My Fellow Arabs

My Fellow Arabs

by Sami Alrabaa

Arab regime leaders and their affiliates swim in wealth (luxury private palaces with the finest and mot expensive man has ever produced, private jets, i.e. flying palaces), ignore the poor, repress the population, blame local backwardness on the West, and support fundamentalist Muslims.

Arab regimes have always been despotic and totalitarian. They have never believed in egalitarianism, economic opportunity, religious tolerance, and self-criticism. They have used medieval forces of governance: tribalism, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, authoritarian traditionalism, and most recently Islamic fundamentalism. Arab schools and universities turn out more graduates in Islamic studies, falsified history, and void nationalism than in science, engineering, and medicine. Critical studies and scientific research have screeched to a halt. The majority of Arab professors translate works and research done in the West and claim they are their own. Empirical work is almost non-existent. Students graduate without having the slightest clue about what is really going on in the Western world. The only things the majority of them know about the West is that it produces good car, but it is decadent; people drink much alcohol and women sleep with everybody.

Billions of barrels of oil, fertile land along the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates valleys, which in the past helped creating great civilizations, yield an excess of misery rather than riches like in North Korea or Hong Kong, for instance. Billions of dollars are squandered on armament and a lavish life-style enjoyed by corrupt despotic rulers of the Arab world and their affiliates. Totalitarian oil rich Arab grandees from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, and Qatar, who plunder their countries' resources, invest their billions of dollars in the West. Countries like Egypt and Jordan, which receive billions of dollars as aid from the America and Europe, spend the money on strengthening their regimes.

Tragically, prospects of improvement are dismal. Arab government spokesmen and the predominantly state-owned media entertain the illiterate and semi-literate population with anti-Western and anti-Israel propaganda.

The Arab media are a great charade and a simulacrum of the West. They lack life-giving spirit and self-criticism. The state-controlled media and the private ones, owned by rich Arabs affiliated to Arab regimes, like the Saudi tycoon Al Waleed Bin Talal, give the appearance of being modern and Western. But their reporters and anchormen and women are by no means journalists by Western standards of free and truthful inquiry.

For example, while BBC makes a point of talking to the victims of a suicide bomber in Baghdad and Kabul, al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and the other Arab TV stations would never interview the mother of an Israeli blown apart by a Palestinian terrorist. To add insult to injury, Arab journalists call Palestinians who clash with Israeli forces and die: Martyrs.

Most Arab television stations would never broadcast freewheeling debates, like Meet the Press style talk show permitting criticism of the government, or critical, liberal interpretation of Islam. Commercial TV stations quibble over a high degree of anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism and obfuscate criticism of official Islam.

Creative novelists, cartoonists, and bloggers like Najeeb Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie, Flemming Rose, and Alaa Fattah received death Fatwas (ruling) for blasphemy. Four Egyptian editors of four Egyptian newspapers, Ibrahim Issa, Adel Hammouda, Wael el-Ebrashi and Abdel-Halim Qandil were sentenced to a year's hard labour for offending the president, Hosni Mubarak. Instead of getting a prize for literary creativity and civic courage, critics receive a prison or death fatwa and a mob at their courtyard.

No wonder that a culture of zero-creativity and silence is pervading the Arab world. On the other hand, a culture of demagogy is spreading across the Arab world. Prime examples are the Islamist preacher Amr Khaled and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darweesh. The Arab current furor is scripted, whipped up, and mercurial.

The Arab regimes and their media focus on and exaggerate the number of Arabs killed in clashes with the Israeli army and the coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, they deliberately ignore the thousands of Shiites, and Kurds butchered by Saddam Hussein and Hafez Asad of Syria.

The murder of some100.000 Muslims in Algeria by fellow Muslims, not by infidels, did not provoke so much indignation and violent demonstrations among Muslims as the so-called "Mohammed cartoons" did, although according to the holy Koran, "If someone kills a human being, it is as if he had killed the whole mankind."

