Lina Joy case: he submitted a
brief in defense of Joy's right to convert.

"Lina Joy is important because it's finally brought to light the tensions
that exist between those who favor an Islamic state and those who believe in
the universal values entrenched in the Constitution," Malik said in an
interview.

Lawyers who back the government's position in the case say Muslims in
Malaysia are subject to Islamic law. "We are not saying you do not have any
choice of religion. But if you want to convert out you must do so in the
Islamic court," said Zulkifli Noordin, a lawyer who submitted a brief in
support of the government's position.

In reality, converting out of Islam is frowned upon if not actively
discouraged in Malaysia. Only one state, Negri Sembilan, allows apostasy and
usually after ordering the person through a lengthy rehabilitation program -
an attempt to keep them from converting.

Zulkifli says 18 people have successfully left the faith, although many
others are thought to have done so unofficially. In the country's most
conservative state, Kelantan, local laws call for the death penalty for
apostates. The law has not yet been applied.

The context of the tensions in the Lina Joy case is a Muslim community that
says it feels under siege and threatened by a thriving evangelical Christian
movement. Newspapers cite wild estimates of mass conversions if Lina Joy
wins her case and call for a strengthening of religious law.

Over the past 30 years, the percentage of people who call themselves
Christians has doubled to 10 percent, according to Wong Kim Kong, secretary
general of the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship. Wong says the
growth in the church has come from Christians "sharing their faith in a very
natural way."

"People experience God and naturally tell people about God," Wong said. "We
don't have missionaries coming from overseas and doing that kind of work. No
more." Josiah, the director of the Women's Aid Organization, says the most
regrettable consequence of the Lina Joy case and other inter-religious
disputes that preceded it is the strain it is placing on personal
interaction between people of different ethnic groups.

"The whole thing about being multicultural, multiethnic is not just a
tourist attraction," Josiah said. "We live it and breathe it."

40 YEARS AFTER SAYYID QUTB'S MARTYRDOM

40 WESTERN YEARS AFTER SAYYID QUTB'S MARTYRDOM

From: islamiccommunitynet
Assalamu aleikum.
Sayyid Qutb was martyred 40 western years ago this date by hanging on
August 29, 1966 by Gamel Nasser. The movement and the struggle
continue and have become internationalized. Sayyid Qutb's work remains
an inspiration for mujahideen everywhere.

Please note that 3 articles follow:

*Sayyid Qutb
*Milestones - By Sayyid Qutb (index and link)
*Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Leaders Arrested


---


(1)

Sayyid Qutb
By Ahmed El-Kadi, MD
http://www.islam101.com/history/people/century20/syedQutb.htm

Sayyid Qutb, the doyen of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun, had a very profound
impact on the Muslim Arab youth coming of age since late 60s. Western
writers in recent years have focused on him as one of the two most
influencial Muslim thinkers of this century, the other being Sayyid
Maududi. Qutb's writings prior to 1951 are more of a `moralist'. It
was after he was introduced to Maududi's ideas, especially his
emphasis on Islam being a complete way of life, and establishment of
Allah's order on earth as every Muslim's primary responsibility that
Qutb changed into a revolutionary. His two years sojourn (1948-1950)
in the US opened his eyes to the malise of the western culture and
non-Islamic ideologies.

After his return to Egypt he resigned his job in the Education
directorate and devoted himself to the idea of bringing a total change
in the political system. Ikhwan gained ideological vitality when
Sayyid Qutb in his jail cell wrote a book in which he revised Hassan
al-Banna Shahid's dream of establishing an Islamic state in Egypt
after the nation was thoroughly Islamized. Sayyid Qutb recommended
that a revlutionary vanguard should first establish an Islamic state
and then, from above impose Islamization on Egyptian society that had
deviated to Arab nationalistic ideologies.

His subsequent 11 years behind prison walls gave him an opportunity to
confirm what Maududi's writing made him aware, and that is what
convinced the secular Nasserites to condemn him to death on false
accusations.

Other than Prophet Muhammad (s), the contemporary men who had great
influence on me were my father, Imam Hassan al-Banna, and Shaheed
Sayyid Qutb. The first two Islamic books that I studied as teenager
were "Dirasat Islamiyya" (Studies in Islam, or Lessons in Islam) and
Aladalah Alijtima'eyyah Fil-Islam (Social Justice in Islam) both by
Sayyid Qutb. Although I have never met or seen Sayyid Qutb, I knew him
(as most other Muslims involved with Islamic work) through his many
books, like the two mentioned above, his great commentary on the
Qur'an, Fithilal-el-Qur'an (in the Shades of the Qur'an), and other books.

Sayyid Qutb was born on 8 October 1906, in a village called "Musha" in
the township of Qaha in the province of Assyout in Egypt. He entered
the elementary and primary school of Musha in 1912 and finished his
primary education in 1918. He dropped out of school for two years
because of the revolution of 1919. His father was Haj Qutb, son of
Ibrahi, and a well-known religious person in his village, and his
mother was also a religious lady from a well-known family who cared
about him and his two younger sisters, Hamida and Amina, and a younger
brother, Muhammad. After completing his primary education in Musha,
Sayyid Qutb moved to Cairo for further education where he lived with
his uncle, Ahmad Hussain Osman. This was in 1920, when he was 14 years
old. It should be noted that he memorized the Qur'an when he was about
10 years old in his village. He lost his father while he was in Cairo,
so he convinced his mother to move with him to Cairo, where she died
in 1940. After the death of his mother, he expressed his loneliness in
several articles (Ummah, My Mother) published in the book, "Atatiaf
Alarbaa" (The Four Lights), which his sisters, brother and he wrote.

