 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 March 1999 Issue No. 420 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 March 1999 Issue No. 420
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Special Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The grim reaper is everywhere
By Eqbal Ahmad
The Jew as well as the Christian, the Hindu no less than the Muslim 'fundamentalist' plies an ideology of superior difference. Each confronts an inferior and threatening Other. Each engages in the politics of exclusion. Hence each poses a menace to the minority communities within their nation's boundary. The Jewish ones regard the Arabs, especially the Palestinian Arabs whose land they covet and colonise, as the Other -- violent, wily, dirty, uncivilised, over-sexed, and dangerous. For long, the Hindu militants' sole Other was the Muslim; Christians have now been added to their list of enemies.
The Christian bigot had long regarded the Jew as the conspiratorial, grasping Other. In the decades after World War II and the Holocaust, anti-Semitism became a widely decried prejudice and receded into the interstices of Christian societies. Gradually, Muslims and coloured immigrants are taking the place of Jews in the Western world. For the Muslim militants, the Other are the Jews, occasionally Christians and, in south Asia, the Hindus, Christians, and Ahmadis. I know of no religio-political formation today which does not have a demonised, and therefore threatened, Other.
The Other is always an active negation. All such movements mobilise hatred, and often harness unusual organisational effort to achieve it. The Ram Janam Bhoomi campaign lasted nearly two years, during which the BJP leaders and their partners reached out to thousands of villages and towns throughout India, with their mobilising rituals of preparing bricks to build a temple where then stood the 16th-century Babri Mosque. The campaign ended in December 1992 in a national march to Ayodhya, where the mosque was violently demolished by a frenzied mob. Riots and massacres inevitably followed.
Hate pays, however temporarily. The mobilisation contributed to the dramatic transformation of the BJP from a marginal political grouping to one of two largest parliamentary parties in India. In Israel, the right-wing Likud and its extremist allies began their rise to national power as they mobilised a campaign of hate and colonisation of Palestinians under occupation. In Bosnia, the Serbs' campaign of ethnic cleansing preceded and accompanied a mobilisation of Christian hatred of Muslims.
The cult of violence and proliferation of enemies are inherent in ideologies of difference. All express their hate for the Other by organised violence. All legitimise their violence with references to religion and history. In nearly all instances, the enemy multiplies. At first, the Indian Parivar had the Muslim Other as its target. It has now turned on Christians. The Dalit, Sikh, and tribal communities will most likely be its future targets. The Jewish militants are increasingly turning on the liberal and secular Jews of Israel. They have already assassinated one prime minister and caused growing internal strife. In Pakistan, Christians have been hit, and Ahmadis. At the same time intra-militant violence has proliferated in Pakistan, and wanton killings occur even inside mosques and imambarahs.
Since all religio-political formations bear but little relationship to lived religious traditions and histories, they tend to invent and, in the process, distort their own history and tradition. "I see but only shadows of Judaism and Jewish history in their writings and statements," Moshe Menuhin, a great Jewish scholar and father of the famous violinist Yehuda Menuhin, said of Zionist ideologues during a meeting I had with him in 1972. In recent decades, an eminent group of Israeli historians have been documenting the ahistorical character of Zionist historiography.
All such movements share a patriarchal outlook, and to varying degrees discriminate against women. Amrita Basu, a political scientist at Amherst College, has shown that a hostile attitude toward minorities parallels in the 'parivar's' literature a patriarchal outlook and discriminatory practices toward women. In this regard, the Islamists outdo their Hindu, Jewish and Christian counterparts, for they alone tend to segregate women and insist on laws which perpetuate gender inequalities in nearly all walks of life.
The cadres and constituents of all religio-political movements present comparable profiles. They appeal to urban more than rural people, to the lumpenproletariat and lower middle class more than the working or upper classes, to technical more than to liberal professionals, and to the expatriate bourgeoisie more than the national one. The pattern suggests that they attract especially those persons and classes which are caught in the 'middle of the ford', between tradition and modernity and who, in differing ways, feel marginal, socially uprooted, and insecure about their place in their social environment.
Given their transitional social standing, leaders and cadres of the contemporary religio-political parties evince ambivalence toward products and symbols of modernity. They love the products of technology and put them to political and personal uses. But they demonstrate a negative attitude toward science with its emphasis on rationality and causation. Nearly all have a proclivity to find, post hoc, the evidence of scientific discovery in religious texts, and proclaim the existence of an Islamic, Hindu, Jewish and Christian science that predates modern scientific discoveries. Invariably, they discover a scientific discovery in their religious texts or tradition only after it has been discovered by modern science.
All tend to be grim and humourless. All, to varying degrees, frown on joy and pleasurable pastimes. They have few positive links to culture and knowledge, and regard these as dangerous sources of corruption. Hence the control of educational institutions and regulation of society's cultural life becomes the primary objective of these movements. This tendency has climaxed with the Taliban who have prohibited chess, football, the homing pigeon, kite-flying, singing, dancing, and leather jackets as un-Islamic.
All religio-political parties are inherently undemocratic, even when they operate in a democratic framework. In theory and practice, they reject basic democratic values -- acceptance of pluralism, emphasis on reason as the organising principle of social and political life, commitment to the resolution of differences by dialogue, and secular legislation. Nearly all favour a centralist and absolutist structure of governance.
As movements and political parties, they are nevertheless quite normal in hankering after power. For power's sake, they make compromises and, when necessary, Faustian deals. The BJP leaders had no problem coalescing with the Janata Party even when it was led by the very secular Prime Minister V P Singh. Ironically, it was the principled Mr Singh who risked the dissolution of his government rather than compromise with the BJP's campaign to demolish the Babri Mosque. The Jamaat-i-Islami, currently a champion of democracy, happily embraced Mohammed Ziaul Haq, a military dictator. Similarly in 1948, when Pakistan's foundations were shaky, Maulana Abul Aula Maudoodi, the Jamaat's founder and theoretician, declared that combat in Kashmir cannot qualify as Jihad. Yet in 1999, the Jamaat's amir, Qazi Hussein Ahmed, claims that it is Jihad fi sabil Illah and must be carried on till total victory. In Sudan, the National Islamic Front was part of the coalition against Jaafar Numeiri's dictatorship. When opportunity permitted, it became an ally of the dictator, and later ousted the ally that had catapulted it to power. Morals have not been an encumbrance in any religio-political pursuit of power.
What then is the future of these 'fundamentalist' movements and parties? I think it is limited and quite dim. The reasons for this are many: their links to the past are twisted; their vision of the future is unworkable, and their connections to contemporary forces and ideals are largely negative or opportunistic. Yet, in their limit lies the reason for us to fear. Between their beginnings and end, right-wing movements are known to have inflicted great damage upon countries and peoples. So help us God.