All the conferences held in the Arab world about alleged Western bias and media distortion, and all those open-letters signed by Muslim leaders to Christians for dialogue cannot hide the self-inflicted catastrophe – and the growing ostracism and suspicion towards Arab regimes and evil forces in the Middle East. The Arab-Muslim message: "You accept our Shari'a or die" will never be accepted by the world community. The gloat over that Islam is engulfing the world is mere self-deception, vulgar and hallucination, at best. What is engulfing the world is extremism and terrorism. And the world will never accept a religion that approves of bloodshed and carnage.

Yet, in sum, Arab regimes remain objectively powerful, at least in one respect, not because of greater courage, higher IQs, or stronger economy, but because of their unique skills in cultivating fanatics and breeding terrorists. The cultivated West has not yet been able to find an antidote to the culture of terrorism. That is an area where Arabs and Muslims have proved to be superior.

U.S. Muslim women fight for rights

U.S.: Muslim Women Try to Shatter the "Glass Minaret"
By Aisha Gawad*

 

NEW YORK, Mar 11 (IPS) - It's Ramadan, and Sara Elghobashy and a group of her women friends, having broken their fast, are looking for a mosque where they can hear the recitation of Koran.

 

"We could go to Medina," said one, suggesting a mosque nearby, in New York's East Village.

 

"No, don't go to Medina. They don't like women there," Elghobashy says, and laughs loudly.

 

There is an awkward silence. The other girls blink and change the subject.

 

Elghobashy doesn't really think mosques' treatment of women as second-class citizens is funny. In fact, she finds it absurd and depressing - but also motivating.

 

Elghobashy wants to crash what she calls the boys' club of Islam. She wants to lead congregations of both men and women - a rare thing in the Muslim world, where mosques often have separate, distinctly inferior seating for women, and the few women who do rise to positions of religious authority tend to lead only other women.

 

She aspires to become a certified Islamic scholar, or a sheikha. It's a serious undertaking. After graduating from New York University, she plans to devote a year to memorising the 114 chapters of the Koran. There is a specific art to reciting them correctly, in the rhyme and rhythm, in the intonation and pronunciation. Only upon mastering this would she have the chance to join the ulama, the community of religious scholars.

 

The most prestigious place to study is Al-Azhar in Cairo, the world's oldest university and the Harvard of Islamic sciences.

 

Elghobashy recently passed the first cut toward admission. But she's troubled.

 

Though Al-Azhar started admitting women in the 1970s, its classes are gender-segregated, and the quality of both professors and lessons for women is notoriously inferior. Al-Azhar is a beacon of Islamic orthodoxy, a place where tradition is cherished and protected, and part of what Elghobashy wants to do is change those traditions - the ones that say that the role of religious authority is Islam is reserved for men.

 

Muslim women have served as chaplains, publishing their own interpretations of the Koran, even issuing fatwas, or religious rulings. But they rarely command as much respect as their male counterparts.

 

"Gender segregation is at the heart of every function" at the mosque, argued Asra Nomani, an Afghan-American author and journalist who leads a controversial Muslim feminist movement she calls her "gender jihad." Traditionally, "women aren't allowed in the front of the mosque, not allowed to lecture, not allowed to speak for the community."

 

Nomani and her colleagues have organised mixed-gender prayers led by female imams, shocking to most Muslims.

 

A few women do lecture to mixed groups, and Muslim-American groups often let women lead. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim organisation in North America, elected its first female president in 2006.

 

But it's much rarer for a woman to lead a mixed-gender congregation in the mosque; in fact, mosques seem to be growing more conservative in this regard. In 66 percent, women pray in separate sections, where they sometimes cannot even see the imam, according to a 2001 study by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). That was up from 54 percent in 1994. And in 31 percent of the mosques surveyed, women were barred from serving on executive boards.