In Cairo, he completed his high school education and enrolled in the
teachers' college, Darul Oloom, in 1929. In 1939 he qualified as an
Arabic-Language teacher and received a Bachelor of Arts degree then
joined the ministry of education. Very soon (about six years), he left
his ministry job as a teacher and devoted his time to freelance
writing. A factor leading to his resignation from the teaching job was
his disagreement with the ministry of education and many colleagues
regarding his philosophy of education and his attitude towards the
literary arts.

From 1939 to 1951, an obvious switch in his writing towards the
Islamic ideology was noted. He wrote several articles on the artistic
expression of the Qur'an, as well as two books titled "Expression of
the Qur'an" and "Scenes from the Day of Judgement." In 1948, his book
"Social Justice in Islam" was published. In it he made it clear that
true social justice can only be realized in Islam. In November 1948,
he went to the United States to study educational curricula. He spent
two and one half years moving between Washington DC., and California,
where he realized the materialistic attitude of the literary arts and
its lack of spirituality. He interrupted his stay in the United States
and returned to Egypt in August 1950. Sayyid Qutb resumed his job as a
teacher and inspector in the ministry of education before he resigned
in October 1952 (again because of his repeated philosophical
disagreements with the minister of education and many of his colleagues).

The period from 1951 to 1965 included his joining the Ikhwan (The
Muslim Brotherhood). His ideas were quite clear about the fallacy of
many of the prevailing social and political/economic injustices and
the need for Islamic reform, and he became the chief editor of the
newspaper of Ikhwan. During his period, several of his books appeared
on Islamic ideology and Islam as a complete way of life. He was
arrested when the Ikhwan was accused of attempting to overthrow the
government in 1954 and was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment with
hard labor. He remained in Jarah prison near Cairo for about 10 years
after which due to his health condition, he was released when the
Iraqi President, Abdul Salam Arif, intervened.

In 1965 he published his famous book, Mallem Fittareek (Milestones),
which led to his re-arrest with the accusation of conspiracy against
the Egyptian President, Abdul Nasser. He was tried and rapidly
sentenced to death based upon many excerpts of his book, Milestones.
There was quite an international uproar and protest in various Muslim
countries with appeals to President Abdul Nasser to pardon Sayyid
Qutb. In spite of several demonstrations and many objections in
various Muslim countries, Sayyid Qutb was executed by hanging on
August 29, 1966. He left behind a total of 24 books, including several
novels, several books on literary arts' critique, on the education of
adults and children, and several religious books, including the 30
volume Commentary of the Qur'an.

Sayyid Qutb will always be remembered for his legacy of clearly
defining the basic ideas of the Oneness and sovereignty of Allah, the
clear distinction between pure faith and the association of partners
with Allah (Shirk) overt and hidden, and the only hope for salvation
of humanity. Sayyid Qutb was smiling when he was executed, showing his
conviction of the beautiful life to come in paradise – a life he
definitely and rightfully deserved.

http://www.islam101.com/history/people/century20/syedQutb.htm


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Milestones - By Sayyid Qutb
Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice, not because of the
danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head-this
being just a symptom and not the real disease
http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/milestones/hold/index_2.asp

Table of Index:

* Introduction
* Chapter 1:
o The unique Qur'anic generation
* Chapter 2:
o The nature of the Qur'anic method
* Chapter 3:
o The Characteristics of the Islamic Society and the Correct
method for its Formation
* Chapter 4:
o Jihadd in the cause of God
* Chapter 5:
o La Ilaha Illa Allah-The way of Life of Islam
* Chapter 6:
o The Universal Law
* Chapter 7:
o Islam is the Real Civilization
* Chapter 8:
o Chapter 8 is down, for technical reasons. We apologize for
the inconvenience. Feel free to search on Google with the keywords
Milestone + Syed Qutb.
* Chapter 9:
o A Muslim's Nationality and his Belief
* Chapter 10:
o Far-Reaching Changes
* Chapter 11:
o The faith Triumphant
* Chapter 12:
o This is the Road

http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/milestones/hold/index_2.asp


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Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Leaders Arrested
Written by The Media Line Staff
The Media Line
Published Monday, August 28, 2006
http://themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=14894

The Egyptian State Security's Prosecution arrested over the weekend 17
leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, including
General-Secretary Dr. Mahmoud 'Izzat, the London-based daily A-Sharq
Al-Awsat reports.

The group will face charges of being members of an outlawed
organization and possessing publications propagating its ideologies,
said the Muslim Brotherhood's lawyer 'Abd Al-Mun'im `Abd Al-Maq'soud.

According to the investigation report, the group attempted to "incite
the public, spread chaos and call for public disobedience." They did
so, according to A-Sharq Al-Awsat, using the offices of the Muslim
Brotherhood's members of parliament.

The Muslim Brotherhood, an outlawed but tolerated movement, is the
largest opposition movement in Egypt. The organization fielded
candidates as independents in last year's legislative elections and
won a fifth of the seats in the parliament.

A week and a half ago the Egyptian police arrested another 17 members
of the movement. They were arrested for allegedly holding a meeting in
eastern Cairo, aimed at "reviving the movement's activities."

http://themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=14894

Why Do Muslims Execute Innocent People?

