A Sceptical Islamist

British Muslims and the problem of mainstream politics

"As in all general elections, British Muslims have been bombarded with advice as to whether and how they should vote. All the parties have appealed to the Muslim vote in constituencies where it has the potential to affect the result, while making sure they do not make promises to Muslims that can be used against them by their opponents... At the same time, there has been a variety of voices from within the Muslim community giving equally conflicting advice... Faced with this confusion, several British Muslim organizations have organized meetings to discuss how Muslims should engage with mainstream politics, and how they should use their votes to maximum effect.

"The problem is that the months and weeks before an election is the wrong time to be thinking about such issues, simply because there is no time to do anything about it. The immediacy of the situation forces Muslims into reactive and short-term responses, instead of more considered ones..."

Muslims intellectuals must take on the universal myths of democracy

"Sooner or later Muslim intellectuals, particularly those operating within Islamic movements, must take on the task of challenging the universal myth of democracy instead of pandering to it, and dare to define their ideas and the aspirations of the Ummah in purely Islamic terms. Until that happens Muslims will never achieve the conceptual clarity that will enable them to articulate their political ideas in terms that will offer a genuine and credible alternative to the seductive but oh-so-dangerous myths of democracy."

Lessons for the Islamic movement seven years after the invasion of Iraq

"This month marks the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The invasion was no surprise of course; it was preceded by months of international politicking as the neo-con Bush administration tried to build international consensus for the war. Before that too, the US had been waging a soft war against Iraq for over a decade, and many commentators had predicted that the US would use the attacks on New York and the Pentagon in September 2001 as the pretext for finally invading.

"Muslims have watched subsequent events unfolding in Iraq with horror. While most attention worldwide has been US-centric, focussing on the political problems of the Bush administration, Muslims have paid more attention to the problems of Iraq’s long-suffering people. On the one hand, they have faced the ruthlessness with which the US dealt with all resistance to their occupation, symbolised by the near-genocidal assault on Fallujah in 2004... On the other has been the total failure of Islamic movements and leaders in the country — Sunni and Shi‘i alike — to provide the sort of wise and principled leadership required in the difficult situation created by the US invasion."

The Ikhwan’s difficult path between accommodation, repression and militancy

"The election last month of Mohammed Badei as the eighth Murshid al-‘Am (General Guide) of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt, and the results of December’s elections for the Ikhwan’s Maktab al-Irshad (Guidance Bureau), have caused ructions among many western and secular observers of Egyptian politics...

The problem for secularists and the west is that the Egyptian public have repeatedly confirmed the Ikhwan as the country’s most popular and credible political party..."

Palestinian politics settle into familiar pattern after hints of radical change

(News/Analysis, Crescent International, January 2009.)

For a few short weeks in the fall, after Palestinian president Mahmood Abbas announced that parliamentary and presidential elections would take place this month, and that he would not be standing for re-election, Palestinian politics seemed on the point of a radical shake-up. Last month, however, the various dislodged pieces settled back into a familiar, sterile pattern, and it quickly became clear that nothing had changed at all.

The importance of history for resisting the "imperialism of the mind"

"The decades of colonialism and postcolonial neo-imperialism have established another kind of hegemony over the Muslim world, which intellectuals such as Malek Bennabi and Ali Shari‘ati recognised long ago (and which was also discussed by non-Muslims such as Franz Fanon), but which is still un-noticed by most Muslims. This is a cultural and intellectual hegemony that takes different forms but has a single net effect: that of encouraging (if not forcing) people to think in terms defined by Western discourses, whatever subject they are thinking about...

"Winston Churchill, a proud imperialist himself, famously said that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind”; that unfortunately is where we are today."

The harsh reality of the limitations of the Palestinian struggle

"The Palestinians may well be forced into the streets for a third intifada sometime soon, to try and prevent the Israelis from achieving their goals; and this may well hinder the Israeli plans for a while and force them to adjust their short-term tactics yet again. But without a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the region, political as well as military, the overall progress of the US-Israeli agenda will not be reversed."

The US-Israeli thinking behind Abbas's call for elections in Palestine in January

"The Israelis and Americans have made it clear that they prefer the Palestinians to remain divided, and Hamas and Gaza isolated, in the hope that Abbas will be able to deliver a “peace settlement” on their terms on the basis of his political authority in the West Bank.

"Although most Palestinians realize that the division between Fatah and Hamas is deeply damaging to their struggle, Abbas and the Fatah leadership are so beholden to outside forces, specifically Israel and its hegemonic ally, that the interests of the Palestinians are no longer their prime concern."

Iran’s real crime: refusing to venerate the West’s holy cows

"In the West, and in the westernised elites of the rest of the world, even those who criticise the policies of Western powers, and the working of international institutions, seldom question the myths on which they are based. Iran’s real crime is that it does precisely that. Its refusal to allow the Western powers to dictate its energy policy, through the spurious authority of the UN and the IAEA, is bad enough. The fact is it is doing so not only on grounds of its interests, but because it rejects the mythical moral foundations of that authority (the same foundations that supposedly legitimise the zionist state) makes it not just an outlaw, but a revolutionary threat..."

The emergence of salafi-jihadi groups to challenge Hamas in Gaza

"When news emerged of fighting in the southern Gaza town of Rafah after juma prayers on August 14, many observers would have been surprised to learn that it was between Hamas authorities and militants belonging to a Salafi-Jihadi group known as Jund Ansar Allah -- “Soldiers of the Followers of Allah”...

"As in other areas of the Muslim world, it appears that the emergence of these groups has been the result of a combination of the enthusiasm and fervour of local Muslims with more anger and commitment than knowledge and political understanding, and the encouragement of outside forces determined to exploit these Muslims for their own purposes."