 

The problem does not just lie with the men. Too few women have spoken up, many activists complain.

 

"Women have to come forward and say, 'we are knowledgeable and we have a right and a responsibility to our community to share our knowledge'," said Mohamed Elsanousi, ISNA's communications director. "Women have to step up and help educate men on these cultural misperceptions."

 

Women like Nomani and Elghobashy are trying to do that, but disagree on how to break up the men's club.

 

Nomani wants to shock the mainstream Muslim community into change. She set off a fierce debate in her small community of Morgantown, West Virginia, by walking into the local mosque and praying in the men-only main hall - an act meant to be as provocative as U.S. civil rights icon Rosa Parks taking a seat in the front of the bus.

 

The mosque tried to ban her, but this only egged her on. Soon afterward, she launched a "Muslim Women's Freedom" campaign, and has been traveling to mosques across the United States.

 

"Images matter, shock blasts matter, because you end up with a tremor and then change," Nomani said. "We have to upset the status quo, because we've had to wait long enough. Shock waves are a good thing, because maybe they will help jolt us into the 21st century."

 

Elghobashy, though, advocates a gentler approach.

 

"A larger crowd of people will feel more compelled to take your views in, and you can affect more people if you're not completely ostracising yourself from the rest of Muslim society," she said.

 

The female scholar Duha Abd El-Hakim, who studied at Al-Azhar, was dissatisfied with her experience there. She felt compelled to look for traditional Islamic learning in other ways.

 

"In Cairo, it was difficult to find male tutors who were willing to work with me, because they didn't want to be alone with a woman," she said. She joined a study group in a sheikh's home, but the women were asked to sit in a separate room where they couldn't see him, and could barely hear the lesson.

 

Yet Abd El-Hakim likewise opposes Nomani's shock approach. She compares it to "a teenager rebelling against her parents."

 

"It's not that there shouldn't be change," Abd El-Hakim said, "but change should be more reasonable. The best way to open up eyes as a woman is to prove yourself by learning and being as well-rounded as possible. There are so many different groups of Muslims out there, and you need to be aware of all of them and be able to communicate with all of them. Start small and grow from there."

 

To Nomani, this is just naïve. "Talk to me in 15 years after you try to change the community that way," she says. "Go to Al-Azhar and you'll still come back and be stuck preaching to women in the cubicle space in the 96th Street Mosque," she said, referring to a large gender-segregated mosque on New York City's Upper East Side.

 

"If you live long enough, you recognise that you have to work from the outside to some degree. Because who in power wants to give it up?"

Prostitiution in the Middle East: Mothers pimp daughers in Iraq

We could predict that a repressed society would produce prostitution. Time magazine is shocked at the Iraqi sexportation industry, but in fact it is a staple of the Arab and Muslim world.

Here's an excerpt from Time's article on Iraq: Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters

 

By Rania Abouzeid / Baghdad

 

She goes by "Hinda," but that's not her real name. That's what she's called by the many Iraqi sex traffickers and pimps who contact her several times a week from across the country. They think she is one of them, a peddler of sexual slaves. Little do they know that the stocky, auburn-haired woman is an undercover human rights activist who has been quietly mapping out their murky underworld since 2006.

 

That underworld is a place where nefarious female pimps hold sway, where impoverished mothers sell their teenage daughters into a sex market that believes females who reach the age of 20 are too old to fetch a good price. The youngest victims, some just 11 and 12, are sold for as much as $30,000, others for as little as $2,000. "The buying and selling of girls in Iraq, it's like the trade in cattle," Hinda says. "I've seen mothers haggle with agents over the price of their daughters." The trafficking routes are both local and international, most often to Syria, Jordan and the Gulf (primarily the United Arab Emirates). The victims are trafficked illegally on forged passports, or "legally" through forced marriages. A married female, even one as young as 14, raises few suspicions if she's travelling with her "husband." The girls are then divorced upon arrival and put to work.

