Fatwa Against Terrorism

A New Leadership Initiative from India

By Badri Raina |ZNet, June 8, 2008

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

May 31, 2008 must rank as a very consequential day in modern Indian history.

Indeed, it might be said, in modern Muslim history as well.

On that day, in a public gathering at Delhi’s historic Ramlila grounds, hundreds of thousands, mainly Muslims, received a fatwa from the Dar-ul-Uloom, Deoband—a seminary that played a leading role in India’s secular anti-colonial freedom movement—declaring terrorism “un-Islamic.”

Considering the fact that the gravest provocations notwithstanding, Indian Muslims—the second largest in the world—have remained aloof from terrorism, the question might be asked as to why the need for such a fatwa was felt in the first place.

One reason clearly was to make it known to the nation at large what seminaries teach their students in private confines—that the Koran explicitly forbids the killing of a single innocent human being, of any faith whatsoever, equating such killing with the murder of all humankind.

A second: to send a message to the state and its agencies, as well as sections of the media and civil society, that Muslims do not take kindly to the frequent use of the term “Islamic terrorism.”

The point was made that whereas the terrorism of the IRA, the Mizos and the Nagas was never called Christian terrorism, or of the LTTE and the ULFA Hindu terrorism, or of the Khalistanis as Sikh terrorism, or of the Irgun and Stein gangs as Jewish terrorism, the term “Islamic terrorism” could only be understood as a political currency floated by imperialists abroad and their collaborators in India who seek single-mindedly to destabilize western Asia and the Middle East in order to install puppet regimes there and obtain control of the oil wealth of the region.

It is to be remembered that of the forty or so groups designated “terrorist organizations” by the Indian state, only six have Islamic nomenclatures.

Indeed, it has been obvious for sometime that those who persist with the “Islamic” nomenclature (“all Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims,” never mind that the gravest acts of terror in post-independence India have been perpetrated by non-Muslims, namely the murders of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, and Rajive Gandhi) have but objective in mind. This is to keep in place the convergence of the interests of communal” nationalism” in India and of global anti-Muslim imperialism. Communalism and terrorism are thus sought to be deployed inseparably as a hegemonic strategy to alter the character both of the Indian Republic and the World Order at large.

Thus a concomitant objective of the Deoband initiative must be to defang majoritarian fascists whose political well-being has for decades now rested on keeping alive the myth that India’s Muslims are not good enough nationalists because their primary loyalty remains allied to the Muslim ummah worldwide.

Remarkably, no questions are asked when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (Global Hindu Organisation) worries day in and day out about the fate of Hindus in all corners of the world. It might be noted that the collapse of the Hindu state and monarchy in Nepal has caused less hurt to the people inside Nepal, more to the imperialists in America and the VHP/RSS/BJP in India! Or, at the fact that millions of dollars are received by these organizations—all unaccounted—from Hindu NRIs in America and elsewhere in the West purely for the purpose of refurbishing temple trusts and the political prospects of India’s Hindus qua Hindus.

And far be it for anyone to question why Jews globally should be willing to stake everything for the well-being of the Zionist state in faraway Israel.

Continued . . .