Why Do Muslims Execute Innocent People?
Islamist Ideology
by Denis MacEoin
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2006
http://www.meforum.org/article/1000

While often ignored in the Western media, human rights abuses in the Islamic world are a daily occurrence. Both Muslim states and ad hoc religious courts order mutilation and execution, not only of criminals but also of individuals—mainly women—who have not committed anything which would be considered a crime in other societies. In some cases, Shari‘a (Islamic law) tribunals issue death sentences for those acquitted in regular courts.[1] In other cases, religious leaders invoke religion to sanction non-Islamic practices such as honor killings and female genital mutilation.

Original Islamic jurisprudence, however, does not necessarily mandate such severe punishments. In the early twentieth century, it even seemed that the introduction of modern legal codes in Muslim majority countries might ameliorate regular Shari‘a punishments, but in recent decades, traditionalists have pushed a back-to-basics program which has augmented application of Shari‘a punishment. Rather than modifying Islamic practice, many self-described Islamist reformers make matters worse by advocating retrenchment rather than reform.

Unjust Punishment
Many of the crimes for which death is mandated involve sex or honor. While capricious application of Shari‘a punishment is common throughout Muslim majority countries and communities, since the fall of the Taliban and because of the activity of Iranian journalists and bloggers, many of the specific examples which are known in the West come from Iran.

On August 15, 2004, 16-year-old Ateqeh Rajabi, was hanged in public in the northern Iranian town of Neka. Her crime was to have sex with her boyfriend. She had no lawyer, nor could her family find one willing to defend her. The capriciousness of the judge rather than a strict interpretation of the Qur'an contributed to her death. She had talked back to the judge, Haji Reza'i, who later remarked that he would not have ordered her execution had it not been for her "sharp tongue."[2]

In December 2004, Leyla, a 19-year-old girl with a mental age of eight, was sentenced to death for "acts contrary to chastity." The sentencing judge ordered her to be flogged before execution. Her situation was lamentable. When she was eight, her mother forced her into prostitution, letting her be raped repeatedly. She was later sold as a temporary wife (mut'a, sigha), legal in Twelver Shi‘ite law which allows temporary wives to be contracted for set periods ranging from one hour to ninety-nine years. Thirteen-year-old Zhila Izadi also received a death sentence—later commuted—after being impregnated by her older brother.

Other examples abound. In July 2005, Iranian authorities publicly hanged two boys, 18-year-old Ayaz Marhoni and 16-year-old Mahmud Asghari, in the shrine city of Mashhad for homosexual acts. Photographs of the boys with nooses round their necks just before their execution are available online,[3] but never appeared in Western newspapers or on television.

On January 7, 2006, an Islamic court in Tehran passed a death sentence on an 18-year old girl, identified only by her first name, Nazanin. She had stabbed an assailant while fighting off three men who attempted to rape her and her 16-year-old niece.[4] Reports suggested their attackers were members of the Basij, a radical militia charged with upholding the Islamic Republic's revolutionary principles. Nazanin was aged seventeen at the time of her offence, too young for a death sentence even under Iranian law that states that such sentences for minors should be commuted to five years' imprisonment. In Nazanin's case, the judge ignored extenuating circumstances and applied rigidly the law of retaliation (qisas). Under such a system, a life must be paid for by a life, an eye for an eye, except where the family of the victim is willing to accept blood money or compensation (diya) for lost body parts and organs.[5]

Iran is not the only Islamic country practicing spurious punishment. On April 21, 2005, in Spingul, a valley near Faizabad in Afghanistan's Badakhshan province, family members and villagers executed 25-year-old Bibi Amin after she was found in the company of a man to whom she was not married. She was buried to her neck and, for two hours, stoned.[6] There have been similar cases in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and other Muslim countries. Even in Egypt, where Shari‘a law has been modified, men and women are still imprisoned unequally for adultery.[7] That the application of such punishments is widespread and that its perpetrators justify their actions in Islam neither means that a consensus exists among theologians or that such interpretations have been consistent through time.

Qur'anic Attitudes toward Punishment
With only one exception, every chapter of the Qur'an begins with the words Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim, "In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate." While such compassion is lacking in modern application of Shari‘a law, this has not always been the case. Many traditional sources argue for limited punishment. The Sunan of Ibn Maja, one of the six canonical collections, cites a saying by Muhammad that reads, "Do not carry out punishments if you can find a way to avoid them."[8]

This example is echoed by another tradition from the Sunan of Tirmidhi: "Wherever possible, do not inflict punishments (hudud; singular hadd) on Muslims; if there is a way out for someone, let him go. It is better for the ruler (al-imam) to err in forgiveness than for him to err in punishment."[9] According to the twelfth-century jurist and philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), "hadd punishments are suspended in doubtful cases," echoing another hadith to that effect.[10]

Still, in traditional Islam, adultery and fornication (both termed zina') are considered criminal acts worthy of a hadd punishment, which the Qur'an sets at 100 lashes.[11] Adultery itself is a difficult charge to bring under Shari‘a: it requires four adult male witnesses to the penetration; in contrast, only two males (or four females) need witness murder for the charges to stick. Nor is circumstantial evidence sufficient. Pregnancy is not enough to prove that adultery occurred since the law considers that a woman may have been penetrated in her sleep or, according to some scholars, the possibility that an embryo could have gestated for up to five years. The penalty for false accusation of adultery is seventy-five lashes.