 

Nobody knows exactly how many Iraqi women and children have been sold into sexual slavery since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, and there are no official numbers because of the shadowy nature of the business. Baghdad-based activists like Hinda and others put the number in the tens of thousands. Still, it remains a hidden crime; one that the 2008 US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report says the Iraqi government is not combating. Baghdad, the report says, "offers no protection services to victims of trafficking, reported no efforts to prevent trafficking in persons and does not acknowledge trafficking to be a problem in the country."

 

But it is not much different in other Arab and Muslim countries. Those that have stricter laws and better policing form lucrative export markets for their neighbors.

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Islam - Religion of Peace? Fair Enough - prove it

Before you get yourself in an uproar about neocon Zionist propaganda - the article was written by a Muslim, and is worth considering. At least consider carefully what the man has to say.

 

Islam Should Prove It's a Religion of Peace
Muslims can start with better Quranic scholarship
By TAWFIK HAMID
The film "Fitna" by Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders has created an uproar around the world because it links violence committed by Islamists to Islam.

 

Many commentators and politicians -- including the British government, which denied him entry to the country last month -- reflexively accused Mr. Wilders of inciting hatred. The question, however, is whether the blame is with Mr. Wilders, who simply exposed Islamic radicalism, or with those who promote and engage in this religious extremism. In other words, shall we fault Mr. Wilders for raising issues like the stoning of women, or shall we fault those who actually promote and practice this crime?

 

Many Muslims seem to believe that it is acceptable to teach hatred and violence in the name of their religion -- while at the same time expecting the world to respect Islam as a religion of peace, love and harmony.

 

Scholars in the most prestigious Islamic institutes and universities continue to teach things like Jews are "pigs and monkeys," that women and men must be stoned to death for adultery, or that Muslims must fight the world to spread their religion. Isn't, then, Mr. Wilders's criticism appropriate? Instead of blaming him, we must blame the leading Islamic scholars for having failed to produce an authoritative book on Islamic jurisprudence that is accepted in the Islamic world and unambiguously rejects these violent teachings.

 

While many religious texts preach violence, the interpretation, modern usage and implementation of these teachings make all the difference. For example, the stoning of women exists in both the Old Testament and in the Islamic tradition, or "Sunna" -- the recorded deeds and manners of the prophet Muhammad. The difference, though, is that leading Jewish scholars agreed to discontinue these practices centuries ago, while Muslim scholars have yet to do so. Hence we do not see the stoning of women practiced or promoted in Israel, the "Jewish" state, but we see it practiced and promoted in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the "Islamic" states.

 

When the British government banned Geert Wilders from entering the country to present his film in the House of Lords, it made two egregious errors. The first was to suppress free speech, a canon of the civilized Western world. The second mistake was to blame the messenger -- punishing, so to speak, the witness who exposed the crime instead of punishing the criminal. Mr. Wilders did not produce the content of the violent Islamic message he showed in his film -- the Islamic world did that. Until the Islamic clerical establishment takes concrete steps to reject violence in the name of their religion, Mr. Wilders's criticism is not only permissible as "controversial" free speech but justified.

 

So, Islamic scholars and clerics, it is up to you to produce a Shariah book that will be accepted in the Islamic world and that teaches that Jews are not pigs and monkeys, that declaring war to spread Islam is unacceptable, and that killing apostates is a crime. Such a book would prove that Islam is a religion of peace.

 

Mr. Hamid, a former member of an Egyptian Islamist terrorist group, is an Islamic reformer and senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Long arm of the Ayatollahs reaches Argentina

AMIA investigator tortured in Argentina

Mar. 8, 2009
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST

Argentinean Jewish community leaders were demanding an immediate probe Sunday into the kidnap and torture of one of the senior investigators in the 1994 Iranian-Hizbullah bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

The investigator, Claudio Lifschitz, said masked attackers nabbed him from his home on Friday night, threw him into the trunk of a van and violently interrogated him for several hours.

