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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (47133)	10/22/2004 3:57:04 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Respond to of 50167

Our fulminating clerics and the West —Khaled Ahmed’s Urdu Press Review In the UK the policy of letting imams come from Pakistan has ruined the country’s communal harmony and the policy is now under review. If our clerics (and people like General Hameed Gul who has been refused entry by the UK) care about our benighted communities abroad they must rein in their inflammatory outpourings here Our clergy is angry at the United States in particular and the West in general. This is reflected in their sermons as well as in their press statements. One reason why Pakistan cannot ‘clean up its act’ in the eyes of the West is the ‘clerical fulmination’ which appears never to cease. But the ulema are made to feel the sting of their own rhetoric when they try to visit the West. Some of them love the West for its luxuries; others go there as shepherds of the Pakistani diaspora. Now Europe seems to check if the cleric does West-bashing, before it issues him a visa. According to Nawa-e-Waqt (August 14, 2004) when MMA leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman reached Belgium he found that he was being tailed by intelligence agents and the police. The local press called him a fundamentalist and a friend of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. He was greatly flustered during the trip and appeared scared by the reception and once even quarrelled with a reporter. After the various anti-West statements issued in Pakistan by him why should the maulana be keen to visit Europe? Belgium is a ‘soft’ state and the Moroccans there have become aggressive, taking over Brussels at night. Earlier, the Moroccan leader there had invited Qazi Hussain Ahmed too, but Brussels got so scared that it requested Holland to prevent Qazi Sahib to land before crossing over into Belgium. Belgium was the oyster that the late Maulana Azam Tariq Shaheed of Sipah Sahaba would open with his sword. He used to go there to see if the sectarian debate was alive there among the Pakistani diaspora. According to Khabrain (August 14, 2004) Qazi Hussain Ahmed’s visit to Norway had become controversial. He was invited by the Islamic Centre in Oslo but the rightwing press had asked the government not to allow Qazi Hussain Ahmed to come ‘because he was a friend of Osama bin Laden’. A local newspaper detailed his statements in favour of Al Qaeda and asked for his banishment. The government had not yet taken a decision in this regard. The same day the interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, said in Islamabad that the MMA was in direct contact with Al Qaeda. Qazi Sahib has clearly become a victim of his own rhetoric. The truth is that the receiving countries in the West have the right to debar clerics and other Pakistani personalities who ‘fulminate’ to become popular in Pakistan. (Sheikh Umar Abdur Rehman, now doing a sentence in America, was the greatest fulminator in the Islamic world; Sheikh Kishk of Egypt may still be the better of the two on objective examination. Both could set off terrorist attacks with the sheer violence of language.) In the UK the policy of letting imams come from Pakistan has ruined the country’s communal harmony and the policy is now under review. If our clerics (and people like General Hameed Gul who has been refused entry by the UK) care about our benighted communities abroad they must rein in their inflammatory outpourings here. Quoted by Khabrain (August 17, 2004) then interior minister Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat stated that in the past four weeks around 51 Pakistani and 12 foreign terrorists had been arrested in Pakistan. He revealed that on October 4, 2002 after one Malooka Khatoon alias Elis was arrested she confessed to having contacts with the Al Qaeda agent Saleh Muhammad. The lady owned Navidul Islam Trust while her husband was a retired DSP. He added that both these were active members of Jamaat-e-Islami and the Trust was headed by a Jamaat-e-Islami member, Shazia Siddiq. On December 18, the Khwaja Brothers were arrested and it was discovered that they were harbouring a number of Arab women. The Khwaja Brothers were members of Jamaat-e-Islami. On January 4, 2003, an Australian member of Al Qaeda named Terry was arrested from the house of former national hockey player, Shahid Ali Khan in Karachi whose wife was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami in the city. On January 28, 2003 Khalid Shaikh Muhammad of Al Qaeda was arrested from the house of a Jamaat-e-Islami member in Rawalpindi. The interior minister is gone and no one in Pakistan has paid heed to what he said about the Jamaat harbouring Al Qaeda, but he has damaged the Jamaat a great deal in the West. The upshot of it all may be that the clergy in general and that of the Jamaat in particular may find it difficult to go to Europe. Some of the possible difficulties are reflected in the news items listed above. Why can’t our clerics be careful in what they say? Columnist Tanvir Qaiser Shahid wrote in daily Pakistan magazine (August 8, 2004) that Abu Musa’ab Zerqavi now doing terrorism in Iraq in the name of Al Qaeda had come from Jordan to fight the jihad in Afghanistan. He started a business in honey collection in Peshawar and called his family to Pakistan. He probably also married another woman in Peshawar. He got money from Al Qaeda in 2001 to organise his own terrorist unit with possible operations in Israel. He got in touch with Kurd terrorists while in Herat and thus became connected with Ansarul Islam and sent many of his terrorists to Kurdistan. Zerqavi lost one leg during the war against America in Afghanistan. He cuts off the heads of his hostages with his own hands. Journalist Tanvir Qaiser Shahid should be complimented on writing in the Urdu press about a person who is daily lionised by it because he kills his hostages in Iraq. Most of us here in Pakistan are in denial about this hoodlum just because he was our guest during the Afghan war. He had no qualms about how he would lose our affection when he killed the Pakistanis employees he had kidnapped in Baghdad.