That does not mean that Islamic law does not embrace the death penalty for adultery. At some point—often said to have occurred during the rule of the second caliph ‘Umar (r. 634-44)—jurists began to set the punishment for married people as stoning to death based on a verse that had allegedly been dropped from the Qur'an.[12] Stoning is also mentioned in the Hadith, and there is no doubt that Muhammad sanctioned the punishment. However, strict conditions are determined for accusation and punishment. A distinction is made between unmarried and married offenders; inebriation, force, and errors such as intercourse with a woman mistaken for a man's wife or slave girl are mitigating factors while the demand for four eyewitnesses to sexual penetration makes it almost impossible to bring an accusation. It is because of the difficulties of formal adultery charges that many Islamic societies embrace honor killing.

Historically, there were significant differences in the treatment of free men and slaves. Modern Iranian law discriminates even further against religious minorities. The Islamic Republic might execute a non-Muslim man accused of having sexual relations with a Muslim woman, whereas a Muslim man who has sex with a non-Muslim woman is not subject to any penalty.[13]

Despite the potential for leniency in the application of Islamic rules, states acting in the name of religion have applied harsher penalties than traditional religious jurists. The Islamic Republic of Iran ordered Ateqeh Rajabi hanged even though Shari‘a only permits the execution of married adulterers, whereas she was single. At most, she should have received 100 lashes—and, according to many interpretations, these should not be laid on hard.

The hadith literature is not silent on two of the factors relevant to many of the recent applications of capital punishment in the name of Islam for crimes of honor. Tirmidhi relates an incident when a woman was brought to the Prophet, accused of adultery. It transpired that the man had forced her to have intercourse in acknowledgment of which Muhammad refused to have her punished.[14] Young age can also be cause for leniency. Ibn Maja records a statement by a boy who survived the massacre of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza in 627, saying he had been spared the fate of the tribe's men because he had not yet grown pubic hair.[15]

What about a case such as Nazanin's, in which a person was killed? In Islamic law, offenses against the person come under the law of qisas. These offenses amount to five crimes: murder, voluntary manslaughter—such as when an offender sets out to beat a victim but kills him or her in the process, involuntary killing, intentional physical injury, and unintentional injury.

Retaliation—a life for a life—is permissible in the two instances of intentional killing or injury, but even in these cases, the victim's family may waive retribution in return for a set financial payment. In all other cases, only blood money may be demanded. If correct Shari‘a rules were applied, Nazanin would not face a death sentence for an involuntary killing, especially when she had acted in defense of her honor.

Theological Impediments to Reform
So why is there a growing discrepancy between the penalties justified in Islamic jurisprudence and the far more serious punishments applied? Traditional Muslims believe that the Qur'an is immutable. It is not just a sacred text like the Torah or the New Testament but a direct copy of God's word imprinted on the mind of Muhammad via recitation from the Archangel Gabriel. It cannot be rewritten. Indeed, a hadith attributes to Muhammad the saying, "Whosoever disputes a single verse of the Qur'an, strike off his head."[16]

This doctrine has become pernicious for all who attempt a modern understanding of the scripture. Whereas progressive Jewish and Christian scholars and clerics have devised forms of higher criticism that tackle issues of context and period, all efforts to do the same thing with the Qur'an have met with fierce resistance. Several Muslim reformers—notably Pakistani academic Fazlur Rahman (1911-88), Iranian cleric Muhammad Mujtahid-i Shabestari (b. 1936), Iranian philosopher ‘Abd al-Karim Soroush (b. 1945), and the Syrian Muhammad Shahrur (b. 1938)—have tried to develop ways to account for the social, linguistic, and religious environment at the time of the Qur'an's revelation when adjudicating and legislating on matters relevant to the modern world, such as women's rights. Their efforts have pushed the debate in a positive direction, but they are both better understood and better liked in the West than in the Muslim world.[17]

Muslim reactions to such reformist initiatives have been largely hostile and even violent. In the 1960s, a Pakistani religious court sentenced Fazlur Rahman to death.[18] Vigilantes have attacked Souroush on numerous occasions,[19] and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born ex-member of the Dutch parliament;[20] Canadian writer Irshad Manji;[21] and Los Angeles-based psychologist Wafa Sultan, [22] all outspoken critics of Islamic social practice, are in hiding or under guard.

The pressure to reject contextualization of the Qur'an is illustrated by two cases, occurring more than sixty years apart in Egypt. In 1930, a cleric named Muhammad Abu Zayd, published a book of Qur'an exegesis titled Al-Hidaya wa'l-'Irfan fi Tafsir al-Qur'an bi'l-Qur'an, in which he treated concepts such as paradise as metaphors. Other clerics at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, the central seat of religious learning and authority in Sunni Islam, condemned him. Rashid Rida' issued a more forceful condemnation, accused the author of being an apostate, and called for his forcible divorce. All copies of the tafsir were collected by the police and destroyed. Clerics who had read it were dismissed from their posts.[23]

In 1992, history repeated itself. Egyptian academic Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd presented research in application for a full professorship at Cairo University. His work argued that the Qur'an had been written in a human language so that men could understand it. Since it was in a specific language, he argued, it was legitimate to read it with reference to our knowledge of seventh-century Arabic and the human world to which it was directed. His arguments created an uproar. Al-Azhar University condemned him. Leaflets and the popular press accused him of heresy. The Egyptian government tried him before a secular court on charges of apostasy. He was declared a heretic (mulhid) and an apostate (murtadd) and became the object of death threats from radical Islamists throughout the country. An Egyptian court ordered that he and his wife be divorced on the grounds that a Muslim woman cannot be married to a non-Muslim, even as he denied ever abandoning his faith. He now teaches at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.[24] That parallel situations would occur sixty years apart illustrates how stifled scholarly discourse is at Al-Azhar.