The men identified themselves as members of the Argentinean intelligence service and demanded to know if Lifschitz had any case material that wasn't presented in court regarding several Iranian suspects, he said.

The assailants also burnt the letters AMIA into Lifschitz 's back and arm before releasing him near the police academy premises in Buenos Aires.

"They made me get out of my car, get into a van and they took me away," Lifschitz said. "They put a plastic bag over my head and with a blowtorch, they burnt the letters AMIA on my arm and my back."

Argentinean Jewish community leader José Scaliter was quoted on the local Jewish News Agency Web site as saying that "we have called for an immediate probe of the incident."

Meanwhile, the American Jewish Committee expressed its outrage over the assault.

"We trust Argentine authorities will quickly find those who carried out this brutal attack on Mr. Lifschitz," AJC Executive Director David A. Harris was quoted on its Web site as saying. "This awful incident undermines Argentina's important progress to bring to justice those responsible for the murderous attack on AMIA's headquarters."

Eighty-five people were killed and more than 200 were wounded in the July 18, 1994, bombing, the single worst terrorist attack on Argentinean soil.

The blast leveled the seven-story building, a symbol of Argentina's 200,000-strong Jewish population.

Late last year, a 10 million pesos civil suit was filed in an Argentinean court by the family of one of the victims, in the wake of an Argentinean prosecutor's report linking Iran to the bombing.

Since the report was released, a series of international arrest warrants were issued against Iranian officials for the attack.

Etgar Lefkovits contributed to this report

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

International Women's day - Middle East

It's International Women's day today, but there will not be much cheering in the Middle East. If you are a woman and live in most of the Muslim Middle East, this is what you can look forward to:

 

Driving and Voting - If you live in Saudi Arabia, forget about driving and voting.

 

Honor killings - If you are suspected of hanky panky by members of your family, you will end up dead for dishonoring the family.

 

Female Genital Mutilation - practised in much of North Africa and parts of the Middle East.

 

Burqa - This is the style in Afghanistan.

Hijab - This is the style in many Muslim countries. Iran and Saudi Arabi have stricter garments.

 

These styles are not options. They are enforced by brutal religious police.

 

If you are a woman, you'll be happy to know that Sharia law protects you - a bit. The bad news is that husbands have a duty to beat disobedient wives. The good news is that they are not supposed to leave a mark. That's fair, isn't it? Owning property and getting citizenship is sometimes a bit tricky for women too in this party of the world.

 

Getting Stoned - And If you like getting stoned, Iran is the place to be. This woman is about to be stoned for adultery:

 

 

There's only one place in the Middle East where women are protected - "Apartheid" Israel.

More about Human Rights in the Middle East

 