A particularly flagrant example of academic suppression in a modern Shi‘ite context may be seen in the case of ‘Abdulaziz Sachedina, a prominent Shi‘ite academic, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, and coauthor of Human Rights and the Conflict of Cultures: Western and Islamic Perspectives on Religious Liberty.[25] In August 1998, Sachedina, who had received complaints from his local Muslim community about his teaching and writing about Islam, held a meeting in Najaf, Iraq, with grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. In the course of this interview, as recorded in detail by Sachedina, Sistani demanded that he could no longer "express any opinions in matters dealing with Islam, its religion, and its teachings." Prominent among the many theological errors of which Sachedina was accused was his promotion of an irenic, pluralist approach to Judaism and Christianity, which he saw as equals of Islam.[26]

The net result of such incidents is discouragement of serious revisionist work on the Qur'an and the Hadith. Fear for one's life, the safety of one's family, or one's livelihood are powerful disincentives to saying or writing anything controversial. The only arena in which open debate on such matters takes place is in Western academe, but it is likely here that some Muslim academics living in the West and, indeed, some Western scholars of Islam have chosen safer areas in which to carry out research, knowing the risks they now run from a single accusation of defamation.

Qur'anic Challenges
The problem is that, despite the belief that the Qur'an is the immutable word of God, in its current form the book was compiled only during the reign of the Caliph ‘Uthman (644-56) and organized into suras, ranging in length from a few verses to many pages. While the Qur'an was revealed over a period of twenty-two years, the order of compilation was curious: with the exception of the first sura (al-Fatiha), the longest suras come first and the shortest last. Early scholars debated when particular suras, verses, or groups of verses were "sent down." Determining chronology was often basic, all suras being labeled either Meccan or Medinan, based on in which of these two Arabian cities Muhammad had received a particular revelation. Sometimes it was possible to attribute certain passages to a particular incident, such as the Battle of Uhud or a dispute with the Prophet's wives. These asbab an-nuzul (occasions of revelation), insofar as they are reliable, permit a more nuanced picture of how the text developed during Muhammad's lifetime.

One thing is clear: later verses often express a position contrary to earlier ones. For example, early—mainly Meccan—verses express a positive view of Jews and Christians, whereas late ones—all Medinan—follow the souring of relations between the Prophet and both Jews and Christians. By this reckoning, there are late verses that abrogate (termed nasikh) and early verses which are abrogated (termed mansukh).

Verses commanding jihad against non-believers abrogate those of an ecumenical nature, moving from a position of "There is no compulsion in religion"[27] to "Fight those who do not believe in God or the last day, who do not forbid what God and his Prophet forbid, who do not believe in the religion of truth among those who were given the Book [Jews and Christians] until they pay the poll tax (jizya) by their own hands, having been brought low."[28]

The problem is that earlier sections of the Qur'an tend to be more amenable to a modernist interpretation than later ones. Where modern Muslims emphasize the verse decreeing that there is no compulsion in matters of faith, more radical or orthodox scholars trump such citations with nasikh verses overriding moderate interpretations.

What impact does this have on punishment? Qur'anic verses that mention punishments are invariably late but not very detailed. Although the Qur'an always carries greater weight than the hadiths, it is not uncommon to see a hadith cited to support a harsher legal position. Thus, the verse, "There is no compulsion in religion" is outweighed by the tradition according to which the Prophet said, "Whosoever changes his religion, kill him,"[29] which forms a basis for the law of apostasy as it still stands.[30]

The Emergence of Islamic Neo-radicalism
What happened to some strains of Islam to favor the past over the present and glorify black-and-white interpretations of the Qur'an over more nuanced approaches? While the exact answer varies across regions, certain common factors emerge.

In several cases, a puritan form of Islam has either allied itself with a military or political force—for example the Salafi-Wahhabi movement's alliance with the Saud family in Saudi Arabia—or has itself taken political power, as with the early nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa or, more recently, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's followers in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or, perhaps, the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. In all such cases, the resulting political systems have applied Shari‘a in a harsher form than usual.

In addition, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, there has been a broader struggle between traditionalist and modernizing influences and movements. Growing European influence in Middle Eastern states led to demands for the introduction of Western-style constitutions, educational systems, and laws. Many regional countries adopted modern legal codes modeled on the French, Italian, Swiss, British, or other systems. This represented a great step forward in respect to areas such as family law, tangential women's rights, legal clarity, and modes of punishment.

There were, however, two drawbacks to this brand of modernization. The first was the alienation of the clerical class. Religious leaders are "the learned" (ulema), men who have undergone training as jurists within Shari‘a. Marginalized by the introduction of European criminal codes and the establishment of Western-style courts, divested in many places of their role as educators, and alienated by the overt secularization of many Muslim societies and cultures, the ulema dreamed of a return to basics. They were backed by like-minded lay thinkers, such as Hasan al-Banna (1906-49), a schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, an influential and radicalizing force in several countries in the Middle East and Europe.[31]

The reaction against modernization might have been muted had there been a loose movement for reformation of Shari‘a itself. Mainstream scholars held that it was impossible for modern jurists to challenge or alter the legal precepts set down in the early tenth century by the four main Sunni law schools—Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali. The classical formulation of this precept is that the gates of ijtihad, independent reasoning in matters of religious law, had been closed. The Qur'an—as the immutable word of God—could not be rewritten nor could the records of the Prophet's life and sayings—the other source from which Islamic law derived—be edited or reconsidered.

However, beginning in the late nineteenth century, a number of thinkers argued that, even if the sacred texts could not be altered, it was legitimate to exercise reasoning in order to bring the laws more in line with modern ways of thought and practice. At that time, Muslim attitudes to the West were generally positive. Arab, Iranian, and Turkish political reformers sought to emulate European political systems, science, technology, military know-how, schools, universities, and laws. They argued that Islam could advance by re-configuring itself along Western lines.

Despite this, a small number of intellectuals developed a countervailing trend that emphasized the religious and legal thought of the first three generations of the faith. This became the Salafi movement, derived from the Arabic term salaf (predecessors).[32] Salafi thinkers such as Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905)[33] reexamined the two basic texts, the Qur'an and the body of traditions or hadiths that make up the Sunna, the living record of how the Prophet and his companions behaved and thought. From this emerged a belief that, far from needing to be modernized, Islamic law and, by extension, Muslim life in general, had to return to how it was at the time of the Salaf. Most of the movements Western commentators term "fundamentalist" are Salafi.

While the first modern Salafi thinkers sought reform, later Salafi theoreticians narrowed the debate. Egyptian cleric Muhammad Rashid Rida' (1865-1935) published a periodical, Al-Manar (The Lighthouse), which influenced intellectuals across the Islamic world. His ideas formed a bridge between Salafi reformers and more radical movements such as Banna's Muslim Brotherhood.[34]

These new Salafists focused on improving Muslim morals and what has come to be known as "Shari‘a-mindedness." Sayyid Qutb (1906-66),[35] probably the most influential Islamist thinker of the twentieth century, took this moral emphasis and extended it to include violent action against both non-believers and unfaithful Muslim rulers. He argued that the term al-jahiliya, which had normally been used to define the "Age of Ignorance" that preceded Islam, should now be applied to the present day to the extent that modern society—including Muslim society—had distanced itself from Islam. Just as Muhammad fought a holy war against the forces of paganism in seventh-century Arabia, so, too, true Muslims should fight the barbarism of the modern age. Qutb outlined these ideas in a short book, Ma'alim fi' t-Tariq (Milestones on the Road), based on notes he kept in prison.[36] The text launched the new, radicalized, jihadist style of Salafi thought and activism.

It is this world-view that is echoed today by theorists such as Osama bin Laden and groups such as the Afghan Taliban. They argue that Islam cannot adapt to the changes imposed by history but must remain rigidly faithful to the existing interpretations of scripture, the models laid down by the Prophet and his companions, and the legal rulings developed from these sources by the first generations of legal scholars.

Reform without Reformation
There have been and are a number of reformers working to bring Islam into closer harmony with universal standards of justice, tolerance, pluralism, and human rights. These include Nurcholish Madjid (1939-2005), the founder of a school of Islamic neo-modernism in Indonesia, in which contextualized, independent reasoning in matters of religious law, ijtihad, is put forward as a path to renovation, and radicalism is understood as an obstacle to progress because of its authoritarian and intolerant nature; Mohammed Arkoun, an Algerian thinker, who teaches at the University of Paris III, for whom secularization and modernization are essential elements of Islamic progress; and feminists such as Asra Q. Nomani who have called for major liberalization in the sphere of women's rights.

Others present a liberalizing face to the Western media and academia but retain an essentially conservative position on everything from hijab (veiling) to jihad. This charismatic but, essentially, two-faced trend promotes an image of Islam as protective of human rights while sticking to an agenda in favor of strict Shari‘a limitations to such rights. Two notable figures in this context are Tariq Ramadan and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Ramadan is the Swiss-born grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna. With a broad academic background including Swiss doctorates in philosophy and Islamic studies, and Arabic and Islamic studies qualifications from Al-Azhar University, he has taught at several Western universities, including the University of Fribourg and St. Anthony's College, Oxford. While he is banned from the United States,[37] he has been accepted in Europe as a Muslim intellectual with a reputation for moderation. That said, many French intellectuals describe him as "The Master of Doubletalk" and regard him as an intégriste or fundamentalist. He has argued, for example, that Muslims should enter into mainstream society only to move it closer to Islam; that he accepts Western laws but only so long as they do not oblige him to do something against his religion; that stoning for adultery should be subject only to a moratorium until Muslim clerics discuss the matter; that Muslim women should insist on wearing the veil; that swimming pools should be segregated, and so on.[38] His support for radicals such as Yahya Michot, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, or Sayyid Qutb lays bare an agenda far from that of the moderate he likes to pass himself off to be.

Qaradawi (b. 1926) is another Azharite with an international following. Considered by most Muslims as a "moderate conservative" and lionized by London mayor Ken Livingstone, Qaradawi's moderation on issues such as elections and women's enfranchisement is a thin disguise for radicalism. He has issued fatwas and commented in lectures, television broadcasts, and on the Internet that wives should submit to their husbands; men may beat their wives "lightly;" men and women should mix only to a very limited degree; and women must wear hijab. He has deemed female genital mutilation, flogging of adulterers, and execution of homosexuals and apostates permissible and has endorsed suicide attacks against Israeli civilians or U.S. soldiers and civilians in Iraq. He has also condemned liberal democracies and urged Muslims to vent their anger publicly on issues such as the Danish cartoon controversy.[39]

Some Western governments have relied upon Ramadan, Qaradawi, and others to develop appropriate policies towards Islam and Muslims. Western media have painted them as authorities on Islam, enabling them to speak without an explicit mandate on behalf of Muslims. By drawing media and government attention to themselves while keeping their agendas hidden, they come to overshadow more authentically reformist figures. This problem is compounded by the numerous self-appointed bodies claiming to represent Muslims in Western countries, such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Council of Britain.