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

The Devil In The Backyard

The Zardari Government is making peace with the Taliban which is hanging amputated bodies from electric poles. AMIR MATEEN analyses the dangers for Pakistan Warzone A Pakistani gunship flies low over Swat valley, which has been taken over by the Taliban Photo: AFP THE ONE-TIME tourist heaven of Swat looks like a ghost valley today. The people have still not recovered from the gory nightmare that was unleashed by the local Taliban. The last one-and-a-half year has seen a population of 1.5 million people being held hostage by a ragtag force of some 2,500 Taliban. They are under the leadership of Maulvi Fazalullah, popularly known as Mullah Radio for his jihad-inflected sermons, aired through his illegal FM radio. Fazalullah's men have fought bloody battles with the army over the past two years. They virtually took control of most of Swat last year. Over 1,200 civilians have died so far and around 350,000 hapless locals forced to leave through rough mountain terrain. The rich have left for Peshawar — 70 miles away, and the richer for more posh Islamabad — 100 miles in the south. The poor, with no place to go, suffered the trauma that makes Hollywood horrors look like a picnic. Intelligence sources dubbed as 'spies' and government officials — particularly from law-enforcing agencies — were specifically targeted by the Taliban. They were abducted and maimed and their killing turned into a gruesome spectacle in order to send a message to others. The reign of terror is symbolised by what has come to be known as Khooni Chowk — the Crossing of Blood. A band of Taliban would, late at night, block the central crossing in the city centre of Mingora, the district headquarters the size of Srinagar and no less beautiful. They hung amputated bodies — some headless — on an electrical pole in the middle of the crossing, with notes giving their name and details of their 'misdeeds' against Islam. The bodies were not to be removed before a given date. Anybody violating this dictat could do so only at the risk of being himself put up headless. THIS SCENE — perpetuated for days and weeks — is not from the Wild West of the cowboys. It happened in the Swat valley, which once took pride in having the most peaceful and bettereducated residents not just in the frontier province alone, but all over Pakistan. The princely state — annexed by Pakistan in 1969 — had better schools, hospitals and police stations than anybody else. It had an airport, and attractions like ski resorts and trout fishing on the meandering River Swat, which used to attract hordes of tourists every year. No more. A majority of the police force has either run away, resigned or simply not turned up for work. Local newspapers are filled with advertisements from policemen declaring that they have left their jobs, and hence they be spared "in the name of their small children." A new force of 600 locals was recruited for special commando training to combat what is actually an insurgency. The story goes that 450 of them disappeared during the training itself, and another 148 did not appear on the date of joining. The two men left in the force have not ventured outside their office in uniform since. This left the entire populace at the mercy of the wolves that are masquerading as saviours of religion. People have seen throats being slit. Those who violate the Taliban code are either lashed or hanged in public jirgas (gatherings). Events where masked gunmen with the latest weaponry went on the rampage were skillfully orchestrated, and then their videos released in order to instill fear in the public. This took a severe toll on the psyche of the public, already hard pressed thanks to unemployment and hunger. New regime People flee the Taliban Photo: REUTERS New regime girls are being barred from studying in schools Photo: AP New regime while all opposition is decimated Photo: AP Life has come to a standstill for 80 percent of the people whose earnings came from tourism. Orchids have become rotten in the absence of labour and markets; and the fields lie barren. People go without fire, food, and electricity for days. The only cinema in Mingora was forced to down shutters, television and music has been banned, and CD shops have been closed. Even barbershops were shutdown as shaving, according to the interpretation of the Taliban, is un-Islamic. It has been particularly hard for women, children and the handicapped because of the problems of age or sickness. Over 200 schools have been blown up as they were giving "western education." Girls are barred from schooling. Over 100,000 Swati girls stand to lose their chance of education and, consequently, any career or professional life. This is happening in a place where the ratio of women in literacy and the job market was one of the highest in the province. The new edict may allow girls an education till the fourth grade, but with a revised curriculum. Also, they must always wear scarves on their heads. In any case, it will take awhile as most schools have been destroyed. Women have been rendered prisoner in their own homes as they are now barred from going out in public, something that even Saudi Arabia has not tried. The central bazaar for women — with items like cosmetics and bangles, when partially open — today gives an image of a