None of these individuals have used their prominence to speak out about harsh punishments, the execution of minors, or the stoning of those whom most modern cultures would call innocent women. It is probable that many self-described reformers practice a form of taqiya or religious dissimulation in order to show a moderate face to the West and quite a different perspective to their constituents in the Muslim world.

Indeed, when challenged about the harshness of Shari‘a penalties, many Muslim writers and Islamist politicians state their dislike for the alternative—human rights as defined by the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights"—on the grounds that such agreements are of Western origin, that they will undermine the norms of Islamic societies, and that they are not themselves based on Shari‘a rulings. Some Muslim intellectuals have even argued that human rights do not exist in Islam. In 1985, Sa'id Raja'i-Khurasani, the permanent Iranian delegate to the United Nations, stated that the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which represented secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition, could not be implemented by Muslims and did not accord with the system of values recognized by the Islamic Republic of Iran … his country would, therefore, not hesitate to violate its prescriptions."[40] According to Ayatollah Muhammad-Taqi Misbah-Yazdi, a contender for the role of Iranian supreme leader upon the demise or removal of ‘Ali Khamene'i, "Islamic human rights differ from the ‘Declaration of Human Rights.' … Human rights must be Islamic human rights."[41]

Conclusion
There are, then, several reasons why severe punishments and unreasonable judgments continue in parts of the Islamic world and why certain human rights—the freedom to change one's religion, to convert Muslims to another faith, to enjoy full civil rights as a Baha'i, Zoroastrian, Armenian, or Jew, to marry by free choice, to write about controversial religious issues—are nowhere recognized. In the absence of fully secularized educational systems and with the increasing political involvement of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas, the day when genuine reform arrives in most Muslim countries seems to be as far off as ever.

A hardening of sentiment against the West and an increasing tendency to fall back on conspiracy theories to explain Islamic problems seem to make insistence on tough Shari‘a -mindedness a desirable option for many if only as a weapon to use against perceived Western weaknesses. Desperate not to offend, the West has done little to make issue of abuses such as those promoted by judges like Haji Reza'i. While crimes such as his go unpunished, the continued stoning, hanging, flogging, and even beheading all serve to intimidate Western critics and are, therefore, encouraged by Islamic states and groups.

On a wider scale, a major debate needs to take place between advocates of Islamic or other relativist human rights agendas and supporters of the principle that such rights are, by their very nature, universal and applicable to all people at all times and in all places. Unfortunately, that debate cannot take place openly while there is a threat of violence from those who oppose the notion of human rights as a Western or Zionist evil.

What are the policy implications of this situation for Western countries, the U.N., and international human rights organizations? One is that they should give more genuine support to Muslim reformers, their conferences and publications, and, where appropriate, their teaching positions. Another is to pressure Islamic governments to make arrests when death threats and similar menaces are used instead of open argument. A recent Saudi doctoral thesis listed two hundred names of intellectuals who must be killed while, in May 2006, Osama bin Laden declared open season on all Muslim freethinkers. Neither the Saudi government nor the Islamic establishment elsewhere have moved to counter such provocations.[42]

Human rights issues must be linked more firmly to trade and other agreements. The multiculturalist notion that Muslims may not be criticized for the use of unjust and cruel punishments must be countered. The stigma of political incorrectness is counterproductive. Islamic countries and ordinary Muslims must be given incentives to observe human rights norms within their borders and disincentives to apply the Shari‘a in harsh and unjust ways.

The case of Egyptian democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim is instructive and suggests that outside pressure can work. In 2000, following his criticism of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's anointing of son Gamal as his successor, an Egyptian court arrested Ibrahim on spurious charges involving finance of his nongovernmental organization, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies. The Bush administration responded by withholding nearly $200 million in aid pending Ibrahim's release. The Egyptian government responded by setting him free.

The payoff from support given to positive reform is potentially enormous. If genuinely reformist thinkers are enabled to have an impact within Muslim societies, violence, unjust punishments, and abuse of human rights in the name of religion will decline. In the end, a space for dialogue can only be opened up when intellectual debate joins forces with a determined war on terror—not only terror against Western interests but also against all violence done to Muslims themselves in the name of religion.

Denis MacEoin holds a Ph.D. in Persian studies from the University of Cambridge. He taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University and was for many years an honorary fellow at Durham University. He is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newcastle University.