haunted place without shoppers. But then, cosmetics are a lesser priority when your children sleep hungry. Women are not allowed to work. Even women doctors are not permitted to carry on with their jobs. Stories abound where women lost babies because of the non-availability of doctors. Many others have died because of the lack of medicines and medical treatment. The question is — how did over a million people accept the inhuman dictates of a bunch of jihadi thugs who do not fit into any Islamic school of thought? Well, they have not. They voted liberal parties to power in the last election. But these parties did not have either the political muscle, or the will, to protect them from the evil of the Taliban. But how did the Taliban gain ascendancy? The system of justice under the princely state was more efficient than what followed. The people, therefore, wanted Sharia courts to be established as a way of achieving quick justice and dispensing with the long delays and corruption of the civil courts. But the Taliban, who had a different agenda, hijacked their demand. For ordinary people, in the absence of the writ of the state, it's just a matter of choosing a lesser evil. All hopes now hinge upon Maulana Sufi Mohammad, the father-in-law of Fazalullah. Sufi Mohammad is no angel himself. He is a radical cleric freed in 2008 after spending six years in jail for leading 10,000 Pashtun tribesmen to fight the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Nearly 7,000 died in the bombing and he ran back for his life. The people whose children he took with him after indoctrinating them, leading to their being killed, hate him. He has now been resurrected in order to persuade Fazalullah to accept the government's offer of a ceasefire, which he has agreed to partially. How long this respite will last, only time will tell. The ceasefire agreement with the Taliban has raised questions as to whether it is a victory for the Pakistan Government, capitulation before the Taliban who want to recreate a 1,500-year-old replica of Islamic rule, or a strategic retreat by the military. IT IS ironic that Frontier Chief Minister Ameer Khan Hoti, the great grandson of the champion of nonviolence, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — the Frontier Gandhi — has signed the agreement. He has justified it saying, "I have done this to stop violence and to fulfill my electoral promise of restoring peace." His uncle and Awami National Party Chief Asfand Yar Wali — whose party runs the troubled province bordering Afghanistan — is under attack from the Taliban. He survived a suicide bomb attack three months ago while most of his party members are on the run because of constant threats to their life. Who won? The Taliban celebrates Photo: AP The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) Government at the Centre is playing it safe. President Asif Zardari's position is that he will decide when the agreement will come to him for his signature. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood has tried to pacify the Americans while on a tour of Washington, saying, "it's a local remedy to a local problem." The PPP has neither accepted the agreement nor rejected it. Obviously, the PPP Government would like to see what the outcome will be in a couple of months, if not earlier, before taking a stand. In the meantime, PPP spinmasters are arguing that the Sharia courts are not the same as strict Islamic law. The new laws, for instance, would not ban education of women or impose other strict tenets espoused by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. LIBERAL CIRCLES in Pakistan and abroad are fuming over what they call "the sellout." Some, like human rights activist Iqbal Haider, have described it as a deal with the devil. "How can you sit with the very people who have maimed hundreds of people," he protested. "It's a matter of principle which should be supreme. These people should be tried for crimes against humanity." The liberals have a valid argument that the agreement will now be a model for the rest of the Taliban. They will demand similar Sharia in other parts of the province. "Now they know that militancy is the way to coerce the government into submission," said senior analyst Saleem Khilji. They have a point, as the agreement extends the scope of their power. The government has conceded that the new Sharia will be extended beyond Swat to the other five districts of Malakand division also. The Pakistan Army has taken refuge behind the government, saying that it is following orders to stay out till further notice. They should be the happiest lot if this agreement were to result in peace. They have taken the brunt of the fight. Media reports say army casualties number more than a hundred dead but the Taliban claims that it might be much higher. The issue is that the Pakistan Army has been trained to fight with India, and it may not be comfortable with counterinsurgency operations. It does not have sufficient experience of that except for the Balochistan insurgency in the 1970s, unlike its Indian rival, which has consistently countered insurgencies in Kashmir, Nagaland and Mizoram. The army will remain stationed in Swat to deal with the fallout. The underlying assumption is that either Sufi Mohammad will deliver peace or fight with his son-inlaw. This will be a tactical victory. Instead