[1] The Washington Post, May 20, 2006.
[2] Amnesty International U.K., news release, Aug. 24, 2004.
[3] BBC News, July 28, 2005.
[4] Etema'ad (Tehran), Jan. 7, 2006.
[5] For examples from a Shi‘ite perspective, see Ayatullah Sayyid Abulqasim al-Khoei, Islamic Laws of Ayatullah Khoei, trans. Muhammad Fazal Haq (New York: Islamic Seminary Publications, n.d.), ch. 35, pp. 2808, 2814-5.
[6] AdvocacyNet, news bulletin, no. 37, May 23, 2005.
[7] "Punishment for Non-Marital Sex in Islam," Religious Tolerance.org, accessed June 6, 2006.
[8] Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Yazid ibn Maja ar-Rab'i al-Qazwini, Sunan Ibn Maja, Bab al-Hudud, Al-Islam.com, Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Waqf, Missions, and Guidance, Saudi Arabia, accessed July 5, 2006.
[9] Abu ‘Isa Muhammad at-Tirmidhi, Sunan at-Tirmidhi wa huwa al-jami' as-sahih, 4 vols., 2nd ed., ed. ‘A. ‘Abdallatif (Beirut: n.p., 1983) Al-Islam.com, Bab al-Hudud, hadith 2, accessed July 5, 2006.
[10] Ibn Rushd, Bidayat al-Mujtahid, vol. 6, p. 113, cited in Asifa Quraishi, "Islamic Legal Analysis of the Zina Punishment Awarded to Bariya Ibrahim Magazu, in Zamfara, Nigeria," Islam for Today, Jan. 20, 2001.
[11] Qur'an, 24:2.
[12] John Burton, Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, s.v "Abrogation," accessed June 21, 2006; Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, Istitabat al-Murtadin, 82: 816, 817; Ahmad Ibn Hanbal and Musnad al-Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, ed., Samir al-Majzub (Beirut: Maktab al-Islami, 1993), vol. 2, p. 39.
[13] "Discrimination against Religious Minorities in Iran," report to 63rd session of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l'Homme (Paris) and Ligue de Défense des Droits de l'Homme en Iran (Geneva), Aug. 2003.
[14] At-Tirmidhi, Sunan, Bab al-Hudud, hadith 22, Al-Islam.com, accessed July 5, 2006.
[15] Ibn Maja, Sunan, Hudud, 14:4:2532.
[16] "Hadith," Ibn Maja, Sunan Ibn I Majah (Lahore, 1995), Arabic with English translation by M. Tufail Ansari, Bab al-Hudud, Al-Islam.com, accessed July 5, 2006.
[17] On these and others, see Suha Taji-Farouki, ed., Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur'an (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Charles Kurzman, ed., Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[18] M. Yahya Birt, "The Message of Fazlur Rahman," Association of Muslim Researchers, June 27, 1996.
[19] "Letter to President Rafshanjani," Human Rights Watch, New York, July 22, 1997.
[20] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "Danger Woman," interview with Alexander Linklater, The Guardian (London), May 17, 2005.
[21] Johann Hari, "Islam's Marked Woman: Irshad Manji," The Independent (London), May 28, 2005.
[22] John M. Broder, "For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats," The New York Times, Mar. 11, 2006.
[23] Ami Ayalon, "Egypt's Quest for Cultural Orientation," Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1999.
[24] Fauzi M. Najjar, "Islamic Fundamentalism and the Intellectuals: The Case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 27:2 (2000): 177-200.
[25] Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
[26] Abdulaziz Sachedina, "What Happened in Najaf?" accessed June 6, 2006.
[27] Qur'an, 2:256.
[28] Qur'an, 9:29.
[29] "Hadith," cited in Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, Istitabat al-Murtadin, 68:2:1.
[30] For an Iranian view of the law on apostasy, see, Sayf Allah Sarami, Ahkam-i murtad az didgah-i Islam va huquq-i bashar, in Tahqiqat-i andisha-yi Islami series, vol. 4 (Tehran: Markaz-i Tahqiqat-i Istratizhik-i Riyasat-i Jumhuri, 1997).
[31] Lorenzo Vidino, "The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe," Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2005, pp. 25-34; The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol. 3, s.v. "Muslim Brotherhood," comprising the following articles: Nazih N. Ayubi, "An Overview," pp. 183-7; Denis J. Sullivan, "Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt," pp. 187-91; Philip S. Khoury, "Muslim Brotherhood in Syria," pp. 191-4; Beverley Milton-Edwards, "Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan," pp. 194-7; Gabriel R. Warburg, "Muslim Brotherhood in the Sudan," pp. 197-201.
[32] The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol. 3, Emad Eldin Shahin, s.v. "Salafiyah."
[33] ‘Uthman Amin, Muhammad ‘Abduh, trans. Charles Wendell (Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1953), pp. 1-103.
[34] Charles Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt: A Study of the Modern Reform Movement Inaugurated by Muhammad ‘Abduh (London: Oxford University Press, 1933); Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
[35] Ahmad Moussalli, Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993).
[36] Sayyid Qutb, Ma'alim fi ‘t-tariq (Cairo: Dar as-Shuruq, 1980).
[37] The Guardian, Dec. 17, 2004; Daniel Pipes, "Why Revoke Tariq Ramadan's U.S. Visa?" The New York Sun, Aug. 27, 2004.
[38] Caroline Fourest, Frère Tariq: Discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan (Lyon, France: Lyon Mag' Hors Serie, 2004).
[39] "The Qaradawi Fatwas," The Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2004, pp. 78-80; The Daily Telegraph (London), Feb. 3, 2006; Lamia Radi, "Qaradawi: Prophet Cartoons Is (sic) War Waged against Us," Middle East Online, Mar. 23, 2006.
[40] See Mayer, Islam and Human Rights, p. 8.
[41] Quoted in Ann Elizabeth Mayer, "Islamic Rights or Human Rights: An Iranian Dilemma," Iranian Studies, Summer/Fall 1996, p. 294.
[42] "Saudi Doctorate Encourages the Murder of Arab Intellectuals," Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Special Dispatch Series, no. 1070, Jan. 12, 2006; "To Kill a Muslim Freethinker," FrontPage Magazine, May 3, 2006; Aluma Dankowitz, "Arab Intellectuals: Under Threat by Islamists," MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis, no. 254, Nov. 23, 2005; Aluma Dankowitz, "Accusing Muslim Intellectuals of Apostasy," MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis, no. 208, Feb. 18, 2005.