of the army fighting the Taliban, it would be the militants fighting each other. But then there is a counter-theory — the two factions might use the time to regroup, consolidate their power and fight later with even more ferocity. There are already signs of this happening. An indicator is that the price of arms in the tribal belt has almost doubled because of the massive demand. In any case, the agreement is simply not implementable. Each party has a different interpretation of it. The governments in the Frontier and Islamabad think that the Sharia court is old wine in a new bottle. Sufi Mohammad believes that his mandate is to provide Sharia courts where religious scholars will be independent judges and not advisers to the regular civil judges like in the earlier agreement of six years ago. "The choice of judges will be ours and they will be all-powerful," said Maulana Izzat, spokes man of Sufi Mohammad, in a telephonic interview. Fazalullah wants the complete domination of the Sharia, encompassing all sectors beyond the judiciary. "We shall run the entire area in accordance with the holy book, "countered Muslim Khan, another spokesman for Fazalullah. "We don't accept any system but our own and will inshallah spread it to other parts of Pakistan very soon." The legal and administrative intricacies involved in merging the old system with the new are something beyond these clerics. The Taliban have simply ceased fire but not surrendered. Both sides are waiting for the next round to start with bated breath. It almost came to that when a newly-appointed senior district official was kidnapped by militants two days after the ceasefire. After a tense standoff lasting hours, the official, Kushal Khan, was freed. Who won? while Pakistan President Zardari confers with the Prime Minister and the army chief Photo: AP Later, it was disclosed that his release had been the result of a swap: Pakistani authorities released two militants who had been picked up a day earlier in Peshawar. Next time around, it is possible that some freed militants like this might renew the fighting while both sides continue to sit in the trenches. Swat is different from other trouble spots like Bahaur, Waziristan and Khyber. It is the only trouble spot that is not a federal (FATA) but a provincial tribal area (PATA). It is wrong to generalise about the Taliban and the Swat situation in particular. FAZALULLAH, A barely-literate former lift operator, was an indigenous product. He does not come from the ranks of Taliban or Al-Qaeda, but was later accepted by them and adopted as the commander of the area looking after his hold in the area. It is only in Swat that schools have been closed in an organised manner, otherwise the Taliban have not done so in FATA, except for occasional episodes. The Taliban have generally refrained from killing hostages, except for spies or the recent Polish engineer in Waziristan. The Swat Talibans have slit throats of hostages and security forces with ruthless abandon. Swat is the only place which has been completely taken over by the Taliban. This may be because of its geography — it is a bowl-shaped valley. The Swat terrain makes it strategically easier for Taliban to hold power against numerical odds. There is one major communication artery along the Swat River that could easily be blocked from anywhere. In Bajaur, Khyber and Waziristan, the Taliban are dominant, but they do not run those agencies. Swat is also the only hotspot that does not border Afghanistan. In fact, it remained aloof and generally peaceful during the war with Afghanistan. Swat has a past of peace and culture where thousands thronged from all over Pakistan and abroad every summer. Its capital, Mingora, happens to be much bigger than any other town in any of the troubled agencies. Also, it houses the elite of Pashtun tribes, and is the abode of the royal, sophisticated Yousafzais of Tana, whereas the other agencies have a history of warring tribes. The impact of Swat's takeover, like in the classical Clausewitzian centre of gravity, has been immense on the psyche of Pashtuns. If the impression goes out that it's a victory for the Taliban, it will encourage militancy elsewhere, in the rest of Pakistan. It becomes more alarming when seen in the larger context where the Waziristan commanders, pro-Pakistan Mullah Nazir and anti-state Baitullah Mehsud, along with Haji Gul Bahadur, have patched up differences in Waziristan to become a formidable force; Bajaur Taliban now expect similar Sharia in their area, and Hamimullah is blocking NATO supplies in Khyber. The Taliban seem to be on the ascendant, which should be a source of worry for not just Pakistan, but also the entire region and the world. If the social fabric continues to be torn apart as it has in Swat, this will lead to the rise of more non-state actors who are not under the control of anyone. Since all of these commanders are connected to each other, including the militants in Kashmir, the genie is threatening to become ever more dangerous. The question is not just about the outcome of the investigation into the Mumbai attack. A more serious question is: what will happen if there is another attack of a similar nature? Mateen is an Islamabad-based journalist WRITER'S EMAIL amirmateen@hotmail.com

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 9, Dated Mar 07, 2009